“And in a historical turn of events, every member of the DNC over 50 has elected to just…not vote this November. Calling it a once in a generation political upset, mainline Democrats have almost unanimously elected to…not elect anyone. One such non-voter was on record not outside of a polling station saying ‘I can’t in good conscience vote for someone who actually seems to stand for something. It’s just not what you’re supposed to do as a Democrat and it’s not in accordance with any beliefs I might have had, if I had ever decided to have any.’”

He’s by far done more good than bad. Even the railway workers were resolved in the end (without a shutdown that would have fucked the inflation greed economy even more).

The issue is that by doing this he showed his hand. A strike has two sides to it: the side of the workers and the side of the bosses. Biden’s interference, by executive order, shows which side he’s on. It’s very telling to me that we live in a country where Biden can make it illegal for thousands of people to go on strike, but he doesn’t have the power to force a single corporation to take the deal that’s on the table from their employees. Or if he does, he elects not to do that. Either way, a union has one single recourse against the company it works for: striking. If that’s suddenly off the table, you are effectively toothless in negotiations. Also, it’s fascinating you can say to thousands of people “oh, you don’t want to work anymore? Well, guess what? You have to.” Last time I checked, that’s functionally indentured servitude, if not outright slavery.

There’s a good chance it was manufactured by a combination of Russia->Iran->Hamas triggering i

Not every single thing is a plan by Russia to destabilize the Western world. This conflict had been ongoing for decades. Is this particular escalation of it bad timing? Sure, but it was also a ticking clock.

The issue is also that he’s gotten a lot done that people do not like or not done enough in some ways. They don’t think he pushed for enough support for Ukraine. Or they don’t like how he handled the late 2022 railway workers strike. Or they don’t like how he’s handling Israel’s invasion of Palestine. And then there’s the fact that he’s the face of mainstream, neoliberal Democrats, who are just generally disliked by more progressive members of the party for seeming to never get things done (like codifying Roe v. Wade into law when they had the chance) and for being so arrogant that they fumble the ball constantly (like with the DNC and Clinton thinking Trump was a fucking pushover and then letting him get elected and functionally give the RNC the Supreme Court for the next 30 years). People are frustrated with Biden because they’re frustrated with the party, and Biden is the party in a very real way.

Well, that’s because Trump was a softball candidate who stood no chance at winning and only acted as a spoiler candidate in relation to other, actual potential Republican candidates.

I think what people believe is more a matter of environment, exposure, and upbringing. The Rittenhouses are victims of an ideology that they internalized because they were, in some very real way, made to internalize it. It doesn’t benefit them and it exists purely to support systems of power that actively disenfranchise them and people like them. And “our” ideologies, however similar or different your beliefs and mine might be, are just as much a product of environment and conditioning. I’m not entirely sure I can draw the exact line where a society’s failure of its own people stops and personal accountability begins when it’s tied so intimately to how an individual believes the world is and should be.

I’m going to go ahead and post my hot take: I hate that these people are facing eviction and that they’re faced with crippling medical debt caused by chronic illness and frequent hospitalization. I don’t like these people. I don’t agree with their beliefs. I think Kyle Rittenhouse did something unforgivably terrible and that his family likely enabled him and his actions. But I also don’t want them to be homeless or to have to deal with medical debt, because those are things that I believe our society should guarantee, as inalienable rights, that no one, regardless of how odious they or their family might be, should have to endure. And I don’t care that they (probably) believe differently.

The party of states’ rights and “keeping the government out of your private life” really like telling cities what they can and can’t do in order to reduce the intrusion of the government into their private lives. I mean, let’s be honest. This is basically being targeted because this is going to significantly reduce the number of non-violent offenders (almost all of whom are gonna be people of color, because damn if the cops don’t love pulling over black people to try and find weed in their car) ingested into the prison industrial complex and the GOP has a fuckload of skin in that game.

Wizards/Hasbro hires contractors to produce art for their game. They make virtually none of it in house. It’s most likely they neither know nor care who or what produces art for MTG. Besides, they produce so much content in a year, some of it has to be AI/ML generated, so this is incredibly unsurprising. At this point, MTG is starting to enshittify by dumping out product as quickly as possible. Their quality control and playtesting has gone out the window. Most of their recent sets are pretty poorly received in the limited magic space. I don’t personally care about the use of AI art, but I can say that for money making enterprises, they’ll eventually have more and more art produced via ML over time, and eventually they’ll use ML to design sets in some capacity, as well. Right now, people are upset over it or annoyed by it on some quasi-ethical grounds of “stealing from artists by not compensating them for the work they produced being used to train the models.” But it’s going to eventually become the norm, purely on the basis that they aren’t going to lose any money from using ML to produce art and they’re going to save money by doing it.

The foundational premise of this argument is purely that there’s something “special” about human thought and that the way humans do pattern recognition is somehow “better” than a machine’s.

God I hate tech this decade.

I feel this sentiment in my bones. I know it gets overused, but the word of the decade so far really does seem to be enshittification. The only thing that seems to be getting better is self-hosting, which is still a massive pain in the ass for a lot of things.