This isn't new in politics -- I don't think anything here is that revealing insofar as scandals go. Every president has basically used the CIA for political ends since its inception -- whether it be foreign ends or local ends. So, your outrage here might be about 50 years late. Personally, the game doesn't bother me that much if it's used against themselves. I like it when the hydra eats its own heads, so to speak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_material_published_by_WikiLeaks

Also, have you considered that Wikileaks is an English speaking organization? A Chinese leak would require a bunch of Chinese <-> English translators to verify it doesn't destroy the entire Chinese government (same thing Wikileaks mostly does with the US).

Technologically, yeah, it's been great for intelligence agencies.

But as far as defense of our civil liberties goes, yeah and during that whole time it would have been much worse if there weren't people doing anything about it.

Give up on trying to pressure the government to not do this? That's all I'm saying here.

Since there are intelligence agencies, politicians, public advocacy groups that are vying for power, and one source of power is political legitimacy, then trying to get certain intelligence agencies to comply with the law involves playing all the players against one another.

It means that the claims they make about things in the world correspond to their factual being in the world 100% of the time, at least as far as claims about factual things in the world can be considered accurate if there is direct evidence that verifies that their claim about the fact in the world is true.

It does not mean that their textual description of the world is necessarily accurate to 100% to how it is in the world -- since there is still information entropy.

Well, guess we should all give up then.

Well, maybe a first step is to know how they get into your devices and then force them to either stop doing it or defund them entirely. In the leaks, it says the CIA had to do a bunch of mental gymnastics to get around some regulations -- which effectively compromised their organization's ability to act covertly, which ultimately led to these leaks.

So what we should be doing is adding a whole bunch of forced mental gymnastics clauses to make them just not do any of this.

Well, I mean, the way you described it, it seems like the singularity is essentially of 'non-quantifiable' quantity, because if you quantify anything, it becomes immediately converted to a particular. Yet we still can refer to singularities, like Thatcherism or Caesarism. How is that paradox resolved? Or is there no paradox there and I'm misunderstanding something?

Oh so you are arguing that the bad guys are the Laplace guys and the good guys are people like Leibniz and Spinoza (to take a completely different 'singularity' insofar as metaphysical thought is situated). By the way, how would we talk about a singularity in language? Because it seems like language is very particular by nature.

Can you give a brief overview of what you mean by this 'singular'?

Um, I'm some sort of dirty commie, so I'll probably just share it with him.

Um hi. I was looking for this thread all my life. Where do I get those smileys to shove up my ass. Oh, by the counter. Thank you very much. That would be all. Oh wait, I'll take a T_T too after I'm done, 'cause I'm probably gonna cry a lot.

I'm of two camps here, both leading to the ultimate execution of Dylan Storm Roof. Technically guilty or not, just like Lennie had to be put down in Of Mice and Men due to him being a danger to society, so does Dylan Roof.

I see more value in making him an example for other racists out there -- if the state does not kill him here, I'd be really concerned about how much it empowers other white supremacists in America. Seriously, his death should be televised and he should be hung in effigy in a public square. I also wish Norway executed Anders Breivik as an example because he's becoming this sort of freedom symbol for white supremacists and neo-nazis all over Europe and North America.

On the other hand, with the incoming Trump presidency, self-described 'alt-right' (code for fascist) white supremacists appointed to cabinet, an emboldened far right that cries out 'Heil Trump!' with a sieg heil, I'm afraid Dylan Roof is the first of many (and he is, because a bunch more followed him). Trump certainly has no clue how to handle it except by sending in the troops. I wonder if he knows what he's unleashed in America.

To the minds of fascists and white supremacists, they are at war with liberal and leftist and diverse Europe and America, and also want to expand white empire. Since they have declared war against us, they ought to die like soldiers, and the liberal state should be clear about which side they are taking here.

Okay did it. Thought 'PornHub' was a clue... unless someone doesn't know about PornHub (merry christmas).

NSFW (the link itself is fine but don't go anywhere else.)

PornHub recently released their 2016 Year in Review, detailing the different search trends and statistics for the users on their website. You can also find results for previous years here.

What are people's thoughts on this?

I disagree. I've seen a lot of 'Bernie Sanders' in my generation -- for better or worse. They won't out Bernie Sanders Bernie Sanders because now we've seen the show, but they might even exceed him if the right doesn't do too much damage in the next few years.

Just people who wrote about when 'black', 'yellow', etc. were created. Now that Trump has won on poor whites who have been neglected for decades, but also marginalized through the 'PC' culture, it might be worth going back to when and why PC culture actually originated and perhaps reconsider whether this was all justified.

You ever read Edward Said's Orientalism? Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth?

Or how about this. Leopold II's letter to missionaries:
http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/~luarnaut/Letter%20Leopold%20II%20to%20Colonial%20Missionaries.pdf

It didn't work well in those instances, but a 99.9% success rate is still pretty good.

Excellent! I've gotten my failures out of the way and now I'm primed for my millions. — Hanover

Well if you weren't such a noob you could have made millions as well.

