From what I’ve gleaned of the ravings of the angry stupid right blogosphere, a lot of people actually do think that only tree huggers want green energy.
And I have little doubt that that’s an opinion that Trump shares, but that’s not his main motivation in all of this. His main motivation is big fat bribes from the fossil fuel industry.
And thanks to Trump, the US is perfectly placed to be entirely left behind.
The more I think about it, the more confident I am that at least the basic outline is actually the truth - that “Big Balls” - entitled, sheltered 4channer that he undoubtedly is - got his ass kicked for being a racist dickhead and/or creepy pervert.
Okay - as of right now, I think there’s much more to this story that we haven’t been told and this is all damage control.
Like it wasn’t actually a carjacking at all, and instead, for instance, “Big Balls” tried to buy sex with one or the other or both of them, then when she/he/they not coincidentally refused, he went on a drunken racist tirade, so they kicked his ass.
You have it exactly and completely backwards.
Imagine:
Dave and Tom live on a desert island - just the two of them
Dave believes that all human beings have a right to life.
Tom does not - he believes that there can be no such thing.
Do either of them actually have, in a practical sense, a right to life?
The answer is yes - Tom has a right to life, because Dave has ceded it to him
It doesn’t matter how strongly Dave believes in a right to life - he himself will never in fact have one because the only person who’s in a position to respect it or violate it - Tom - doesn’t even recognize it.
However, it also doesn’t matter that Tom does not believe in a right to life - he does in fact have one, solely because Dave is the only person in a position to respect it or violate it, and Dave believes it exists.
Rights don’t exist when they’re claimed - they exist when they’re recognized and respected.
So Miranda has it exactly right and you have it exactly wrong - it’s not only not an accused criminal’s responsibility to lay claim to their rights - it’s functionally impossible for them to do so. The rights of an accused criminal "must* be stipulated by those who are in a position to violate them, because it’s only by their recognition of them and respect for them that they can be meaningfully said to exist at all.
And that’s also why an officer or an organization that will, if given the chance, ignore the rights of defendants must be stopped. By doing so, they are explicitly violating the trust that has been placed in them and demonstrating categorically that they cannot be allowed to wield that authority.
Yeaaaahhhh… no. I don’t think “stability” is really an accurate descriptor of what the Fed has done.
Their “stability” consists of following policies explicitly and deliberately designed to generate an ongoing transfer of wealth up the economic ladder, and using slanted and incomplete indicators like GDP to create the illusion that their policies are of benefit to the country as a whole.
I mean… yes, it is “stability” of a form- it’s akin to the stability necessary to build a house of cards.
But that stability is revealed to be a fleeting and ultimately ephemeral thing when the house of cards comes crashing down, as this one most assuredly will.
That said though, I do agree that this is theater.
Yes.
Data hoarders are going to really come into their own after the corporations start trying to paywall information - pretty much no matter what it is, there’s somebody out there who has it squirreled away on a drive.
This could get interesting.
Whether or not the Fed “operates successfully” is a matter of perspective - if you’re fabulously wealthy, and particularly if you’re a banker or investor or corporate executive, then yes, as a general rule it does. If you’re anything else, then not so much so.
And Trump’s relationship with bankers et al is difficult, since he’s never been able to browbeat them - he’s always had to lie and wheedle and beg to get money out of them, then when he doesn’t bother paying them back, they have the gall to come after him and try to force him to pay and even to drive him into bankruptcy. Again.
So on the one hand, he likely wants to stick it to them.
But on the other hand, when push comes to shove, they’re likely still more powerful than he is, even now.
On the first point, I’m not sure. I definitely agree that left to their own devices the AIbros would just keep expanding and battling each other and chasing ever more pie in the sky. But I don’t think they’ll be left to themselves. I think the MBAs will move in and take over, and it’ll shift to standard corporate tactics of buyouts and mergers and bankruptcies and liquidations, and inevitable consolidation.
On the second, I agree. I think the web is actually going to effectively split into a commercial system of monolithic corporations and subscriptions and fixed hardware and a much less formal true web of small servers and self hosting and ad hoc networks.
Amusingly enough, The Economist illustrates what I believe to be the new business model that’s already waiting in the wings for the internet.
With admittedly no direct evidence to support it, my theory at the moment is that the “AI” players plan to consolidate and to continue to expand their reach and continue to gain users who rely on the “AI” for information rather than following links to the originals, then, once the "AI"s have killed enough clicks to collapse the ad model and drive the websites out of business (and give them the opportunity to buy up the remains of the businesses, and more importantly, their databases), they’ll put all of the information of which they’re now in sole possession behind paywalls.
Broadly, the goal is to apply the most lucrative if least popular business model to information ,- to monopolize ownership of it in order to sit back and collect money as rent-seeking parasites.
So the Russian asset is accusing the Obama administration of falsely accusing Russia of something that everybody knows they not only did, but do as a matter of course?
It’s not even as if the accusations are particularly noteworthy, They explicitly did not accuse the Trump campaign of seeking out or cooperating with the Russian interference - they just accuse Russia of interfering. As they do in every election (and as virtually every major world power does in virtually every election everywhere).
Trump is really desperate to shift attention away from Epstein, isn’t he?
And Gabbard is really driving home the point that she has absolutely no integrity, principles or ethics.
Just another day in the decline and fall of the United States…
Conservatives live in such a bizarre fantasy world.
You’d think that sooner or later it would filter through to at least some of them that it’s meaningful that essentially without exception, if they just let information flow freely, whether on a website or a forum or in public comments or via an AI or whatever - it ends up skewed against conservatism.
But they never seem to get it. Instead, they go to great lengths to carefully censor and silence and astroturf and manipulate to force it over to a pro-conservative position, and they then have to constantly monitor and censor and astroturf to keep it there because if they relax their guard it starts drifting anti-conservative again.
In one sense, yeah - it’s easy and obvious - they lie, and often even to themselves.
But that doesn’t really explain anything. It goes so far beyond just lying that I really have a hard time making sense of it. Glib answers just don’t hack it.
It just doesn’t seem possible that they can sincerely believe that opinion consistently turns against them through some sort of near-universal conspiracy and that their constant manipulations and censorship and astroturfing can really be in support of truth. Sure, individuals can be that delusional, but that many of them?
I just can’t make sense of it. It’s like they believe that gravity is a conspiratorial lie that everyone else pretends to believe in just to stop them from flapping their arms and flying to the moon.
And this is why DOGE gutted the Office for Vehicle Automation Safety at the NHTSA.
Of course, what she actually means is that people have been brainwashed in a somewhat different way than she would’ve preferred, but at least she’s right about the brainwashing part. Since she’s incapable of self-reflection, that’s not going to mean anything to her or change anything for her, but still… for someone as willfully and angrily ignorant as she is, that’s almost sort of impressive.
Israel is a rogue state.
To the degree that fascism has a distinctive economic system, one of its most notable qualities is a combination of private ownership of the means of producton with government/corporate partnership and a “revolving door” by which powerful individuals pass back and forth between business and political leadership positions.
I propose a new term - “malscurrocracy” - government by evil clowns.
If only it was that simple…
I just think it’s funny that “AI” (which is “artificial intelligence” not in the sense of “human-made” but in the sense of “fake”) is contemperaneous with Trump.
This is going to go down in history (if humanity survives long enough) as the Idiot and Lunatic Age.