to be fair, he had more checks on his power then, had less motive for revenge against the justice and electoral systems, and is now even more crazy. Im hoping it will be just some incompetence and international embarrassment, but Im worried that it might be more.
Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?
Back when computers were nowhere near capable of teaching kids, one can handwave away issues with the tech by saying “when the tech is ready to do this, it will be great” essentially. When the tech is at the point where it can sort of do something, but not do it well, one instead imagines how badly things might go if one tried the notion right now instead of at whatever point in the future the technology is good enough to actually do a good job.
I mean, It has partially worked, information is more accessible than it would be if you had to go find a library and search through a ton of book that may or may not even have what youre looking for, or had to try to find someone who knew something or had some skill that you wanted to learn. And it has brought together people across distance, consider the number of online communities and subcultures whos members live in far-removed places, some of whom might be in fairly small towns or rural areas that just wouldnt have enough people of a particular interest to even have a branch of that community there. And it does also reduce the monopoly on dissemination of news and information that traditional media outlets and governments used to share. Its just, the predictions didnt also take into account that it would increase the ease of spreading false information either, or that not all debates have an answer that is obvious to everyone if only they are presented certain info, or that people wont want to talk to everyone and will instead choose to talk to those they find commonality with even given the means to talk to people they dont.
While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.
My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.
Iirc the Russian casualty rate was supposedly on the order of 1000 a day recently, so probably implying the former.
Theres someone I sometimes encounter in a discord Im in that makes a hobby of doing stuff with them (from what I gather seeing it, they do more with it that just asking them for a prompt and leaving them at that, at least partly because it doesnt generally give them something theyre happy with initially and they end up having to ask the thing to edit specific bits of it in different ways over and over until it does). I dont really understand what exactly it is this entails, as what they seem to most like making it do is code “shaders” for them that create unrecognizable abstract patterns, but they spend a lot of time talking at length about technical parameters of various models and what they like and dont like about them, so I assume the guy must find something enjoyable in it all. That being said, using it as a sort of strange toy isnt really the most useful use case.
The issue is that people will use votes for if they like the thing or not instead of if it’s in good faith, even if you tell them not to, both on purpose to harm opposing views, and unintentionally because they’re more likely to notice a bad faith tactic coming from someone disagreeing than from someone agreeing with them.
“hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”
-“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”
I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.
why doesnt it make sense for a natural system? What do you expect a natural system to look like? As far as I can imagine, a universe that can be observed must display some consistent sent of mathematical rules (because any universe that did not, would be too chaotic to allow an ordered system like life to exist within it, and therefore all observers will find themselves existing within the limited ones), and a simulation is itself just executing a bunch of mathematical rules, and so any universe you can exist in will appear indistinguishable from a simulated one from the inside (unless the simulators do something specifically to reveal it).
There is quite a lot Trump could do to speed things up. He could, for one thing, send American troops to assist Israel on the ground; I have concern that he might do such, because Israel has increasingly been dragging other countries in the region into this, notably Iran, and Trump pursued a policy towards that country during his term in office that very well could have led to war had things gone slightly worse. Given his support for Netanyahu, whose government has itself been tempting fate of late by engaging in back and forth missile strikes, and his disregard for the consequences of attacks against Iran, I have serious fears that he might give Israel a green light to pursue a full scale war with that country, by promising to commit US forces in the event of such a thing.
At a lesser degree, he also could simply increase US military aid to Israel beyond the current level, and end what efforts (insufficient by a country mile but still better than their absence would be) have been made by the US to convince Israel to limit its actions, such as the recent threats to cut some of its military aid if Israel does not allow more food aid across Gaza. He appears to actively dislike Muslim populations, as seen by his efforts as president to ban travelers from Muslim majority countries, so it strikes me as rather unlikely that he would do anything, even something basic like that, to assist a Muslim majority country like Palestine against the wishes of one of his allies.
Also for the record, I do not think that I am simply protecting “my outgroup” in opposing him. I am of the view that he, (or more importantly, the fascistic movement that he has grown around him, of which Trump himself is the leader, but which may persist even after he is gone), presents an existential threat not just to myself and those whom I know, but to you, to everyone in the country, to everyone in the numerous countries who he seems actively hostile to (including but not limited to Palestine as I have said, and Iran, as I was saying earlier, and Ukraine), and to a lesser extent, to the future of every single person on this planet. That may sound a bit extreme, but we are talking about making a narcissistic old man showing signs of mental decline and known for lashing out at things that anger him the commander in chief of a nuclear armed state, we are talking about putting someone who does not seem to believe in climate change at the head of the world’s largest economy at a time when getting carbon emissions down is critical to keeping the planet livable in the future, and we are talking about putting the country with the world’s largest military budget in the hands of a person who idealizes fascists, has attempted to maintain power despite a previous election loss, and has a following composed to a large degree of racists and religious zealots.
I am not saying that I worry about what Trump will do as hyperbole, or to justify what the current dem administration has done in arming Israel while it bombs and shoots civilians, I am saying that I worry about what he will do, because thinking about it quite literally keeps me up at night and has quite literally given me actual panic attacks within recent weeks upon seeing the prevalence of his support in polls and among my coworkers.
