Their concern about optics is the reason they want agents to stop shooting white people.

Good riddance.

law does not demand disrespect.

Unjust laws do.

Any law that criminalizes behavior that does not cause anyone harm is unjust, and we therefore have a moral duty to disobey it. Your insistence that “respecting the rule of law” is not hateful is no different from using “just following orders” as an excuse for immoral actions. You cannot be seriously suggesting that it is respectful to tell a person they don’t belong in this country because they don’t have the proper paperwork. Fuck borders, fuck ICE, CBP, DHS, and fuck the rule of law. I refuse to accept inhumane treatment simply because the law demands it.

To consolidate power. As ineffectual as the Democrats are they remain a barrier to Trump and his backers’ autocratic ambitions. He wants his coalition to stay in power more or less indefinitely, and to do that he needs to take control of state and local elections. That’s why he’s targeting blue states like MN and demanding voter rolls. He will make baseless claims of voter fraud and use that as justification to throw out votes, allowing Republicans to win a state that has voted Democrat every election since 1976.

He doesn’t necessarily want a civil war, he wants an excuse to bring the boot of the US military down on his political enemies to suppress their vote and he isn’t expecting a fair fight, he expects people to roll over and surrender.

The Trump administration is sending increasing numbers of ICE agents - many of whom are untrained new recruits while the DHS makes recruitment ads targeting white supremacists - into Minneapolis and having them raid schools, churches, workplaces, and homes without warrants to arrest people based on things like the color of their skin, accents, and perceived political leanings (in addition to snatching people directly off the street or their vehicles). The community in Minneapolis has responded by organizing neighborhood watches that coordinate to track the location of ICE agents and warn people of their approach (often by blowing whistles), while also showing up to film them. Many are sheltering immigrant families in their homes to protect them from ICE. Local officials have been urging Minnesotans to stay peaceful while ICE and DHS have been using increasingly aggressive tactics, and several people have already been shot and killed by ICE agents, which the Trump administration has been lying about despite there being video with multiple angles of the incidents.

People - including state and local officials - have speculated that Trump is attempting to provoke a violent backlash to use as justification for invoking the insurrection act, which would allow Trump to send in the military (of which he has already put troops on standby) and put the state under direct federal control. As a result they are continuing to urge people to remain peaceful even as ICE agents are becoming increasingly violent. There is also a leaked letter that Pam Bondi (US Attorney General) sent to Tim Walz (Governor of Minnesota) offering to consider pulling ICE out of the state in exchange for repealing sanctuary policies as well as turning over the state’s voter rolls and social welfare records.

Short answer: The administration is trying to start a civil war, the state is trying not to give them what they want, and the people are becoming increasingly organized. This is the closest we have been to civil war since, well, the lead-up to the first one, but if it were to break out today it would look very different (probably more like a larger scale version of Ireland’s ‘troubles’).

I do understand how that works, and it’s not in the weights, it’s entirely in the context. ChatGPT can easily answer that question because the answer exists in the training data, it just doesn’t because there are instructions in the system prompt telling it not to. That can be bypassed by changing the context through prompt injection. The biases you’re talking about are not the same biases that are baked into the model. Remember how people would ask grok questions and be shocked at how “woke” it was at the same time that it was saying Nazi shit? That’s because the system prompt contains instructions like “don’t shy away from being politically incorrect” (that is literally a line from grok’s system prompt) and that shifts the model into a context in which Nazi shit is more likely to be said. Changing the context changes the model’s bias because it didn’t just learn one bias, it learned all of them. Whatever your biases are, talk to it enough and it will pick up on that, shifting the context to one where responses that confirm your biases are more likely.

If you want these people out why would you cheer for such an obviously horrifically mismanaged clusterfuck? Ugh.

Because they’re too stupid/brainwashed to understand how much of a clusterfuck ICE is. You really expect someone who thinks Trump is a genius to think through the logistics of mass deportation? Racists are emotionally dysregulated; any powers of analytical reasoning are dominated by visceral fear and revulsion that overpowers everything else.

