In theory, Judges hold individual people accountable, the representatives of the people hold the judges accountable, the people collectively hold their representatives accountable.

However, if a significant part of the representatives refuses to do their job, and the nature of the two-party FPTP system combined with highly effective identity politics makes it hard to hold them accountable for it, the system breaks down.

That’s what I was trying to allude to. Whoever is left is either not competent enough or unwilling to call him out (possibly because being employed is generally more important than being right).

I don’t think she’s particularly good looking, which may just be personal taste, but in any case doesn’t matter in the slightest. She’s not running for Miss America, she’s running for President.

Not that I hold any particular love for beauty contests either, but - like Harris’ looks - that’s irrelevant here.

Oh absolutely, provided you’re versed enough to understand the resource limitations, the need to prepare scaling solutions and have the willingness to admit that your in-house resources might not be enough. I’m not confident Musk ticks any of these boxes, let alone all of them.

And a competent team can only do so much. He ripped out data center servers, against his competent sysadmins’ advice.

I don’t think auto-scaling can scale to resources that don’t exist. Besides, I’m not sure how many people with both the competence and the spine to advise Musk when he’s doing A Stupid again still remain at the company.

He’s a product of a biased system. He was elected to the Senate in '72, over 50 years ago, and spent 36 years there. That long, during that time in a highly business-heavy state, would probably have been untenable for anything left of liberal. I’m not optimistic that anyone trying to be an effective politician in those circumstances for so long could have been much more progressive.

Considering all that, he got a lot of good done. But like you say, it’s easy for the media to focus on the things that generate outrage. He wasn’t a saint by any measure, but he was a decent compromise at a time when the Democrats were scared of losing the moderate votes. Him being nominated for re-election is probably a product of the political inertia that sitting and eligible presidents are rarely swapped out instead of being put up for re-election (actually, is there any precedent at all?)

Walz, by contrast, was in the House for twelve years, then governor for another five. That’s a third of Biden’s time in Congress, and much later too. I think it’s much more realistic for someone in his position to be and stay progressive, and I hope he helps pull the Overton Window to the left. I hope this election shows that there is a platform for progress, that Biden was an emergency measure for damage control and that handing the baton over to Harris and Walz was a step in the right direction.

Of course, that hinges on Harris also driving a more progressive line than Biden did, instead of resigning to another term of mediocrity. She seems to signal as much, but whether that will be followed up with deeds remains to be seen.

In my experience, the shelf helps avoid having water splash your nethers, which happens to me more often than leaving streaks, so I prefer it over having my urine splash back up at me.

To be fair, seeing a complex equation simplify down to a concise result is kinda hot 😳

…then you use the brush to clean them? Is that a big deal?

This sentence is a lie.

-The Ascended, product of Trump and his cult fusing into one giant monstrosity… That promptly implodes from the self-loathing of realising it’s mostly made up of 🤢 poor people 🤮

What else can you do on the gallows but laugh?

I’m in your boat often enough. Sometimes a post assumes familiarity with a context and it may be hard to figure out the intent or sincerity without that familiarity.

Pageant Predator?

I imagine there are a lot of conservatives that aren’t actually so concerned about racism / sexism / LGBT issues as about financial ones. They fear that empowering the “leftists” will lead to them losing all the luxuries they enjoy, a flame Conservative pundits are all too happy to fan. Particularly when they believe they have a chance to become one of those rich people the leftists are actually targeting, they’re worried about “lazy” people (obviously not working hard enough) coming for their hard-earned wealth. So even if they might disagree with the GOP’s stance on the social issues, they’re concerned about the “collateral damage” the progressives might do their own lives, and since that affects them much more tangibly than reports of social issues, they’re naturally biased to worry about their own wellbeing first.

Religion obviously plays a role in enabling that mindset by justifying supremacy (I’m a better person, so I deserve better) and inequality (God gives us each what we deserve), giving an explanation for things we don’t understand (God’s plan) and a goal (be a pious Christian and go to heaven), relieving of guilt (just ask God to forgive you and that’s that) and a fear of death (I’ll go to heaven anyway). It also provides a mechanism for Power to steer people (The preacher I trust tells me it’s God’s will) and direct their anger and attention away from the people exploiting them (Those damn <insert relevant slur> are the devil’s agents and working against the good and pious people like myself).

Better access to education, teaching critical thinking and scepticism, helping people realise the lies they’re fed - and particularly the fact that none of us are immune to deception and propaganda, no matter how smart - could help both these problems.

My hope - yes, I’m naive and optimistic, let me have this - is that it’ll gradually shift the Overton Window to the left.

Radical political change has a risk of emboldening “They’re going too far!” rhetorics, swaying those who prefer the familiar over uncertain promises of improvement to help swing it back. We’re in a certain bubble here in that we’d like to see significant changes ASAP, but don’t have an accurate idea of how many people agree with us on that.

The same mechanism that enabled a gradual slide to the right needs to be stalled and reversed, improving things little by little. I would guess voter enfranchisement would have to be an early priority, along with education and media bias (though censorship is a bad precedent to set, and I’m not sure if there’s a better way to tackle that)

I don’t have all the answers. It’s far easier to point out flaws than come up with sustainable and lasting improvements as an amateur. This is why I think having discussions on such things is important: Collectively, we may come up with more ideas, show up errors in them and maybe develop better solutions.

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

[…]

[A]s long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force

Karl Popper, 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies

Germany uses lower quotation marks too

But someone that blatantly argues for Russia’s benefit probably has some ulterior motives. Doesn’t have to be deep throating Putin, money will probably do.

Cognitive disabilities are a thing. Accommodating for them would be a good thing.

Not that that’s the intended purpose of that AI, probably, but if it can simplify the form without twisting the content*, it could be a great tool to make complex works more approachable. It’s not necessarily a question of “can they understand it” as much as “can they be arsed to read it”. I know plenty of people that just straight up didn’t read one of the books relevant for our finals and just skirted through with guides laying out the things you were supposed to know. The book wasn’t necessarily impossible to understand, but so tedious to dig into they just couldn’t muster the motivation.

I don’t know how many books worth reading for their point remain unread by people who didn’t find the wrapping around that point appealing. Simplification may help them, even if it butchers the artful use of language others enjoy.

*The issue I’m concerned about is that the content may be inadvertently twisted in the process of being parsed and rephrased by an AI with no actual sense for the semantics. Who would notice? Would you have someone proof-read it? What about repeat queries of the same book? Would you assemble a library of simplified books?

At that point you might as well make manually supervised “translations” into simpler language that take care to preserve the point, can be written once and revised when language shifts. You’d still get the benefits, but also be less dependent on an AI doing a good job.

If it’s five people throwing them, they’re terrorists. If it’s five million, they’re a problem. (Depending on the size of country and military, I’m pulling numbers out my arse to exemplify a point, not as accurate measures).

Numbers matter. If you have enough people on your side and willing to join the throwing for your cocktails to make a difference, that might work for you. But if most of the populace are scared to lose more than they stand to gain, you’ll end up with the brave throwers arrested or killed, the media denouncing their “undemocratic” acts and possibly the people even more afraid to do anything.

Any revolutionary movement will need to hit a point of critical mass that allows it to succeed. It’s hard to gauge just when that point is reached, but if you misjudge, you’ll end up another failed insurrection.