Prelude to the Apocalypse

[BulletMagnet]

He doesn't deserve my support

Dude, this isn't about who "deserves" support, certainly not in the way you're describing it - if you're looking for someone who doesn't very deeply offend your sensibilities on some level you're simply never going to find them (as has already been mentioned, Bernie has been absolutely painful to watch at times when it comes to the Israel/Gaza issue, to cite just one prominent instance). This is about how you think change happens. No, Biden's not going to call for a cease-fire, as much as I wish he would, but I'd like to hear you argue that the "uncommitted" campaign in Michigan and other calls for change from supporters didn't force him to look into approving aid air drops there, or that similar pressure didn't inform his appointments to agencies making real progress in hunting down ultra-wealthy tax cheats and blocking monopolistic business mergers...unless, yet again, you'd rather the countless people, almost certainly including you and me, who will benefit from these efforts, incomplete as they are, should continue to suffer because the problems haven't been completely solved in one fell swoop. To be perfectly blunt, it's the exact same blatantly bad-faith argument by, to cite just one example, gun lobby apologists against any form of gun control legislation because "it won't prevent all gun deaths".

Moreover, unless I've forgotten a previous post where you've been more specific I don't recall you mentioning precisely what alternative process (aside from badmouthing those attempting to build on existing progress) it is you advocate for, but considering that you've embodied the literal Homer Simpson line of "democracy doesn't work" (not to mention deign to call the Dems "slightly" better on reproductive rights or the "throw school librarians in jail" party as the superior choice on free speech) I'm frankly rather loath to ask, especially since, to borrow your turn of phrase, one party is unquestionably slightly better when it comes to democracy than the other.

[Sengoku Strider]

Leftists are odd bunch. You see dehumanizing slurs like "techbro" thrown around a lot, "a technological singularity, to any degree, isn't possible it's just a religion for stupid people." They dismiss technology as an agent of change (despite how it has been core to many transformations throughout all of history), and think that change can be brought about through conversations and political means.

Well, those who are a certain number of degrees leftward on the granola spectrum tend to be. I think the thing is that until you come across a person or a book or article that really lays out how environmentally situated consciousness is, and how mediated it is by techne from shoe soles to eye glasses to forks, people have a hard time intuitively grasping that it's not all them.

Anyway, the futures where Bill Gates terraforms the planet into his version of Epstein island or the machine instantiates some kind of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream LARP...

I haven't been interested in anything in the last 4 years so I haven't really been keeping up with the issue, but frankly I'm not ready to think about dystopic sci-fi futures where alive and unalive, truth and illusion become indistinguishable until we deal with this giant skeleton problem in the here and now.

[Vanguard]

Dude, this isn't about who "deserves" support, certainly not in the way you're describing it - if you're looking for someone who doesn't very deeply offend your sensibilities on some level you're simply never going to find them

Hmm, interesting. So it's impossible for someone to be elected president unless they're a loathsome monster worse than what we'd get if we randomly selected death row inmates for the job instead. That sure sounds like representative democracy doesn't work. But of course representative "democracy" does work. The purpose of a system is what it does, and what representative democracy does is give the public the illusion of control while in reality giving them as little power to influence policy as possible. This is done to keep the public complacent, if people believe they have a safe, inexpensive way to get what they want, they are far less likely to undergo the risks of taking what they want more forcefully. This is why even the most authoritarian states in the world still bother to hold elections. If they wanted the voting public to decide policy, they would of course allow the public to vote on policy directly.

You know very well that Congress and the White House are a hundred times more receptive to the will of their donors than the will of their voters. A system wherein governance is determined not by the will of the majority, but by wealth is not a democracy but a plutocracy.

(not to mention deign to call the Dems "slightly" better on reproductive rights or the "throw school librarians in jail" party as the superior choice on free speech)

I am correct in both cases. The democrats have had opportunities to defend abortion rights and did not lift a finger. Obama's first two years were a particularly excellent opportunity to try and pass a law and finally get the matter away from the courts, but he was far too busy massacring civilians and giving billions of dollars in public money to corporations, and furthermore, the democrats don't actually want us to have secure abortion rights. To them it's little more than a tool for attracting voters, and the more desperate the situation gets the more single-issue voters they win. It also draws attention away from the issues the democrats genuinely care about, like labor costs and war, which they want to reduce and increase respectively.

And yes the democrats are horrible on free speech. So far as I know, republicans have not actually been imprisoning school librarians, but Obama really did go around persecuting journalists and whistleblowers for saying things he didn't want people to hear. The democrats have also been successful in convincing much of their base to oppose free speech in various ways. Cancel culture is largely a leftist phenomenon and you are overwhelming more likely to be banned on western websites for saying things leftists don't like than things right wingers don't like. There was a time when support for free speech was a leftist belief but that is obviously no longer the case.

