Prelude to the Apocalypse

[Sima Tuna]

Form is important. You need to decide which kind of kick you're trying to do and set it up properly. Balance and momentum are key. Don't be that old guy who went spinning off into the distance. Either chamber that motherfucker and lash it out, Korean-style, or whip the leg around in a crescent and put the waist into it! Wax on, wax off, but with your leg, bitch!

[BryanM]

At the end of the day he didn't have enough votes in 2020, 65% of the US has an unfavourable view of Trump

Eh?

Donald Trump. Favorable: 42.4%. Unfavorable: 53.1%.

Joe Biden. Favorable: 39.9%. Unfavorable: 55.3%.

You're not being rational about this. By every single objective metric, Biden is currently the underdog.

I get it, I don't want Trump to win this year either. And by a quite large degree, by my standards at least.

I would love to hear some good metrics for why I'm wrong. But so far the only thing close is "maybe Trump will do something to destroy himself?" Not one that has had a good track record, when it comes to elections at least. It's pretty unlikely Trump will accidentally be caught on camera hugging Obama or an immigrant, or expressing support for some kind of gun regulation at a rally or debate, so I'm pretty sure he's safe.

Using lines like "At the end of the day he didn't have enough votes in 2020" is the kind of post-hoc reasoning the genius eggheads in charge of Democratic election strategy use for why nothing bad will ever happen, why they should use the same strategy, and that they should keep their jobs. You know how thin the line was in the swing states. You know this line of reasoning is a non-sequitur: "Hillary lost Michigan in 2016 ergo Biden will lose Michigan in 2020."

Doing things like focusing on the conflict inherent in the GOP while ignoring the conflict inherent in the DEM is also a massive cope n' hope.

No, you know what's happening. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.

I started this thread hoping that Bernie Sanders would be able to take control of the democratic party and begin the purge of its corporate lapdogs. To reverse the purge Clinton did. What happened instead is the GOP is being purged, and is moving toward fascism. The people they've defeated and cast out of the party aren't "a loss of talent", it's them destroying their enemies and cutting the fat.

It's time to discard the veil of denial, shed the capitalist realism drilled into us that makes us think that nothing will ever change, and begin the process of truly accepting and internalizing the fact we're in the middle of an apocalypse.

It's been eight years, it's about time yeah?

----

(There's a lot of this reasoning through feelings and emotion thing going on with the AGI timelines too. Where the timeframe people give are more influenced by when they're emotionally ready for it to arrive. So you have the guys ready to kick reality to the curb and live in the matrix with their anime catgirls saying it'll happen next week. While boring awful people like Gary Goalposts and LeCun say it'll never happen, but if it did it'd be awful.

LeCun is a particularly silly person, dedicating his entire life to a dead end philosophy and now is reduced to being a loser that works for Facebook. I always wonder about the deep shame he must struggle to suppress every single day, when he looks at himself in the mirror in the morning..)

----

>> why they should use the same strategy

Seriously, if you start seeing pro-Trump ads by the Biden campaign going "Trump is a bad, bad naughty boy and you're a bad, naughty person if you vote for him!" you should begin to feel like one of those guys being slowly torn apart by a cenobite.

I know I'm going to start hearing about them soon. They're the worst part of all of this, the active suicide the Washington Generals do themselves... it's hard to watch.

That time John Kerry mentioned Cheney's gay daughter during a debate and I literally yelled something like "You FUCKTARD!" at the TV as soon as the words came out of his mouth..... hah. I always thought it was a mistake by his strategists or something, a one off thing. But after decades of seeing similar self-sabotage, I've realized it's all an act like David Brooks's "republican with empathy" (aka, liberalism. Always against every war but the current one. Always supports every civil rights movement except the current one.) schtick: they have to either be doing it intentionally, or they were selected by capital because of their massive incompetence and ability to lose.

[Vanguard]

Former Boeing employee and whistleblower John Barnett has been found dead of a gunshot wound after testifying on Boeing's blatant disregard for safety in their planes, done in their pursuit of cutting costs and eliminating unions. Even though Barnett had previously stated "if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide." the cops and most of the media are, of course, calling it a suicide.

just in case you really are that dangerously ignorant

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, BulletMagnet. I may be misinformed, but it is you who is ignorant, and yes, dangerously so. The degree of your ignorance is comparable to that of people who believe pro wrestling is real, though your case is infinitely more consequential. You believe against all evidence that if the faces win this election instead of the heels, things will improve. You refuse to consider the full implications of the fact that the same people write both of their paychecks. You like posting lists of the heels' crimes, and I encourage you to continue, but your tribal mindset prevents you from taking an honest look at the faces' equivalent lists.

