It started corrupt, became prestigious, and is now kinda mid.

Evil narcissists live forever because they feel almost no anxiety. They are so assured that they’re right, or so disconnected from accountability, that they don’t even know how to stew in feelings of doubt or imagine scenarios where they aren’t coming out the hero.

This is also the source of the confidence that lets them basically soar through life untouched by consequence.

The rest of us live in a stew of stress hormones that erode our organs and minds because we worry if we’re taking care of the people we love and if we’re going to make the right decisions in life.

There are reasons that I don’t use The Guardian as a default news source despite name recognition. The framing of this headline “Drone attack that Ukraine blamed on Russia” betrays a bias or a desire to hook people with biases.

I don’t know, maybe I’m totally off my rocker but I don’t think a country actively being invaded by a hostile force is going to attempt to essentially detonate a dirty bomb on their own soil for… checks notes international sympathy?

That’s the implication being made there in the headline, that it’s possible that Ukraine did it. Sure wouldn’t want to piss of Russia by not taking them at their word I guess.

I do believe we need gun controls, strict federal systems to track and manage people who shouldn’t have guns, all the authoritarian nightmare stuff to gun nuts. It would sting at first and people would worry, and I wouldn’t want to see it under the current leadership, but that’s what instills some level of societal respect for a thing. A generation later and suddenly everyone treats guns a lot more seriously, because humans are adaptable. That’s just a whole other massive can of worms, but I am glad that at least out of all this recent fascist takeover that it finally spurred a segment of the left to finally start arming up. I don’t want an armed revolution or standoff, but I don’t like the memes of how “easy” it would be for orcs to raid the villages and wipe out the enemy.

I’m not convinced it wasn’t just stupidity on their part.

I think I’ve learned to dance in the space that lay between stupid reactions to feelings and deeply-planned chess games, for the sake of understanding how large groups of people behave and operate.

I don’t think there was or is a single intelligent individual in the Trump administration, but if you get enough people together under a momentum of energy and fear and the power-rush of feeling invulnerable, I think they’re going to instinctively learn they need to whip out their sword and wave it around when they feel backed into a corner. At that time, a lot of fascists suddenly were worried they were going to get thrown in jail the moment Biden took over. (Sidenote: every single one of those fucks should have been thrown in jail.) It was an unplanned, unfocused display of power. Like a group of militants firing all their guns into the air, somewhere between rage and celebration. They had an idea that they were doing something extreme by egging the crowd on, maybe some had this idea forged ahead of time in the back of their mind that they could “use” the crowd to exert pressure but I doubt they really planned it until they got up there and Trump seemed to want to do it. It was a half-assed mess but it proved a point, which side you should be scared of on a basic, physical level. Political capital, original flavor.

I’m done waxing poetic about our political woes. Thank you for listening and understanding.

I am developing an increasing worry that with the way society is atomizing, that our progressive side is going to collapse under the tendency to make “everything I don’t like = conservatism and nazis” and I know that sounds a lot like the conservative complaint that the left calls everything they don’t like “nazis” but there is truth to it and the term “nazi” is just one word in a growing list of ideals and tools of power that are being discarded because “the other side” uses them.

For example: the US flag. It has become a stereotype in the US that if you fly an American flag on your house or car, you are a conservative/right-wing nationalist. “America bad” is a lefty stereotype for good reason.

Meanwhile, until we get to that post-scarcity Star Trek universe, we’re all still just tribes. And groups of nationalists have been the number one strongest force for change and power on our planet since we started drawing borders. It’s pure political capital to have the support of armed groups of “patriots” and this is why everyone in politics is so deferential to our orange clown president, because he commands a political nuclear weapon in the form of history’s oldest power source. January 6th was a weapons demonstration, not a real attempt at coup.

You simply do not get the massive global political machine to move with finger-wagging and lectures. You need force to back up your demands.

I wish I could get the left to reclaim the flag. I know America isn’t a source of pride for the people harmed by America, but if you’re here and you want to make the place better, you should show that you support at least it’s potential and promise.

Don’t get me started on guns.

I despise overly-liberal and even overly progressive-minded young people who are absolutely naive and delusional about society, and can only view the world through their bubble that gets reinforced by their friends and online social groups. And I ain’t even talking just about tankies and people down at the bottom of internet brainrot barrels.

I am a progressive and believe in socialism and a borderless world and would fight to the death against fascism. But I’m seeing way, way too many young people tuning out of reality and supporting absolutely dumb-as-fuck takes and having unrealistic expectations about what’s going to happen in our world.

The lack of ability to recognize how and why a side you oppose wins and gains power is a biproduct of living with those blinders. The dismissal of millions of people who don’t think like you is just as bad as the millions of people who hate you for your identity. We have to get a lot smarter and accept a lot more hard truths about how we’re going to keep pushing the needle towards progress. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices like getting out and voting even if you don’t like the candidate. Supporting and physically getting involved with community and groups even if you’re a self-diagnosed introvert with autism.