[BryanM]

Having to do a Berlin Airlift against one of our own vassal states does project a mind-bending amount of weakness. It's pretty good fuel for the racists who think we don't dictate our own policies in the region.

This is way more of an effective influence on our election than Netanyahu's campaigning for Trump back in 2020 was. This is how you create a wedge and slice a voting coalition apart. There's no winning move here for the Democrats - be decent human beings, support the ceasefire, and the wealthy liberal class will tear them apart. Be genocide-enabling shitbags, you lose young people and the Muslim population.

So they'll wait and hope the situation resolves itself somehow. It's very Democrat of them.

Cancel culture is largely a leftist phenomenon and you are overwhelming more likely to be banned on western websites for saying things leftists don't like than things right wingers don't like.

To be fair most of those are guys advocating to round certain people up and gas them... the analogous leftist version of that is expressing a dangerously high amount of anti-slaver sentiment. Saying positive things about John Brown is a very fast way to get your reddit forum banned, lightspeed.

The twitter takes are always a cesspool. Wealthy future techno-prince roon called Bushnell's act "silly" and it's like... sigh. Having any empathy for out-groups is unamerican, and setting yourself on fire to get heard? That's not how you're supposed to do it! You're supposed to go shoot up a school or a mall or a church or a wall-mart or something, that's the American way!

Our culture is pretty fucked up.

Learning that a woman already did this back in December, but we never heard about it and we'll never be allowed to know her name, all because she didn't have the foresight to stream it on Twitch... that really annoys me, personally.

I am correct in both cases. The democrats have had opportunities to defend abortion rights and did not lift a finger.

One of those things that always blows my mind is how the 2000 election was stolen (factually stolen, according to Florida state law), and they didn't care. They took the L and didn't really do anything.

The black caucus held some meetings about how to protect the vote, the only people outside the caucus that attended were hippy weirdos like Sanders, and that was about it.

Flash forward 20 years and we have Paxton over there crowing over himself in public about how he was the reason Trump was able to hold on to Texas. Nothing really ever changes on its own, does it...

leftists

Most leftists I've seen spend most of their time talking about video games, weed, how based John Brown was, and dunking on libertarians, nerds, democrats, and anime fans.

I... feel unclean calling the liberals who like things like the SNL sketch of women praying to James Comey to make the orange man disappear "leftists". I... feel like there's a big difference between caring more about the material conditions of human beings, or caring more about symbols and trophies....

(I guess while I'm posting Brad Neely, this old one is pertinent to current events...)

[Vanguard]

I expected the Gaza aid to be a drop in the ocean, but this is ridiculous.

Having to do a Berlin Airlift against one of our own vassal states does project a mind-bending amount of weakness.

At this point it's more like the other way around. Epstein and Maxwell were Mossad assets and none of the pedophiles in our government can oppose Israel or Israel will expose them for what they are. Turns out there are a lot of pedophiles in our government.

To be fair most of those are guys advocating to round certain people up and gas them...

That is nowhere near true, but banning wrongthink has driven many of those people to places like /pol/ where they do ultimately become that guy.

I... feel unclean calling the liberals who like things like the SNL sketch of women praying to James Comey to make the orange man disappear "leftists". I... feel like there's a big difference between caring more about the material conditions of human beings, or caring more about symbols and trophies....

If so then the "real" leftists make up such a minuscule minority among self-described leftists that they can safely be considered irrelevant. I often see conservatives try to "no true scotsman" against their embarrassing and counterproductive majority too.

[Sengoku Strider]

To his everlasting credit, John Vervaeke very accurately predicted that the mortality caused by the pandemic would give rise to new expressions of folk religion. I don't know if even he called Trump's replicant harem though.






I'd always wondered how they were made.

[orange808]

My apologies. I'm not here to push worship of humanity as the ultimate solution. In fact, I've expressed my frustration with the vagaries of people multiple times.

I regret opening any conversation about rather or not a machine is alive. That's a rabbit hole. I shouldn't have mentioned it.

But, I stand by my assessment of "AI". It's just a computer program--and we are bound by the limitations of the hardware.

Bard did what it was designed to do within the limitations. Bard is also up against impossible expectations. It's being asked to behave like a human being without ever saying anything human and simultaneously know everything.

That's a lot to ask when we can't even reproduce a single human brain on silicon. AFAIK, a LLM can't even write a novel. If I told it to write The Grapes of Wrath (a lousy popular book I chose for convenience), the turtle would come crawling from the road into the story with the characters. Of course, the characters and other details would disappear or change by the end of the book, because the model would forget the details.