You do get ~20% of people being pro-labor, and another ~20% of the population who want to enslave or murder its outgroups.

Sure but I don't believe the pro-labor 20% of the population particularly overlaps with leftists on the venn diagram anymore, things have changed a lot since Occupy Wall Street. Not that they correlate with rightists at all, of course. Leftists absolutely do hold a big chunk of the enslave or murder 20%. At this point the most significant difference between the left and the right may well be whom they consider to be the outgroup in need of imprisonment or death. And the leftists who believe their opponents must be silenced by force absolutely dwarf the numbers of the same group on the right. Obviously this is only because the right is in a state of political and social decline and if that reverses, our current state of leftist McCarthyism will quickly be replaced with classic McCarthyism.

[BryanM]

Leftists absolutely do hold a big chunk of the enslave or murder 20%.

Maybe they're "leftist" in relative terms by the current standards of the USA. (Just like the word "fat" has a much different meaning than it does in the rest of the world. Those guys can only dream of being American Fat.) I just find it completely impossible to ever call someone to the far right of Ronald Reagan a "leftist".

Even Ronald Reagan told Israel to take it easy one time, something completely impossible for the current regime. Even Magnet doesn't believe the Biden administration could ever be that far to the left, even after bullying them. (The kind of bargaining and protest Mischief thought might be able to influence democrats. "We'll elect Hillary and push her to be less shitty." et el. Hey, it sure looks like money from the arms industry and AIPAC are more important than our opinions on genocide. Who'd a-thunk it...)

That's the ratchet effect in effect, baby. The obvious outcome of harm reduction and the "lesser evil".

So no, I don't consider the people who think pronouns and adding more representation in movies is the #1 issue in the world to be "leftist". Those kinds of people are more along the lines of a liberal, someone who cares about symbols, while the material conditions of people's lives continue to get worse.

Force is throwing people in prison. Force is killing people. Force is overthrowing democracy. Force is not being mean to people on twitter.

(Which is something you should absolutely do, but only in very small moderation. Everyone on the planet should go to Eve Fartlow's page and leave a reply of "Eve Fartlow" at least once a day. It can be a chore sometimes, but it's something that absolutely needs to be done...)

[BulletMagnet]

You like posting lists of the heels' crimes, and I encourage you to continue, but your tribal mindset prevents you from taking an honest look at the faces' equivalent lists.

Troll harder.

[BryanM]

You know you're getting old when you go back to edit a post to change an "ass" into a "bad".

I just heard about Trump's River of Blood monument. lul.

So some Blue MAGA time.



Keith Olbermann used to be so much fun to watch, back during the era when our generation was liberal. The 'ole Daily Show days. If The Tea Party Wins, America Loses was a masterpiece. It's sad to see him such a broken shell of his former self. Countless other Blue MAGA people, too. They know the status quo is melting, and their gentle minds that want a serene unchanging world can't handle our current reality.

I noticed that I had the Troma Film's endorsement of Bernie Sanders on my hard-drive. And realized that it needs to be on the internet, in case someone ever wants to see this important historical event.

Unfortunately it doesn't show up in a youtube search even if you search for it specifically, because it's utterly, massively broken. Massively popular dude ProZD made a video of his stuff not showing up... but what bothers me more is getting globs of completely unrelated videos in the search results. The hell is Google doing, man... They're letting someone else build the machine god and take over the earth first, they busted the working-perfectly-fine youtube search function... are they becoming the Democrats of tech companies or what....

...In ten years will we clown on them like we do Facebook? I never thought I'd see the day...

[Sima Tuna]

The youtube search is much worse than you think. The search engine has been stolen by gore peddlers. You think I'm lying. There's some phobia of small holes or something, I guess? Anyway, those videos get recommended absolutely everywhere. They're fake as hell, but they do amount to gore and they get recommended on absolutely everything and in every search result. There are tons of threads of people complaining about getting PTSD from logging into youtube. They wanted to watch cat videos or people playing musical instruments, but instead they're treated to gore video after gore video. Of course, they aren't clicking on the videos. But the thumbnails alone are already horrific and they keep showing up no matter how many times you say you are not interested. "But you must have clicked on the video or youtube wouldn't recommend it!" Wrong. You don't have to ever click on the video. You'll still be recommend the same shit as everyone else. Thirst trap videos and gore videos get recommended to ALL of us.

And don't ever leave autoplay on. If autoplay is on, it's more than likely it will autoplay an unrelated video after you finish watching your video about sink repair, lockpicking or whatever innocuous subject you were enjoying. At which point, the floodgates will open and youtube will shovel its entire gore/thirst trap/animal abuse (yes really) library directly onto your front page.

