The “reform is impossible” is a self-fulfilling prophesy because it leads leftists to never try to get involved in the party, which means they’ll never get a seat at the table, which means they’ll never be able to steer the party.

I certainly can’t prove that the influence of big money can ever be overcome within the party by grassroots organization, but you also can’t prove that it’s impossible (you can only prove that it’s difficult, which is something I certainly won’t dispute).

You certainly can’t prove that a true socialist movement will ever gain traction in America. It seems like the general public is so brainwashed they would rather be indentured servants of large corporations than lift a single finger to seize the means of production.

So we’re left with two unprovable paths to consider, and here’s the thing: the two paths are not mutually exclusive. Leftists can try both at the same time with neither being disruptive to the other. So this is the pragmatism: consider all possibilities and put the eggs into more than one basket.

Or he’s a pragmatist who is concerned with both harm reduction and the likely reality that the only takeaway that Democrats will ever have from losing an election to someone right wing is that Democrats need to go even further to the right to win.

If leftists give the impression that nothing will ever be good enough for them then

1. Democrats have no incentive to court the left
2. Democrats have no estimate for how many votes they would even be able to pick up from the left relative to how far left they might try to reach

I personally believe that if the Democrats had taken on a progressive populist anti-genocide platform they would have won the election handsomely, but I am left with no way to empirically prove that to anyone because so many leftists opt out of voting entirely.

I’m not convinced he really believes that OpenAI is going to roll out AGI in the next ten years, but I’m completely sure he’s determined that it’s a good marketing strategy to make people believe that he believes it.

Google is an enormous company which operates flatter than you’d expect for an organization of its size. It’s entirely possible that someone from Google was involved in organizing this (i.e. booking the venue) without having buy-in from leadership. Once leadership became aware after being asked about it, they may have shut the whole thing down because they knew the optics would be bad.

How exactly is an individual supposed to determine which cops will be good and which will abuse their power?

Just as we can’t make a general statement that all cops are definitely bad, you can’t make a general statement that all cops in any particular country or town will be good.

From a basic risk management viewpoint, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to accept the risk that any given cop won’t abuse their position, even if we were willing to accept that very few would actually do so.

Cops have an extremely privileged status in society and the amount of damage that a bad one can do to an individual - on purpose or even by accident - is incalculable, including setting up an innocent person for capital punishment as we’re seeing unfold in Missouri right now.

There have been articles out there for multiple days now which spell out your same conclusion, but these CNN clowns keep pushing the same false narrative. It’s blatantly intentional misdirection at this point.

The official act could be to use the national guard to rescue a US citizen from wrongful imprisonment, but that’s the kind of thing that racist Republicans would start a civil war over in the name of “states’ rights”.

You’d be amazed at how resistant most people are to anything that feels unfamiliar, even if it’s good for them. Coal and oil jobs are familiar, green jobs are not.

It should be as simple as you’re suggesting, but sadly it isn’t.

Valid questions. Do we have firm answers to any of them? And absent firm answers, what kind of risks to the safety of the general public are we willing to accept in service of ideological values?

Yeah… I’m all for compassion and understanding, but if someone is missing the voice in their head that says “Hey, we shouldn’t be killing people” then their circuitry is broken, no matter what age they are or what their circumstances are. And that broken circuitry poses a real and present danger to everyone in that person’s orbit.

I don’t support punitive incarceration, but the general public has the right to exist with a reasonable degree of certainty that they’re not likely to encounter a cold blooded murderer on any given day, and part of ensuring that is to incarcerate people who are known to kill others, at least until such a time that we can have a high degree of confidence that they won’t be doing that again.

The person being a child doesn’t really change that part of the social contract. I promise you won’t be any less upset if someone you love is murdered by a child than by an adult.

One thing I’ve noticed among friends and family, who lean quite left compared to the general public and would be generally supportive of progressive policies, is that there’s a belief that progressive policies are unpopular outside of our circle and therefore in the primary they must vote for a candidate who triangulates in order appeal to the majority in the general election. Because a centrist from the Democratic Party is better than anything we can hope for from the Republican Party.

I try to show them statistics that progressive policies are broadly popular across both parties as long as they are not presented with labels of “socialism” or “progressivism” but the reality that we all need to contend with is that we cannot easily escape the unfair baggage that these labels carry in our society where the big media cartel controls the narrative.

I think if we got rid of FPTP and got rid of primaries we’d see an enormous swing in favor progressive candidates. In my mind that electoral reform is the key thing to pursue. Well that and literally anything related to mitigating the climate crisis because that one really can’t wait.

I assume he thinks this will win over more Gen Z than it will lose him Boomers, and no one will ever hold him to this promise anyway.

Countries ranked in descending order by number of school shootings from 2009-2018:

• United States: 288
• Mexico: 8
• South Africa: 6
• Afghanistan: 3
• Brazil, Canada, France: 2
• Azerbaijan, China, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Kenya, Russia, Turkey: 1

One of these is not like the others. This isn’t exactly a fact of life in other parts of the world.

Source

People just don’t want to believe that China can win at capitalism because it undermines all their internal narratives around the innovation power of liberalism. I say this as someone who does not personally like China and its authoritarianism.

The fact of the matter is with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, you’re statistically guaranteed to have enormous pools of talent to draw on. Even a relatively modest per capita investment in education, focused on key objectives and funneled into the portion of the talent pool that they’ve managed to identify, will be able to yield massive innovation.

A lot of people will suffer under this authoritarianism. The people from these talent pools will be exploited and burnt out at a young age. This is already happening in China. But as a nation, it will be able to position itself extremely well technologically and economically, and this is a reality the rest of the world needs to be prepared to deal with.

Same energy

This is very insulting, Dr. Doom is an intelligent and effective ruler, please do not draw such an unfair comparison between him and Musk. Fictional character feelings matter.

It sure worked out positively for her Walz pick.

I actually remember her being a standout at the debates until Tulsi Gabbard managed to latch onto a line of attack that hurt her credibility as the progressive candidate that she was presenting herself as. Shortly after that traction was lost I think she saw the writing on the wall and exited gracefully, which obviously worked in her favor because it made it easy for Biden to tap her for VP.

PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.

I really can’t feel bad for these women that get involved with jackass conservative men. There were plenty of signals that they either ignored or saw as green flags. For her to be in her position is either extreme negligence or sheer karma, probably the latter.

But I feel very bad for any children that land in that position. They did nothing to deserve what they’re going through.