His base are the 0.01%. They could end this tomorrow by phoning their pet senators and having a quiet word.
The people on the front lines - including the ICE thugs - are entirely disposable. They people using them have zero interest in their welfare or how this works out for them in the long term. (Spoilers - not well.)
Of course they don't understand this. But this is absolutely standard for authoritarian fascism - groom and grudge farm the petty criminals and deviants, recruit them as regime enforcers with promises of money and freedom from consequences, set them loose, profit.
30 million Americans on the low end believe the earth is only thousands of years old and specifically deny the existence of plate tectonics and continental drift
That is a huge constituency that openly believes in falsehoods and has a premade conspiracy taught to their children that all scientists are in a satanic conspiracy to make you disbelieve god. Not even that scientists are wrong, but that they actively work, all over the world, every one of them, to lie to you.
They produce an entire alternative media ecosystem, one where everything they consume is made out of trivial lies you must take as axioms, where scientists have no evidence and just say things (like a preacher), where scientists don't answer questions (or invite learning and experimentation!), where you are violently oppressed (and murdered) for being "Christian", and where only a specific version of the bible is allowed and the doctrine is that anyone is supposed to be able to understand the bible because god made it that way but for some reason people only listen to interpretations from their pastors.
They aren't exactly voting for democrats.
This constituency is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority" in education, a thing which should never and not at all be a part of public education, and which literally means they are upset that schools teach their kids that evolution is a well understood and documented and supported phenomenon that directly explains speciation, because their religious doctrine is so far off the norm that it has to reject an earth as old as we know it is, and instead relies on an age of the earth that was incorrectly calculated by a religious scholar making poor assumptions and adding up ages in the bible and was done before we had incontrovertible evidence against it.
This constituency needs conspiracy theories because they need to somehow wave away the massive knowledge we gained from science in the time since their cults started. Of course, once you have convinced your 11 year old to internalize your conspiracy theory as ground truth or else be physically abused, it's trivial to then get them to believe any bullshit. They literally were not taught basic things like how to evaluate a source, or how to support an argument.
Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime, or a knock off of a popular movie redone to make Christians the oppressed populace by making up things out of whole cloth.
THIS is why the "war on christmas" is a thing. THIS is why they have to play victim and insist that allowing other people to abort pregnancies is somehow an affront to the individual practice of THEIR religion. THIS is why they insist the USA is a christian nation despite all the contrary evidence.
<< is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority"
You either don't have a child or have an agenda that does not include your input in its future. This is the nicest and most charitable take I can have here. In short, but you are wrong in a way that you might not even understand to be possible. FWIW, I heard this line of argumentation before and, amusingly based on the argument itself, reeks of current education system.
> Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime
I was raised by a hyper abusive boxer-turned-Catholic deacon and forced to be involved in the Church. I've read the Bible front to back, we don't even need to get into Fundamentalists to find insane cult behavior. I was kicked out and left on the street, homeless, because I refused to undergo Catholic confirmation at age 15. It has affected my entire life.
According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.
Being subject to the topic promotion and suppression technologies [1] and bizarre political whims of billionaire media owners is an unusual definition of "freedom."
All media is subject to the whims of its owners. That's freedom of the press. The only other option is that the government tells the owners what they can and can't publish.
Another option is that the government limits the power individuals can have. How many people control, say, 80% of the media? Do you need more than one hand to count them?
How do you define "control" here? Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
I’d argue that social media stopped being democratic as it introduced algorithmic content selection. But today perhaps a bigger problem is bot farms shaping public opinion.
Bots don't count as people. They're not represented demographically. They also don't have voting rights. Yet they're spreading propaganda to influence how people vote. So one could argue social media is rather anti democratoc.
Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.
One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.
But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.
In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin
Yes, Vladimir Lenin is likely one of the most appropriate people to quote on the question of freedom. Maybe only his successor Joseph Stalin is better in that regard.
I used to live in the UK and thought double-digit broadband was pretty good, actually.
Now I live in a slightly remote corner of Europe and I had 6Gbps fiber installed yesterday, for €15/month. (Nominally 10Gbps, measures as 6, which is... pretty good, actually.)
