I can see your point, but I respectfully disagree. I find the desert to fairly beautiful, and at least Bakersfield and Stockton have more of a small-town feel. IMO, LA combines all the negatives of Stockton and Bakersfield into one plasticized, superficial mess; LA’s better at covering up their flaws, but there’s a certain authenticity in owning your blemishes.
While I stand in solidarity with my fellow Californians, LA is objectively the worst part of California.
I’m sure someone will come along and point out that the 90s were no more or less peaceful than any other decade
Not to be that guy, but there was the whole Bosnian Genocide thing from 92-95 and the Gulf War from 90-91 that really legitimized the US practice of inference in the Middle East in the eyes of many US citizens. Up until then, most Americans still saw intervention a la the Iran Contra Affair as a negative.
Plus, the Troubles in North Ireland were still in pretty high gear until 1998, most of Africa was involved in civil wars and ethnic cleansing for a large chunk of the 90’s, and the collapse of the USSR, which was viewed as a positive in many parts of the world, did leave a power vacuum that resulted in numerous civil wars and militant separatist movements throughout eastern Europe and western Asia
You’re correct that the police like having the dogs as a pretext to search on flimsy/non-existent evidence, but it’s not that the dogs are half-trained; they are very well trained to give false positives based on the officers’ body language and attitude.
Agreed, that’s my whole point. It was not the ideal way to get where we are, but it’s how it happened. There was a… I don’t want to say purpose, but “benefit,” might be the right word.
If we were designing things from scratch, then obviously religion would be left out. But it’s an unfortunate accident of the evolution of consciousness and evolution of civilization that certain societal benefits were included with the magical thinking. Just like the health of the human gut biome is tied to the existence of the appendix, even through the appendix doesn’t provide much in the way of direct benefits these days and can become inflamed and kill us.
The supernatural claims are just a byproduct of the mechanism that passed along the creation myths and cultural norms. It would be great if that wasn’t how it happened, but it did. Rational people can agree at this point that the magical thinking is a net negative for society, but IMO, to ignore that there were some positives to come along with religion is the same sort of blind denial that religious folks use.
It was a collective delusion to soothe ancient fears of a world we could not comprehend
Agreed, but can’t you see that that was an advantage during the formative ages of society and civilization?
I’ve said that, word for word. When I actually sit and think about it though, I think it’s more like appendicitis. Religion once served a purpose (passing on of useful cultural norms and expectations), has become vestigial, and is now inflamed and likely to kill us (as a society and individually, in some cases)
That book… Was the Bible
or “water closet” in the UK
Keep in mind, these are almost certain to be the same people who complain about how political everything is these days. What they mean is that they don’t want to see leftist/progressive memes, but they’re fine shifting the Overton widow to the right.
I don’t know; during the Bush Jr. Era, I would have agreed with you, but I think the powers that be have figured out that religion is more useful for creating wedge issues than actually governing.
If the goal is simply controlling the population, then oligarch-controlled media and social media seems to be perfectly adequate with just a little bit of religion to give the conservatives bad-faith plausible deniability when it comes to the racism, misogyny, and homophobia (both the politicians and the voters).
If I’m being honest, I don’t expect to see a penny of social security. I’m making other arrangements wherever possible
On the other hand, if you have the power to help people and you don’t use it, isn’t that immoral, too? Especially when the harm you might be doing is merely subverting the free-will of oligarchs and bigots to ensure the physical safety of marginalized groups?
It’s the trolley problem on a larger scale with hypothetical superpowers
wouldn’t you use that for evil if you could?
I wouldn’t, but I can see the temptation, even for people that aren’t sociopaths.
I’d like to think that even if I was using that power to go around official channels, it would be in the service of the greater good and I would strive to leave the lower and middle classes better off than when I took office (but of course that could very easily turn into a God Emperor of Dune-situation where I’m trying to keep everyone on the “Golden Path” that only I can see, which is of course the danger of any dictator, benevolent or otherwise)
Sure there is, just not a morally or ethically defensible way.
tell me more…
I’m an AI/comp-sci novice, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but does running the program locally allow you to better control the information that it trains on? I’m a college chemistry instructor that has to write lots of curriculum, assingments and lab protocols; if I ran deepseeks locally and fed it all my chemistry textbooks and previous syllabi and assignments, would I get better results when asking it to write a lab procedure? And could I then train it to cite specific sources when it does so?
I thought for sure this was an Onion article
No, they don’t believe him; they just don’t care and this gives them plausible deniability
Nice to see at least one other person understands the definition of “Third World Country”