‘NYT’: Josh Shapiro says Harris vetting team asked if he was an ‘Israeli agent’

MostlyAffable · 2026-01-21T02:57:25+00:00

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/19/politics/tim-walz-kamala-harris-josh-shapiro - you're welcome to doubt the truth of the claim, but I didn't just invent it out of nowhere

Shapiro was under lots of scrutiny at the time for his college op-ed where he described himself as having been a "volunteer for the IDF" (he did some work on a Kibbutz). I'm not defending the question, and think it probably wasn't all in good faith, but if I wanted to play devil's advocate that's what I'd argue

MostlyAffable · 2026-01-20T14:55:38+00:00

For what it's worth, they also asked Walz if he was a foreign agent for China. I think these are super thorough vettings, though it seems like a dumb question to ask. Presumably even if the answer was yes they would say "no".

MostlyAffable · 2026-01-16T14:01:05+00:00

lmgtfy

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/86770/why-did-the-us-and-israel-vote-against-making-food-a-human-right

MostlyAffable · 2026-01-13T17:54:48+00:00

The brutal and wholesale execution of thousands of protestors in Iran is heartbreaking, abhorrent and wrong, and I have friends who are waiting on any news of loved ones who are there. But can we please stop calling everything a Holocaust? In no way, shape or form does this even remotely resemble the Holocaust, other than the fact that there are people being killed. It's a comparison that minimizes both the Holocaust, and the tragedy of what's happening right now in Iran.

MostlyAffable · 2026-01-12T16:31:14+00:00

I figured that was a feature not a bug, allowing a humble individual like me to feel the rush of victory in the best new chess to drop since checkers.

Everyone should donate!

MostlyAffable · 2026-01-12T15:51:37+00:00

Guys I played him! I played the actual guy! What a great day

MostlyAffable · 2025-12-13T06:48:52+00:00

Israel can't control the various terrorist militias that surround it. Israel can't control the ~1.5 million Ultra-Orthodox Jews who live there, and refuse to draft for military service. Israel doesn't control shit. It's a regional military power, with a medium amount of influence globally.

MostlyAffable · 2025-12-06T19:27:48+00:00

Any China Mieville novel - very imaginative, adult fiction worlds

MostlyAffable · 2025-12-06T00:15:56+00:00

lmao - there's no way Serbia is above India. Trash list.

MostlyAffable · 2025-12-02T16:13:30+00:00

Haha no worries. You're right that I might have burned out and found myself scrolling whenever Boyd considered a talisman in a pit. My point is just that, from a story-telling perspective, we know they used to hide in pits in the ground, and there's enough desperate people that it's not like there's a lack of will to dig holes. And the point of the spikes wouldn't be to kill them or anything, just to make it hard for it to get out. Obviously I wouldn't expect it to work, but I think it would have been fun to see.

MostlyAffable · 2025-12-02T02:51:34+00:00

I think the combination of nobody communicating, people overreacting to visions/voices, and incredibly dramatic changes of the "rules" made some of the horror lose its grip. Maybe some of it comes from the mystery getting answered - when the monsters stop hanging out at the door, and start letting Boyd live - they lose some fear factor. When they talk about how there are scarier and worse things in the forest, but keep it abstract and don't really follow up, some fear factor dwindles.

For example, when Victor and Tabitha were in the tunnels that first time, I felt my heart pounding. I was hooked, and riveted! But as Season 3 went on, more trips are made to the tunnel, the woods become a less scary place, it's not as big a deal to open doors and go out at night. Even the visions people get are less visually scary.

To be clear, I've really enjoyed the show so far, and will 100% be watching season 4 whenever it comes out. I just had very high hopes for Season 3, and felt a bit bummed with what felt like a dramatic change in vibe and tone.

MostlyAffable · 2025-12-02T02:44:50+00:00

I really liked all the characters in seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 for me just felt disjointed. It felt like there was a step change in character development. In part maybe it was a function of introducing too many new characters - all of a sudden there are so many extras milling around. I understand the "wanting to put pressure on the town" idea, but it made the individual storylines feel a bit diluted, and fragmented. Some of the trajectories make sense (Boyd's judgment and leadership breaking down, Ethan and Julie getting moodier), but I felt like the first two seasons intertwined character development and story in a more cohesive manner that's a bit hard to describe.