I do not think the democrats are actually “willing to throw out trans people” the way you seem to suggest at the end there. I dont even think that they are happy with what their “ally” in Israel is doing. I think they are a fragile “everything that isn’t the R’s” alliance of much of the right and what passes for the left here that includes both LGBT people and their allies, and conservative types who never wanted them in their party in the first place but arent quite extreme enough for the republicans, who are sort of mashed together in a broad coalition that as a result has no real collectively agreed upon ideology and doesn’t have the guts to rock the boat by withholding military aid to a country traditionally seen as an ally, even though that country really deserves to have that aid cut right now. Their vague compromises of positions do not really align with mine on many if not most things, especially economic and foreign policy, and I resent that they stay just barely to the left of the republicans to get the support of the left while offering it little but scraps. I do not like them, except maybe a few on the leftmost edge. But we (or at least I, I guess I’ve just assumed you were probably also American if youre invested in our election but I guess with our international influence that doesnt actually mean much) live under a system that guarantees that if they dont win, Trump will, and when he and his cult look so startlingly similar to the fascists of history, just before they succeed in subverting the systems that constrained them, not voting for them is a luxury that I do not think that I or any of us in this country really have.
I am not simping for anything. I firmly believe Trump would be far worse for genocide (he has literally said that he thinks Israel should “finish the job” with regards to the war in Palestine, and when he was president, he was incredibly supportive of Netanyahu, and proposed a “peace plan” that was actually just carving up Palestine into a bunch of little pieces that could never constitute a viable state and giving Israel control of the paths between, effectively wishing to formalize Israeli control of the entire region) The only reason anyone can suggest he wouldnt be without getting laughed out of the room is that he happened to get lucky enough to not have the current escalation of Israel’s genocide happen during the time when he was president. From my point of view, any action that brings him closer to getting back in power is asking to throw gasoline on a genocidal fire, and saying that one’s motive for doing so is being against genocide is sickening in the kind of way that it would be if you saw someone suggest that Hitler should have won ww2 because of all the evil stuff that Winston Churchill was responsible for. Consider for a second what people making your argument look like, from that lens.
There isn’t a constitutional mandate that there only be two choices, it’s instead a consequence of poor design. The US, with the exception of a few state and local governments that have tried different things, uses something called first past the post voting: each person votes for one candidate, whoever gets the most votes wins the job. Then, we just hold an election in each of a number of geographic districts for each seat. That’s intuitive, but actually not a good way to design a democracy, because it forces a two party system. If you have multiple parties that have similar ideas, there’s no mechanism for them to form a “coalition” like you might get in other countries. If you win 30% of the votes in a state, split evenly such that you get 30% of the votes for each district, and someone else gets the rest, you don’t get 30% of the seats or 30% of the power, you get zero, because you were the loser for each of those seats, and it’s winner take all. Thus, any time you have two parties with similar ideas, it is in their interest to combine to form one party to get a higher chance of winning the most votes in a given district, and this process continues until every party of note has consolidated into one of two camps. Those two camps don’t consolidate with eachother because they represent views too different to tolerate, and anyone else must join the closest one in order to have a shot of actually winning (unless the election is local enough that personal connections can get you a majority in spite of this, which is why third parties tend to do better at local elections than national ones).
Now, there are going to be some parties left out of this, either those that idealize having more parties to the point of retaining independence at the cost of any chance to actually win at most levels, or those so different from the major ones that they just can’t fit with either. The fact that the two party system isn’t really originally intended means they still are allowed on the ballot and everything. But since most people voting care about their choice having a hope of winning, it makes pragmatic sense to not vote for them unless the election is very local in scale and you can organize enough people. Thus, only two effective choices even if more are technically on the list.
In some sense, you can say the two major parties basically are like the coalition governments you get in other countries, it’s just they’re stuck together despite not really liking it, they don’t have independent enough identities that they could easily split up and recombine into new ones, at best they could leave and watch their voters stay behind with the old party, becoming irrelevant, and at worst they could sabotage the side closest to them and ensure they get even less power than otherwise. This is why the democrats have such a wide difference in ideals between more conservative and progressive candidates, and the republicans have both “small government” people and “ban everything I don’t like” authoritarian types in one party, they’re both basically political coalitions stuck together with super glue that have to just go along with whatever most voters in their bloc do or else lose.
I can say the same about you. Putting “no there aren’t” in all caps and adding profanity and personal insults doesn’t make it more true, but it does make people remember that a block button exists for the kind of person that uses things as disgusting as a genocide as an opportunity to troll. I do not think that anyone who both has paid any attention to the past 8 years and is arguing in good faith can possibly support that conclusion.
The difference is that there are real, material differences between the actions the candidates take. It’s not a fair choice, but it isn’t false either, and choosing not to go along won’t give you a better outcome
I am repeating myself because the notion that the least evil option available is the best one, that the lesser evil if you will is preferable to the more evil one, is axiomatic, that is, it’s a basis one takes when constructing a moral framework, not a consequence of one that can be reasoned through. If you do not agree with someone’s moral axioms, then there is simply nothing to debate, you and they are simply operating under mutually incompatible definitions for what is and is not the right thing to do. Restating that in a slightly different way is a way of testing if the axioms we are operating under are truly different, in which case further argument is pointless, or if we merely misunderstood eachother the first time around.
If you reject the lesser evil, and all options possible to you are evil, then you by inaction support the greater evil, which, by definition, makes you evil. “Working against both”, when evil is inherit in all means by which you might do that work, is a fantasy you tell yourself to justify sabotaging efforts to limit the damage by practicing and encouraging what effective amounts to surrendering one of the few levers of power that you have any limited ability to pull.
What message would we be sending if our replacement for them is a guy that wants Isreal to “finish the job” with it? Killing fewer people matters more than accountability
Because having a revolver or a rifle or something is going to really do anything if the government comes after you personally.
Any actual resistance movement capable of achieving much is going to find a way to arm itself regardless of if the country theyre from allowed guns during peacetime or not, they seem to in other countries that such things have formed in after all. Could be through illicit purchases from elsewhere, or homemade weapons, or theft, or whatever else, it always seems to happen.