Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

That should be “Sam Harriss” above, not “Sam Harris’s”. Trying to reference problems in referencing or using scientific term and findings generally.

JoeB:

Bad News today, it’s because they’ve made him a Ecuadorian national so the plan appears to be to get him to Ecuador.

Would he be safe in the US now, thanks to Trump? I was entertained by the thought of Ecuador trolling him by transferring him to their embassy in Washington DC. “Relax, Mr Assange, you’re perfectly safe. Just… stay away from any windows, ok?”

Eeeeeeee it is only scant days ’till the kittens come! Aaaaaah!

(And again, thanks peeps! Making some slight recovery, still.)

From the WaPo, bolding mine

President Trump grew frustrated with lawmakers Thursday in the Oval Office when they floated restoring protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries as part of a bipartisan immigration deal, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to these people, referring to African countries and Haiti. He then suggested that the United States should instead bring more people from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he met Wednesday.

The comments left lawmakers taken aback, according to people familiar with their reactions.

How in the everloving fuck are people pretending to be surprised by the Cheeto’s racism? Seriously. We’ve been hearing it on a daily basis from him for two years now.

I’m just not sure what if anything it’s going to take to get people to grasp the concept that yes, Trump really is this racist.

Oh, yeah. Linky

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html?utm_term=.f4ab769ec379

And meanwhile, it doesn’t occur to Trump or the congresscritters that Norwegians are probably about as interested in moving to the US as it is right now as Americans are interested in moving to Haiti. They won’t want to give up their universal healthcare and decent public transit any more than Americans want to give up (semi-)reliable electricity and clean drinking water.

@Grumpy: Don’t worry, Stephen King tweeted about it:

https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/951589567429332993

@Nebuchadnezzar:

I had to resort to TOR

Please consider using Cloudflare or another DDoS protection provider instead of cack-handedly blocking large swathes of users

Irony here: according to complaints I’ve run across in a few different places, Cloudflare … blocks TOR.

@David:

Outages wouldn’t selectively let through TOR users. And if Nebuchadnezzar tried a proxy, and then TOR, something about the error message must have made them suspect a block rather than an outage.

Most likely, the same hosting provider you say acts on their own initiative without you having any control enacted some kind of temporary block without consulting you, probably triggered by DoS activity. I’m surprised you don’t get more such incidents, actually, given the amount of butthurt this site evidently causes rightwingers.

Aww. Trump’s not coming to the UK in February to open the new US Embassy after all.

@SFHC

Cockroaches have their place in life and are a useful part of the ecosystem. Racists – not so much.

@Brony

You said nothing that concerns me, a side effect of my life is that I’m very hard to offend (but tend to be sensitive to offense in others). Your instincts are correct, and it’s more accurate to say that I’ve buried myself in mechanistic territory for most of the last decade. I’ve seen enough Sam Harris’s to take criticism of my ideas seriously though, I’d be happy to respond to any concerns you have. I’m comfortable being clinical about myself, my anxieties are usually about extending social contact.

Good. Still prefer to be careful, as talking about someone’s internals can be sensitive in unexpected spots, even when they ask. 🙂

There are some significant differences between what you are needing to do and what I needed (and still need, it’s an ongoing process) to do, but there are enough similarities that I’m comfortable discussing it.

It’s not really a criticism as such, more an awareness of the weakenesses of a particular tool. The mechanistic approach is a very thin reed when it comes to behaviour. No, I’m not talking about souls or anything like that, but the basic flaw in the approach:

It’s not reproducible, because it’s pretty much impossible to factor all the inputs that make up an output since you have no control over the pathways the stimuli take to reach the response segment. Thought isn’t a reflex arc. 😛

90% of the time you’ll get hungry if you smell bread baking. The other 10% can be anything from depressed to irritated to reminded that your keys are in your other coat. Same stimulus – multiple possible responses, with one (call it the base response) being likely and the others being completely unpredictable but equally valid.

Doesn’t mean the mechanistic approach is invalid – it is a useful tool, and you have had success with it, right? Just adjust your margins of error, and don’t stress over odd results to a given social stimulus. 🙂

By stress, I do mean don’t assign them a higher importance than they actually have – if you smile at 10 people and 9 smile back ond 1 bites your head off, it’s the 9 that’s the important detail. Sew your head back on and remember to not smile at that one in future unless they smile first.

Further news on Mark Wahlberg getting paid $1.5 million for reshooting All the Money in the World while Michelle Williams scored a massive $800 – it wasn’t down to sexism.

Wahlberg had co-star approval in his contract and basically held up the studio by refusing to approve the change in co-star (from Spacey) unless he was paid for it.

Not sure if thats better or worse.

@shadowplay

Wahlberg had co-star approval in his contract and basically held up the studio by refusing to approve the change in co-star (from Spacey) unless he was paid for it.

I see that Wahlberg isn’t worried about being labeled difficult — a label that the women in Hollywood seem to be stuck with more than the men. Wahlberg is probably seen as a tough negotiator with appropriately high self-esteem.

In August, Forbes named Wahlberg the highest-paid actor of the year, calculating his pretax and prefee earnings at $68 million.

Williams previously told USA TODAY that when Scott’s team called to request her time for the reshoot, “I said I’d be wherever they needed me, whenever they needed me. And they could have my salary, they could have my holiday, whatever they wanted. Because I appreciated so much that they were making this massive effort.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/01/11/exclusive-mark-wahlberg-refused-approve-christopher-plummer-unless-he-paid/1026347001/

Valentin:

I suggest if you want to learn about Russian opinions – Twitter is really good place to go. also for Ukraine too. there is plenty of English language Twitter accounts which share information and options about Ukraine and Russia.

Thanks for suggestion!

Speaking of immigration to US, last year my browser caught a long-running and highly scammy-looking ad campaign that was apparently advertising immigration opportunities to the US – possibly someone with deep pockets wanted to phish my personal info. I guess many people across the world are desperate to move to a rich country, or (less often) the US specifically.

Many of those ads specifically mentioned great immigration opportunities for “Europeans”. Now, this was obviously just fake localization based on my IP address (Hey, I’m a European!). However, in the context of Trump’s recent election, it did sound hilariously like “America wants white people!”

@Kat

Wahlberg is probably seen as a tough negotiator with appropriately high self-esteem.

I put that in my Hollywood/English translator and got “Wahlberg is a greedily entitled talentless bastard.” 😛

@Valentin

You said it yesterday, got proof in billboard size today. 🙂