Me neither…but that’s the aesthetic. Chrysler is faux luxury, and Jeep is faux ruggedness.

They look tough / classy though!

Enshittification alternative phase 3: let the government goons run your platform.

Hahaha first thing I thought of

In America, every once in a while the people seem to vote based upon the economy. They, for a time, seem to acknowledge that the statistics may even be wrong, and that way too many people in the country live in abject poverty. Then, they elect a Republican, and they forget they ever gave half a shit about poor, working poor, or homeless people.

We are a deeply unserious country full of deeply unserious people.

Published by no shit magazine first

The whole comparison of “you laughed at Charlie thing, and now we’re laughing at ice killing” is so hard for these people to understand why most sane people view these deaths differently.

The primary difference here is that Charlie was murdered by a citizen who was arrested as soon as his identity was uncovered and is now in custody.

Renee Good was murdered by a federal agent that has the full support of the federal government and will likely never be arrested or face any accountability.

Can’t Bolsonaro just catch COVID for the 90th time and die in prison already?

Oh come on, he has power, he’s the podcaster-in-chief!

I’ve heard it said that historically when a country or empire starts collapsing, for some reason, the people and government often paradoxically behave in ways that speed up that collapse.

Yeah I mean setting aside the facts that Germany was literally split in half for 40 years after WW2 and governed by outside forces for a time, was basically forced to enact reforms to prevent the elevation of fascists to their government again, and had a thorough set of war crime trials (a process created from the ground up specifically for Germany), they basically just whistled dixie and the world started trusting them again when they elected a different chancellor. /s

As for Trump’s supposed “immunity,” I think we’ll eventually discover that it isn’t as wide-reaching as many think, and especially as he thinks. SCOTUS said he has immunity for his official presidential duties, but that’s a serious limitation.

It’s not a big limitation for Republicans. They can simply make the argument to a sympathetic Supreme Court that the charged violation was part of his official presidential duties.

That’s the thing in general as well. “The law is the law” is a meaningless platitude. Humans interpret (and reinterpret) the law as they see fit. We also pick and choose which portions to enforce.

That all set aside:

On July 1, 2024, the Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview, at least presumptive immunity for official acts within the outer perimeter of their official responsibility, and no immunity for unofficial acts.

(Emphasis mine)

“At least presumptive immunity” is another bit of legal worminess that makes whomever is president with a sympathetic make-up on the Supreme Court effectively a king with one exception reiterated throughout the opinion: impeachment, conviction, and removal.

Sure, there’s “unofficial acts”, but that is another bit of subjective non-sense that can be argued away before the trial even starts.

The idea that “the law applies to everyone” is not shared by our current Supreme Court. Despite Democrats being fairly useless and spineless, this part of the deconstruction of our country (along with the disastrous decision in Citizen’s United) belongs solely upon the shoulders of the gowned guys and gals of the Supreme Court. He acts with impunity because he can. He acts without fear of prosecution because his supplicants in Congress and the Supreme Court allow him to do so.

I agree that saying “non-voters voted for” anything is basically absurd, but people sitting on the couch rather than voting did affect the outcome of the 2024 election. A bit over three million fewer people voted in 2024 than 2020.

Eh, I prefer people to know where they’re going before clicking without having to hover first.

And as I am not, Clark is not really calling Plato a crank. That’s not the point of using the quote.

Maybe you are not intending it, but your usage of the quote comes across as the same, thought-terminating cliche that is basically summarized in the partial citation of the bible of “there is nothing new under the sun”.

You’re not saying Plato was a crank, but I am. He definitely had some wisdom to impart about things (especially given his time and place in history), but his remarks about writing are ridiculous and crank-like (and made even more ridiculous based upon the fact that we only know what they are because someone wrote them down).

The paper waffles around a bit as to whether or not the result will be overall “good”, and tries to be as adept at fence sitting as Dwight Shrute from the Office (https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/6b3c335d-fd65-4db0-aa70-01c70f312b5a) but the position was made very apparent even from a short skim of the article as well as the way you’re continually referencing it here.

I’d argue that a critical eye toward a specific new technology does not require someone to proceed back through time immemorial and compare it to the naysayers of the invention of the wheel.

Since you seem to have an affinity for Greek philosophers:

“It is the mark of an educated mind not to believe everything you read on the Internet.” - Aristotle

We are still a nation of laws, and they extend to all of us, including Trump.

This is not true according to the Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States.

He’s just choosing to break them openly, because he knows the Dems are too cowardly to stop him, and he is 100% right.

Once you accept that the highest court in the land is the one who decides which people are subject to the law, the path for accountability for Trump within the status quo of the system only has a single outlet: impeachment, conviction, and removal from office (followed by subsequent prosecution in the criminal system outside of Congress).

While impeachment has occurred (or been threatened) multiple times, nobody has ever convicted a president nor removed one from office in the country’s history. The “Dems” – who you are somewhat unjustly demonizing here given the current make-up of Congress – got the closest anyone has ever gotten to removing one in Trump’s second impeachment.

The status quo responded by saying “he’s close to out of office anyway, it doesn’t matter” and then allowed Trump’s propaganda machine to re-write history and turn the participants in the January 6th insurrection into pardoned, misunderstood heroes.

Inside the system (which you still think will save us), the “Dems” also attempted (though halfheartedly) to prosecute Trump after he was out of office, and this Supreme Court carve out for a sitting President was the reward for them trying to enforce the law under Biden.

The Democrats have plenty of blame to take here for the rise of Trump both generally speaking and in particular him being allowed to run for and win re-election. But they did much more than any single Republican has ever done to stop Trump.

I’d argue that Biden’s true mistake was not acting as Lula did and arresting Trump immediately upon entry to office.

You didn’t say his concerns were valid. You said you thought he was not “wholly wrong”. Regardless, Plato being a crank about writing proves only that cranks existed before writing. It does nothing to help you interrogate nor help set you down the path to interrogate the problems mentioned (which is why I categorized it as a thought terminating cliche).

Your referenced article is basically a long-form version of your post, which has a perceivable bias toward the viewpoint that every newly-introduced technology can or will inevitably result in “progress” for humanity as a whole regardless of the methods of implementation or the incentives in the technology itself.

Far from being an instance of skub (https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/) as trumpeting this perspective – perhaps unknowingly – implies that it is (i.e. an agnostic technology / inanimate object that “two sides” are getting emotionally charged about), LLMs (and their “agentic” offspring) are both deliberately and unwittingly programmed to be biased. There are real concerns about this particular set of technologies that posting a quote from an ancient tome does not dismiss.

I see these thought-terminating cliches everywhere, and nowhere do their posters pause a moment to consider the specifics of the actual technology involved. The people forewarning about this stuff were correct about, for instance, social media, but who cares because Plato wasn’t a fan of writing, we rode on horses before in cars, or the term Luddite exists…etc. etc.

Alright relax pluribus

We’ve seen with Ukraine that drone warfare is highly effective and if the US wants to clear a supposed guerilla location they’ll just carpet bomb it all.

That’s what you get from Ukraine? Cuz what I got is that a dime a dozen drone can take down millions of dollars of military equipment. Our shit is bloated, expensive, and built by organizations that rival the largest governments on the planet in terms of bureaucracy. Do you remember any of that recent shit with Boeing?

In this scenario, we’re Russia.

It’s easy to move in and destabilize a government. It’s another entirely to control a whole region that doesn’t want you there.

We can compare this to Vietnam or whatever, but a lot has changed in 50 years and with Venezuela it’s clear that South America is not ready for this type of aggression.

Why Vietnam? Try Iraq or Afghanistan except the destabilized nations we’re “building” are in our backyard. Great. 👍