No, I would say it is the “minimum evil” framing, as in at minimum they failed to stop it and that is already damning enough to disband the whole thing regardless of how much more evil the reality is.

which is saying a lot!

UK are you high?

What made you look at the FBI and think “yeah, we need that”!!?

Let me remind everyone because the haze of chaos has made it easy to forget, January 6th was organized IN PUBLIC ON FACEBOOK and the FBI still completely failed to stop it.

There is no failing bigger than that, and that was before children’s book author Kash Patel took over.

yes this is real, I am sorry to say…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/07/trump-fbi-pick-kash-patel-childrens-books

I mean holy shit pick any other entity to compare yourself too, have some damn standards!

The DNC and corporate Democrats would rather have a fascist takeover than empower actual leftwing policies, so I don’t think that eventuality really bothers them as much as the possibility of losing control over the power structures of the Democratic party does.

For the leaders of the Democratic party, if they complete the parties transition to an entirely controlled opposition party if anything that makes the jobs of dumpsterfires like Chuck Shumer and Hakeem Jeffries easier, whenever their job gets hard they can just threaten anybody left of them that they will get hurt by their Republican colleagues and their violent thugs if they keep talking like that. They don’t have to campaign on doing or accomplishing anything since the fascist regime is in relative terms so horrific people will feel forced to vote against it for “opposition party” politicians who are worse than useless but still technically better.

I think it makes perfect sense for the power structures of the DNC to act like this will be a fair election, the best outcome for them is it won’t be and it will thus make the job of leaders in the DNC far easier. Then they can just work as an advertising campaign for something that doesn’t exist and nobody will have any expectations for them to actually be able to accomplish anything material. This is the dream job description for both Chuck Shumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

Lol nope, out of principle I will never pay for this even if I didn’t already hate Google.

It feels so condescending to the user, so unconcerned with their agency that I could never bring myself to support this choice with even a tiny amount of money.

We banish you from this plane of reality, AI bubble!

waves wand

Begone evil beast!

:(

Yes and my point is that the architecture that is most conducive to countering that tendency in physical acoustics suggests the opposite conclusion people come to about echo chambers in abstracted metaphorical application to communities and systems of people in conversation.

I genuinely think it muddles discussion around human topics when the phrase “echo chamber” is used as the association people make is so backwards it hurts more than it helps.

Singing them! It is only natural, they are full of notes.

Sound dissipates and loses energy as it travels through air, so for an echo to occur and you to hear it, you need to be a relatively short distance away from a wall.

It is not that act of reflecting off a surface that induces an echo with energy, the echo is a transformation.

The same dissipation of energy occurs no matter what because of air friction, what sound deadening structures such as acoustic foam do is increase that friction per unit of space.

The background effect of sound slowly losing energy simply from being conveyed through the air represents a minimum sound deadening capacity in terms of space not a maximum.

open spaces don’t echo because there’s nothing to bounce off of.

You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.

Plus, if you shrank down to the size where you could fit inside one of the bubbles of acoustic foam, it may very well be echoey in there.

Isn’t the reason you are invoking a contortion of scale to shift our focus to inside one of these smaller bubbles/cells motivated by a desire to induce a sense of some small degree of open space around us? In a sense, aren’t you arguably still invoking the idea that space is what allows echoes rather than density and enclosure?

But a canyon won’t echo regular speaking voices like a cathedral does

…because a Cathedral echoes more than a Canyon does! Which is my point! When people apply the metaphor of the echo chamber they almost always use it in precisely the incorrect mapping and speak of mitigating the “echo chamber effect” by creating large, enclosed spaces with huge unbroken internal voids where even whispers cascade all the way across the volume in a cacophony.

Conversely when people speak of systems of communication that are most like open celled or closed celled acoustic foam with many smaller spaces separated by manifold barriers and divisions, they are likely to refer to it as being prone to the “echo chamber effect” and I think it seriously hurts rational thinking on the subject.

I have never seen someone criticize a human communication system with the structure of a Cathedral as an “echo chamber” while gesturing to the structure of a Canyon as superior in that it lets echoes proliferate but doesn’t concentrate them. Rather, it seems to be used almost without exception to argue in favor of making systems MORE like a Cathedral and less like acoustic deadening foam in structure.

I agree though sometimes stairwells come out of nowhere and surprise with crazy good echoes, doesn’t beat the accessibility of a shower however and people tend to look at you weird if you hang out in a random stairwell.

Clearly I am singing.

This is exactly why the DNC and Democratic establishment was so incredibly hostile to Mamdani, figures like Newsom can only win in an extremely cynical environment where people openly accept corrupted, empty figureheads because there are no better options.

Newsom can only win if the DNC’s corporate centrist thesis that progressive politics and socialist policies are just too scary for the US public to understand and this is an unchangable fact of nature remains unchallenged and becomes reified as common knowledge.

All it takes is one example to disprove a rule, and Mamadani just did exactly that. This is an extinction level event for corporate centrist Democrats and Gavin is just too dumbly deferential to the status quo of the past to realize he is already a dinosaur and has been left behind in the dust by a new era.

Look I want kids to grow up and be able to pursue any passion they want, but we have to ask serious real world questions here about Austerity and I am starting to think we should entirely cut MBA programs and in general business education.

I know that sounds extreme, but we have to focus on training kids on skills that will actually be productive, useful and lead to new breakthroughs. We clearly need to fund the hard stuff like art, music and theater or we are going to collapse as a society and continue to fall behind more competitive nations because we got distracted by fluff and empty ideologies masquerading as knowledge, MBAs being exhibit A.

Nah, no way in hell that cardboard cutout of a human will win.

His job is to distract centrists with a candidate both the rightwing and leftwing hate and can tell is full of shit in order to doom Democrats to losing the next election by positioning a centrist, morally bankrupt politician to split the party and in the end only represent the interests of the rich.

It would honestly be hilarious seeing center “left” liberals getting openly played like this if the consequences weren’t so legitimately scary.

This would make Trump panic in the best way, it would directly undermine his aesthetic of Rich Asshole Who Other Rich Assholes Like.

Go Away Gavin - is my new slogan

They listen if you listen

In a fantasy world version of the US, conservatives do that, in the real world US the minute you start doing that you have abandoned what it means to be a conservative.