People Aren’t Facing Up to the Horrors a New Trump Term Would Bring | G’bye, NATO. G’bye, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal. G’bye, democracy. He’s telling us plain as day. Why aren’t people listening?
yiliu @ yiliu @informis.land Posts 0Comments 294Joined 2 yr. ago
yiliu @ yiliu @informis.land
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This feels like historical revisionism.
Musk bought Tesla before it had ever released a car, and now it's one of the most valuable companies in the world. There was no such thing as a consumer electric car when he took over Tesla. A few years later, I started seeing these weird cars slipping quietly past in Seattle. And at this point, Teslas are all over the place, and you see all kinds of electric cars. I'm not at all convinced that the major car companies would ever have made that shift without pressure from Tesla.
Musk obviously didn't design & build the rockets that SpaceX uses, but he found the people capable of building those rockets and gave them funding. There were many companies competing to build the first private spacecraft (and many, many more people laughing at the idea that private spacecraft were even possible), and the best any of them managed was to shoot a couple tourists juuust out of the atmosphere--and that was with Jeff Bezos' money. Meanwhile SpaceX drove the Russians right out of the space game.
He's not some genius scientist, but holy shit what a track record. But if his talent was finding other talented people capable of solving nigh-impossible problems and throwing money at them...well, it's a huge shame we've lost that.
His family did have a mine in South Africa, and benefited from Apartheid. But my understanding is that he cut ties with his father and left with nothing.
The guy has gone right off the deep end, and become profoundly unlikable, and all evidence is that he was always pretty much an asshole. What he's doing to Twitter would be a tragedy if Twitter wasn't already kind of a nightmare. But despite that, I think the world is better off for Musk's efforts.
I mean, so far. I don't know what he's gonna do next. If he runs for president or something, he may yet tip the scale in the other direction.
Well, he got in a feud with one specific diver who called him a rich idiot or something, and insinuated that he was a pedophile.
It was cringey as hell, but the kind of thing people could forgive as a lapse in judgement. These days he does more embarrassing things pretty much daily.
I have a lot of memories of debugging xf86config, browsing forums & docs in lynx in another term, frantically trying to get a GUI so I could finish an assignment or whatever...
I guess those are good memories?
As a looong-time Linux user...does it, though?
I'm pretty sure not even the developers of X like X...
Are you under the impression that I'm a Republican, much less a Trump supporter? I'm not trying to defend Trump, I loathe him and I sincerely hope he goes to jail for the January 6th riot, because that set an extremely dangerous precedent. At the same time, facts are facts.
The money printer kicked in specifically due to COVID. Before that Trump gave some big tax breaks to corporations, as well as an offshore-tax amnesty. You can definitely be mad at him for that, but it wasn't paid for with newly-minted money.
If Trump is shown to have abused minors with Epstein, that's another very good reason to put him in jail. But Epstein did his best to rub shoulders with the rich & famous, and pedophilia is not an airborne disease, so the fact that some rich or famous person is associated with him in some way is not sufficient proof to me that they're a pedophile. If somebody in my neighborhood was convicted as a pedophile, I wouldn't immediately assume that everybody who ever hitched a ride with him or went to see the superbowl at his place was also a pedophile.
I would agree that 'populist' pretty much means 'con-man'. It's somebody who basically says: Everything that's wrong with the world, and your life specifically, is somebody else's fault! You people are great, you're the real salt of the earth, keep doing exactly what you're doing! Vote for me and I'll make things better for you and worse for everybody you don't like! Anybody who suggests there's more nuance to the situation is your enemy!
Tucker Carlson is 100% a populist.
The mainstream Republican party of the post-Bush years was never really populist, because they kinda loathed their own voters too much for that. They'd pander, but their heart wasn't in it. The big schism in the party today is basically between the new populists and the old elitists...which is pretty much the state of the Democratic party as well.
Trump may be rich, but he's also a fucking idiot, and a populist. Those are terrible for business. He desperately wants to be 'the establishment', but he's not.
The tax cuts (and the attempt at repealing Obamacare) were part of the trade he made with the Republican party, and Paul Ryan in particular, in exchange for their support.
And on top of changing it:
- 'x' isn't searchable
- It's associated with a thousand things already...including porn
- It sounds dated: as a culture, we went through an 'x' phase
There's just no sense in which this is a good idea...
...How did we make it through the 00's without a sit.com?
Lol, the baseball bat casually placed in arms reach...
Yes, absolutely this.
Do people think that if they didn't have a credit score, banks would just freely give loans to anybody? Nah, man, without credit scores, they judged you by your reputation in the community (and if you were black, you probably didn't share the same 'community' with the banker) or else on how much they trusted you. You can imagine how that would go for black people.
And when you got rejected, it wasn't "ahh well better pay my bills on time for a couple years then try again", you were just shit outta luck.
