polyploy

"This is what happens in a dictatorship, and these are test cases," said Eric Lee, a lawyer who represents Momodou Taal, a Cornell University Ph.D. student and advocate for Palestinian rights whose visa was revoked. "If the government can get away with doing this to these students, it can do it to everybody in this country. Your citizenship won't save you. ... Your views will be next."

Taal sued the government on the grounds of free speech this year. After the case was filed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement called on Taal to turn himself in for deportation. Taal didn't turn himself in and continued the case until just over a week ago, when he issued a public statement on X sharing that he had left the country.

"Given what we have seen across the United States," he wrote, "I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs. I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted."

The suit has now been withdrawn, but Taal's lawyers say the implications of this case go well beyond their client.

"The First Amendment applies to people who are physically in the United States, regardless of their alienage, regardless of what country they were born in, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of their immigration status," Lee said. "By … saying that attending a protest makes one a threat to American foreign policy, the administration is admitting that the Constitution is getting in the way of the fight for democracy. Something is not right there."

God damn this is bleak.

Mitch says the first signs of a deepening reliance on AI came when the company’s CEO was found to be rewriting parts of their app so that it would be easier for AI models to understand and help with. “Then”, Mitch says, “I had a meeting with the CEO where he told me he noticed I wasn't using the Chat GPT account the company had given me. I wasn't really aware the company was tracking that”.

“Anyway, he told me that I would need to start using Chat GPT to speed up my development process. Furthermore, he said I should start using Claude, another AI tool, to just wholesale create new features for the app. He walked me through setting up the accounts and had me write one with Claude while I was on call with him. I’m still not entirely sure why he did that, but I think it may have been him trying to convince himself that it would work.”

Mitch describes this increasing reliance on AI to be not just “incredibly boring”, but ultimately pointless. “Sure, it was faster, but it had a completely different development rhythm”, they say. “In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it”.

“One thing to note is that just the thought of using AI to generate code was so demotivating that I think it would counteract any of the speed gains that the tool would provide, and on top of that would produce worse code than I didn’t understand. And that’s not even mentioning the ethical concerns of a tool built on plagiarism.”

Wechat has over a billion active users, it's the world's only super app. There are probably tens of thousands of users in Montreal alone. This is like saying "anybody using whatapp is already compromised" it's ridiculous.

Yeah it would have been more appropriate to say "Chinese-speaking audiences" on my part, especially given the concern seems to be that it was aimed at Canadian voters who can read/speak the language.

The second link was definitely the one I was more referring to when talking about editorializing and characterizations, it's more emotive language overall but it still doesn't really say anything wrong or misleading. Disagreeing with the characterization could be reasonable, but the tone of it is like any sensationalized news aggregator blog or social media account anywhere else in the world. Like we don't call it misinformation when people post a video called "[Public Figure] DESTROYED in HEATED DEBATE!" even if we roll our eyes at the language, and similarly any kind of social media format lends itself to catchier and more dramatic descriptions.

The lack of attribution could actually be the real source of concern. It's possible there's some disagreements on wording in a translation, or that not having direct links to sources is viewed as misleading but again... it's not hard to see that's exactly how just about any social media news account tends to function these days.

It just honestly feels like this is the Canadian government grasping at straws, especially given that this is being treated like overt election interference from the Chinese government. Given that there is a much more present and obvious concern about US interference. Most of our media outside the CBC and all of our social media is directly owned by US corporations that are backing the fascist threatening to annex us. I don't understand why the fed and CSIS keep issuing these warnings about often dubious claims of malicious state actors from elsewhere, it's maddening.

The funny thing is that you can actually check the official Canadian source right here that links to two posts directly (one and two) and if you use some browser translation you can see exactly what the articles actually say which is... literally just a news update for Chinese audiences offering a summary of Carney's past behavior and achievements. It's not even really negative, if anything it's just vaguely uncertain.

I have read them both twice and am not really really finding any false narratives to speak of. The only real editorializing is in portrayal of current exchanges between Trump, Carney, and Trudeau, and if we're going to consider any kind of characterization of foreign political leaders as somehow pushing a false narrative then we should probably take a look at how all our own media reports on the US, EU, and elsewhere ourselves.

Granted, I don't speak mandarin and there is always a possibility that there are more skewed statements that are being lost in translation, but I don't really understand why these particular posts summarizing Canadian electoral politics for Chinese readers on wechat are somehow some kind of election interference.

A snippet, from one of the posts that is being framed as some kind of attack on Carney, which is actually titled "The United States is facing a tough prime minister from Canada":

Who is Mark Carney? What is his campaign message? Can he lead Canada through the current crisis?

Carney was born in a small town called Fort Smith in the northwest region of Canada. His mother was a teacher and his father was the principal of a local high school. He later became a professor of education at the University of Alberta. Carney, who grew up in an academic family, originally dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, but changed his mind after being admitted to the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He admitted: "I came to Harvard from Canada with a large student loan, and the most effective way to repay the loan was to become a banker."

After that, Carney graduated from Harvard University and Oxford University, spent 13 years in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and then returned to Canada to start a public service.

In 2008, Carney, who was only 42 years old, became the governor of the Bank of Canada and was praised for his quick and effective response to the financial crisis. Carney then moved to London to take charge of the Bank of England, the central bank of the United Kingdom, becoming the first foreign governor in the bank's 300-year history.

The British media called him a "rock star economist" for his series of modern reforms to the traditional Bank of England.

During his tenure in the UK, Carney helped the UK through the turbulent period after Brexit and was called "the only adult in the room." But at the same time, Carney also caused controversy for repeatedly warning about the economic risks of Britain's withdrawal from the EU and making remarks about the risks of climate change to financial markets.

After leaving his post as Governor of the Bank of England in 2020, Carney served as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Chairman of Bloomberg, and Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management.

His professional achievements have earned Carney a large support base among Canadian Liberal MPs.

Earlier, Canadian Foreign Minister Joly said Carney was "capable of dealing with major crises". Canadian Environment Minister Guilbeault believed that Carney was best suited to "manage" US President Trump and lead the Canadian economy to achieve energy transformation in the coming years.

Genocide is actually very clearly defined under international law. To quote directly from the source:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Any single one of these criteria individually is enough to meet the definition of genocide. Every single one of these has already occurred and is ongoing, and it is only through pure delusion, media control, and wishful ignorance that anyone can claim otherwise.

There is virtually no dissent among actual scholars and experts in the field of international law, Israel is unequivocally perpetrating genocide. They have simply not been held to account for their actions yet, due primarily to complicity from allies and collaborators who do not want to be criminalized for their actions as well. People are also not their rulers, and they have been watching those running their governments provide diplomatic, strategic, and political cover for some of the worst atrocities in human history.

Make no mistake though, justice will come for Israel, and hopefully every state and individual actor who has supported and covered for it as well.

For people like yourself, I hope you understand that at some point in the future you're going to have to live in a world that sees you for exactly what you are. Israel will be remembered as exactly what it is, and you will know you were one of its defenders.

When you hear stories of traumatized, maimed, orphaned children, of mothers forced to endure c sections without anesthesia, of the weeping friends and family of journalists, medical workers, educators, caretakers, and innocents of all walks of life as they and their loved ones were targeted and massacred by an inhuman genocidal apartheid state, you will have to reckon with the fact that you stood on the side of the perpetrators.

Greens lost my support forever when they ratfucked Dimitri Lascaris and Maryam Haddad, just a shameful display of overtly anti-democratic values. All to install Paul who ended up failing catastrophically in less than two years.

Is it though, especially given the present trajectory and conduct of the Trump regime?