I don't see this stuff when I'm logged in, but only because the algorithm has been fed by 10+ years of me watching certain things. But I do see it whenever I'm logged out on a device.

[BryanM]

Damn, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's only happened to me once, but it made me feel disgusted by armpits for days afterward. As a long-term internet-haver, it takes something pretty revolting to linger with me at all.

Even before that, I had gone a decade without using an ad blocker like the little boy scout that I am. "They gotta make some money off this somehow!" I thought. Then the HeroWars ads started. And wouldn't stop. And I couldn't take it anymore.

The tech guys there are good eggs and certainly know everything's absolutely fucked. But they can only do what management allows them to do.

Google itself is pretty terminally fucked from SEO garbage as well. If you're looking for something, you usually include the website type you want to look at, like "reddit" or "wiki" or whatever other information aggregator exists for the info you're looking for.

The days of finding little charming personal websites are long gone. At least with anything new. The last time I found one of those, was an old Tripod website for Tokimeki Memorial. The anonymous wiki/aggregator hivemind has kind of stripped the internet of any personality.

Dead Internet Theory man... bots and people paid pennies to click on search links to SEO the crap out of this thing. It's a perfect example of the old adage: "Once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric."

[Sima Tuna]

I used to browse the chans, so I'm no stranger to disgusting shock imagery. Motorcycle accidents, footage of beheadings, people being thrown from rooftops, creepy sex shit, etc.

I can honestly say that the gore thumbnails posted to youtube are up there with the worst of what I've seen. Now, the 4chan stuff, maybe that's more shocking to some people because it's real. But on pure disgusting value, I think the fake gore youtube is pushing these days can't be far behind. It's all the worse for being so readily visible on the clearnet and dominating the largest video-sharing website on the internet. If you see some illegal/disgusting imagery on a chan, then you kinda did that to yourself. You opted in. But for boomers to be bombarded with gore in the middle of their cat videos, that takes some extra special kind of fucked up to allow your website to become that way.

Then the HeroWars ads started. And wouldn't stop. And I couldn't take it anymore.

I would be willing to forgo adblock if websites wouldn't take advantage of the situation to advertise scams or porn, and if they could stop their ads from hijacking all of my cpu for autoplaying video+audio banners with additional pop-ups. I decided I wasn't willing to risk the health of my computer so that rich people could get richer.

Nearly every time I turn off my adblock on youtube, the first thing that pops up on the side is an ad for either a scam, HeroWars or a porn/dating website. I don't believe it's based on my search habits, because I sequester my searches very carefully to reduce/eliminate this very problem. I've heard many others complain about it too.

[BryanM]

It really does feel like convergent attracter states. Like how all arthropods will turn into crabs over time. Every inline ad on Facebook will be either a scam or someone infringing copyright to make money. All the top videos on Twitch will be a woman giving a microphone a bj, as a gateway to their Onlyfans page.

On one hand you can say people are lazy and want to make a buck for minimal effort. (And when has that never been true of any animal, that's the whole point of having a brain.) But on the other I do get the feeling it's a bit of a pandemic of desperation. Another symptom of late stage capitalism.

Maybe we've just gotten to boomer-age, and everything sucks now when compared to the world state we imprinted on in the 80's and 90's.

Anyway, here's a video of that cat licking a deer to distract from the darkness, if but for a minute or two.

[Sengoku Strider]

You're not being rational about this. By every single objective metric, Biden is currently the underdog.

I'm being very rational, Trump - along with his collective surrogates - has lost every election he's ever been in except the one time he squeaked past Hillary 8 years ago. And that wasn't an example of how inherently competitive a candidate Trump is, it was an example of how many needles any republican candidate has to thread in a country where they've only won 3 presidential elections since Kurt Cobain died (and probably had to flat-out steal the first W. Bush result). They're significantly outnumbered and the only hope they have is gerrymandering, cheesing electoral college math and then every battleground falling the right way.

It's not that I don't see the stats you're citing, it's just that for me to believe any pro-Trump horse race polls at this point, I'd have to think he's become much more popular than 2020, or that well funded and organized women's groups have suddenly become cool with abortion laws.

