the last time around we had robber barons. this time we have toddler tyrants.
is syria an isolated event or some kind of domino?
@mcc (i think i’m at several years of mondays ago. best of luck to you.)
“The average cost of a three-day hospital stay is $30,000.” #HelenOuyang https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/opinion/health-care-anger.html
“Or, as the Northwestern University political-science professor Jeffrey Winters put it…this feels like a moment of ‘in-your-face oligarchy.’”
// “feels like” is too soft. this is what oligarchy looks like, laughing proud. https://universeodon.com/@memeorandum/113624917149665952
You will receive an email receipt for your records.
there was the moment they decided dark patterns are really bright patterns because they are profitable patterns, and what is profitable is efficient and good, progressive in the only way that is ultimately meaningful. that was the moment they left us, became something apart. they continue to diverge.
a value i’ve always strived to uphold is intellectual charity. people i disagree with are good people like me. try to understand the circumstances and beliefs under which a good person might come to see things as they do. 1/
with age my eyesight has changed, my focal range has grown narrower and more brittle. something similar has happened to my capacity for intellectual charity. 2/
i do my best, of course, in arguments and conversations to behave charitably. but beyond the confines of a live conversation — in which the presence of a real human does encourage stretching toward mutual comprehension — i find myself more and more just quietly writing off political adversaries. 3/
these are just bad fucking people, i find myself thinking. 4/
i don’t take this as a positive development. i wonder how much of it is my increasing age, my decaying soul, and how much reflects the changing times. /fin
elon’s gonna send us all an oath where we all have to agree to be “hardcore” as citizens or be expatriated.
@inkican “especially violations of your privacy. we pursue those very seriously.”
“we emphasize trust and accountability, your trust and our lack of accountability.”
@inkican not really.
it’s gonna be unreal when shit gets real.
"they invented a philosophy — a 'science' they called it — under which greed is reason. then they wondered why things didn't work out."
look at least if we end up with a warlord called “hagsex” the aesthetic will be something other than cyberpunk.
@sqrtminusone i meant a jewish/american word for smoked salmon. but whatever works!
“never go on Lox News. it’ll only be a total schmear job.”
@phillmv when i was 6? 7?, we went to Israel and picked up arab hitchhikers. there was no apartheid then. in the 1990s, after PLO and intifada, i held out hope for the Oslo Accords. Rabin didn’t need to be killed. Netanyahu might have been a shoe salesman.
@phillmv i do know. i mean it was always broken, but as our grandparents’ youth, then ours, attested, it was improving, had improved. we lived in a paradise made from extrapolation. it seemed like reasonable extrapolation.
yeah, i think we all face quite a test now. we took for granted humane incentives (tho capitalism was boiling-frogging them away). who will each and all of us become now that alignment is totally sprung, there may be terrible consequences for not being terrible?