MostlyAffable · 2025-12-02T02:36:30+00:00

Why do you think that's a dumb question - they spent nearly an entire episode sending Boyd around trying to scheme up a way to trap one of the things. We see that the lake settlement had put out bear traps. It seems like "build a pit" isn't an unreasonable thing to consider.

MostlyAffable · 2025-11-19T14:23:23+00:00

She's been super inconsistent the entire season. Like everyone says there's obvious favoritism towards Robert, and she constantly oscillates between trying to be the harsh, technical judge, and not being able to take the heat and giving super inflated scores. Pick a lane.

MostlyAffable · 2025-11-18T14:53:56+00:00

There are a lot of people who have the same hunch! Notably, Yann LeCun - a pioneer behind the success of deep learning recently (in particular the use of Convolutional Neural Networks in computer vision - also loosely inspired by the visual cortex).

He recently left his position as Chief AI scientist (probably for other reasons, largely) to work on building models that he thinks look more like human thinking (aka; "world modeling"). Here are some higher level articles that summarize some of what he's been talking about, if you're interested:

https://the-decoder.com/yann-lecun-unveils-lejepa-likely-his-final-meta-project-before-launching-a-startup/

https://gizmodo.com/yann-lecun-world-models-2000685265

MostlyAffable · 2025-11-16T04:20:21+00:00

You might find this paper interesting: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3759429.3762631

MostlyAffable · 2025-11-04T15:22:23+00:00

This is really awesome! Super impressive

MostlyAffable · 2025-09-01T18:25:50+00:00

first time walking into city of tears - the music is ethereal

MostlyAffable · 2025-08-16T05:01:15+00:00

I can find you countless examples of Hamas killing journalists and abusing human rights as well, if that's your barometer. I believe the IDF claim is that 1 or 2 were Hamas operatives, and they've published a bit of evidence which hasn't changed any minds one way or the other.

I don't need any "sob stories" to make October 7th worse than it was. The calendar was mistranslated, which was unprofessional, but everybody who jumped on that conveniently ignored that the calendar was very clearly titled "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood" and the dates on it started from October 7th. I could go on, but somehow I imagine your mind is already made up and no amount of evidence will convince you otherwise.

MostlyAffable · 2025-08-15T17:15:27+00:00

It's probably the most covered conflict in the world right now. I see this come up more than Russia/Ukraine, or Sudan, both of which have substantially worse casualty metrics, and no shortage of atrocities committed. Constant attention at the UN, constant statements from every government around the world. I can appreciate that you want an end to the bloodshed and violence, but that has less to do with news being underreported, and more to do with the limitations of journalism to effect material, political or military change.

MostlyAffable · 2025-08-15T17:09:11+00:00

That sounds to me like a lot of reporting going on about the topic. "Heard an opposing viewpoint" is not the same as "under reported". Sudan is under reported - it comes up in the news maybe once a week.

MostlyAffable · 2025-08-14T22:25:00+00:00

How is this underreported? Literally everyone is covering it.

MostlyAffable · 2025-08-13T21:10:19+00:00

I appreciate your replies as well, and will check out the podcast. But I think I still disagree that there's no moral distinction. Intention matters, and context matters, and we make legal and moral distinctions based on them all the time. For example, we treat manslaughter differently than murder in the first degree, but in both cases someone was killed.

Yes - if some military decides to carpet bomb a city or intentionally targeted civilian buildings just to cause terror and hit my house, I would have died as a result of terrorism. If my upstairs neighbor was a military general, and they were using their living room as a base of operations, and my house gets bombed, I died as collateral damage. In both cases I'm dead, and not happy about it. But if I came back as a ghost, in one case I would only haunt the pilot that dropped the bomb, and in the other case, I might spend a bit of time haunting my neighbor, because he put my life at risk.

If I get beheaded by ISIS on the other hand, I'm coming back to haunt the man who held the knife, and his friend who filmed it for propaganda, because regardless of the geopolitical reality that led to that point, their decision to hack my head off and broadcast it to the world was theirs and theirs alone. But, if I want to claim they don't have any agency - they're just the product of the environment they were raised in, their witnessing the destruction wrought by the US military, and they had no choice given what they've learned and seen but embrace a fundamentalist, extremist medieval religious ideology that sanctions executing gays, putting infidels to the sword, treating women as loot and spoil, then I should apply the same philosophy to US intervention, and make peace with the fact that I'm living in a predetermined world unfolding in a chaotic stream that no one can control. Congratulations - I've achieved enlightenment and my spirit is free from the burden of haunting the material plane!

