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"I felt very scared and concerned as the men surrounded me and grabbed my phone from me," Ozturk said in the statement. They told her they were police, and one quickly showed what might have been a gold badge. "But I didn't think they were the police because I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this," she said... She said the men didn't tell her why they were arresting her and shackled her. She said at one point, after they had changed cars, she felt "sure they were going to kill me." During a stop in Massachusetts, one of the men said to her, "We are not monsters," and "We do what the government tells us."

— Tufts student recounts her detention by ICE, says she feared for her life in new court filing | CBS News

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original url http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Grove/2150/

last modified 2008-12-04 11:35:54

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“You tell yourself, ‘I want eggs,’ but explain to me what this ‘I’ is that you speak of? Can you point to it? Of course not. ‘I’ is a prison you’ve built for yourself. So long as you live within the ‘I,’ you live in a perpetual dream. Only when we dissolve this ‘I’ can we extinguish all of the terrible clinging and instead start living authentically in the realm of awakened life.” At press time, Trump had concluded by noting that it was thus that his Liberation Day tariffs were the path to freeing oneself from the karmic wheel of samsara.

Full Story

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Trump has undone years of progress.

And we're not even 100 days in.

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“Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs.”

— Senator Bernie Sanders at the 2020 Democratic National Convention

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Trump said the response to his staggering new tariff plan is “going very well.” “The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom,” he told reporters as he departed the White House.

— Live updates: Trump says tariff rollout is ‘going very well’ as global markets sell off

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Newsmax is ringing the opening bell today.

How poetic.

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lmao?

“how dare these countries sell us shit?”

funniest economic policy possible

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Is this good

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401k about to turn into a 404k.

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“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

— George Orwell, from “Politics and the English Language” in Why I Write

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What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced

On the night of Saturday, March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador, carrying 261 men deported from the United States. A few dozen were Salvadoran, but most of the men were Venezuelans the Trump Administration had designated as gang members and deported, with little or no due process. I was there to document their arrival. [...] The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster. The men were pulled from the buses so fast the guards couldn’t keep pace. Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear.  Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

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"Knowledge is useless unless accessible."

— John M. Barry, from The Great Influenza

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Absolutely losing my shit at this Goodreads chucklefuck, somehow officially ranking at #72 best reviewer on the site, who writes all of their reviews with ChatGPT, meaning that every single review includes 'quotes' from the books that ChatGPT has just wholesale made up or stolen from someone else lmfao

“Longed for as the sun warmed earth is by the wayfaring man in autumn.” - ChatGPT seems to have invented this wholesale, as the only Google result is this review.

“Far in the west, the sun set on the sea, and the stars came out, shining like silver. Then, I lay on the ground and wept, with tears that were salty as the sea.” - ditto

“Nobly he fought, but in the end, we were left with nothing but ruin.” - ditto

“They [the gods] give and they take, and the mortal man must suffer or rejoice, depending on their whim.” - ditto, but with vibes of Luke 9:22 (“The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”)

“My home is where I can be true to myself, not a place, but a promise.” - another ChatGPT invention

“Endurance is the key to life.” - seems like a generic motivational quote, can't find the original, but it ain't Homer.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” - this one is, for once, not a ChatGPT original, but by Maya Angelou, and although no-one really knows Homer's real identity, I don't think Angelou is a strong contender.

“Do not rage at the gods, my friend, for they are not to blame. They give, and they take, as they will." - ChatGPT made this one up, and unfortunately, it absolutely slaps. Homer wishes he wrote this one.

I'm so, so serious: people have got to get better at recognising AI generated content. This isn't to target this Goodreads user specifically (although Maddy, if you're reading this, jump into the nearest bin and close the lid) but is more so to say that this kind of slop is so fucking pervasive, we need to be teaching people how to recognise it. Check quotes. Look out for telltale hallmarks of ChatGPT writing, like over-use of emdashes and the word 'captivating'. There's no end in sight for the proliferation of this godforsaken bullshit, and the only way we can fight back against it is to stop rewarding people for plugging shit into ChatGPT.

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Sam Seder attempts to reason with a Trump supporter