This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the data on improving mental health among teens:
But this contradicts my agenda! Can’t you just ignore the facts “for the sake of the children?!?” …and my political and business aspirations?
Notice that all the proposed “do something” solutions for mental health issues never involve making the world a better place for teens to grow up in, stopping greedy selfish assholes from running the country, or cracking down on all the adults who take out their issues on their kids. Conservatives making up fake issues and making targets out furries and trans kids and immigrants and women et cetera et alia ad nauseum ad infinitum nunc est bibendum… is making their lives actively worse.
In second place, it’s SpcAgentOrange pushing back on our post about AI, copyright, and “theft”:
This is a whole lot of words dedicated to deliberately misreading. The executive did not say that this was the “largest theft of writing,” or the “largest theft of literature,” or “largest theft of copyrighted material in human history.” He said that it’s the “largest theft of labor in human history.” Whether or not it was ‘copyright infringement,’ these AI companies took the written works from thousands and thousands of writers, mostly without their consent or even their knowledge, and used it to create their own commercial product. Calling it “the largest theft of labor” is not wrong or hyperbolic – it’s a simple statement about what happened. These AI companies could have simply paid workers to create new training material. But they didn’t. They chose to rely on the labor of others without their consent. They stole their labor.
(Yes, yes, I hear the whining – “They didn’t steal their labor, because the labor was already done before they took the work – the books and papers and posts and movies and shows and all the rest had already been made, so AI companies didn’t actually take anything.” And if these systems weren’t being created specifically to put the original creators out of a job, that argument might move me.)
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Stephen T. Stone about the ideology of the Trump regime:
Throw a rock at the Trump regime and you’ve got a good chance of hitting a eugenicist. That includes Trump himself, whose steadfast belief in IQ—itself an invention meant to quantify and therefore justify racist beliefs—and obsession with genetics are hallmarks of eugenicist beliefs.
Next, it’s Flakbait with a comment about the ICE officer who dodged extradition and then got arrested:
How does it feel, ICE?
This is straight out of ICE’s playbook. They have arrested numerous people outside courthouses who were heading in for their legal immigration hearing. Now this ICEhole gets taken down while in town for a legal hearing. That’s just a tasty bit of comeuppance.
Over on the funny side, both our winners come in response to our post about Elon Musk’s extreme failure to fight CSAM. In first place, it’s Pixelation with a quick reaction:
Obviously…
Biden did it.
In second place, it’s Heart of Dawn with another response:
Musk has decided to fight in the war on CSAM on the side of CSAM.
Things were pretty slow on the funny side beyond that, so we’ll just keep it to one single editor’s choice. It’s Thad with a response to the reminder that Trump allegedly kept Hitler’s speeches as “bedside reading material”:
Well, kept them at bedside, anyway. I’m skeptical about the “reading” part.
That’s all for this week, folks!