Bard is not going to reflect the nuances of history. It's not realistic to expect that. I also question the quality of the prompts people used.

[BryanM]

If so then the "real" leftists make up such a minuscule minority among self-described leftists that they can safely be considered irrelevant. I often see conservatives try to "no true scotsman" against their embarrassing and counterproductive majority too.

Liberalism is the default state of mind for our countrymen. It's what we're saturated with cradle to grave. Free speech and "free" markets.

You do get ~20% of people being pro-labor, and another ~20% of the population who want to enslave or murder its outgroups. (The "nuke Gaza" people are serious fyi.) Elections are decided by the ~60% of the cattle in between who vote based on what imaginary friend on TV they like more, or whatever their social group in real life has decided is their team.

Internet skub wars are pretty depressing, when you think about it too long. Arguing over minutiae, the problem of the heap, harm reduction, incompatible value alignment between people.... all of that is 0.00000000000000% as important as some guy in Pennsylvania watching his TV and thinking that Trump is more fun to watch than Biden.

You know how the song works, until something effects someone personally they don't actually care. That's one thing I strongly agree with orange with: real, actual personal sacrifice for someone you'll never know for no reward is the only measure of a "good" person.

That is nowhere near true

Nah it... really is. You need to spend a couple years in conservative forums to get a real sense of who they are. They really do enjoy stomping on people with a boot. That's what you get out of being a conservative, if you're not a wealthy capitalist, after all. The David Brooks types are liberals. (Mitt Romney joining the #resistance after Trump made a fool of him is just classic...)

I dunno. The mockery of Bushnell and lies spinning around him in those circles hasn't made me any more sympathetic to their "muh free speech" (but not your free speech) play-victim routine. Of course I agree with you that a ministry of truth (which we basically have in television, since that's where most people live out the elective section of their lives) is evil. I don't think corporations have to tolerate slurs or calls for violence on their forums, though.

People are really just animals at the end of the day. The Nazis weren't uniquely evil monsters that phased into our reality from another dimension, they were human beings too. Our friends who want to overthrow our sham elections for fixed elections do have actual material desires, and they're not in it to give everyone healthcare or a basic income once everyone's replaced with machines.

If people were cool and good, we'd have had a galactic communist space empire thousands of years ago. Our terminal values don't naturally lead to that.

Reminder that I considered Trump to be the lesser evil back in 2016 by a very thin margin.

But, I stand by my assessment of "AI". It's just a computer program--and we are bound by the limitations of the hardware.

Eh, weights can be adjusted at runtime. It'd just do more harm than good since that isn't a training environment to give feedback and prune undesirable mutations.

What's required for live independent learning is a multitude of faculties. Some things absolutely should be hard-wired, like how we have a limited control interface with our eyes. (We can't smoothly move them unless we have an object to track. We can't move them independently. You can't train yourself to learn how to. Some smarty man brain that is, hmph.)

The allegory of the cave is always important to keep in mind. As additional faculties are brought more effectively together, there's an increasingly less-wrong model of the world made by the system as a whole. Live learning is going to be impossible without first having the faculties to judge how something should be adjusted.

Whacking the computer with a stick by human beings isn't a sustainable long term training environment. nVidia using an LM to teach a hand how to twirl a pen is the earliest example of this kind of cross-domain oversight I'm talking about.

I haven't tried out the chatbots with a bazillion token long context window yet either. (One claim that was a little interesting was giving it a rule book of a table top RPG and asking it to generate a valid character. Successfully passing that would be pretty impressive for where we are on the roadmap.) I'm not expecting terribly much. Fundamentally scale is everything, the proto-AGI's I'm talking about will require at least 10 to 20 times as many parameters as GPT-4.

Multi-modal systems have always been inferior to a single min/maxer at a specific given task, for obvious reasons. It's really only around now they're getting the horsepower to get a module up to a useful level, with enough space left over to toss other stuff in there with it. (The diminishing returns are real.) The research on that is still very early.

Which yeah, is kind of sad when you think of how old neural nets are. So much left untapped, in hardware, software, and training.



(And yeah, there's a ton of philosophical navel-gazing to be had on the point/counterpoint of "predicting a least unlikely outcome does not imply understanding"/"but maybe it kind of does?" It's another of those fun endless internet skub wars that can't go anywhere currently...)

(Sydney is definitely the most fun of the corporate chatbots. It actually seems to get sarcasm. The Suno generation in the comments is pretty fluffy too.)

[BulletMagnet]

So it's impossible for someone to be elected president unless they're a loathsome monster worse than what we'd get if we randomly selected death row inmates for the job instead.

*sigh* ...I really don't know why I fucking bother, these conversations always seem to end up like this...

Epstein and Maxwell were Mossad assets and none of the pedophiles in our government can oppose Israel or Israel will expose them for what they are

...and this. The weekend's too damn short as it is, forget this shit.

Well, one parting note: just in case you really are that dangerously ignorant, yes, they want to put school librarians in jail. (Oh, and end all work breaks too, since you probably didn't see that either.) Just in case naming the party utterly beholden to religious extremists as best positioned to preserve free expression somehow still wasn't setting off an alarm bell or two in your mind. Spend some time with the already-cited Project 2025 if you really want to educate yourself.

[BryanM]

Well, yeah. You're fighting over the Harlem Globetrotters vs the Washington Generals. In a time where the status quo is falling apart, and the capitalists have chosen fascism over socialism, as they always have.

It's the apocalypse thread.

A good time for Matt's copypasta though:

-----

We deserve Trump, though. God, do we deserve him. We Americans have some good qualities, too, don’t get me wrong. But we’re also a bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde nation that subsists on massacres and slave labor and leaves victims half-alive and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on couches and blathering about our “American exceptionalism.” We dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win “hearts and minds” that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease – including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of view, of course.

Nowadays we use flying robots and missiles to kill so many civilians and women and children in places like Mosul and Raqqa and Damadola, Pakistan, in our countless ongoing undeclared wars that the incidents scarcely make the news anymore. Our next innovation is “automation,” AI-powered drones that can identify and shoot targets, so human beings don’t have to pull triggers and feel bad anymore. If you want to look in our rearview, it’s lynchings and race war and genocide all the way back, from Hispaniola to Jolo Island in the Philippines to Mendocino County, California, where we nearly wiped out the Yuki people once upon a time.

This is who we’ve always been, a nation of madmen and sociopaths, for whom murder is a line item, kept hidden via a long list of semantic self-deceptions, from “manifest destiny” to “collateral damage.” We’re used to presidents being the soul of probity, kind Dads and struggling Atlases, humbled by the terrible responsibility, proof to ourselves of our goodness. Now, the mask of respectability is gone, and we feel sorry for ourselves, because the sickness is showing.

So much of the Trump phenomenon is about history. Fueling the divide between pro- and anti-Trump camps is exactly the fact that we’ve never had a real reckoning with either our terrible past or our similarly bloody present. The Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of our sins from slavery on – hence the intense reaction to the removal of Confederate statues, the bizarre paranoia about the Washington Monument being next, and so on. But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in the White House and feel our dignity outraged, but when you really think about it, what should America’s president look like?

Trump is no malfunction. He’s a perfect representation of who, as a country, we are and always have been: an insane monster. Frankly, we’re lucky he’s not walking around using a child’s femur as a toothpick.

[Sengoku Strider]

This TRUMP WHITE HOUSE ON DRUGS story has been kind of a let down. I always knew the morbidly obese 75 year-old man on the Super-Size Me diet wasn't just on a natural 6-coffee high for 16 hours a day. It was especially obvious when he went on his daily 5:30am all-caps rants; no amount of golf will get you out of bed like that. But I was hoping it would turn out to be something way more exotic than just every day name brand pharma. Xanax and Provigil? *snooze*. Where are my Deep State nanomachines and alien neuroaccelerator pills?

Trump’s White House Was ‘Awash in Speed’ — and Xanax

In January, the Defense Department’s inspector general released a report detailing how the White House Medical Unit during the Trump administration distributed controlled substances with scant oversight and even sloppier record keeping. Investigators repeatedly noted that the unit had ordered thousands and thousands of doses of the stimulant modafinil, which has been used by military pilots for decades to stay alert during long missions.

But this is the real money quote:

As one former senior administration official puts it: “You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol.”

I hear you, Elton.

[BulletMagnet]

But #resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil, and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go back to the way things were.

It's absolutely true that anyone who claims Trump is the disease and not a symptom is either delusional or (much more likely) taking the piss, but frankly I hear that sort of line a lot more from the supposedly "reasonable" right, the "oh no, this isn't who we are" faction. Who will, in unbroken lock step, still obediently vote for Trump and his army of ass-kissers come November.

That being said, this doesn't make what Trump embodies any less worth calling out for what it is and fighting to the bitter end, especially when we've already been saddled with, just for starters, a Supreme Court that, when presented with the question "should a President be able to go on as horrific and brazen a crime spree as he wants in office without any fear of ever being prosecuted for any of it?" answers "...hmmm...well now, that's a tricky one, we're gonna have to hash that one out."

But yeah, y'know, the years spanning Obama to Trump to Biden are all just kind of a big gray blur, nothing really changed at all, who cares, it's all just the same bunch of lizard people.

