This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people’s lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

There’s a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there’d be less, probably.

Also, what do you even consider “political”? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn’t political, but a story about two men getting married is. That’s a really low quality analysis there.

Zohran ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohran_Mamdani ) seems like a much better candidate. NYC has too more information voters and regressives than I like, sadly.

I said similar on another article like this, but I worry the kind of people who need to know this won’t read it. They’ll just dismiss it because “cnn is woke” or “they just don’t like trump” (which reminds me of the “missing missing reasons” post about estranged parents, incidentally)

But maybe a few fence sitters or accidentally-low-information types will read this and realize trump is not the way to go.

On the one hand, yes. But also, it’s mostly capitalism.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with “I’m starting a frisbee club for fun. We’re going to meet saturdays in the park. I’m going to put up some flyers and tell my friends about it”.

But at some point that can mutate into “i put a 30 second unskippable ad for FrisbeeFranchise on youtube, and a giant billboard over the subway stop that implies if you don’t play frisbee you’ll never be happy”. That’s bad.

I think targeted ads should be illegal as a first step. I don’t think anyone except the worst sort of advertisers would go to bat for those. Old fashioned static ads where they put an ad for bike stuff by the bike lane in town is annoying, but somehow we’ve invented things so much worse than that.

Another reason I feel good about buying albums.

I worry a lot of people won’t learn until the leopard is eating their face, and maybe not even then.

Adams is a giant turd. He’s terrible and I hope Zohran ousts him in the next mayoral election.

There’s also things that conservatives would never do, but would net money.

Fund the IRS to go after rich tax cheats. That brings in a lot of money without changing any laws, and it would be good publicity. A lot of people would enjoy seeing a rich guy nailed to the wall for cheating on taxes.

I think you could probably simplify a lot of government aid if we went for universal basic income instead of a bunch of programs that need to be maintained and staffed and all that.

Anyone who thought DOGE was actually going to make the government more “efficient” or save money is not well informed, and has a very limited understanding of US politics. Hopefully articles like this reach people and people learn.

I wonder what sort of studies have been done on this. I found a few with a quick search about admitting being wrong- IT seems to correlate with humility like you would expect. Also admitting fault also sometimes makes people like you more, contrary to the belief that people will think you suck if you admit fault. Though maybe not for politicians, oddly.

I think there’s a difference between someone who voted trump and realized they fucked up in a like deep , systemic, way, and someone who doesn’t like this specific implemention of right wing stuff.

Like, if they regret trump but keep voting R, that’s not good.

I feel like this is a deep flaw in humanity. That most people would rather continue eating literal shit than admit they were wrong.

There are a small subset of people who legitimately just don’t understand game development fundamentals though, and they actually believe that things would just be fully interchangeable. As in, you buy a skin in Fortnite, and you can then open up Roblox and set it as your player model.

Those ones are especially not the brightest.

The people who are like “you can just take your skin from Skyrim and put it in gta5 and it’ll just work!!” people really are baffling. The hubris and ignorance is so much

Verdi and Rey voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, saying they supported his pledge to bring order to the southern border and crack down on immigrants without legal status.

Oh so they wanted cruelty for other people. Fuck them.

There was recently a story of someone whose kid died of measles, but they were still anti-vax in the interviews afterwards.

There are two main ways people change their mind. One is in-group pressure. If your friends and trusted people are telling you a thing, you’ll probably believe it. None of us are immune to this. Who you consider part of your in-group varies- some people fall for celebrity endorsements more than others, or view bad sources like Fox News as trustworthy.

The other thing that can change people’s minds is trauma. If you’ve been an anti-climate-change guy and your house gets destroyed by a freak super hurricane, you might reevaluate. Maybe. Of if a big KKK guy gets hit by a car and left a dead, and a black guy saves your life, they might reevaluate.

But there’s no guarantee.

I really want people to roll up on the factory, shoot the management, and then shut it down.

This shit is a crime against the environment and humanity.

On the one hand: Good. Google is a monopoly and they suck, too.

On the other, I don’t trust the trump administration to do anything correctly. They’ll probably try to give google to Musk or something.

We can’t fix it but we could probably fix Miller so he can’t hurt anyone ever again.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to build a healthy social network.

Smaller communities can work, if they’re well moderated. The small size also helps norms become established.

Once the network gets really big, you have eternal September problems. You have too many bad actors in absolute numbers to deal with.

So yeah, the problem is us but we suck.

Maybe federation would work, since that can keep the moderation workload smaller and distributed.

Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook