WatDabney

Mmm... sort of.

In some very broad sense, yes, it's corruption.

In a narrower and more precise sense though, it isn't really, since "corruption" implies a violation of higher standards, which is what we've had, to a greater or lesser extent, pretty much throughout our history.

The difference in the coming era is that there will be no higher standards to corrupt. The things that were previously violations of higher standards will become the new standards. Theft and graft and cronyism will no longer be crimes or even (meaningfully recognized) wrongs - they will be the institutional norms.

And I don't mean this as mere pedantry - the point is that when what used to be corruption becomes the overt norms, things will get much, much worse than they ever were or could be when they were still corruption.

Fascism is, at heart, at least as much an economic system as it is a political one, and broadly, more so.

Fascism, alongside its political control of the populace, establishes economic control of the populace, and it does it very simply, by organizing the government to serve businesses and the wealthy few who control them, and by establishing a revolving door by which a relative few are allowed to freely move between control of the two.

This is the underlying point of Project 2025, and specifically the reason for the planned purge of civil servants. They are to be replaced by people who can be counted upon to serve the interests of the wealthy few and to deny the interests of the rest of the populace.

Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side.

Those in power in those institutions, even if they don't share the political goals of Trump and his coattail-riders, are driven by their own greed to at the very least not stand too much in the way, since they too expect to profit.

I predict.... a corporate ass-kissing establishment hack with a focus on appealing to suburban professionals.

What "us?"

I'm going to be right there alongside her, on my way to an execution too.

And so are you.

I wonder how she's going to feel about this choice a few years down the line, when President-for-life Trump orders her execution.

Very much so (and there's at least one patient gamers community around, because I've posted to one).

The only advantage I can see to playing a game on release is taking part in that first rush of interest, but I'm antisocial enough that that doesn't appeal to me anyway, so I'm not missing anything there.

Beyond that, I think playing a game at least a year or so after release has all of the advantages. The initial flurry of absolute love vs. absolute hate has died down so it's easier to get a broad view of the quality, the game is more stable, the price is better, dlc and expansions are out and generally packaged with the game, and best of all, in this current era, I can most likely buy it from GOG and actually have the full game, DRM-free, on my system.

And there are a bajillion good games out there, just waiting for me to discover them.

Has anyone else noticed that the NYT's coverage of the election lately has been more generous to Harris and more critical of Trump?

I think a case could be made that that's potentially an even more sure indicator that Harris has the advantage than any poll, since the NYT is so craven and cowardly that the only way they'd shift their coverage like that is if they're reasonably confident that Harris is going to win. If they thought that Trump might win, they'd still be kissing his stinky ass.

It's not quite true that we "never" hear about Ukraine's far right. We hear about them fairly regularly in fact - from Putin's apologists and sycophants.

Ah... yes. A lot of things just clicked into place for me, and not just regarding Vance.

Most notably really - trying to grasp the idea of "TheoBros" broadly - I wondered how such a thing is even possible. How can any even moderately intelligent person spend a great deal of time online and cling to a Christian belief at all, and much less a conservative one? There's just far too much information out there that contradicts that view. Granted, there is of course content tailored to affirm it, but it's essentially a specialist thing - not just a bubble, but a very specific and limited bubble, surrounded by a sea of contrary views and contradicting facts.

And then it clicked - the way to maintain a conservative Christian viewpoint on the internet is to be an aggressively censorious conspiracy theorist.

The only way they can face the sea of contradictory information is to ascribe it to some sort of ridiculously massive conspiracy by the forces of evil - such that the vast majority of what exists on the internet is the lies of Satan's minions - and to establish little, aggressively monitored and censored enclaves in which their views and only their views are allowed, and everything else is condemned and preferably censored.

Their whole cognitively dissonant view on "free speech" - in which they somehow simultaneously cry about being "censored" generally simply for being massively downvoted and even as they, in their own bubbles, overtly censor any and all contrary views - suddenly makes sense. They explain away the fact that the vast majority of people disagree with them and even condemn them as a conspiracy to silence them, and create the illusion that they're not merely a noxious and irrational few by aggressively monitoring and controlling their walled gardens, so that opposition is at least underrepresented if not silenced entirely.

It also explains their slippery relationship with truth, and specifically things like Vance clinging to the Haitians eating pets myth even after it's been proven false. For them, coming across information that proves them wrong has to be an essentially daily occurrence, so they undoubtedly work out an approach to it, such that they, exactly as he's doing, just flatly ignore the necessary ramifications of the truth and instead just blithely cling to whatever myth affirms their beliefs.

Yeah... suddenly a whole lot of previously inexplicable behavior and beliefs are making sense to me...

And frankly, while it's notably pathetic and cringily willfully ignorant, it's also scary. More on that later maybe...

Right. The country in which officials insist that soldiers should be entirely free to sexually abuse Palestinians can investigate itself.

Intelligence is a measure of reasoning ability. LLMs do not reason at all, and therefore cannot be categorized in terms of intelligence at all.

LLMs have been engineered such that they can generally produce content that bears a resemblance to products of reason, but the process by which that's accomplished is a purely statistical one with zero awareness of the ideas communicated by the words they generate and therefore is not and cannot be reason. Reason is and will remain impossible at least until an AI possesses an understanding of the ideas represented by the words it generates.

And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he'll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he's almost certainly right.