One of the biggest gripes I've had with Americans over the years has been their perspective that America was the whole world. The rest of the world was just "out there somewhere", some vague hinterland that news stories came from sometimes but that didn't really matter and was totally at the whim of whatever was going on in the real place in the world, America. Even now, even among the Americans who are horrified at Trump and what he's doing and want to say sympathetic things to the allies he's screwing over, we're still seeing this.
Putin's useful idiot has smashed America and America's global dominance. This is bad for America, sure. But it's not necessarily bad for the whole world, and it's not necessarily even good for Putin in the grand scheme of things. Putin is still three years into his three-day "special military operation", with his troops travelling to the front lines on crutches and donkeys to die in meat waves. Finland and Sweden joined NATO. The EU is allocating hundreds of billions of Euros to defense. Germany just elected a government that seems willing to stand up and join them in combating Russia. Russia is still completely hosed. It is not bending the world to Putin's vision.
Sure, it would have been nice to have America fully on board with defeating him too. But America's only a part of the whole world, and an increasingly smaller part these days. Let them go wallow in the isolation they seemingly crave.
Indeed, that's IMO the most horrifying part. It sounds like Gene himself may have been too far gone mentally to be suffering, but that poor dog suffered greatly.
I live alone and even though I'm perfectly healthy I bought self-filling water and food dishes for my dog and I make sure they stay topped up. If my brain were to abruptly explode someday for some unknown reason I want to be sure she'll be okay for however long it takes for my friends to come over and check on why I'm not answering any communication.
I mean, I guess we'll see. Donald just spews out whatever comes to his spongey brain at any given moment.
I've long thought that even if Russia is supporting Donald, that doesn't really make Donald Russia's "operative." That gives far too much credit to Donald. He never keeps any agreement he's made for one second longer than he thinks it's personally benefiting him.
Canada is actually in a pretty good position, geographically, if you ignore the fact that our two immediate neighbours are hostile powers bent on conquering our land and taking our resources. We can get involved in both Atlantic alliances and Pacific alliances. All we need to do is survive long enough to get those nicely sorted, and rebuild our strength after having America yank the rug out from under us.
No, it's not the same. I was using basketball as an analogy. Someone who doesn't enjoy basketball wouldn't "get it", just as you're not "getting" the fun that can come from building and playing around with AI bots. Different people find different things to be fun.
I actually wandered away from the SubredditSimulator successor subreddits because even with GPT2 they were "too good", they lost their charm. Back when SubredditSimulator was still active it was using simple Markov chain based text generators and they produced the most wonderfully bonkers nonsense, that was hilarious. Modern AIs just sound like regular people, and I get that everywhere already.
People do things for fun sometimes. You could ask this about almost anything that people do that isn't directly and immediately related to survival. Why do people play basketball? It's just pointlessly bouncing a ball around in a room, following arbitrary rules that only serve to make the apparent goal of getting it through the hoop harder.
The US is a representative democracy, and those were its chosen representatives. Sorry, but you can't collectively vote Trump into office and then immediately go "woah, we have nothing to do with any of this!" When he turns out to be exactly what everyone expected him to be.
Something similar happened to Babylon 5, it was designed as a 5-season series and then they were told season 4 would be the end. So they hurriedly wrapped everything up for the season 4 finale.
And then they were told they were getting a fifth season after all once that was all locked in, so they had to create a whole season of filler for season 5.
As I recall, the main point of contention was that this was one of the first big "there's a big mystery and the whole series is one big story to unravel it and we totally have it all planned out, honest" series. And then it turned out that no, they didn't totally have it planned out, and they were just making crap up as they went and most of the profound "clues" people were trying to cobble together were basically meaningless.
Maybe the show runners managed to cobble something together out of them that was satisfying regardless, but still, it felt like quite the betrayal. History repeated itself with Battlestar Galactica, where the show kept insisting "they have a plan!" When no, they really did not.
Yeah, I'd much rather have random humans I don't know anything about making those "moral" decisions.
So the purpose of this article is to convince people of a particular answer, not to actually evaluate the arguments pro and con.