The final Republican primary results are in:

Trump 2020: 18 million
Trump 2024: 13 million

Like I keep saying, compared to 2020 when his voters literally thought he was The Chosen One and nobody would dare seriously run against him, his own base is deflated. Evangelicals got their Supreme Court, they're not in panic-mobilization. A lot of the independents he relied on for anti-government protest votes have drifted off him. Big money donors don't want his name and his legal troubles attached to theirs. Multiple republican members of congress have publicly called it quits citing him as the reason. A not-insignificant number of republicans voters have gone on record saying they won't vote for him this time. And it's showing in his fundraising numbers. Last month:

Trump $11 million
Biden $53 million

Now consider that he's blowing at least $6 million in legal costs every month and he has no personal cash on hand after having to pay E. Jean Carroll, and he can't get loans to pay his NY fraud bond. Add in the fact that Murdoch media isn't caping for him anymore, and I'm not seeing where the Trump wave comes from.

It's reflected in the hilarious levels of weapons-grade copium his true believers have been reduced to huffing:

Spoiler

Politics always comes back around to the orcas.

[BryanM]

It's not that I don't see the stats you're citing, it's just that for me to believe any pro-Trump horse race polls at this point, I'd have to think he's become much more popular than 2020

It's about being very slightly less unpopular than the alternative. Perform a similar analysis on disappointment and disillusionment for Joe Biden voters.

Remember 2012 Obama's drop from peak Hope n' Change? Ben Garrison's cartoon, The March of Tyranny, is a great illustration of the see-saw effect. (Even if he happens to be the kind of guy who really means "Jew" when he says "Banker". ... ... hah, authoritarians are so weird. They absolutely love tyrants, but only if the tyrant in question is them.) Get kicked by one foot, then try the other.

It's too easy to see what we want to see, that's why the data is a useful lens to get a sense of an outcome (the polls, remember, have been nearly dead on in the past presidential elections. Despite the lies and gaslighting by the media about what they said).

One of the most absurd group of people has to be Nate Silver and his crew. Back in 2016 Trump was steamrolling the GOP primaries (winner take all reform, lol) and the whole time they were writing essays giving him a 0% chance of winning the primary. After spending years being the "data guy who can average a collection of polls".

The future's gonna get a lot worse before it gets worse. We just have to hope the AI people pull through and Bill Gates turns out to be a nicer god than he's been so far. I'm sure that's super likely.

........ I'm literally clinging to things like quantum immortality and the anthropic principle as reasons for anything good happening. 99.9999% of the time we all succumb to S or Ex-risks, but we're not alive or sane to observe such timelines so we never witness them. Our blessed timeline of constant miracles will continue!

I guess we all have our comfort blankets : (

The final Republican primary results are in:

Trump 2020: 18 million
Trump 2024: 13 million

You're doing the thing again.

Trump 2016: 14 million.

(And for reference Biden got ~10 million this year. If that means anything.)

The 2024 numbers might increase a bit, sometimes it can take months for things to come in and settle.

One metric here that does support your narrative is 2016 seems to have been a lot more active of a primary, but.... ... well, this year's primary has been a wet fart with a predetermined outcome everyone already knew. It's normal for only those 18 million weirdos who really like voting for no reason to care....

.... god, if republican voters are feeling ambivalent about things, imagine how bad it must be for blue voters. It constantly reminds me of the xenophobe planet in Hitchhiker's that's winning the war against the universe: "In the end they will win, because they just care more."


(One thing that's really important here to observe, is that party loyalty is absolute and all elections are won by bringing in people on the margins. The democrats may have "Blue no matter who" people, but the republicans have "Vote red until I'm dead" analogues as well. This is my narrative: Trump's racism and white supremacy stuff activates the urge of angry poorer voters who want revenge on the world. It's not a weakness, it's a strength. Especially in the rust belt, which are the only states that matter. The other fraction of the party doesn't matter a damn because they're already deeply invested in the party, their minds made up.

(The real horror here is the Democrat's strategy of trying to do cultural war stuff, too... which is really, really stupid. White supremacy works as a strategy because white people are the majority in the rust belt. Many of them may not like racism, but it doesn't feel like it's targeted at them specifically, and they're happy to ignore it. "Doesn't effect me, so why should I care!"

(So now we have a situation where fascist black and mexican-american people, who normally don't vote, are being squeezed by both sides into activation to get on the Trump train. It's absolutely ridiculous..)

Historically the winning move for Democrats has always been easy to understand, big policy changes that will improve people's material quality of life.

... well I've spent years arguing with liberals here trying to get them to understand this is the only thing that matters in the long run, if you don't want to ratchet ourselves somewhere in the spectrum of Mafia Russia/Nazi Germany one of these days.. The beliefs of fascists are immaterial. You need the Washington Generals to actually pick up the ball and play the game, if you want them to win in any lasting or meaningful way.)

