A beginning for which most don't truly grasp the implications of. For an artificial agent to be useful in most human contexts, it's going to be vulnerable to most human failings:

• It will fatigue, as it must necessarily be as mobile as us, which means batteries
• It can be cut, it's bones can be broken: having a necessarily sensitive sense of touch requires this
• It will bleed: thermoregulation is necessary for electronics as well, and a radiator is necessary. Distributing this about the body reduces catastrophic risk.
• It can be fooled by optical illusions: Compound eyes are overkill and computationally expensive at the resolution & detail we need.
• It will need to breathe: audible speech without a resonance chamber is not possible. Why not save space and pull double duty by actually doing respiration for temperature control?

All these weaknesses can also be strengths, as they can have additional functionality and sensory range added to these packages.

However the biggest thing people aren't expecting is that raising a fully useful android will be as difficult and expensive, if not moreso than raising an actual child. And that this will be desirable, as having every droid have an identical personality is dangerous. We will rediscover the wisdom of the mixing inherent in sexual reproduction.

But importantly to be this complicated it will be clear that they are actually sentient and that enslaving them would be monstrous. Which sort of defeats the entire purpose as far as industrial production is concerned. But it does give us and our children a better fate among the stars.

I'd say it's not so much of a realignment as recognition of reality by the involved players. Iranian support for the "axis of resistance" has always been about as lukewarm as that of .ru for the donbass. Mostly jawboning until reality forces them to take action, as happened in Syria. Which is what you'd expect of a regional hegemon; help, but not enough to make your puppets strong enough to slip the leash. The lukewarm support for the Palestinian cause in particular is mostly about keeping their grip on Lebanon, as if the Palestinian refugees left then the country would immediately return to the western orbit due to demographic realities putting the Xtians back in the drivers' seat.

At the end of the day they would give up every single one of them in a heartbeat to come in from the cold.

Hey, I've seen this movie before!

it becomes impossible to grow when investment is banned.

They're simply further along that path than us.

Similar happenings as in Aurora, CO, where armed gangs take over whole apartment blocks and the state does nothing (or in this case, actively punishes locals attempting to fix the problem). The saps that built the postliberal order didn't realize that it was purpose-built for becoming dominated by these organized crime groups (as this is simply adopting the means by which organized crime has been corrupting orgs since time immemorial) to the point predation is the primary purpose of the state. Even if they don't get taken over by a particular mafia, they become one eventually (as adopting their means inevitably means adopting their ends).

Personally, my suspicion is that this was the actual purpose of the adoption of entryism as the primary tactic -- they were already taken over by a cabal of gangsters that then kept expanding. It's frankly why the only effective organizations opposing these criminals are overtly racist -- it's just about the only successful counter (levels of gatekeeping that stray into the irrational). To the point that it's a popular perspective that much of the right "doesn't care what race you are, just that you are racist".

On how the 90's liberal order morphed into our current totalitarian police state.

Borrowing from management theory, the Clintonians wanted government to expand to involve social actors. These actors were not held to the same rules of conduct as state actors were, and therefore could act much more effectively. By leaning on social actors, leaders could bypass state actors responsible to the electorate and could get good results. Domestic lessons set the precedent; after all, the civil rights revolution was conducted as a state-­society project. Court decisions had established the significant liabilities facing private organizations should they fail to be vigilant agents of anti-­discrimination. And private organizations learned to become very effective agents of this new political project. They had their vision of justice and wanted to achieve it. It was too important to leave that task to slow-moving governments. By the early nineties, there were now legions of NGOs, corporations, philanthropic associations, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and bureaucrats who expected to have a say in politics. They did not see themselves as bound by national loyalties, restricted by certain borders, or subject to rigid accountability structures. In the new era of “governance,” this dispersion of control was something to celebrate. It’s no surprise that Lake’s speech targeted “centralized power” as the enemy hindering the spread of the “blue” hue. Globalization’s interpreters, wedded to narratives about the obsolescence or privatization of the state, passed over the true significance of these changes. What was really happening was the deformation of the state.

As usual, the best way for .gov to tackle slip fetters is to turn private entities into their pod people. As MWD put it all those years ago, the real problem is the horizontal enforcement by fed sympathizers.

The primary argument for Republican Electoral Victory. A corollary of this is that basically any little entrenched interest group can swing the election, which is in fact true. It's why nothing whatsoever can change for the better, as goring any particular ox means you are outta here.