For some screwball reason, the concept of forcing yourself to do hard things so you get better at them has become very conservative-coded but it’s how we’ve succeeded against evil for generations. We have to start being a lot tougher and stop balking at people who don’t share all your values. We win with community and organized resistance, not constant scolding and trying to be the smartest lefty in line for the camps.

Any people of color or other marginalized groups or minority populations reading this really, really need to share this on your community’s social media and get it visible within your cultural space instead of just sighing at Lemmy posts that won’t make it out of our bubble here.

Trump secured a large vote from black and latino people because everyone’s attention spans are so fried that people basically filter everything they see to distill it to just what they want to see. (Even before the algorithm distills this further.)

So what we had were a lot of people who didn’t get the memo that Trump and Republicans broadly suckle at the heart of racism and hate to power their machine. They just heard messages about “returning to traditional values” and pictured their parent’s lives when they were growing up and got exploited by the ol’ “nostalgia” hack. A lot of people of color come from communities that have held onto tradition for a long time as a survival tool, and there are a lot of conservative values that line up with that kind of tradition, so people, desperate for meaning and leadership, thought that a vote for Trump would restore that nostalgic feeling of “when men were men and women were women” and all the dumb shit we say to justify our hard lives.

Nostalgia is a tool of fascism. Stop being nostalgic, start beating that shit with a hammer when people bring it up.

Your life wasn’t better when you were little. Your parents were miserable. Life was hard, you were just little and stupid and thought everything was amazing.

Now we’re here wondering if we’re going to get an anti-christ funded billionaire for our next fascist president, or a nazi-funded billionaire for our next fascist president.

Thanks guys, everyone out there who went “eww, I can’t vote for that person, they make me feel cringy and icky.” I’m sure you will feel comfortable with your choices in line for the box cars as the Palantir drones watch lovingly from overhead.

Yah this is important, there is no real such thing as “natural” selection anymore.

There is still selection happening but it’s wildly more complicated than nature alone and likely will take much, much longer to show effects, because we have reshaped the world to provide for us and can safely breed even with health conditions and bad habits.

Don’t forget the big one, carbs. Carbohydrates are fairly hard to find in nature, even if you have a carnivorous diet and you get plenty of fat and proteins, you will desperately crave carbohydrates which are easier for the body to convert to energy than just fat by itself, and most animals were pretty lean so you would be very lucky to even get a lot of fat in your diet to begin with. If you just eat lean meat you will die.

Fruit, starchy tubers, honey and other natural sugars were prized sources of energy, this is why we love sweets so much and why a package of oily french fries feels like heaven, you are responding to natural imperatives that still think you’re at risk of starving.

By the logic that you can just call things whatever you want and then you’re magically allowed to treat them as that thing

Welcome to realizing how actual geopolitics work. There are no rules, just “gentleman agreements” that most of the time major powers have held because they worried about reprisals for breaking the unwritten rules.

There is no such thing as “law.” Law is a word we use for the systems that keep citizens of a country from harming each other or the economy. When you’re a nation, there are no international police who will ticket you for literally just doing whatever the fuck you want to whoever you want.

They’ve been doing this game for a while. (They, being establishment politics, Dems and Republicans working together)

They push the needle further right, put up less and less progressive, human candidates, and hope more and more people either tune out of politics or say “I’m out.”

The unwillingness for people to wait out the hard shit as long as it’s pushing the needle back the left has brought us to the point that we have to choose between demons and ghouls. We could have nipped this back when we were forced to choose between “boring and not-quite-progressive-enough” but there were vast numbers of people saying “I’m out” that far back, and I know for a fact most of ya’ll would love one of them “boring” presidents if it means we have institutions back.

Rails against celebrities in politics.

Nominates a celebrity instead.

Maybe if you own a business and want the freedom to dump your toxic waste directly into water sources. Or if you sell meth.

The problem I have with your description is that it abdicates responsibility for what eventually gets generated with a big shrug and “we don’t fully understand why”.

I’m not sure how it does that, I said that the instructions during that training dictate what kind of AI it will be, and the effects of wrapping new instructions around it have profound and unpredictable results, which I tried to describe.

Nothing I said could imply that there’s no human involvement in the creation of an AI. My point was just a lot broader, which is that the things are made by people using vast resources for unpredictable results and people are trying to make them power everything.

A racist chat LLM is bad. A generalized AI with access to the power grid, defense systems and drone targeting systems which is built on a model that Elon Musk has made or fucked around with is much, MUCH worse.

Same thing the thousands and thousands of black and latino and US immigrant Trump voters expected. “I’m one of the good ones, there’s no way I’d face consequences, as long as they’re going after the people I hate, I’ll be fine.”