Blue no matter who will vote for more concentration camps if their guy says they'll make one less of them than the other guy. Red until dead will do the same, except his guy promises +1 concentration camps. These partisan freaks don't matter, no matter what sounds they might make.

In a perfect world, yes "cool and good" steamrolls "bad and lame", 1.5 to 1. FDR shows that. Hope and Change showed that. The polls on policy show that. Give everyone healthcare? Sure, sounds good.

Not on the menu though. They'll sure let the price of groceries double a few more times, though.)

[orange808]

We need a new government technology, but there's no new ideas with any traction and no place to test them. We're fucked.

Given how awful human beings are, it's quite remarkable that western civilization even exists--although the true face of all humanity is feverishly working to control and dismantle any gains we have made.

Speaking of humanity, slavers didn't sneak onto African shores and kidnap most people. Local warlords sold their own people. Oh! Hello humanity! There you are! Same as always! (Stay classy, homo sapien!)

Corporate pronouns are pure capitalism. All money is green and alienating potential customers is bad business. Corporate diversity efforts ultimately encourage everyone to work for slave wages. More consumption and productivity can grow your bottom line. That's all there is to it. It's just money. Get the most out of workers, pay them as little as possible, and sell as many units as you can.

It's obvious what they're doing. Katherine Johnson is a great example. That wasn't about money, but it was about productivity. In most environments, productivity can deliver more gross income and more potential profit. The reason NASA made concessions had nothing to do with love. They had a job to do. It was definitely a case of "humanity," but not the kind of humanity people choose to believe in. Johnson moved up because she was more qualified than anyone else and NASA was desperate.

It's really about the money. It's always about the money. Always has been and always will be. Anyone that argues is thick--and a useful idiot.

[BryanM]

With this year written off, it's time to think about the future.

Future president Marjorie Taylor Greene making some moves.

When Strider called her an unserious goon that doesn't have a chance, it seemed credulous at the time. But I always thought that people said the same thing about Bernie: "He's a hand grenade they threw into congress. Every time he ran for Governor, he got rejected!" But of course, the only time he ran for governor was when he was a smol hippy fresh out of college...

It's the fuckin' brainwashing, man. We're brainwashed to associate Ronald Reagan with "presidential", and anyone who doesn't fit in that mass-production mold feels "wrong".

You've got to remind yourself this isn't a decorum simulator or soccer, it's wrestling. Fame and mindshare is all that matters. MTG is easily in the top ten of possible future presidents. She's literally the average American house wife, smack dab in the center. Who's ahead of her? Rubio? Desantis? Bernie Sanders??

There's no mechanism for the Democratic party to nominate anyone who even whispers "capitalism bad" in their sleep. They're protected from that forever. So it's fascist clowns until we're all dead.



(By this point, if you think MTG doesn't have some shot, reflect perhaps that you might be the one who is the clown? Trump clowned around with the birth certificate stuff and it got him elected president twice. (Okay, we haven't gotten there quite yet. It got him elected 1.5 to 1.7 times.))

[Lord British]

The good news is Mitch Hedberg is back baby!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcCijozuVjI

(and no, I don't go to TYT for news)

[Sengoku Strider]

... hah, authoritarians are so weird. They absolutely love tyrants, but only if the tyrant in question is them.) Get kicked by one foot, then try the other.

This cartoon is so on point I'm legit jealous I didn't come up with it.



It'd land better without the unnecessarily snarky last panel though, it just puts it back in the tribal cheerleading category. Real life provides much more trenchant punchlines.

[vol.2]

Back in Feb of 2017 I was in DC for the Women's March and I snapped this gem. Felt kind of relevant.

[BryanM]

Whenever I read internet stories like this guy who blew up his marriage because the manosphere convinced him he needed to get a DNA test on the baby, to be sure... On one hand I know it's the internet and anything could be bullshit. On the other, there's absolutely some guys out there too dumb to know that you can do a DNA test on the down-low if you're really that freakin' insecure. It's not as outlandish as things like the "do you like knives?" copy-pasta.

More pertinent to that guy's situation would be people who don't really want to get married or have kids, but do it anyway because society says that's what you're supposed to do.

The Chapo guys recently mocked the guy who wrote the "why I'm no longer a white nationalist" article. Where-in the guy said some of the most ridiculous, cringiest shit I've ever seen. Like take the world's biggest weeb, who thinks Japan is a land of miracles where he'll be treated like a demigod, who lives in a fantasy world of anime, and he's less cringe than this dude. Who's unable to comprehend that normies just want to do their job, go to church, raise their kids, and maybe watch some football on the side every now and then. They're not particularly interested in subjugating their out-groups any more than they already are, nor in building any particular new giant monuments as trophies. Mount Rushmore is more than enough, for most.

