We can go lower!!!

lots of rights get modified, curtailed, or eliminated by the larger society based on misuse or misbehavior or other transgressions.

(or positions of power, etc…)

After WWII there was a halcyon era where nearly every adult in America agreed that nerds had been crucial to our winning. That’s why Operation Paperclip came to be where we stole all the former Axis nerds we could find.

It also led to an unprecedented boom in education spending, research spending, etc., mostly aimed at beating the USSR at technological development. Sputnik goosed that significantly, and the Apollo program briefly did as well, until Americans got bored of Moon landings…

That was probably the first major flashing red warning light most of us ignored: Moon landings… boring!!!

Anyway, educated people started doing things that weren’t directly associated with winning the Cold War, like exposing the dangers of lead in everything, the dangers of smoking, the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons, the dangers of greenhouse gasses, etc.

That threatened the ability of grotesquely wealthy hoarders to hoard even more grotesque levels of wealth.

So they started the project to dismantle education in America.

That project kicked into afterburn once the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended.

And so far, nerds haven’t been successful in regaining their status.

Also the villification of experts as people hell bent on leveraging their expertise to dominate our control non experts.

I recently right that a useful counter to that conspiracy their is to point out that experts should be thought of as tools to be used for different purposes. Like any tool, experts can be misused in a variety of ways, including accidental and purposeful.

with “hire more” you do run up against the “9 women can have a baby in 1 month” limit, but in this case it’s likely to help.

it’s been an honor serving with you

always yelling “the Democrats should do something!” but never saying for example what…

interest groups were mad at Senate democrats so the Senate Dems started filibustering everything they can (all confirmations are not subject to filibuster), and forcing the longest delays possible for all confirmations by using all of their speaking time.

did the whining jagoffs say, “finally thank you for at least doing something!” No. They just keep accusing Democrats of not doing enough.

figure it out

I’m done listening to this crap. Democrats are doing what they can with the incredibly limited power they have.

it’s a combo of trolling and attention seeking. “there’s no such thing as bad press” and all that.

we should point it out, condemn it, but not engage in arguments with them about what is and isn’t a sig heil.

and when they pop up in other places trying to talk about other stuff, just bring up the fact that they threw a Nazi salute from time to time.

the most important thing is to focus on their evil policies and actions. but we can’t forget their performative evil.

if this is machine learning and neural networks, I can believe it’s a good thing, maybe even meaningful for the potential of so called artificial intelligence.

if this is an LLM that’s alleged to have popped this “virus tail” theory out of… what exactly…? I’m not buying it.

I’m really hoping that Churchill’s quote about Americans doing the right thing is evergreen, because this first month (!!!) of Trump has been A LOT.

I feel like we’re really close to having tried every alternative by now, right?..right?

every example of “monkey considering monkey stranger” was “bad monkey.” That is the forest of this article: we’re good monkeys to monkey friends and bad monkeys to monkey strangers.

but that’s not the case at all, because we have monkey traditions and monkey manners and monkey mores.

again I agree that we don’t think of people outside our 150-200 person capacity in the same way as those we know well. we don’t give them the level of consideration we should. we don’t live up to the golden rule all the time.

but EVERY example in the article was monkey stranger --> bad monkey.

my thought is actually that higher levels of technology begin to whittle away at the workability of more “free form” social organization.

For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.

I think anarchist societies could probably solve problems that require high technology (electricity, sewage, water distribution…), probably in ways we can’t imagine. But I don’t think they can solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem.

it seems accurate to say that most people conceive only of “people i know well enough to fully humanize” and “all other humans.”

I take a huge issue with the portrayal that all of us are willing to fuck over the second group all the time with no acknowledgement that over the centuries we’ve built elaborate customs and mores for interacting with strangers or within groups or between groups.

The author focusing on hypothetical examples of monkeys mistreating monkey strangers exclusively is inaccurate to the reality we all live in. There are monkeys out in the real world who just help monkey strangers altruistically. Just stopping to help change a tire gives the lie to the author’s premise.

Are there asshole monkeys? Sure. But we’re not all assholes to monkey strangers.

AND even in small knit monkey communities sometimes there are “defectors” (game theory term) and the society can react to them in many different ways.

do you remember one or two? I’m unlikely to go get that book any time soon.

up to what size & technological level?

https://www.ncja.org/crimeandjusticenews/ice-to-review-social-media-users-for-negative-activity-threats

This has a version of the article without the “non paywall” landing page/wall.

https://wikitok.vercel.app/

WikiTok

Not sure if there’s an app yet, I found one on the Android store by Arakassia…

smoking everywhere

The owners would last 10 days, especially if the duration was announced ahead of time. Maybe a general strike that had no end date, once it went 3 months or so, would have the desired effect.

Going Luigi on a bunch of them would be faster, more effective, with stronger effects that lasted longer. Probably fewer total deaths.

I think it’s more likely they’ll go after us than go after Israel, because the world doesn’t have centuries or millenia of anti American bigotry stored up that in a twisted fashion leads them to let the Israeli government do whatever it wants to poor Muslims as long as that means there’s a Jewish state.

What complicates matters is all the military power we have and the certainty most people have that Trump would order it to attack anyone who embargoes us.