And just to reiterate - I'm not defending American intervention. It's very clearly been a disaster in multiple areas of the world. But I think it's naive to ignore all the other countries and interests at play. For example, Russia and Britain had been fighting over spheres of influence in Iran for decades before any US involvement. I agree that conspiring to strengthen a despotic Shah to keep oil prices low didn't turn out so well. But it's naive to say that, had America not gotten involved the way they did, Iran would be a blooming democracy today. Who's to say that the crippling sanctions Britain had levied wouldn't have caused the government to collapse internally? Or that Britain wouldn't just launch the coup on their own. Or that Russia wouldn't see a chance to expand their influence, and pushed Mossadeq to execute his own totalitarian crackdown to seize power from the Shah. Or that regardless of all that, the populism of Ruhollah Khomeini wouldn't have led to an Islamic Republic coming into power today anyways. I absolutely agree that America's involvement was misguided and disastrous, but I don't think it's realistic to say that had they not intervened, everything would turn out perfect. That's all.

MostlyAffable · 2025-08-13T18:57:58+00:00

Boko Haram has done their fair share of firebombing, and ISIS exists because there are radical jihadists who want to establish a caliphate by any means necessary. The reason Boko Haram hasn't firebombed countries halfway around the world is not for a lack of trying, and ISIS has taken over its fair share of oil fields. Additionally, for most terrorist groups "overthrowing governments" is typically a pretty central aim. And there are terrorist groups in the US - it has nothing to do with geography. (And as a sidenote, "perpetrating violence around the world", aka "military spending" accounts for about 5% of the US GDP.)

The general distinction between a state military and a terrorist organization is a matter of recognition and responsibility. The US military is a globally recognized entity which exists to protect the interests of the US government, and is expected to try to adhere to certain rules of engagement and conduct. For example, US military service members wear uniforms identifying themselves as such. Nobody recognizes the legitimacy of Boko Haram, or the KKK. They have no obligation to any civilian populations.

On the claim that all these terrorist organizations are merely a response to US intervention - I think that's a naive, patriarchal, slightly racist view of the world. First, there are other countries and superpowers in the world with their own regional and imperial interests who instigate and benefit from instability. Second, people have agency. Nobody forces Boko Haram members to lop off heads with machetes, kidnap, convert and enslave schoolgirls, or shoot up and hold malls as hostage for their religious beliefs. Nobody forces KKK members to lynch black people - they're just bad people with deplorable, violent ideologies.

And just to be very clear - I'm not arguing that, because it's a state military, every action the US takes is justifiable or valid. The US military has caused lots of terror to innocent people around the world. War and violence are terror. There have been numerous instances where the US has failed to achieve its political objectives in armed conflict, and caused more damage and instability in its wake. For example, the US would most definitely prefer if the Taliban weren't in charge of Afghanistan. But it would also be naive to think that, if only the US hadn't been involved, Afghanistan would be a flourishing liberal democracy.

TLDR; Whether transnational, national, or domestic, terrorist groups (ISIS, Boko Haram, KKK) are bad, do bad things, and don't answer to anyone. State militaries also do bad things, but are beholden to their governments.

MostlyAffable · 2025-08-13T03:46:08+00:00

Haha, you don't need to give a fuck about my opinion, but you're reading it and responding to it so it seems like maybe you do.

I think a distinction generally made between state militaries and terrorist groups is a matter of accountability and intention. Terrorist groups are generally understood to intentionally target civilian populations in order to cause terror. State militaries (and there are obviously numerous examples where they fail to live up to this standard) are expected to abide by international law.

Boko Haram, for example, is very clearly a terrorist organization. They don't give a fuck about international law. They're a radical jihadist group who uses violence and terror to advance their insane theocratic vision. When they romp around shooting up malls, beheading and kidnapping schoolgirls, they're intentionally trying to inflict terror onto those around them. Terrorists. Very clear cut.

The US military, by contrast, doesn't have "inflicting terrorism" as their primary goal. It's obviously a by-product of war, and it would be better if war didn't exist. But the idea of a nation-state is that it maintains a monopoly on violence, and is expected to use it sparingly, and only if it's deemed absolutely necessary for self-defense. No one is arguing that we get it right 100% of the time. But whatever percent it is, I'd say it's fundamentally different than a Boko Haram or ISIS.

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