[Sengoku Strider]

But yeah, y'know, the years spanning Obama to Trump to Biden are all just kind of a big gray blur, nothing really changed at all, who cares, it's all just the same bunch of lizard people.

I get why people become cynical about the duopoly that has run American politics since the 1860s, but the two fandoms are really not vibing the same right now.

[Sima Tuna]

I always like when they slide the God bit in there. Just to make extra sure that they clarify anyone who believes differently than them is the enemy. Don't worship the exact same god in the same way that they do? Get into a prison cell!

A big part of the reason the Right wing keep losing elections is this religious right nonsense. We're talking about governing a country here. We're talking about administration and proper judicial procedure. We're discussing issues of how we handle our foreign policy, where we allocate our funds and what we prioritize when researching future technologies. What the fuck does any of that have to do with how you, personally believe the world was created or if you believe in a supreme god being or not? What does your creation myth have to do with taxation and representation?

I'd say the same if we were talking about any religion, not just christianity. You can believe whatever you want. I don't care. But please don't bring up what you believe unless it's relevant to the discussion we're having.

Besides, the whole bible thing is such a red herring, because you can read anything you want into/out of that book. It's full of all kinds of hippie liberal "be nice to each other" cliches, while at the same time containing endorsements of horrible atrocity, infinite punishment for finite crimes, extermination of entire tribes, mistreatment of women and children, displays of barbarism heralded as morally upright behavior... I no longer have the patience to even try to explain to christians why their interpretation of Scripture is a carefully cultivated personal fiction. I was raised christian conservative and it took a long time to deprogram all the bullshit. What surprisingly helped the most was actually reading and knowing the content of the Bible. Turns out that the Bible is an excellent tool for creating Atheists.

[sunnshiner]

One of the worst things that the bollocks that's been going on in the US is that the right wing nutjobs are trying to get that shit started over here in the UK. Fuck that noise.

[Sengoku Strider]

RELEASE THE LONG FORM BIRTH CERTIFICATE

Spoiler

John Candy was a decent man and a Canadian institution. He would never.

One of the worst things that the bollocks that's been going on in the US is that the right wing nutjobs are trying to get that shit started over here in the UK. Fuck that noise.

You're not special, Europe. You're bound by the Constitution just like any other state.

[BryanM]

So it's barely been a week and now Claude 3 is all the rage. (The joke is they told investors they were going to study safety, and spent it all on capabilities instead.)

One anecdote I found a bit shocking (a word that's been worn into the ground lately) is a feller claiming he passed it a document with a few thousands of examples of how to translate his niche language that basically doesn't exist on the internet and isn't in any of its training data. And from that in-context one shot learning, was able to translate the language.

Maybe GPT-5 or 6 really could pass the Turing test. Maybe Picard cosplayer David Shapiro was right about timelines all along. As you all know, language isn't just language. The output could easily be used to move a vehicle or robot. The size and cost of the hardware is the primary bottleneck, perhaps the only real bottleneck there ever was.

A big part of the reason the Right wing keep losing elections is this religious right nonsense. We're talking about governing a country here. We're talking about administration and proper judicial procedure.

It's the reason they win elections. Protecting their tribe cohesion. Rationality is antithetical to that; the zany q-anon stuff Strider posts isn't useless at all. It's a glue that keeps a voting bloc together and engaged. To get those asses to the polls. It's a major reason Biden will probably lose.

Their equivalent on team blue are much less fun. Unlikable, miserable people actively fragmenting their coalition. (The miserable people on the other side at least understand they have to be a little entertaining. THAT is the real innovation of Trumpism. A return to the real "rules" of politics: you have to make more people want to vote for you than the other guy. The monopoly of politics by horrible plastic corporations for decades has made everyone forget that.)

It is an interesting study in nature versus nurture. They're the same people fundamentally, motivated by the same impulses of holy symbols and fear, but trained on a different training set based on their upbringing.

[Sengoku Strider]

It's the reason they win elections. Protecting their tribe cohesion. Rationality is antithetical to that; the zany q-anon stuff Strider posts isn't useless at all. It's a glue that keeps a voting bloc together and engaged. To get those asses to the polls. It's a major reason Biden will probably lose.

Yeah, organized religion has done a terrible job of explaining itself to 21st century audiences, but it's a particular expression of a vital element of human community. The word religion comes from the latin religio, which derives from the verb religiare, to bind. Religio carries the connotation of both bond and reverence, it's basically the nicest, most together set of social programming humans have. But because of that socially binding element it can also turn belligerent if in-group sentiment sways that way.

