i think the only way we can survive and create a successful egalitarian society is by having some sort of overlord ruling over us
so for example let’s say we write a constitution and then have a super-powered generalized artificial intelligence machine force us to follow the rules
or aliens. we could become pets for alients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPeP_pfjp4
I mean, Bannon started this whole thing. He was pushed out of the inner circle but he was the one with the vision back in 2016.
Bannon is a visionary and he had the right idea. He just didn’t have the ability to execute. Trump took the ideas from Bannon and found new allies who have the ability to execute. Musk (and Thiel) were more than happy to jump on board
Edit: just in case it’s not clear I’m not endorsing his views. I am firmly anti-Nazi
look there was no plausible deniability when Elon did it. He pretended like he was a weirdo autist the night of with his weird head bobbing and his exaggerated gestures to try and give plausible deniability. but the Nazi salute was putting the toe in the water. feeling the room
it seems that the wannabe Nazis felt like the water was warm enough and they’re gonna start descending the staircase into the pool
And also if you want books that can’t be altered buy a paper book
The books on my 1st generation kindle have been there 15 years unchanged. Just don’t connect devices to the internet that don’t need to be connected to the internet.
The “internet of things” that was sold to us is just a way for corporations to exert more control. I am pro-technology. I think an ebook reader is infinitely more useful and valuable than a paper book - I can fit tens of thousands of books on my Kindle, more than I could read in a lifetime, and a full charge lasts more than a month at a time.
I can use whatever font I want, I can scale the size to what I want. I can change the margins, place bookmarks, gives a % of how far I am in a book, skip to chapters, etc.
Like, it’s objectively better than a book.
But it doesn’t need to be connected to the internet.
you’re correct it’s not a unique experience to feel isolated from the rest of your peers. i feel like it’s an experience that might actually be increasing. i think social media ironically adds to this in the youth. many biracial people also experience something like this (ie, too white for the blacks, too black for the whites)
when i got here initially i moved to a place where nobody spoke my native language. so when i went to school, i would get put in a class all by myself with a nice lady who would hold flash cards with pictures on them. she would show me a card, it would say something like “cat” or “ball” and then she would repeat them over and over.
so the first year or so of primary school I was alone in a room because I didn’t speak english yet. really what eventually taught me english was cable TV
another element in the experience is being afraid of authority. the police were dangerous because at any moment if they caught us the family could get separated and we could get deported. one time my parents were cleaning an office late at night (they worked in cleaning when they first arrived in US) and they brought me with.
i didn’t understand what a fire alarm was so i pulled it. my parents, scared that the authorities would arrive and see a young child, took me and put me in the backseat of the car where people’s feet usually go and they put a blanket on me. they told me to be very quiet and not make a sound otherwise we could all be deported. so i hid in that car for an hour or so until the emergency services left
i share these things not to say i had a hard life or anything like that. I think I had a good upbringing. and I understand many Americans have had much worse experiences and also feel alienated as well.
But I share these things just because the story in the OP touched me because I was that 11 year old child once. It’s a life and a set of experiences a lot of Americans don’t really think about very much. Or at least historically has been more or less ignored.
Nowadays illegals have attention but unfortunately an overwhelmingly peaceful people become “rapists and murderers”. if you look up statistics, illegals are 2-4x less likely to commit crime than native born americans (if you get any charge at all, you can get deported… even if you get acquitted or the charges dropped!). so naturally they tend to be more careful breaking laws
I’m not sure where exactly they made the switch. Basically, I got my girlfriend one a year and a half ago and it did not need the software. I explained to her to turn off the wifi and just download books and drag and drop.
But then around Christmastime last year my girlfriend’s cousin wanted an ebook ready so we bought her a Kindle and I gave the same advice. But she couldn’t figure out how to drag and drop, so she brought it over. I was fussing around thinking something was wrong with my USB cable but then I realized it required that special software.
So the switch happened at some point in the last ~18 months or so my memory’s a bit hazy
Amazon just couldn’t let it be. There’s a certain set of people that just aren’t going to opt into all the bullshit. These people just want a plain and simple ebook ready to host their ebooks. They think if they force the special software they’ll be able to do things like sign into your Kindle and change your settings by force.
But what happens? Instead of gaining those people like me or you into their ecosystem, they’re just gonna lose future hardware customers. I would have been perfectly fine buying Kindles for the rest of my life if they had just kept that feature.
I’m sure it’s going to be reversed engineered at some point but it’s absurd. I don’t understand the short-sighted greed.