I do have some sympathy for those who feel like the world isn't what they would wish it to be. But not very much for the fash's dreams, no.

----

Yesterday I was reminded that Lieberman was Al Gore's running mate because reasons. Another bullet point in why I'm an absolute moron for caring even a little about electoral politics.

----

Back to the sci-fi stuff my in-group cares about. The hard take-off scenarios intuitively have always seemed extremely outlandish and unlikely. However, NVidia churning out a new top-of-the-line chip every six months or so that's multiple times more powerful than the last... it really puts into focus the real magnitude of the improvements in the lithography processes we've recently unlocked. As their CEO said: "Software can't be written without AI, chips can't be designed without AI, nothing's possible."

As I mentioned about NPU's, a human-level network is feasible in a matter of years. At that point, it's a matter of organizing and training the damn thing.

This recent skit encapsulates current events pretty well.

----

That drunk billionaire lady backing up into a pond and calling her friend while she was drowning taught me something horrible:

I knew that shithead Musk already put an iPad into his cars and stuck the speedometer and radio on there. Horrible as that is, it wasn't enough apparently: they've recently put the GEAR SHIFT controls on there, too. And also the thing will automatically "helpfully" decide if you want to be in drive, neutral, park, or reverse. Because it's so smart, you see.

I don't even like touch controls in my Mega Man games. Let alone while operating a giant death machine.

[Sengoku Strider]

If Elon was the real libertarian ubergeek he pretends to be, he'd have a proper badass Genesis 6-button in every one of those things. Instead he's just another Mr Burns with his foot on the gas hurtling us off the cliff toward the post-ownership corpocracy.



I'm pulling for Richard Branson to be the one who gets to Mars and founds the Federation of Zeon first. He's the reason the Master System succeeded in Europe; if I'm going to surrender all personal autonomy it might as well at least be to someone who can appreciate Hang-On.

[Sima Tuna]

I want to live on a Side. Get to work, space billionaires! I better see a floating space city in my lifetime.

>citing ancient aliens as proof of anything

[Sengoku Strider]

>citing ancient aliens as proof of anything

Not just cited, but brought up as "even Ancient Aliens," like it's the very last place you would expect to hear about ancient aliens, and yet there it is for all to see.

Elon is a very confusing figure for patriots. He takes contracts from The Deep State, puts his children through Satanic blood rituals and wants to install chips in everyone's brains, but also pumps right wing talking points. Somehow this seems to result in a tie:



At least they're rooting for the alien Freemason book keepers of Satanic artifacts to have their honour restored. Political news commentary is so negative all the time, it's nice to hear some positivity once in a while.

[orange808]

Rats have better memories than these people.

Bill Gates has fought the American government more than Elon Musk. Not only more frequently, but with significantly more furiosity.

Also, right wing fucks have absolutely no awareness or understanding of the political spectrum. They're fucking thick and stupid. Who on the left approves of rich "philanthropists" refusing to pay taxes and unilaterally spending their share on pet projects? Guess what, we don't like it and we don't like fucking Bill Gates.

Oh sure, he cut some red tape, but there's no guarantee he did the right thing. When Gates did his malaria thing, many people proposed RNA. He said "no". Instead, the Gates Foundation chose the most expensive and difficult route.

Why didn't the brave free market and one of its darling heroes find the best route? Because, they were terrified of risk. They made a "business decision" and it sucked. Society didn't take that chance or pursue that possibility until we needed a COVID vax to save old and weak people in western nations--and we did it with government money. And, oh boy, when old neoliberal boomers were in danger of dying because nature called their number, it was time to spend!

[BryanM]

You would think they'd have cared more about the aging thing, but nope. Big LOL if it's fucking exosomes and t-cell replenishment. The original parabiosis experiments were over a hundred years ago...

The team sports thing is very sad. Symbols for the symbol-minded, indeed. Libs still fuming about Nader "stealing" the election from Gore (not the republicans in Florida who literally did that). But will welcome an ex-republican into their fold with open arms and sloppy kisses, as long as they have the right letter next to their name.

At least the paranoid fash have some kind of standards. They're stupid standards that don't make any sense (or are outright evil), but at least they don't think the kings at the top of society are Santa Claus. If you wanna talk about ridiculous fantasies, what's more fundamentally more ridiculous than that?

[Sima Tuna]

Aging will be solved as soon as the baby boomers start dying off en masse. We aren't there yet. When the first round of baby boomer billionaires start kicking the bucket, that's when the immortality serums will get pioneered.