This must be what it feels like to be that dwarf in Game of Thrones when going through that old city that looks like Angkor Wat.

Not like philosophy forums at all, 'cause you're face to face. Talking philosophy face to face, if it's good, is a million times better than online.

I don't see this to be the case with the Democratic party at all. Especially since they seem to be actively killing the teat as opposed to how you describe them.

Here's a fact though: both Republicans and Democrats have multiple juicy teats for corporations to suck from that they constantly deliver on time without delays to billionaires, that much I think we can agree on.

The Democrats are no different. If you have ever done anything political in America, you'd see that the Democrats are the cancer of the American left. They are the fairweather ruling class, and constantly throw most oppressed peoples under the bus.

I kind of feel angry and hurt and sad at Kafkaeque situations, especially people stuck in bureaucratic loops, or subject to objective violence -- violence that slowly chips away at that soul, Sisyphean grinds in work life that clearly results in a life of meaninglessness, general workplace alienation, or slow descents into madness when clear alternatives could be possible if not for the certain unnecessary and harmful institutions. For example, truck drivers and factory workers here in Thailand almost always being some form of meth addict because their employer demands them do their 36 hour shift, and they pay their entire workday of pay to purchase meth so that they can stay awake. When I see situations like these, and then trace the consequences to whole pockets of society, I feel angry and enraged and my heart is constantly broken. Then, on top of this, the drug war, which makes these drugs more expensive to purchase and also the consequence of getting caught even worse for the families.

All in the name of making sure those stupid twinkies get produced by the sales deadline.

Oh, I was just using it ironically, but cool, there is a tag functionality here. Better stop using it ironically.

But I was enjoying it.

Bunch of rich idiots. Nothing to see here. Anyone who calls them self an #Entrepreneur is probably an idiot.

What's going on? Why is Hanover stroking all our cocks?

That movie Baader-Meinhof Complex was so good.

Well, something similar might be happening in the US, which is a split in the Democratic Party.

I see. I only started reading the Guardian when I moved out West and I can see here that those 'preference algorithms' that the big websites use to tailor my newsfeed to my biases has resulted in me thinking that the Guardian consists of commies like Zizek, Varoufakis, and Graeber, and generally anti-establishment people like Glenn Greenwald writing for it as guests.

During Corbyn's rise a while back, the Guardian also seemed to be supporting him overall. It was just a surprise to start seeing them backing some sort of Hillary-esque establishment candidate.

Can someone explain to me the recent Guardian anti-Corbyn campaign? Did Rupert Murdoch buy up the Guardian?

It's kind of similar to Schrodinger Sanders. The best person on the major field, the establishment backs Hillary, loses because idiots were duped by fraud and lesser of two evils logical errors.

Yeah fuck off! (just kidding, I'm sure you are one of the good ones, I'm just trying to keep up with the Leave spirit)

Sometimes I wish I could send all the Brits off on a ship back to the UK here in Thailand. They contribute nothing to Thai society except their cash and generally leave it in a worse state than it was previously and the lowest scumbag shitfucker who can barely afford a plane ticket comes over and finds out that they are now little royals with the 50/60:1 exchange rate and proceeds to trash our cities and beaches and knock up our women and proceed to leave fatherless children to be raised here by single mothers. They basically all have jobs ready for them here to teach English even though the vast majority of them weren't trained to teach anything -- hell, I'd be surprised most of them actually knew how to read -- but they proceed to get a salary well above median income in Thailand, successfully catapulting them to upper middle class status. No Thai person ever learns a lick of English from them and they smoke opium and drink two or three bottles of whiskey before coming in to teach their 9.30 AM class and sexually harass their underage students before committing statutory rape while teaching in school by forming British networks of pedophile rings. These fucking migrants must go. Don't even get me started on the ones coming here to find themselves in a Buddhist temple.

So does anyone know if the Daily Express is hiring?

Catered, comfy sit-ins, so emblematic of the Democratic Party's approach to the world. :-d I mean, I think the whole attempt at introducing these gun control bills is entirely wrong and will solve nothing, but that's nothing new with the Democratic Party USA.

My ideas just follow from basing them on anti-colonial/imperialist logic. I'm not sure if I should be worried here...

Honestly, I think the reaction to Brexit actually happening has been really overblown by the media. It seems so obvious that the media has an agenda here. The fact is that the UK wasn't even that much of a real member of the EU anyways, choosing to opt-out of 4 out of 6 policy areas. The UK was, at best, an awkward member, and these market woes are puny compared to just a couple months earlier with what happened in China. People are really overreacting.

I actually think there is a silver lining to all this. The EU has been quite oppressive to smaller nations like Greece and remember the Greek default years (which is still happening but people seem to forget about this) and the wholly undemocratic nature of the EU itself, and what the EU is doing to Italy and Portugal -- a UK exit actually serves as a much needed experiment for other nations to exit as well and avoid the horrific things that happened to Greece that will inevitably happen to many nations in the future.

One interesting perspective is Subversive Spinoza by Antonio Negri.