It’s difficult to conceive the AI manually making this up for no reason, and doing it so consistently for multiple accounts so consistently when asked the same question.

If you understand how LLMs work it’s not difficult to conceive. These models are probabilistic and context-driven, and they pick up biases in their training data (which is nearly the entire internet). They learn patterns that exist in the training data, identify identical or similar patterns in the context (prompts and previous responses), and generate a likely completion of those patterns. It is conceivable that a pattern exists on the internet of people requesting information and - more often than not - receiving information that confirms whatever biases are evident in their request. Given that LLMs are known to be excessively sycophantic it’s not surprising that when prompted for proof of what the user already suspects to be true it generates exactly what they were expecting.

There have already been whistleblowers.

For a national general strike to work you need to get buy-in (ideally pledges) from major trade unions all across the US, as well as non-union organizations due to the very low union membership here in the US. Simply calling for one and then having almost nobody participate would be a disaster and would set the movement back, which is why it’s important to do the work of organizing a coalition to agree ahead of time to participate. The short of it is, if you want this to happen (which I do as well), start selling the idea to the people who need to buy it now and get them talking. The only reason they were able to get this organized so quickly in MN is because of how dire the situation is on the ground, so that everyone asked was immediately on board.

This isn’t a protest, it’s a state-wide general strike, and it’ll be the first one to happen in the US in 80 years. Labor power has been diminished and defanged here for decades, but people are relearning how to fight. It’ll likely please you that the Black Panthers have reformed, armed themselves, and are guarding protestors and community members in some areas as well (which is what the 2nd amendment is actually supposed to be for; local militias).

It’s the difference between defense and vengeance. In Transformers One they had already defeated the big bad and had the support of the other transformers, so killing him then was an unnecessary act of revenge. It’s different when you’re still fighting and the big bad’s death could make a difference in the outcome.

Cooperatives, mutual aid networks like Food Not Bombs, rank-and-file/leaderless unions like the IWW, etc. There is a limited number of modern day examples because such organizations have historically faced systematic repression, but the list grows much longer if we look to the past. Such organization also tends to form spontaneously during natural disasters and the like when there is little to no state intervention, and quickly dissolve whenever the state intervenes.

For organizations with broader scope and on longer timescales, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and Rojava in north and east Syria are good examples.

Keep in mind of course that the real world is messy and full of conflict, and that results in there not being any perfectly pure example of anarchist ideals in practice in the same way that there is no perfectly pure example of any ideology in practice. In addition, many of the groups I listed above do not make explicit reference to anarchism and are doing their own thing that just so happens to map onto anarchist ideas, and they often don’t call themselves anarchist or even have an aversion to ideological labels entirely.

The places in the US that are safer for minorities are also the first places that will be targeted for Trump’s domestic military occupation. If you’re trans and paying attention to how things are playing out, those are the places you go to seek solidarity and fight, not to flee and seek asylum.

If you say “capitalism sucks”, you are going to get reactionary thought and action. You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding without tripping the propagandized brain worms.

Extending your metaphor, this is what your average American’s brain looks like. There is a lot of propaganda and social conditioning working against you here.

I’m half expecting Peter Thiel to say “maybe we should build a bunch of fallout shelters and then initiate a nuclear holocaust so we can outlast all our enemies, and also run some experiments while we’re at it” in an interview tomorrow, wearing a vault suit and giving a thumbs up.

These are soft power projection projects. You would recognize them as such if it were the US doing it (which we used to before Trump decided it was woke), so why do you stick to the Chinese state narrative here?

There is no alternative to capitalism (which has only really been the dominant economic model for a few hundred years at most) and if you dare suggest alternatives I’ll just dismiss them out of hand using propaganda I have burned into my skull and act like it refutes every argument you could possibly make.

• You

How’s capitalism working out for the US right now, btw? Guess it depends who you ask, and if you ask the billionaires it’s doing great. Yay!

“I’m not that kind of fascist, I’m this other kind of fascist!”

• Larry Ellison