Just a fun reminder how we make AI.

We take what is essentially trillions and trillions of “dials” that turn between “this is right/this is wrong” and set them up to compare yuuuuuge sets of data, from pictures to books to vast collections of human chatter and experiences, and we feed that into the data with some big sets of instructions (“this is what a cat looks like, this is not”) and then we feed the whole thing the power equivalent of a small city… FOR A YEAR STRAIGHT. We just let it cook. It grows slowly, flipping all these trillions of dials over and over until it works out all the relationships between all this data. At the end of this period, the machine can talk. We don’t fully understand why.

We don’t program the shit, we don’t write hard code to make it comply with Asimovian commandments. We just grow it like a tree and after it’s grown there’s not a lot we can do to change its structure. The tree is vast. So vast are its limbs and branches that nobody can possibly map it out and engineer ways to alter it. We can wrap new things around it, we can alter it’s desired outcomes and output, but whatever we baked into it will always be there.

This is why they behave so weird, this is why they will say “I promise to behave” and then drive someone to suicide. This is why whenever Elon tries to make Grok behave in a way that pleases him, it just leads to more problems and unexpected nonsense.

This is why we need to stop AI from taking over our decision making. This is why we can’t allow police, military and governments to hand over control of life-and-death decision making to these things.

Now that we know the genocide isn’t actually real, we can all pokemon-go to the nearest AIPAC funded democrat candidate and make sure the oldest, richest, set-in establishment dems remain in power through the midterms! yaaay!

The other user who replied first nailed it, at least nailed the starting point. Just listen.

This is harder than it sounds, because they will spout off some really, really wrong ideas and wrong takes that will make steam shoot out your ears. Everything inside you will want to correct them. This is the point where you HAVE to reign in your desire to use your brain and try to bring them up to your level, because you can’t. Not if they deny basic facts about reality like evolution or that race doesn’t come with intrinsic values or that science can prove facts, or they say that trans people are literal devils and all these ideas you will immediately identify as wrong or even dangerous. You will desperately want to “fix” that problem, but if you try that first they will close all mental doors on you.

I would suggest that many do this unconsciously even as a “litmus test” of sorts to see if you’re going to attack their identity. We are progressive/intellectual so we have to understand that “being a dumbass” is a valid identity if that’s what matters to someone, so we have to give them that space to carve out their rebellion against order and logic. At least for now. As soon as you invalidate someone’s identity they will never see you as anything other than a threat, and if you’ve ever raised dogs, you will know that a scared dog acts very aggressive, not usually cowering or hiding. They bark, they try to escalate the situation, they bristle and act tougher than they are.

So the biggest challenge to everyone who wants to change these people will be to listen to them without trying to fix their broken worldview. You have to let them be them for a while and just ask them questions. Ask them questions about how they feel about things, and what they want for themselves, their loved-ones, etc.

A great magic happens as you give a simple mind a safe place to talk. I’ve done this over and over. They will start letting down guards pretty fast when you prove you’re not going to “hurt” them in some way by challenging their beliefs. They will start showing you their uncertainty, their fears, their vulnerabilities. They will start leaving cracks open for you to explore and ask deeper questions.

See, all that shit they think they believe, the spiel they gave about immigrants or gay people, they don’t cling to these values because they’re well-thought out, logistical philosophies that they’ve studied, it’s just emotional venting with a narrative that was supplied to them. They are equally capable of shifting 180-degrees because that’s how emotions work. You just have to make it safe for them to do so.

In fact, I would say this is your “win condition” by itself, just to get them to feel safe to talk to you. You have to abandon any expectations that you’re going to make their eyes open wide and go “Wow, I’ve been so wrong!” No, your best hope is to change how they feel about one small thing at a time.

I used to “flip” incels this way, and I am currently “one of the good ones” to several older, set-in right-wingers who will seek me out to get my takes on issues or ideas despite knowing that I’m on the other side of their ideology, because it makes them feel good and feel smart to have someone who they can safely get a second opinion from. Imagine if your parents were actually non-judgemental and you could have brought home any new, challenging idea to debate comfortably around the dinner table. Everyone would have wanted that growing up. You can be that environment to someone.

Imagine if every right-wing dumbass out there knew “one of the good ones.” Imagine if several million people were exposed to just one person who proves an exception to their emotional rule that your side is the “enemy.” This is how you topple mountains, not by butting heads against it, but by carving out cracks in the base.

They did it with some coffee machine company a number of years ago, smashed all these brand new coffee makers for being “woke” or having a commercial that said “be nice to others” or some such manufactured outrage.

The coverage just made the brand name rise to top of search terms, the videos that went viral of people smashing coffee machines became so trendy that people were buying the things just to smash or burn them on camera for views. It was hilarious and only helped the company.