Up until fairly recently, you could just drag and drop files onto the Kindle with a usb. I’ve had my first generation Kindle for almost 15 years now and it still works. Just download an .epub file, convert it to .mobi with Calibre, and drag and drop it over to the Kindle.
I have a newer one too, that I got a couple of years ago as a gift.
The trick is just disable the wifi and never let it communicate with Amazon servers. They will mess with your settings and push secret updates that remove features. For example, it could “sync” your books with your Amazon account if you naively log into your Amazon account and that literally results in you not being able to remove items from your Kindle without logging into your Amazon account on your computer and going through a million menus. It won’t let you do it from the Kindle, even if you’re offline.
But if you just never let it connect it to the internet at all, you’re fine.
Although the new Kindles now require a special Amazon software to copy files over (because of “convenience”) and it won’t communicate with the usual protocol so you can’t drag and drop like you could for the last 15 years.
So yeah, don’t buy a Kindle. at least not a new one.
Thank you. I feel like one these days. Especially after the naturalization ceremony. This is a country of immigrants and I’m part of it. I’m not ashamed of it anymore. I was when I was younger.
thank you, i appreciate the kind words. like i said, after processing and coming to terms with my upbringing, I see it as a positive these days. I got a unique outlook on life that most people don’t have the privilege to see.
I know things about this country Americans don’t have any clue about. By being sort of “in between” cultures, it lets you zoom out more easily. the world which was once small gets bigger.
It’s very depressing our world is still caught up in racial problems and not important problems like food and shelter.
I think people are scared. Americans are insecure about their future. Financially, emotionally, and societally.
I think we have to go through this painful phase but we will come out the other side with a new 21st century ideology. Once that fixes the contradictions of the 20th century one we still have.
exactly this. later on as an adult I realized I had my own path and that path was always going to be different from the average. got me thinking differently, opened my mind, etc. I think also knowing 3 languages helps
ideology gets impressed upon you at an early age already, especially here in the US.
I grew up illegal in the US. I was brought on a travel visa at the age of 5 and it wasn’t until my mid 20s that I became a citizen.
I vividly remember being in elementary school, around her age, in music class where we were learning the national anthem. The entire class would stand up and we should sing “I’m proud to be an American” and I remember silently crying as I stood up and sang the song.
I cried because I understood even at that age that I was not an American. I was part of everything while simultaneously always being detached from everything. Never fitting in, but pretending to. I think long-term it created a strange sense of detachment from society. This shit fucks you up and it’s heavy stuff for a child to process. It wasn’t until my adulthood that I really started to understand and internalize a positive narrative from my upbringing. An 11 year old child does not have the capacity to process this.
And I’m in my 30s now- I grew up illegal before social media and before this xenophobic outburst started circa 2016. I’d imagine it’s so much worse today.
I feel for this little girl. I feel for all the children in the country who’s only crime was existing. Obama, while famously being the deporter-in-chief (both Obama terms aw more deported than Trump’s first term), at least did offer DACA as an executive order for these children.
Really, I think you can tell the state of a society by how they treat the vulnerable. And the US is getting increasingly brutal and cruel. We’re in for a wild fascist ride, comrades. It’s only just begun.
don’t leave. same reason i remain in florida. that’s why they want. if all the sane people leave, you raise the % of insane to sane.
we counter intuitively need more progressives to move and live in florida and texas. these are going to be the two most important starts in the upcoming century
plus while the government is insane, there are many varied and diverse communities in these states. i live in an immigrant heavy community in florid and absolutely love it more than the blue states i’ve lived in the past. minus the state government, needless to say
Texas will inevitably be blue. Just like what happened with California.
Get an old Kindle. The new ones make it hard for you to connect to your computer. They require you to download a “convenient” piece of software meant to allow you to transfer files. But conveniently it also makes it so you can’t transfer files easily without it.
Even just a couple of years back you could plug in your Kindle to your computer through a USB and just drag and drop files. It only reads the proprietary .mobi format but Calibre, an excellent piece of software, will automatically convert .epub files to .mobi for you and it has a great algorithm.
Then all you gotta do is look up whatever you want on libgen and for the price of one kindle you can have a virtually infinite library of books.
I’ve actually had my first generation Kindle for about ~14 years now and my newer one for about ~3 years. I won’t ever buy a new one, but the ones from ~3 years ago are excellent pieces of hardware.
You just have to disconnect it from the internet and never turn on the wifi. If you do, Amazon will fuck with your settings and make your life difficult.
Basically, if you’re on a budget a used Kindle from ~3 years ago is a great choice in my opinion. If you want something new, stay far away from Amazon.
this was was always going to end with Russia taking a large chunk of Ukraine. there was some collective delusion for a while that it wasn’t because of strong state war propaganda
but Russia is always going to care more about Ukraine than the US. It’s their neighbor who they have more or less controlled directly or indirectly for hundreds of years.
