Hitler was extremely charismatic, an effective speaker and a clever politician. He was a terrible commander, compounded by his inability to acknowledge and account for that weakness, but in the run-up to the war and in the opening phase, he correctly estimated and effectively capitalised on the other powers’ reluctance to fight another war.

In Musk and Trump, you can observe a similar phenomenon: the ability to hit the right notes with the right people in order to rile them up and seize the moment before their opponents manage to effectively rally and organise a resistance. Whether by blind luck, intuition or cunning calculation, their results aren’t those of fumbling idiots. However idiotic they may seem to us, their success (so far) proves they got something right.

But the story isn’t over yet. If I’m wrong and they do end up fumbling their big chance, I’ll happily rescind those words. But as it stands now, I’d rather not underestimate their cunning.

And since self-improvement is “woke”, they choose the latter.

If you need to improve to be able to compete, you’re not good enough. That’s never a pleasant thought. Preventing competition is one way to avoid the possibility of having to face it.

Just don’t expect them to always tell the truth, or to actually be human-like

I think the point of the post is to call out exactly that: people preaching AI as replacing humans

In theory, asking isn’t illegal and truth is a defense against charges of slander and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn his desire for domination extends to children. In practice, you’re probably a few billion short of laws to apply.

That’s what I mean. Voting third party isn’t reasonable, unless it polls well enough ahead of time that it becomes a viable choice for people to risk their vote being wasted for the chance to pick a better option. But even then, they need to trust those polls and need to hope that enough other people come to the same conclusion to actually make it so…

If you want to break the two-party-stranglehold, you have to vote third party, but only if enough other people vote third party, and that kind of “guessing motives” or trusting in the other actors to make individually irrational but collectively rational decisions is where Game Theory breaks down.

The theory is clear, but humans aren’t quite so easy to model, and when your game features piles and piles of incomplete information and non-deterministic decisions, things get muddy.

There were resistance movements, some of which got quite famous. Most well-known to me would be Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian who was quite vocal about his opposition to the Nazi regime and eventually participated in plans to assassinate Hitler. It failed, as we know, and he was sentenced to death for his role. He very much grappled with the question of whether murdering a tyrant was a sin, but eventually came to the conclusion that it had to be done either way.

He also petitioned the allies to differentiate between Germans and Nazis once the war was over, pertinent to your post.

I think many just don’t understand or don’t want to understand the complexity of the public opinion guessing game that is attempting to break the vile equilibrium of a two-party-system without spoilering the worse party into power.

At least that’s what I hope, because the alternative is that they actually think Trump is better and I’m trying to get out of the habit of assuming the worst.

Time to take my alt account elsewhere…

Voting for Harris was always going to be an attempt to buy more time for more effective change measures, for pushing progressive support in primaries and local elections, for building public perception that the left actually has a chance and can make a difference. It was never going to fix things –nothing can do so quickly, because cultural change takes time – but prevent the worst so that there might be more time for other measures that would set a better course.

But some people opted to let perfect be the enemy of “not as bad” and call their complacency noble, so I guess that option is off the table now.

I thought that was a synonym for shit smear?

Feed him enough of it and it will work

There is a gun and a bottle of wild turkey next to my printer

I wouldn’t leave a gun in the printer’s reach. The fucking thing will murder you in your sleep. Those things are the work of the devil and every day they continue to exist is a day too long.

No, that’s not “back”, which implies they left. That’s just staying with what you’re used to, what is normal to you.

Google has become established enough that the name has obtained a sense in itself. When switching to something else, the new tool has to convince in a way that the previous one doesn’t. Often, function isn’t enough if the form doesn’t fit.

Put them on an Ark - wooden, overloaded, cast adrift in the type of weather that would cause massive flooding, if you catch my drift. Of course, gathering two of each animal would be cruel, so we’ll skip those.

For God so loved the world that he invented a hell to throw people into so he could call himself merciful by sending his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

I think I might have gotten a weird translation there. Anyway, he loves you so much he might choose not to throw you into the lake of fire.

The core of Christianity is originally the redemption, not the threat that necessitates it and often is more prominent.

The cross is a symbol of the sacrifice made to redeem people from the threat of hell. More relevant here is that sin separates humans from God, and through that sacrifice, the connection is restored. It is a catalyst of redemption and reunion. In that sense, they don’t so much pray towards an implement of torture as an implement of liberation, salvation and mercy.

Given that those are hard things to put in a visual, tangible form and that humans tend to place a lot of value in visual, tangible representations, it’s basically the simplest symbol you could come up with as a nascent cult.

It’s not the only symbol, and particularly during the rise of the Roman church, you’ll note that icons of saints become very common too. Some places will even have the Crucifix feature the crucified Jesus as well, to drive home the point about sacrifice and gratitude.

Protestants later held that the worship of saints was tantamount to idolatry and did away with them again, leaving just the core of the message of redemption. There was in some places a conscious choice to pick the “empty” cross rather than the crucified saviour as a symbol that he is no longer dead.

All in all, given his divine wisdom and love for metaphors and similes, I’d think Jesus would understand the point of the cross…

…then proceed to trash the place out of rage over the waste of money and effort that went into gaudy churches and gold-embroidered robes instead of helping the sick and poor.

In fact, just right-to-repair the whole car. In fact, the whole everything!

Boy, that escalated quickly

But yes, please.

Nope, McTurtle got rich along the way. But his lifelong goal has been packing the courts.

He is literally salivating like he just walked into a salad bar at the 42 vacancies Biden is about to hand over.

Moscow Mitch is a politician, and a good one (in the sense of “good at manipulating political affairs”, not “a good person”). He’s a canny cunt, and that’s the most dangerous enemy you could come up with: one that knows what they’re doing.

Hey, here’s a thought. You know about the guy that shot a parasite in NY? AOC could try that too. She’d need enough vocal (and armed) popular support to avoid conviction (and retaliatory assassination) and it might turn into a civil war, but it might also work.

Really, the metric we should be looking at is (f+a)/b where f is some subjective weighted measure of functionality, a of aesthetic value and b describes the bloat.