Bro… Russia arrests protesters from the streets for committing the crime of holding up blank sheets of paper… Russia throws people in jail for political reasons all the time. How are those the actions of the free country? I have a trans friend living in Russia right now who is literally unable to speak about being trans online because she might be accused of “spreading lgbtq+ propaganda”.

The funniest story about this is that time AST (Russian book publisher) literally redacted the text of a biography about an openly-gay Italian director called Pier Paolo Pasolini in order to comply with Russian anti-gay “propaganda” laws… and then published it with the redactions clearly visible:

Literally redacted lmao. Does this scream “free country” to you?

• rolls off the table, bounces a bit and rolls toward a glass door, where it also bounces gently after hitting the glass door. You could see outside into a yard that had a green garden in it. And trash bins outside.
• blue
• female, I think. But I didn’t pay much attention to the person at all.
• long light brown hair, wearing a winter jacket, facing away from me. So I couldn’t see their face.
• it was a dodgeball. Blue dodgeball. Not brand new. A few scuff marks on it. I could see like, the raised bumps on it.
• it was a dark brown thin wooden table. It had a tray with a vase in the middle of it with a green plant with long grass-like leaves. There was a black, modern looking chandelier hanging from the ceiling above it. The table kind of looked like it came from IKEA lol.

The reason this is so detailed is that I just so happened to imagine the kitchen from a friend’s house. I already know everything that’s in there. It was easy to picture. And no, I didn’t come up with any of this as a result of answering the questions. I just saw it in my head.

While this might not be racist if the cashier had other reasons to close the line as the comments in this thread may suggest, it is a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts for minorities that go through this. Actual racists like to hide their racism in plausible deniability. So it makes it difficult for anyone to call them out. Someone in the comments said they “hate when people assume it’s racism” but I feel like they haven’t considered how often BIPOC ppl have to make that call. It’s such a mental load and it sucks.

People also go through this when it comes to sexual harassment. Like, if someone puts their hands on your waist to move past you in a narrow hallway, you have no idea whether they’re acting innocently or not. But if they do that to no one else except you… it starts looking sus. That’s how a lot of this bad behavior goes. It’s not as simple as giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, because bad actors take advantage of your doubt to act how they will.

So don’t assume the cashier was being racist, but don’t assume they weren’t either. Be suspicious of bs like that, and act accordingly.

False dichotomy.

They shouldn’t have generated it in the first place. How would you feel if people did that to your mom, or you, or your sisters, or your kids?

I don’t think just keeping it to yourself is enough.

Idk why communists defend China’s every move. Communism can be defended without excusing China’s authoritarian practices. I have Chinese friends living in China who tell me all kinds of horrific stories that they’ve had to deal with because of China’s mass surveillance (and more). That isn’t western propaganda, that’s people’s lived experiences. There is literally a “Great Firewall of China” lmao. China IS bad when it comes to their mass surveillance and suppression of speech. USA IS bad when it comes to their letting giant corporations have such free rein that it makes us all into serfs. Why compare to China? Because China is a great comparison.

I’ve seen videos of the ventilation bs. To call it awful and disgusting is an understatement. They get slow cooked alive and take hours to die and they scream for all of it until they can’t scream anymore. And there’s hundreds of them. Hundreds of screaming voices dying in absolute agony. For hours. It’s literally the Brazen Bull. It’s torture, full stop. I can’t believe we allow this bs to be done to anything that can feel pain and suffer.

Ironically, cars are stopping me. Roads used to be for walking, and now they’re for cars. They gave us sidewalks and now some places don’t have them, and are unwalkable. The bike lanes either don’t exist or are too dangerous to use. It’s all roads and stroads now, with speed limits dangerous to pedestrians, and large SUVs meaning that car crashes with a pedestrian are more likely to end in death.

The amount of people in cars has also crippled public transportation. Buses aren’t quick, and there are so few of them in general. Not to mention the lack of high speed trains, and the inefficiency of our subways.