US support was always limited and self-interested. Just like every time US hypes up some international ally to inevitably discard them. Remember the Kurds? I’m guessing Taiwan is the next one going forward
i’m kind of lost on how to respond to this. we weren’t talking about games, the card analogy was to show that even with a relatively small set of starting conditions you can get to relatively absurd possibilities very quickly. it was to highlight the chaos theory that rules our lives.
the OP wasn’t about winning or losing anything, it was about “having experienced all life has to offer”. that would necessarily include both winning and losing combinations, no matter your subjective definition of “winning” or “losing”
and even having said all that and to follow your analogy- there are many games where drawing a face card (a-k) is a bad thing.
you ever play rummy? you want the least amount of points at the end of the round and face cards are worth more points.
you can make a straight flush with a 2 3 4 5 6 in poker, a face card can be enough to bust you in blackjack, etc.
this is the wildest statement i’ve seen all month
the breadth and depth of the experiences that life has to offer is unfathomable. do not be so brazen to assume you have experienced even a tiny drop of vast ocean of what humans have actually lived through
From suicide in the trenches to the raising of a child; from gazing upon Earth from space to hunting a predator with a spear; from meditating in silence for weeks to leading a entire nation through a crisis; from winning a chess tournament to starting a business—and losing it all in a bankruptcy—existence is infinite, or may as well be.
think of it this way
there are 52 cards in a deck. that means every single deck has a specific order, right? what are the chances of you getting one specific order of cards if you shuffle? Well, how many different combinations are there? 52! ( ! means both factorial and emphasis here)
That’s 52 × 51 x 50 … all the way to × 2 × 1
That’s 8x10⁶⁷
That’s 8 with 67 zeros. Here
80000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
For reference… the number of seconds since the Big Bang is estimated to be about 4×10¹⁷
Now think of your life and human life in general. Think of all the variables. Hell, there are 7 days in a week. 52 weeks in a year. Coincidentally the same as a deck of cards.
If you do something different every week, there are going to be 8000000000… different ways your year could turn out.
So, please do not fall victim to this type of irrational thought. I’m not sure if it’s arrogance, depression, or something else leading to that delusion, but it’s a wild statement—absolutely nuts
I guess the main difference is that I think things are salvageable
To be honest, I think we are very ideologically aligned. I agree that government power is something that should be used with very precise care. Look at what happens for example when we introduce Pell Grants, giving lower income kids the opportunity to go to college.
That sounds great, right? Who doesn’t support that? Well, I sure want poor kids to be afforded the opportunity to go to school.
But look at what actually happens. Now you have a whole new class of people with a sizable chunk of government money. The demand for college goes up. Tuition rates skyrocket. The few thousand you get from the Pell Grant is now meaningless and it counter intuitively costs you more even with the grant.
Who benefits? Not the kids. Not the working class. The college administrators.
Kamala was campaigning “taxes incentives for first time homeowners!” Great. Who is going to say to no to that, right? Support young families. Sure.
What would inevitably happen? Large increase in spending => large increase in price. So if they get a $10,000 tax credit but the houses are $15,000 more expensive- what’s the difference? These are arbitrary numbers, obviously, and not borne out of some analysis.
But who would benefit? Not young families. Banks and land owners.
Government action, usually disguised as something to help is almost always going to be twisted to hurt average people.
But yes, I agree 100%. I rather like Chomsky’s take on this. I’m not an anarchist but he has advocated before for a system where every single use of government power should be consistently and continually challenged. Every single time the government spends a dollar, it needs to be transparent and justified and there needs to be a way to challenge it.
The thing is, government spending is not inherently a bad thing. Government action sometimes is exactly what is needed. For example in an economic crisis, government stimulus can be enough to turn things around or at least ameliorate the situation for the working class.
But and the big but - and the but that basically had made me lose all faith in democracy over the last 10 years or so is the way you put it
But no, “drugs bad,” and the public wants to control “bad” things
Politicians do not do what is rational. They do what is popular. These are two separate things entirely. And even worse, they can modify what is popular with a variety of mechanisms. For a simple example- look at the death tax. You ask average Americans whether they support a death tax, they will say of course not. It sounds absurd, right?
If you call it an inheritance tax, all of a sudden majority of people support it.
So yeah, I think you’re right in that we more or less align on what the ideal system should be but you still believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment and believe that egalitarianism and liberty is possible.
