Honestly, the National Guard is a lot better trained at this kind of “dealing with large groups of angry but mostly unarmed and harmless people” situation. The cops are trained and experienced at dealing with individuals, for the most part, but when they’re faced with a big protest or a riot they are often making it up as they go along.

One thing that multiple National Guard people said after they got involved in BLM in 2020 was that they often felt like their role in practice was to protect the people against the police. Since their job is, more or less, to maintain order, and the people were (most of the time) pretty orderly and the police often were not.

So I disagreed with this:

Because the opinion pieces were all winging about how Harris lost because … she hadn’t been mean enough to trans people.

Now that we’ve solidly established that I was 100% in the right to disagree with this, you’ve done a few rhetorical backflips around to where you’re accusing me of a bunch of things I never said. You’ve also actually managed to backflip your way around to where because I posted a negative story about Gavin Newsom, I must not care about negative things about Gavin Newsom and I must think he’s our next president.

I changed my mind: You might be the galaxy brain propaganda. It’s honestly pretty impressive. Well done! If you want to engage with anything I actually said, you’re welcome to.

Okay, so it wasn’t “all” opinion pieces, it was no opinion pieces. Glad we got that squared away. There is an NBC News article, and a couple of clueless reps apparently. Hooray. To me this piece sounds like a pretty good instance of the galaxy-brain type of propaganda that can successfully turn everyone against the Democrats, whether you are pro-trans or anti-trans, which is generally a pretty good accomplishment when you can swing it.

Do they? When did this happen? I know they arrest people for “Plasticine Action” T-shirts.

Germany’s been doing fucked up stuff for a while. People have literally had the police visit and gotten citations for what they said online (for example calling a politician a “penis” on social media.) It’s fucked.

Haha, I was actually going to make fun of the “milk toast” but I thought there were some more substantive issues.

People are applying for refugee status in Canada already, especially LGBTQ people. Which makes it fucking hilarious that there are people in another adjacent comments section yelling at me “AS AN LGBTQ PERSON I CAN’T SUPPORT GAVIN NEWSOM HOW DARE” and expecting me to take them seriously or something.

No, he made it into the news because he’s doing all this attention grabbing shit. And then some geniuses sprung the gotcha of “Aha! He is a high-profile Democrat, therefore nothing he does counts, because he’s just doing it because he wants to be president!” And then they sat back with a satisfied smile.

The article isn’t talking him up as a candidate. I’m not talking him up as a candidate. He’s not in the news because he’s a candidate for the election that’s going to happen in three and a half years. Are you now shifting your stance from “now that he’s being talked up as a candidate” to something different? Or still claiming he’s being talked up as a candidate for the election and that’s why we have to “respond” with this sort of disclaimer? I mean, it’s fine, I actually was as you noted the person who posted this article which is slapping a disclaimer on what he is doing. But IDK where you got the idea that all of a sudden now he’s being talked up as a candidate.

I’m not going to vote for my own demise

If you didn’t vote against Trump in the last election, you literally voted for your own demise. Maybe literally. I hope it turns out okay for you.

Fighting for better than the Democrats is in no way whatsoever incompatible with fighting to survive in the meantime.

now that he’s being talked up as a presidential candidate

I haven’t heard anyone talking him up as a candidate. I mean, people have talked about it periodically and I’m sure they still are, but the reason he’s in the news right now is because he’s trying to fuck up Trump’s planning. The election isn’t for years and years (maybe longer than that, the way things are going) right now.

If you look back on my profile you can see me commenting on a couple of them (including return2ozma reposting something from 2023 because it was a good opportunity to shit on Newsom and then a bunch of people coming in the comments lecturing me on how important it was to shit on Newsom).

Because the opinion pieces were all winging about how Harris lost because she didn’t go on enough podcasts

I mean that part is definitely true. The Democratic campaign machine is a big collection of boomer shit, of which this was one example. I thought that was generally agreed upon on Lemmy?

, and/or because she hadn’t been mean enough to trans people.

Fuckin’ what? Who said that? What are some of these opinion pieces?

at best his milk toast careerism will knee cap the congressional battles that happen at the same time

Sounds like it’s doing literally 100% the exact opposite, because he unlike almost all of the Democratic party is actually trying to fight for proper representation in congress. Right? Or did we read different articles or something?

Yeah. I’m especially suspicious of the big influx of posts that are all of a sudden super-concerned about his progressive credentials, as if the most important thing right now that we’re trying not to go to Trump-prison for making a Democratic campaign contribution, is what Gavin Newsom’s homeless policy was like. But this one I posted because I do feel like it’s pretty accurate to what I don’t like about Gavin Newsom on a general personal level. But yeah, he’s doing fine, it’s good that he’s trying to mess up Trump, I wish more people would.