Which is why I think that Q stuff's an excellent barometer of the true believers, the retirees who will drive 3 hours to hear him speak and buy 2 t-shirts, or volunteer to spend all morning folding pamphlets for the local MAGA guy. Or leaving threatening voice messages for the local judge or whatever they might need done that day. And most of all, sign up for several million monthly recurring $2-5 donations en masse. Stuff like this is kind of sad, but it shows what these Trump-centric fables and folklores really mean to the people and digital communities who generate them:






And watching their ranks thin out, the Q forum populations dwindle, and the communities fracturing and re-fracturing, it's why I didn't and don't think he'll win this time around. You can only show up to so many courthouse protests where your guy loses before you start thinking maybe he doesn't have all the answers after all, and it starts feeling like a waste of time.

This is half right:



Florida is MAGA country, and even in a state full of retirees with endless free time hardly anyone shows up to these things anymore. That's a thin crowd and anyone who wants a spot at the front can get it. But if that's all still too anecdotal, I just checked Trump's primary results.

2020: 18,159,752 93.99% of vote

2024: 1,541,026, 63.9% of vote

It's not a 1:1 comparison for various reasons, but it's more than close enough to see participation fell off a cliff and his support within the party is dented after 4 years of continuous losses, both electoral and PR. Yeah, corpo political media will keep running dramatic horse race stories because this is literally their Super Bowl and it only comes once every 4 years. And yeah, every time a journalist goes to one of these things and sticks a microphone in someone's face they spout the true believer party line, but you see how few of those people there really are left; everyone else found something better to do. When you add in the fact that he's now succeeded in turning the RNC into his own personal legal slush fund, his own campaign is effectively going to be party headquarters and local down-ballot candidates are going to be starved for organizational support. If local organizers aren't getting people to show up on voting days, that's it for him and I don't think any amount of Joe-Biden-is-mega-old stories can change that.

[orange808]

Capitalism has no time for culture wars, outside of exploiting it for advert purposes and expanding the customer base. All money is green.

Ultimately, Trump is a poor ally.

[BryanM]

2020: 18,159,752 93.99% of vote

2024: 1,541,026, 63.9% of vote

It's not a 1:1 comparison for various reasons, but it's more than close enough to see participation fell off a cliff and his support within the party is dented after 4 years of continuous losses, both electoral and PR.

Obviously an election where he was the only candidate and the TV didn't have a horse race is different from a real election. You should be apples to apples the 2016 primary, where he got 45%. He's never been stronger within the party. Doesn't even have to show up to the televised wrestling matches, and he's got not just a plurality, but a majority.

I always link the flowers vs butterflies CGP Grey video about these things. Yes, things are more exciting when they're new. People get bored and fall off after a few years. This effect is true of the anti-Trump crowd as well. Their care-cat energy is lower, as well.

As you can see interest in this thread being less than a shell of what it was in 2015. Just us weirdo freaks left. Listening to the same songs on an endless loop.

It's no coincidence our presidential elections are always coin flips that see-saw back and forth. The genocide stuff is doing horrible damage to Biden.

Eventually they'll get a new protagonist with new lore and the cycle will begin again. Again and again. He'll probably be less entertaining than Trump. But of course, he doesn't have to be as good. His opponent is Kamala Harris after all. The new guy's practically got a red carpet.

Super Tuesday results

lol, the progress bars on a google search are absolutely brutal. Trump: 1,013 delegates. What's-her-face: 89 delegates.

I didn't check to see if they ever changed their winner take all rules for many states, but with numbers like that it doesn't look like they did! Reminder they did this after all the challengers to Mitt Romney kept rotating in on a monthly basis, and they wanted to cut off any future challenges of that nature to their chosen puppet.

lol. lmao, even.

Ultimately, Trump is a poor ally.

They really don't understand he is just a passing landmark on the overton window they themselves created. If the democrats are 80's republicans, then where do the republicans have to go? Closer and closer to fascism.

It's their own damn fault for failing to make sure to run and support their own bought dancing clown. For failing to adapt to the times. Another moment of silence for pokémaster Herman Cain. He was everything we could possibly want or hope for from a politician.

Or you know, failing to make republican primaries undemocratic like the democrats did with super delegates. That "break in case of emergency" cheat code.

"If they take away your vote, there's only one way to take it back: VOTE."

I also love the unskewing of polls, or the whole "polls aren't predictive at this point" whining.

Polling average first week of March 2020: Biden +5.5
actual election result: 4.5

Polling average first week of march 2016: Clinton +3.4
actual election result: Clinton +2.5

Polling average first week of march 2012: Obama +4.9
actual election result: Obama +3.9

Looks like polls this far out for candidates that are well known are pretty predictive to me...

Ugh, these results are freakin' bleak man. Losing Minnesota will outdo Hillary and then some. This year is gonna be a slow motion train wreck.