Giant parking lots with no cars took our parks. Took our public spaces. Took our nature. And they’re everywhere. Everywhere I look is dull, grey asphalt.

It’s depressing to be outside. And where would I walk to? Everything is too far away to walk to. It used to be a 5-15 minute walk away. Now it’s more like 40 minutes to hours…

I’m tired of human interests and public transportation being overlooked so that people can drive a couple minutes faster to their destination. When people in Europe, Japan, and China can just… get on a train.

Sorry for the rant but I hate this bs

What about what I said was tenuous? Did you think I said the death penalty held no power to deter? I made no claims about that. I suggest you reread what I said, if that’s what you think.

I merely pointed out that the greatest deterrence comes from the likelihood of being caught, not from the severity of the punishment itself. This is the popular view. Here’s an article from the National Institute of Justice about it, with sources cited at the bottom: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence (Points 1, 4, and 5 may be of particular interest to you.)

This Wikipedia article may also interest you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterrence_(penology)

The reason I make no claims (and disagree with you) about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent is because there is no body of evidence supporting either view. You seem convinced that the death penalty is an effective deterrent on your instinct alone. I am uncertain how I am the one reaching tenuous conclusions here, lol.

I disagree that the deterrence would be significant enough to justify the death penalty. But I don’t think our disagreement matters. Even assuming what you say is true, it’s not worth the lives of the innocent people who will be found guilty and executed, in my opinion. I also think it’s a bad idea to give the government the power to kill its own citizens. So even if you are correct, I have other objections that outweigh the potential deterrence factor.

It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?

It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.

The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.

I just use this god-tier free, open-source app: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html

It’s called Hydrus Network, and it’s like an organized database for managing your pics, videos, and more.

Features include: tagging images, adding notes to images, saving urls for images, searching your collection for duplicates and letting you compare them to keep the highest quality image, dark mode, meta tags, and more.

It’s literally one of my top 5 most essential apps to my life, and it’s so unknown. I feel like a cultist because I’m always harping on about how great Hydrus Network is and no one knows about it.

I got a 17/20, which is awesome!

I’m angry because I could’ve gotten an 18/20 if I’d paid attention to the thispersondoesnotexists’ glasses, which in hindsight, are clearly all messed up.

I did guess that one human-created image was made by AI, “The End of the Journey”. I guessed that way because the horses had unspecific legs and no tails. And also, the back door of the cart they were pulling also looked funky. The sky looked weirdly detailed near the top of the image, and suddenly less detailed near the middle. And it had birds at the very corner of the image, which was weird. I did notice the cart has a step-up stool thing attached to the door, which is something an AI likely wouldn’t include. But I was unsure of that. In the end, I chose wrong.

It seems the best strategy really is to look at the image and ask two questions:

• what intricate details of this image are weird or strange?
• does this image have ideas indicate thought was put into them?

About the second bullet point, it was immediately clear to me the strawberry cat thing was human-made, because the waffle cone it was sitting in was shaped like a fish. That’s not really something an AI would understand is clever.

One the tomato and avocado one, the avocado was missing an eyebrow. And one of the leaves of the stem of the tomato didn’t connect correctly to the rest. Plus their shadows were identical and did not match the shadows they would’ve made had a human drawn them. If a human did the shadows, it would either be 2 perfect simplified circles, or include the avocado’s arm. The AI included the feet but not the arm. It was odd.

The anime sword guy’s armor suddenly diverged in style when compared to the left and right of the sword. It’s especially apparent in his skirt and the shoulder pads.

The sketch of the girl sitting on the bench also had a mistake: one of the back legs of the bench didn’t make sense. Her shoes were also very indistinct.

I’ve not had a lot of practice staring at AI images, so this result is cool!

Celeste! Pixel graphics, cute story, the bosses not too scary I think! Plus it’s very fun.

This is just insane. How are people not cooking alive? I don’t look forward to the coming years…