And before bank loans (which is another thing people are commonly against) you literally had to have a rich relative, or take loans from a rich person on ridiculous terms.
Credit scores can be pretty annoying when you're getting started, but they're a pretty reasonable way for anybody to demonstrate that they can be trusted with money. And they're a lot better than the old system (still current in much of the world) of: are you already rich or from a rich family? No? Well fuck you then.
The first federated application I ever saw was Diaspora, which was basically federated Facebook. It predates Mastodon by 5+ years.
Thing is...it seems like it's harder to launch federated Facebook. With Twitter or Reddit, as long as there's enough activity on the new platform, it can act as a drop-in replacement for the original. There might be friends or favorite subscriptions who make the jump, and you might miss them, but they're not critical to the experience.
But with Facebook...the whole point is that the people you're interacting with are real-world friends and family. You need to convince them to migrate to the new platform. If they don't do it, the platform is kinda pointless. And...generally speaking, one's real-world friends and family usually aren't a bunch of enthusiastic early-adopters.
I created an instance in the early days, and convinced like 3-4 people to give it a try. None of us knew anybody on other instances. It's not designed to find new friends easily. So it just quietly died.
Of course, this was pre-2016, pre-evil-Facebook, back before large-scale skepticism about social networks, when people stared at you blankly when you talked about "federated alternatives". But I still don't think I could get my family to transition, because they'd be losing all their contacts with the specific, real-world friends they have on Facebook (not to mention, say, the Facebook Marketplace, which is apparently a big deal...)
I'm...not sure you're really in sync with a lot of the people here. I'm 100% in favor of all of that, which I would just call healthy capitalism.
I guess I'm reacting to other conversations I've had today. A lot of people with Mao banners and Che Guevara profile pics, calling for the total overthrow of capitalism.
If people are just talking about capitalism with accountability, hell, sign me up.
Fair enough. I know Achilles' and Patroclus' affair has been discussed for more than a century.
I subbed to Reddit's community on this topic (SapphoAndHerRoommate?) out of curiosity, and it struck me at some point that none of the examples posted were historians denying the possibility of historical figures being gay. So at some point I actually went through like 3 pages of the top stories...like 50+% were tweets saying basically "Boy, those historians sure do like to pretend gay people don't exist! Imagine them pretending Achilles and Patroclus were just buds lol!" Seriously most of them were specifically about A&P.
Then another 30% or so were religious fundamentalists posting complaints about how people were trying to queer up history.
There were a handful of historians saying "hey guys, gender roles were different back then, it may not be accurate to label a history figure 'gay' even if they did have male lovers"
Then there were like 3-4 quotes from popular biographies from the 1800s that used funny language about "never married" and "lifelong friends".
And finally there was one article from the BBC about two dudes from the Roman period in Britain who were buried in an embrace, and it was like "What could their relationship have been? We can only speculate...maybe they were both apprentices?" or something. It was pretty egregious. Maybe a historian was involved in that.
Anyway, that was one example in the 60 or so top stories. It seems like a meme that just keeps on going even though it's been obsolete for a century.
Yeah. And it'd be pretty stupid to say of most adults "You don't agree with me? Must be because you never read a book before.
As opposed to what?
Jesus Christ returning and establishing God's Kingdom on Earth? Yeah, capitalism is probably worse.
Compared to Soviet Communism? Way better.
When people say "we need to stop capitalism", do they mean add some new regulations? Or do they mean overthrowing society and replacing it with some as-yet-completely-nebulous leftist system? Cuz, like, I could get on board with the first one. But the second, or variations thereof, are downright ridiculous.
As bad as it is in many ways, it's better for the environment. There's less actual consumption.
There's a certain strain of Leftism that sees that people are taking the climate crisis seriously, so they're like "Oh shit, it's my chance to make good! If you care about the environment, you gotta give me shit! Capitalism is bad for the environment, and the opposite of capitalism is money in my pocket, let's get going!"
It's purely self-serving.
Certain strawman historians...
I've been reading and studying for decades, and yet somehow your worldview remains inconsistent and incoherent to me.
I'm sure it's my fault.
Careful! By including more of the world in the Global South, you're gonna start seeing more and more thriving capitalist countries, which kinda underlines my initial point.
You know that Hong Kong (occupied by the evil British!) provided the inspiration for Deng Xiaoping's U-turn? Now it's a joke to call China communist, and it's GDP per capita looks like this...
Yes, Britain is capitalist these days. No, it was not a modern capitalist society in the 1700s--or at least, it was only just emerging. India was given to the East India Company by edict of the King.
Maybe spend the time to minimally educate yourself on the subject you’re attempting to debate here instead of opining about things you very clearly don’t have any clue about? The fact that you think communism could ever work in the real world is just the cherry on top.
There's a lot to worry about from a second Trump presidency, but Russia running amok in Europe isn't one of them. They're having enough trouble running amok on the eastern fringes of Ukraine.