I think humanity is brutal and stupid by nature and we are bound to be ruled by people with strength. I think all government systems eventually deteriorate into fancy feudalism.
For a bit of an absurd statement- I think what we need to do is create a constitution that is very explicit. And then what we need to do is let an AI enforce it. Assuming the AI is objective and not able to be influenced, I think then and only then would we have a free society. And the irony is- we wouldn’t be in control of it.
Maybe I’m just a pessimist about human nature. Don’t misinterpret me, I consider myself a humanist. I like humans. I feel empathy for others. I want the best world possible for everyone.
But I think humans in a group are stupid. The crowd is like a locust swarm, destroying without thinking. It’s sad
You said you’re not pushing socialism, but you didn’t offer what you do support, so I’ll speak broadly.
I’m a bit of a pessimist here. I think free market capitalism is a terrible system that will inevitably crash and fail. It is also the best thing we have come up with so far. Essentially Churchill’s quote. I only hope that after our next foray into fascism we will come out the other side with a new 21st century ideology that is somehow able to fix the fundamental contradictions.
I really support Liberalism (and I mean you know, freedom of speech, free market, pursuit of happiness, etc). I would always prefer to live in a society that gives me the freedom to live life on my terms. In theory, we could have a socialist version of this, but I think like we discussed it falls victim to precisely the same fate. When the Soviets initially took power, they were genuine in their desire for revolutionary emancipation. They did many great things- they created written languages for all of the local ethnicities that didn’t have them. They put local leaders in positions of power. They increased literacy and invested in education strictly for altruism.
That only lasted a couple short decades, however, because the wheels of power inevitably turn. I shouldn’t have to go into detail on the horrific abuses of power that resulted from the developed Soviet state
Here’s the thing, I think you make great points. And the solutions you propose would benefit the system both in the short and long term. But I think collapse is inevitable anyway, and specifically collapse into fascism. Perhaps in a system where the institutions are strong and we have policies in the line of what you’re suggesting (campaign finance reform, proportional representation, etc. I’d even say higher salaries for politicians counter intuitively) the descent will be slowed for a long period of time.
But ultimately, it’s the classic criminal versus police officer. You can put up a border wall to stop drugs coming in, they’ll go under the ground. You put ground penetrating radar sensors, they build DIY-submarines. You invest in a coast guard, they build drones. Etc Etc
It’s a constant battle that requires constant vigilance. However, here’s the kicker. Here’s the reason why it will always inevitably fail.
The people with significant wealth and by extension power- they will always have incentive to change the system to their advance and they will always have the ability to influence it. They will never stop trying to come up with new ways to either exploit current laws or create new ones.
The average people, the consumers and voters, they will sometimes have the incentive to change the system and they will sometimes have the ability to influence it. In times of trouble, people get upset and they start protesting. They start voting for new measures, different policies get enacted. Like you mentioned, we broke up Standard Oil. Or when we broke up the Bell Telephone Company.
During that time people were both discontent, which means they had the incentive to change the system and coincidentally that also gives them the ability to influence the system- politicians are only scared into making positive change for the average person when there is large scale dissent.
But what happened to both of those examples (and virtually every other anti-trust regulation we’ve ever tried to implement)?
Today, Bell Telephone’s descendant is AT&T- a behemoth of a megacorp that participates in an oligopoly over the telecommunications market. Today, Standard Oil’s descendant is Exxon Mobil and remains the largest oil and gas company in the US.
What happened here? Well, the public interest eventually fades. Some other crisis shows up on the news channels and people become content with their lives. If the economy is doing well, people are paying their bills, etc, they don’t care. If they economy isn’t, the politicians have become exceedingly proficient at redirecting that discontent towards scapegoats (today it’s immigrants for example).
So, it’s a simple math equation. Let’s say the corporations win 51% of the coin flips and the free market / law abiding public wins 49% of the time. For a very long time, it can stay more or less even. Cops versus robbers- the equilibrium stays intact.
But imagine a limit that goes to infinity. What happens? Eventually the interest of wealth wins. Now, different societies can have different coin flip ratios.
I think our society is nowhere near 51% / 49%. I think your solutions would bring us closer to that 50 / 50 but due to again, the very nature of the capitalist system- the law will never be in the driving seat.
Two very simple axioms determine that, which we have discussed above
wealth tends to accumulate due to economies of scale
wealth leads to power and power self-perpetuates
We would still be supporting Israel with Biden in place. The only difference is there would be a few “we are very concerned” statements from the White House press secretary instead of Trump’s reality TV show statements. But in the background, the same number of MK84 2,000lb bombs are being transported by the same military vehicles and they blow up on top of the same people.