this is just a hypothesis on my part, but I also think this would change the nature of the interaction in a way that would dissuade (not make impossible) AI psychosis a little. the guy who compliments you for free is different than the guy you have to pay a dime to compliment you.

the other thing about "radical action" on climate is that if you combined the cumulative impact on the climate of all "radical acts" ever, it's probably like 0.1% of the impact of, say, the province of Alberta's carbon pricing scheme

This is actually a big increase vs how much it used to cost. Google ball inflation to learn more

this is essentially a horror story, an old guy interacting with an alien entity that has taken the shape of a friendly helper that always agrees with him and coming away with the lesson “it’s my buddy!”

Do you want to feel incandescently angry? Read coverage of Biden’s economic addresses, where he would truthfully relay great progress with accurate numbers, and it would get covered as a pack of lies. Then look at what the current guy does, who is covered the same way edition.cnn.com/2023/01/28/p...

Living through the OWS period when everyone was like "okay if a McDonalds charged just a little more per order we could pay $15/hr" and similar claims about food, and then the moment that started actually happening (Ag and CDL jobs with HUGE increases) people said "Fuck this, fuck you, fuck off"

there is nothing Elon Musk wants that he cannot afford, there are only things he is not allowed to buy. so his enormous fortune is turned to the destruction of liberalism

When do you think pomni’s levitation powers will become relevant to the plot

In general people really seem to like lying about medically assisted dying and I genuinely do not know why. Like yeah man what technically constitutes a terminal disease is a fuzzy boundary, but eg the Illinois laws do not say "terminal disease" they have a clean definition (6mo to live or less)

The space shuttle was, objectively speaking, not very good. But in terms of design it is by far the most spaceship-y spaceship humanity’s ever made

The tragedy of the Biden administration is it did not have to be a blip and interregnum in the Long Trump Era, but thanks to choices made, largely his own, it will at best be remembered as an attempt to govern without doing politics, a failure compounded by his disastrous support for genocide abroad

A recurring theme in TNG is that Data is, in essence, a superbeing, and also the nicest boy. I basically think there is no task for which you do not want Data, he is great socially and functionally.

In terms of US politics, Bush v. Gore is the defining event of the century. It set the template: a ruthless right that instinctively seeks power & doesn't give a shit about rule of law...and a bunch of hapless, feckless octogenarian Dems worried about the good opinion of centrist opinion columnists.

The last part is especially and obviously true if you think about it for two seconds - “Tiny Tim lived better than we do today” would, if it were true, be an incredible indictment of the welfare state and endorsement of laissez faire capitalism

Broke: being mad at the Trader Joe’s “Trader Ming’s” branding because it’s racist cultural appropriation Woke: being mad at that branding because it should be Trader Zhou’s

broke: our delicate culture is at constant risk of disappearing under the slightest demographic pressure woke: you don't even have to live here to get fully assimilated

Verily, friend, ereyesterday, I visited Hore Abbey- and thy mother wast there!

merr crimus everyone I did an impulse purchase and got a silly little drawing from @itsthenutzone.bsky.social of tom as a gingerbread otter

Trump did not run on a concrete affordability platform. If anything Harris focused on the issue far more. I know this has become a thing people say, but it’s a retcon to paper over the uncomfortable reality that 2024 makes no sense according to conventional wisdom about how to win elections.

I think that the longstanding trauma of this moment is going to be that many people in their 20-30s rn in not-quite-elite circles are going to be intensely small c conservative for a long time and have something of a hair-trigger for anything that smells of populism for the rest of their days

love the idea that while ICE won't respect your civil liberties they will totally let you get away with shooting one of them in the head.

i do kind of wonder how movement that obsesses over intelligence, reconciles the fact that they have so few intelligent people on their side. like, educational polarization should be incredibly demoralizing to these guys.

By the way this is why I know they’re lying when they say they knew who was on the boats and they’re all on a military list. The US military had somehow built a dossier on Robert Sanchez, the boat pilot living in a cinderblock house and earning $100 a month? He was next on the kill list after Osama?

