Some of the USAID spending arguably was self-defeating for soft power. What I've heard from multiple Japanese family members is that the subsidies and policy pressure for LGBT programs and refugee acceptance felt like narcissistic cultural imperialism and soured their opinion of the US-Japan alliance.
Most of the founding intellectuals of neoconservatism, especially Irving Kristol, came from secular socialist backgrounds and imagined their ideal society to be eerily similar to The Culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
The Culture intervenes in and steers those other societies and species even when unprovoked. Essentially a neoconservative utopia as envisioned by a young Irving Kristol. Yes, it would be a heaven for all who are pleased to take on its espirit de corps and live in it, casual and decadently low-pressure such might be, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a healthy influence in the long run on a universe that it is arrogantly homogenizing. There is such a thing as unintended consequences, and The Culture is not yet one of the more advanced, wiser "Sublimed" civilizations.
The Culture is absolutely not "neoconservative". I don't think modern political terms can meaningfully apply to a post-scarcity civilization with benevolent AI Gods.
I'm old enough to recall MSNBC in 2011 cropping video footage of an Obama townhall protestor to only show his long-sleeve shirted back with slung open-carry rifle. They used it to immediately launch into a pundit discussion claiming that the protestors were motivated by racial animus. Turned out the protestor was black.
News manipulating footage to cast aspersions to historical boogeymen is routine. All it takes is one pundit mentioning an imagined similarity to play the edited B-roll.
Who asked? Countless criminals worse than him are pardoned by every president. Clinton pardoned dozens of terrorists. Liberal prosecutors pseudo-pardon thousands of violent criminals by refusing to charge.
That mechanism usually goes the other way in these escalations - all it takes is one of the school librarians being a stubborn ideologue, not stocking classical literature (effectively censoring) and filling shelves with anti-capitalist pop lit and low-brow Tumblr graphic novels with obscene sexual depictions. It reaches the point where it's obvious to anyone walking into the library, replete with colorful signage on frontal shelves dedicated to narrow progressive fads. The kids post about it or check it out, parents notice. The librarian is named and shamed. Then, sadly, the library overall loses support in addition to the librarian.
The root cause is unfortunately lost in the ensuing battle between library-defending parents and library-critiquing parents, but the ultimate fault in this situation lies in the needless and self-destructive politicization of librarian training and the lack of standards for younger librarians. They seem to lack the common sense that loud politicking is not exactly befitting of a library, nor beneficial for their ulterior motive of gradual ideological persuasion. Another sad case of politicking and safe-space-signaling ideation being prioritized over preserving institutions and professional integrity.
Auto-Pilot is not FSD. It's akin to a regular carmaker's Automatic-Braking-System and Lane-Keep-Assist. If you're seeing it used dangerously that's user error.
Similarly in mobile apps where install size is key, designed image assets are better exported as SVG or platform draw code. There are tools to do this conversion easily and the benefit of draw code is that it is crisp at all sizes and can be dynamically colored and animated. Whether or not an app does this is often the reason why some relatively basic apps are 1 mb while others are 100+ mb.
Keep in mind that Pre-2016 Twitter was markedly looser in enforcement than 2016-2022 Twitter which was increasingly run by legal and moral busybodies sensitive to the fallout of the Arab Spring, and habituated to government pressure (see Twitter Files). If anything, Twitter under Musk is a continuation of that trajectory for Rest-Of-World, but with special exemptions and protections for English language countries and issues in which he and the firm has personal awareness of and popular capital - for example, see how it stands up to the governments of Brazil and UK.
Can you clarify where in the Twitter Files it says that things were run by “legal and moral busybodies”? From what I recall the “Twitter Files” were just big dumps of innocuous records that rarely (if ever) contained any sort of narrative. The “story” of what they meant was entirely constructed by folks that pretty transparently set out with the intention of making Musk look good (eg Matt Taibbi)
I like this post because it didn’t answer the question. Like “can you show me where in the text it says that?” “No but I’m real flustered that you asked. Furthermore, I just want to say: nazis”
Because there haven't actually been a release of "the Twitter Files". What was done was that Musk provided Matt Taibbi (among others) select internal emails and documents, and coordinated to selectively publicize some of those in editorialized twitter threads.
And yet I've never actually seen anything resembling a smoking gun or whatever it was they were aiming for.
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