One of the most important parts of a propaganda framework is the introduction of code-words, little phrasings that automatically call to mind a particular narrative you’re trying to construct. “People are fleeing California to move to red states” may be true, it may not be, it may be because of property values more than anything else. Doesn’t matter. By incorporating that same phrasing and framing into as many different contexts as possible, it does two things:

1. It gives people security. It’s like a little affirmation that gives them assurance they’re on the right side. They can slip it into conversation on their YouTube channel, in their press conference, at their dinner table. It reminds them that everyone on the “enemy” side is stupid, and losing, and they’re on the right side. It gives them camaraderie, it strengthens the bond.
2. It creates an artificial external reality. If you just walk up to people a few times a week and say, “Democratic policies are a failure,” they’ll think you’re super weird, and they might even disagree with you. But if you just use the code-word, if you allude to it, even in contexts like this that have nothing to do with anything, it’ll smuggle its way into their worldview without them even noticing. Eventually, it’s reach a point where if someone tries to tell them it’s not that way, they’ll scoff and decide the person is stupid, because everyone thinks that, they hear it everywhere.

It’s very effective.

Dude you were the one that asked the fucking question lol

You define it in exactly the same way you just did. Completely fine, you have to do it for lots of things. It’s nice that Python can do that too.

Now, I’ll grab a random snippet of code from some random file from my source dir:

        existing_bookmarks = db.session.execute(
            text('SELECT post_reply_id FROM "post_reply_bookmark" WHERE user_id = :user_id'),
            {"user_id": user_id}).scalars()
        reply = PostReply.query.filter(PostReply.id.in_(existing_bookmarks), PostReply.deleted == False).first()
        if reply:
            data = {"comment_id": reply.id, "save": True}
            with pytest.raises(Exception) as ex:
                put_reply_save(auth, data)
            assert str(ex.value) == 'This comment has already been bookmarked.'

You can see some classes in use, which again is fine. But you also see inline instantiation of some reply JSON, a database returning a list of post_reply_id values without needing a special interface definition for returning multiple values, lots and lots of cognitive and computational load per line of code that’s being saved because the language features are saving people the heavy lifting of depending on user-defined classes for everything. It means you don’t have as many adventures through the code where you’re trying to modify a user-defined interface class, you don’t need as much strong typing, that kind of thing.

I would bet heavily that a lot of the things that are happening in that short little space of code, would need specific classes to get them done if the same project were getting implemented in some C+±derived language. Maybe not, I just grabbed a random segment of code instead of trying especially hard to find my perfect example to prove my point.

It is fine, there are significant weaknesses to Python too, I’m not trying to say “yay python it’s better for everything,” anything like that. I’m just saying that if you don’t get familiar with at least some language that does things more that way, and instead get solely accustomed to just user-defined classes or templates for every information exchange or functional definition, then you’ll be missing out on a good paradigm for thinking about programming. That’s all.

Complex data structures are not “more of a C++ type of program structure”.

Oh, they are not at all. Equating complex data structures with user-defined data structures (in the form of classes and fields and whatnot), and using the latter as the primary method of storing and working with data (so that you’re constantly having to bring into your mental scope a bunch of different classes and how they need to interact), is 100% a C++ type of program structure. It’s pretty unusual in my experience in Python. Or, I mean, it’s perfectly common, but it’s not primary in the same universal way that it is in C++ and derivatives. It gets to exist as its own useful thing without being the only way. That’s what I am trying to say.

IDK, I just have never really had this become a serious issue for me. I get what you mean, some actions are a little bit of a pain in the neck because people are often sloppy about typing, but literally the only time I can remember it being an issue at all has been when numpy is involved and so I have to figure out if something is a native Python thing or a numpy-fied custom structure.

I mean there’s just not that many types. Generally something is a list, a number, a map, or a string, and it’s pretty obvious which. Maybe there are OOP domain things where a lot of variables are objects of some kind of class (sort of more of a C++ type of program structure), and so it starts to become really critical to have strong type tools, I’m just saying I haven’t really encountered too much trouble with it. I’m not saying it’s imaginary, you may be right in your experience, I’m just saying I’ve worked on projects way bigger than a few hundred lines and never really had too much of an issue with it in practice in my experience.

Hm… yeah, maybe so. They linked to taz, they quoted a random member of Masch, and they cited some other cases, but yeah maybe it would have been good to have an actual legal expert weighing in on how realistic it is that this will mean anything significant.

That’s not really clear in actuality. Different people have different opinions on what might be the results, and a few of them are quoted in the article stating their takes on it. The fact that the reality isn’t clear yet isn’t exactly the article’s fault.