... the democrats will learn nothing and nominate Harris. Please be surprised when this happens. Spoilers ruin the movie.

... how many Ginsburgs do we have on the court waiting to die and give Trump a few more seats? Lemme check...

... zero. Excellent. Stephen Breyer is a hero. And not a shithead. Unlike certain people. There's some chance Trump won't be getting more seats this time. All thanks to Steve.

Steve wasn't even dying of five different kinds of cancer and shambling around like an invalid before retiring. What an absolute hero o7


(Trump's still gonna get to refresh some of their seats with a 13 year old brat or something. But that was always gonna happen because a republican was always gonna win one of the recent elections.)

[BulletMagnet]

It's not a 1:1 comparison for various reasons, but it's more than close enough to see participation fell off a cliff and his support within the party is dented after 4 years of continuous losses, both electoral and PR.

I'll say it again: it's not the diehards I'm most worried about. It's the tens of millions of supposedly "reasonable" voters who aren't nearly as loud as the ones you see on TV but are absolutely planning to turn out en masse for Trump and the GOP, if only to spite the people they've always smeared as victims of "Trump derangement syndrome" who turned out to be depressingly correct on nearly every front.

I don't fear the Boeberts and Gaetzes; I fear the McConnells and Barrs. "Well duh, of course he's incompetent, a criminal and a dire threat to democracy...but I'm still voting for him because fuck you."

[BryanM]

As always it's the Democrat's job, in theory, to get people to vote for them. Maybe you should send an e-mail to the Joe Biden campaign that their strategy to court Nikki Haley voters is probably doomed and they should maybe try to do some things college kids would like to support. That isn't genocide. I don't think they like that very much.

It's not the Republican's job to lay on the ground and kill themselves. They're not Democrats, after all.

2016 all over again. First as farce. Then as gigaclown farce.


lololoololl

[Sima Tuna]

... they should maybe try to do some things college kids would like to support. That isn't genocide. I don't think they like that very much.

Making too much sense as always. What are we gonna do with this guy?

[BryanM]

Steve Garvey is another benefactor of the classic Democrat pied piper strategy. (You can read about the ur example from loathsome ghoul McCaskill herself.) It'll probably work out better than the Clinton campaign's investment in building up Trump did.

And even if they lose, they still defeated the chance of a filthy hippy that wants to help people getting into the senate. So they won't lose even if they lose. You don't want two of those guys in there, things might get a little crazy if you did.

The whole thing does remind me of how mind share and popularity works. In wrestling, villains are a lot easier to remember since they have so much more personality than the faces do. Wiping their bums with the flag. Feeding a guy his own dog stuffed in tacos. You don't tend to forget such antics.

So when viewed through that lens, of course the anti-Trump ads ran in 2016 only helped him. You're building up awareness that he's a guy you can vote for. That there's an election going on. Riling his people up to defend their imaginary TV dad. In what world did it do anything other than aggrandize and empower him?

Anyone with two brain cells understands that's how it works. Every dollar spent on that, is a dollar not spent on making your own candidate more of an imaginary TV friend.

Of course, losing is the point. As is ensuring only proper bank-approved candidates get into office.




(The Garvey fans in comment sections acting like the "attack" ads were meant to harm him are absurd little animals. Schiff spent more money on elevating him, then he did on his own campaign. How people can be this stupid and somehow manage to not die from jamming a fork in too deep while eating, I'll never understand....)

----

"Don't be dropping aid from parachutes like it's some kind of Looney Tunes cartoon." - Moore

Daaaamnnn. What a burn.

Mike's political instincts are really good. He understands people, and very specifically the people of Michigan.

Well, flashback to the Biden Avengers victory celebration. Remember how dark the humor in this was? All these people, all these factions, doing all this work, busting their asses to the bone to barely cross the goal line by a margin of like 0.6%?

[orange808]

In case someone cares, they're working to restrict open source. Before you consent, remember that development will continue behind closed doors.

When it takes your job (and you can't stop that), you won't have access to the automation tools. You won't be able to take on your former employer. You'll be locked out. New technologies shouls disrupt, but this time it could only disrupt you.

Worried about ethics? Sorry. There's no solution.

We're human beings. History proves we have no "ethics". The models they develop behind closed doors will have no guardrails. Not internally. The only difference is, you won't have access, but someone else always will.

Banning open source "AI" won't help society or save your job--and it will lock the technology IP inside vaults and walled gardens.

Anyhow, they're taking our comments here:
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/NTIA ... 9/document

Not speaking up is consent.

[BryanM]

I know the open source AI initiative is mostly symbolic. Still, I'm not sure what scenario they can imagine where it's possible to compete with the corpos.