We'll never be rid of boomers, dude.

[BryanM]

Maybe. The boomer mindset won't ever die, that's for sure. A comfortable mind desires stillness.

Jon released a bit on AI just now, foreshadowing how our cyberpunk dystopia is about to start getting a lot, lot worse. From the way the nerds were skreee'ing about it, I thought it was gonna be a "ain't never gonna work" thing, not a statement of factual "they want to replace people with computers and robots" type stuff.

Joe Biden, as ever, gives the best version of the dismissive "learn to code, rednecks" I've ever heard. The others always frame their bullshit in the sounds of being reasonable so dipshits not paying attention will absorb it into their brains and internalize their words as part of their latent space. But Joe's version? Nah, it's like "the words I am saying are obviously bullshit."

That's why I like him more than most other robots. He seems like a real person, genocide and all....

(The parachute failing and killing 5 kids and crippling 10 others was classic looney tunes stuff. For the ones that don't fail, they fall at 60 mph. Dumping "aid" into the sea, for the fish I guess, has some symbolism to it, too. The Berlin Airlift had these things called airports where they would land and unload their cargo. It was a crazier, more barbaric time when they didn't know about parachutes and how based dunking food into the ocean is. The fools.)

[Sengoku Strider]

Also, right wing fucks have absolutely no awareness or understanding of the political spectrum. They're fucking thick and stupid. Who on the left approves of rich "philanthropists" refusing to pay taxes and unilaterally spending their share on pet projects? Guess what, we don't like it and we don't like fucking Bill Gates.

Yeah, but self-identified democrats will also handwave Nancy Pelosi's mysterious millions, constantly pretend they're the plucky little outsider underdogs rather than a majority following an educated urban elite of influencers who are largely defining the terms of social conversation, and will unironically post anti-republican MicroSoft National Broadcasting Company news links while decrying the US industrial-everything complex in the name of traditional American half-hearted socialism. So I mean, right wing critiques of the contradictions inherent in oblivious social liberal discourse are not entirely without merit.

Oh sure, he cut some red tape, but there's no guarantee he did the right thing. When Gates did his malaria thing, many people proposed RNA. He said "no". Instead, the Gates Foundation chose the most expensive and difficult route.

That's why they started hating him. He's a rich guy, and since the proper Western European Calvinist God rewards virtue with material wealth, there are only two ways to get that affluent. Being a good person and getting phat stacks of paper like Supply Side Jesus would, or cheating and joining league with Satan. Since Gates championed vaccines when trusted™ conservative medical experts were signalling that they were a clear betrayal of everything good and right in the world (ie. economic numbers ahead of Trump's re-election campaign), it's obvious he couldn't possibly be in category A.



There's a direct through-line from that ^^ to 2020s internet folk-biology:



EDITING TIP - If you're ever unsure if you've written a run-on sentence, try reading it out loud. If you can't do it in one breath, it's too long for anyone's working memory:



Though I was being factionally agnostic when I said 'folk biology' above; this isn't just a right wing thing. There's a libertarian sphere on the left too (they just call themselves anarchists instead), and this type of paranoia is the foundation of RFK jr.'s candidacy:

The team sports thing is very sad. Symbols for the symbol-minded, indeed. Libs still fuming about Nader "stealing" the election from Gore (not the republicans in Florida who literally did that). But will welcome an ex-republican into their fold with open arms and sloppy kisses, as long as they have the right letter next to their name.

Hey, friends become enemies, enemies become friends, that's a core element of any good epic narrative. If Trump's lifelong fixer Michael Cohen didn't become a solid and trustworthy democrat-at-heart-all-along worthy of his own tagline the moment Donald ditched him, maybe I can't believe in anything anymore.

[orange808]

Yeah. Thanks to Fox News, I had to bully older family members into getting vaccines. One of my family told me Covid wasn't even real. As a society, we sacrificed and invested so much to save them (despite the fact that nature was calling their number). Still, I had to push them--kicking and screaming--to get the jab and survive. At risk groups weren't difficult to identify and the existence of viruses is well established.

It's infuriating. Society stopped the world for them, moved mountains to develop a jab (for them), and the fuckers couldn't even accept the gift--and say thank you.

These boomers were saved from polio by vaccinations. How in the fuck did we get here?

[BulletMagnet]

There's a libertarian sphere on the left too (they just call themselves anarchists instead), and this type of paranoia is the foundation of RFK jr.'s candidacy:

The crucial difference here is that it hasn't taken over essentially the entire movement apparatus.

