Put Lina Khan in charge of all these agencies.

Take stories like this with a huge grain of salt until they’re verified by credible international organizations. This genre of story specifically is a classic wartime propaganda tale with not much precedent for being true.

It’s like nuclear fusion, always just around the corner…

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reads:

The forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another. Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper to man. It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject. Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person." (C.C.C. # 2524)

People here are not serious, they repeat slogans and polemics very superficially. The nipple taboo is found across pre-Christian and non-Abrahamic societies, probably because of breasts’ association with fertility. I.e

When did bare breasts become taboo in Western civilization?

Probably around 3,000 years ago. Women are displayed with exposed breasts in Minoan artwork from 1500 B.C. Some historians believe that these ancient women went topless only during religious rituals—bare-breasted, buxom goddesses have been worshipped since the dawn of civilization—but some of the artworks depict everyday activities, suggesting that bare breasts may have been commonplace. Just across the Mediterranean, ancient Egyptian women sported elaborate dresses that could either cover the breasts or leave them exposed, depending on the whim of the designer. Over the next few centuries, however, breasts become strictly private parts. Ancient Athenian women were wearing flowing, multilayered robes that concealed the shape of the bosom by the middle of the first millennium B.C. Spartan attire was more risqué, exposing the female thigh, but breasts were always covered.

Their argument is that “gender is just a social construct”, without acknowledging that some of the most paramount aspects of human existence are “social constructs” (i.e language) and that gender is one of them. And without addressing why sexual taboos (like public nudity) are gendered - to them its a form of irrational injustice. But expore the social ramifications -through real and hypothetical examples- and you quickly find that it is indeed rational to treat bodies different according to their gender, and that human social psychology does have strong roots in human phsyiognamy.

“I’ve definitely learned that gender classifiers are an unreliable and flawed technology, especially when it comes to trans people’s gender expression,” Ada Ada Ada said. “I regularly see my algorithmic gender swing back and forth from week to week.

Says the person changing themselves week to week to fit different classifications?

I’d say that if you live in literally any nation that doesn’t directly border them or isnt married to the Pentagon, they haven’t proven to be much of a concern at all. Except maybe to your exports. As far as “free world” gibberish goes, they aren’t the ones defending the Saudi monarch from his own people.

Big mistake tbh.

China is a global tech competitor and any major incident relating to espionage via its commercial devices would kill the golden goose. The CCP also know this. In fact they more and more follow the US model of approaching their tech firms in more roundabout legal ways in order to get their way. It turns out having market access to the US and EU is more useful than knowing whatever some NCO at Port Hadlock is babbling about at any given moment.

The fear appears to be that Chinese tech could become a security threat in the case of very high tensions or war. As for “free world”, that’s not a particularly meaningful term to me.

That’s very interesting, are the security concerns warranted or just a “better safe than sorry” overcompensation? I recall when the Trump admin started their war on Huawei (for protectionist purposes), the US government suddenly treated all Huawei infrastructure near military sites as suspect despite okay’ing it during the Obama years.

1. Chinese manufacturers makes modern cars with modern functionality.
2. The CCP doesn’t make cars.
3. UK has data localization laws.

25% Pentagon/Kremlin/Israeli and political bot farms.

25% AI and Marketing sock puppets, content farms.

50% users.

Tends to happen when you open the conversation by calling someone a “liar for their murderous leader.”

McCarthyism hasn’t been exlusively about the Kremlin since… well since way before McCarthy even died. And it’s a moot task for me to try to convince a paranoiac who eschews facts.

In the case of AfD and political polarization, that’s a problem on all platforms and has more to do with how algorithms and user engagement work.

The article is about China and TikTok’s behavior, not “the Kremlin”, and the behavior described in the article is mundane ad-buying. You can quite literally sift through the TikTok ad library yourself to confirm this. Instead you rely on vagueries and call people secret Kremlin agents who are very invested in changing your perspective, like a schizophrenic.

When it comes to deadly “mistakes” in a military context there should be strong laws preventing “appeal to AI fuckery”, so that militaries don’t get comfortable making such “mistakes.”

Anyone who uses Arabic-language social media has encountered this. They used to ban you for just making reference to “Al Aqsa” (Arabic name for Dome of the Rock) because their algorithm deemed it terror-related. They banned the word “shaheed” (martyr) too even though in Arabic it’s commonly used to refer to loved ones who died an untimely death, even in accidents. It’s also a name, which is hilarious because a member of their oversight board said in an interview that after they banned the word one of her coworkers named Shaheed had to explained that this was nonsense. Researchers did an experiment where they ran pages that used uncontroverdial Arabic keywords that would get censored, then do the same for Hebrew (including #death_to_arabs) which were left up and even gained traction.

You can blame Meta to some degree, but the chief issue are US federal institutions that use notices and scare stories aimed at making risk-averse firms shut down anything deemed anti-American (which essentially means anti-Israel.) Just recently they’ve been sending FBI agents to knock on journalists’ doors if they publish the leaked Vance dossier and give them a “friendly reminder” that it may have been leaked by Iran. Even when the journalists mentioned it in their reports on the dossier.

That’s always a rational and logical place to take the conversation - viscious McCarthyist paranoia! Who knows, I could even be Xi himself, trying to make you lower your guard so I can feed you an ad for my dastardly electric car companies while you scroll past memes and tits.

That’s fair, I’m also bored with the topic.