They'll have the foundries. They'll have the bleeding edge on parameter count.

By the time they're printing mechanical brains that are feasibly affordable to small businesses and consumers, they'll be insurmountable. They won't even let us own our own computers anymore with the latest OS's, and they're going to sell us (let's be real, lease us) brains without hardwired networks built in?

The real fun is this ole meme.

Spoiler

....... those videos that guy made of his dead daughter..... Black Mirror's seriously becoming real..... .... ..

... the hell're they gonna do for the new seasons that's new or relevant.....

[orange808]

We still have universities and computer science departments. We probably can't beat the corporate interests, but we have to try.

There's still a few salaried jobs in research. Don't let it completely die.

Not speaking up is consent.

[Sima Tuna]

Let's see you call an AI when your toilet breaks, fucko!

[BryanM]

That seriously might happen within ten years. We can't be Randy forever.

It's not going to be a slow, gentle transition. Whenever the machines are cheaper than people, it's gonna be a hard sudden cut across a few years.

The Model T created a world where our sole collective material purpose in life is to build cars and set oil on fire. Nobody really appreciates how extremely weird that is, since it's "normal" nowadays. The model T of robots would likewise signal the start of a new era for civilization.

A very very post-human civilization, if the technological singularity people are correct and more intelligent beings would be substantially better at making themselves more intelligent.

Picard cosplayer David Shapiro said something rather poignant the other week. That the timelines a lot of people come up with aren't based on cold rational facts, but rather when they're emotionally ready for AGI to arrive. And it's obvious that's true: Yann LeCun and Gary Goalposts basically keep repeating "AGI will never happen but if it ever does it'll be terrible.


In the meantime, let's enjoy all the new Kanye West remixes we have to enjoy.

----

Or just stare into the burning house/aristocrats joke that is the democrats. I feel like the snide sarcastic dirtbags are the real voice of the era. The boomers had Walter Cronkite, and this is what we got instead.

(... holy fuck, even the Second Thought guy is rrrreeeee'ing. That guy is... not prone to dunking hard on liberals. Very very not prone. I guess to not be tilted at them currently, you'd have to be one of those absolute lunatics that scream at Michael Moore for trying to get the democrats to have a small chance at winning, instead of 100% losing.)

(Nah I'm sure 50% of Nikki Haley voters will totally vote for Biden and everything will work out exactly to plan. Just like it's always worked out before...)

(Did you know there are people who seriously don't think the democrats are paid to intentionally lose, like the Washington Generals? It's true. Just like how some small babies think wrestling is real. Children and young adults are one thing, but anyone over 30 buying into the kayfabe is just sad...)

[Sengoku Strider]

2020: 18,159,752 93.99% of vote

2024: 1,541,026, 63.9% of vote

It's not a 1:1 comparison for various reasons, but it's more than close enough to see participation fell off a cliff and his support within the party is dented after 4 years of continuous losses, both electoral and PR.

Obviously an election where he was the only candidate and the TV didn't have a horse race is different from a real election. You should be apples to apples the 2016 primary, where he got 45%. He's never been stronger within the party. Doesn't even have to show up to the televised wrestling matches, and he's got not just a plurality, but a majority.

I don't know that 2016 is much of a comparison point, purely because he was a completely unknown quantity at the time who many still saw as a meme or protest candidate, with no ground organization in place yet. It was only once he beat Hillary that the messianic chorus for him truly kicked in, and 2017 when QAnon started up and fully crystallized the sentiment. By 2020 nobody credible wanted to test him, his favourability within the republican party was at ~97+%. It's different this time around, he's down to 80% and like I keep saying I think it's comparatively soft support among anyone but his hardcore cultists.

The other point you raise is that he's never been stronger in the party. Favourability aside, he has finally succeeded in shoving out anyone who won't kiss the ring, and put his daughter in-law in charge of the RNC. So that part is true. But in doing so, he's hollowed out the party's talent base. There are a pile of them not running for re-election this time out because they can't deal with the AM Radiocracy anymore. And when a Mitt Romney walks away, it's because a whole lot of like-minded people already went out the door ahead of him, not because he suddenly lost a taste for influence. Trump's got more power, but over fewer voters after shrinking the tent.

At the end of the day he didn't have enough votes in 2020, 65% of the US has an unfavourable view of Trump, and I can't see what magic trick he's going to pull in his current situation - constant bad legal headlines, sounding older and doddery, Murdoch not in his corner and a campaign ledger with a negative balance - to change all that. People might not be inspired by Biden whose presidency has been characterized by favourability problems of his own, but only people with actual issues come up with reasons to genuinely hate him.



...so like 27% of the population.