The substantial majority of Star Trek content released in the past 25 years has been pretty bad. There was plenty of bad Trek before that but the hit rate has been substantially lower. More importantly, there's no real indication that the people in charge of the franchise know what "good" is.

it is a hell of a thing to ask, like, liberal arts college cultural studies majors to become the nation's inquisitors. but, we are being faced with genuine evil. I do not see another way past it. we either accept the internal conflicts of what we must become, or fail

"the government should try, convict and then kill the secretary of defense for the crime he very obviously seems to have committed" seems like a radical thing to say, but -- no, it's not. it's the actual penalty for what pete hegseth, a man who ordered death squads to murder civilians, has done.

“We had to kill the survivors in the water with a missile because they might flip the shards of the boat, continue to the US, and sell drugs” is not really any different than “We had to kill the entire village because the children might grow up and join the Vietcong,” except much less plausible

it is somewhat bleak that the cordon sanitaire on the right seems to have totally evaporated. stephen crowder had fuentes on just a day ago

like for god's sake why do you think people like Platner are so popular despite what should be disqualifying personal histories? because they will actually say it's a genocide. they will say 'no war with venezuela' not whatever mealy mouthed insistence that congress have a chance to co-sign it.

we oftrn talk about social media being a radicalization engine, but for some it is an *de*-radicalization engine. unending, nonstop exposure since early 2010s to people with niche ideologies behaving badly has sharpened/reinforced my inclination towards conservatism

I’m convinced this nightmarish episode is happening because Hegseth is essentially cosplaying the TV version of a national security official. In that vein wanted his very own Situation Room scenario, like the Bin Laden strike, and so they cast dozens of poor dudes in unarmed boats as the terrorists.

I dunno if early modern Europe produced more sociopaths than the average society, or just whether the kind of person who wanted to go to exotic places to get rich was more fucked up than average, but it is striking how so many Age of Discovery European explorers resort to brutal violence *quick*

dems should start saying that presidential pardons dont apply to international war crimes and in fact implicate the president, no idea if thats true but they should start saying it

I think the reason that ‘civic duty socialism’, or ‘socialism with small c conservative characteristics’ is having a moment in left of center circles is that the long hangover of the 60s, where the assumption was that the median citizen would be a square too trusting, too patriotic, is finally over.

I don’t even really think this is the problem. The Constitution prohibits basically every terrible thing Trump has done. The problem is that our institutions have decided to ignore the Constitution. Can’t fix that by changing what it says.

The risk isn’t that a constitution contains some loophole (and indeed, ours mostly does not - Trump’s offenses are broadly illegal and unconstitutional, at least until the Supreme Court immunized him in 2024). It’s that people decide to ignore or eliminate it. That’s a lot easier if it’s brand new.

While I'm certainly supportive of all these things, I don't see how "making the country more democratic" stops a tyrant who wins the popular vote

as always, transphobia consumes your entire personality until there is nothing left but deeply offputting garbage

“Things were better before” “We are suffering because they took the good times from us” “They’re working together in ways we cannot see to take what we deserve” “Doesn’t it feel good to hurt them? Your inferiors, who persecuted you?”

Rewatched the original Star Wars (A New Hope) today. Obviously 'I love Star Wars' is baked in, but if you've not watched it in a while you can easily forget that the back half of that movie is some of the most genuinely thrilling stuff on film, back to back. 1977 must not have known what hit it.

crucially, "voters are fucking dipshit idiots" is not actually in conflict with "human beings are guided by ideas and beliefs". sometimes the ideas and beliefs are wrong and dumb and bad. they're still fervently held, and you cannot distract people from them w/ jangling keys or money

Really looks like the United States is about to launch a regime change war against Venezuela with: -No casus belli -No authorization from Congress -No allies or international support -No plan for a post-Maduro Venezuela -No preparation for any sort of stabilization or containment of the fallout

Genuinely I think the first season of Andor is about the closest thing you can possibly get to perfect TV

Worth it, it's far better than every cinematic Star War made since 1980 www.forbes.com/sites/caroli...

I thought it was ridiculous when people said “this might be the best single production in the franchise.” By about half way through S1 I had moved to “ok, can’t rule it out.”