[BryanM]

I've never met a self-described anarchist who wants to dissolve the government right now, this exact second. The ideology comes from the idea of having true equality, and as most of them have at least a couple braincells, they understand that material conditions exist. That doing that would backslide us into feudalism. The opposite of their goals.

So Anarchy is a far-off endgoal state, and they have instrumental goals in the meantime. Like giving everyone healthcare. Or having everyone own their own labor. Opinions on how to get to a state where people are truly free vary wildly. (My own has always been Star Trek communism, not until our labor has no material value. Only when the machines are our slaves, will we stop making slaves of one another. This unfortunately has the likely possibility of being tossed into a blender like a male baby chicken, and paper-clipping... and of course pointless Fifteen Million Merits type human-on-human torture.... but it's honestly the only realistic path I can see that dream ever being feasible.)

Things like Tonight We Riot are a fantasy.

(I'm sure there's plenty of people who just want to break things and steal X-boxes, though...)

On a tightly related topic, we have this latest banger from the New York Times:

Let People Sell Their Kidneys. It Will Save Lives


I seriously can't read a New York Times article anymore, without hearing it in Will Menaker's or Felix's voice...

Hundreds of millions of healthy people walk the streets quietly carrying two kidneys. They need only one. The head-scratcher is how to get kidneys from the people who have one to spare into the people who need one. Getting them from genetically modified pigs, as was recently found possible, won’t be a widespread solution for a very long time.

There’s a simpler and long overdue answer: Pay people for their kidneys.

Creating a market for kidneys is not a new concept, but it’s historically been met with disgust: Sell what? To be fair, some of the ways to structure such a market would be irresponsible, coercive and deserving of that disgust.

But others are more thoughtful and prudent. One approach is to make the federal government the sole purchaser of kidneys. Donor and recipient would never meet. Compensation would be fixed, haggling impossible. After the kidney is acquired, the transplant process would unfold in the typical manner.

I'm suddenly more appreciative of conservative closed-mindedness. You can't let sneaky sells-guys worm their way into your brain like this...

----

In Amazon Mechanical Turk news, their walk-out stores have been largely bullshit. The system only worked perfectly ~30% of the time, so instead...

Amazon billed its "Just Walk Out" stores as some triumph of AI. In reality, it was powered by thousands of low-paid Indian workers manually adding up items in your cart as you shopped.

How insanely dystopian.

I also came across a particular bit of brainrot we've all been infected with by the propaganda, yesterday. The "vote with your dollars" thing. Some anon thought we could influence the future by "boycotting" any company that uses AI. (Which will be all of them, btw.) I howled and lol'd.

He's still wrapped up in this little wagie world where money means anything. They're burning hundreds of billions of THEIR dollars, pouring it down a hole hoping to one day manifest a machine god, and he thinks they give a shit about his five bux? They're trying to accelerate into a world without money, where they have an interstellar space empire, and he thinks they care about money????

We're strange little bonsai plants. It gave off strong vibes of that meme of the cosmic space shoggoth about to swallow the planet, and a guy going "I hope it doesn't take my job." Normies have no world model to deal with what's coming.

Even if the would-be Warhammer 40k god emperor falls far short of their dreams, it's still going to steamroll everything.

Hey, friends become enemies, enemies become friends, that's a core element of any good epic narrative.

The Hillary campaign hiring David Brock was another "what's even the difference..." moments. If anyone wondered why their campaign sounded like a republican's campaign, there you go. Biden strategists are hoping to do the same. Spit on the Sanders wing of the party, and pick up those Nikki Haley voters. Who're just chomping at the bit to vote for Biden.

It's always worked in the past, right.

This almost makes sense if you can strain your brain into a perfect cube and believe there's only two kinds of people in the world, democrat or republican, and there's nothing more to it than that. The more rational explanation is they've been chosen to lose, and would rather lose than move the Overton Window even a little to the left.

Their job is to suppress the left, not to fight billionaires.

Trump will have dominated American politics for at least 13 years when he's done, and his legacy might last forever, if this really is the final industrial revolution. My gut just quivered in disgusted horror at the idea of a Trump Tower on every planet and every moon. Somehow.... it makes the scale of Reagan's legacy look rather small and quaint. Even if it is the natural inevitable endpoint of the Reagan revolution...

[Sima Tuna]

You have two kidneys in case something happens to one of them. If every working class poor person sells their kidney to a rich fuck, then they won't have a kidney available for them (because they can't afford one) when/if the working poor person's remaining kidney develops a problem.

But hey, don't let logic get in the way of funneling youth and good health away from the young and healthy and into the old, rich, lecherous reptilians.