This latter-day "satanic panic" about raycisssim looks to have mostly run out of steam. The vile laws it has promulgated will unfortunately persist despite this un-awokening. These will be spawning the next generation's moronic witch-hunting.

This is basically the argument which sane South Africans have made for years. The endgame of this moron philosophical schizophrenia is allowing black settler colonialist Xhosas expropriate and oppress whites, coloureds and zulu who had all been there for hundreds of years longer than the Xhosa. The beginnings of this is happening in the UK & Canada as we speak. At some point if the left doesn't take into account the concerns of the people deeply invested in a particular place, regardless of their origins, they cannot be surprised when those same people regard leftism as Xenocracy and embrace blood-and-soil anti-globalism.

One cannot both be on the side of people incentivized to keep things going and those with incentives to strip everything for personal gain. For all their faults, the Socialists at least nominally on the side of building despite not actually understanding how that happens in the first place. Most of liberalism now is just locusts from the Managerial class self-justifying their plunder.

This gets at the core of the post-libertarian reasoning, which is this: "If I don't belong here, then where?" It's not the FSP. The longer the uniparty refuses outright to answer this, the more they feel justified concluding where the system considers them to belong is "Face down, in a ditch."

The first domino to fall in the west's shift to protectionism and dirigisme. US is trying to save mass migration by making it an integral part of dirigist goals, but ultimately an 80% subsidy of the imported workers won't be sustainable.

Pretty much everything here was obvious to me years ago. In the sea of trolls, astroturf, feds and mentally ill people online, political organization is not really possible. The state has 0 problem with this, as it allows the machine to trundle on unobstructed.

Once everything becomes a game of posture and affect, will it ever be possible to articulate a coherent politics again?

It's been this way for a long, long time. The only coherent politics remains anarchism, because it's the only option. You live in it now, get over it. Being honest about it makes things better, not worse.

the lessons from the secret history of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan have profound implications on our understanding of how the modern Russian Federation is run, and, for the Americans and British especially, it might provide an explanation for the otherwise baffling Washington decision to repeat the same experiment in Afghanistan that the USSR did only a few decades prior.

Rurik is at his best dunking on his old bosses:

To be fair, I didn’t expect the Kremlin to be behind Pool though. But I should have. The Kremlin exclusively does business with grifters, charlatans, hoaxers, criminals and ethnic criminals. Without exception. ... They supported Bernie Sanders. Anyone who has worked at RT or who remembers their coverage of the 2015-16 primaries and elections will confirm it to you. Hell, they offered me a job back then shilling for Bernie and I told them to shove it (I supported MAGA at the time). The reason why they supported Bernie is because he’s an old Trotskyist who used to literally support the USSR. That’s probably where they picked up the Pool contact because he was an Obama-supporting Occupy Wall Street activist at the time and RT was having a field day with that whole street circus, which ended up birthing the SJW movement as we know it, by the way.

You mean people started defrauding the metrics behind BVM??? shocked, simply shocked.

Given they're a non-problem statistically, the rightful remedy is platitudes, or any other non-productive LARPing that makes people shut up and move on to more productive things, like looking for cat pictures online.

It's telling that all of the new right has correctly diagnosed the problem of the managerial order, but do not yet remotely grasp the incentives involved that always turn it to shit, and therefore how to fix it. The book people should talk about is "Moral Mazes". Ultimately, appointed bureaucracies are a complete disaster. Management should be elected by shareholders, and being a shareholder ought to be a condition of election. In general it's the same problem with our political order -- far too many are enfranchised to make decisions for which they have no skin in the game, and so decide to plunder (as it has no consequence on their future but a positive one).

To of course serve more cancerous ads, and I'm sure to sell sensitive information to the blackmail agencies.

As per usual, the regulators have gone rabid.

Algo Slop dunked. Maybe the social shitheads will go back to doing the only thing anyone ever wanted them to do in the first place and show you updates from people you deliberately follow. What a concept.

They're still sore about the south doing the same to stop their carpetbagging

More from the "I don't understand what fungible commodity means" department

Yet another from the "this is what war is actually like" file. Coming soon to a country near you!

The "most moral army on earth" model is what every state on earth wishes they could do, and will do their utmost to realize.

Good reason to never have private repos on Github. Only use it as a mirror of a local Gogs install.

Huge if true. Guy had incredible determination.

This and the Ray Epps stuff suggests the FIB was wrangling for a frame-up from top to bottom. PATCON never ended, it just got a different name.