Phase 8 is a high margin collectible and brand promotion device. Korg may not make their money back from direct sales - although I wouldn't be surprised if they did - but likely there would be enough of a halo effect to make it worthwhile.
I expect this will turn into a small range of variations with strings, tubes, and so on.
But it's also part of a cultural trend moving back from do-it-all software products to tactile collectibles with a simple, legible purpose. Vinyl started that, and I think this is a kind of musical take on the idea that something mechanical has more presence and authority than software.
Sonically I don't think that's true at all, but it's a comprehensible marketing pitch.
It's not just deprecation, it's systemic understatement. It drives non-British people insane because everyone is talking in code.
And some of the meaning is hidden in intonation.
If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" or "Might be worth a look, but not a priority right now." Or maybe "That's very suspicious."
"That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
There is the famous case in the Korean War at the Battle of Imjin River where the British commander of the Gloucestershire regiment reported to an American General, 'Things are a bit sticky, sir'. The American General thought that meant a good thing, like they were holding the line, when in fact they were fighting a heroic last stand outnumbered 25:1!
> "That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
This is backwards from the conventional British use of "quite". In American English "quite" is a positive modifier, so that "quite good" is better than "good". In British English, historically, it's a negative modifier so that "quite good" means "not as good as good".
Don't know who downvoted this comment but this is correct. Like all matters of speaking, it depends on the tone. Sometimes "quite good" can mean better than good. But the parent is correct that conventionally, unless the tone suggests the opposite, "quite good" means "not as good as good" when an English person says it.
It occured to me yesterday that at least in a now slightly historic version of British English (though one that isn't actually extinct yet), "rather" plays a similar role to the one "quite" does in American English. So "rather good" is better than good, "rather nice" is better than nice" etc.
I certainly use the word "exciting" in ways that that might be non-standard, like for instance describing when everything has gone catastrophically wrong.
Writing didn't destroy memory, it externalised it and made it stable and shareable. That was absolutely transformative, and far more useful than being able to re-improvise a once-upon-a-time heroic poem from memory.
It hugely enhanced synthetic and contextual memory, which was a huge development.
AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.
Of course we identify with cognition in a way we didn't do with rote memory. But we should possibly identify more with synthetic and creative cognition - in the sense of exploring interesting problem spaces of all kinds - than with "I need code to..."
> AI has the potential to do something similar for cognition. It's not very good at it yet, but externalised cognition has the potential to be transformative in ways we can't imagine - in the same way Socrates couldn't imagine Hacker News.
Wouldnt the endgame of externalized cognition be that humans essentially become cogs in the machine?
Regardless of whether memory was externalised, it’s still the case that it was lost internally, that much is true. If you really care about having a great internal memory then of course you’ll think it’s a downside.
So we’ve externalised memory, we’ve externalised arithmetic. Personally the idea of externalising thinking seems to be the last one? It’s not clear what’s left inside us of being a human once that one is gone
It did destroy memory though. I would bet any amount of money that our memories in 2026 are far, far worse than they were in 1950 or 1900.
In fact, I can feel my memory is easily worse now than from before ChatGPT's release, because we are doing less hard cognitive work. The less we use our brain's the dumber we get, and we are definitely using our brains less now.
It's not writing that destroys memory. It's fast/low-cost lookup of written material that destroys memory. This is why people had strong memory despite hundreds of years of widespread writing, and it suddenly fell through the floor with the introduction of widespread computers, internet, and smartphones.
we existing in a stunningly more abstract and complex society than we did even 100 years. Unless you are reasonably intelligent its incredibly difficult to even navigate the modern world.
Photography, computer graphics, Photoshop, synthesizers, samplers, and others have all been considered "not real art."
The irony is that the kind of genre art you see at Comic-Con is mostly reproductions of commercial properties or standard tropes and formulas, with very little original vision and creativity. Being able to draw something recognisable as [genre character name goes here], even with some skill, is not that high a bar, and it lives in a tiny niche in the art world as a whole.
AI brought something fresh to art for a while, but now I think creative people are more aware of the limitations. It's in a strange mid-way place between being fascinating, and being frustratingly limited compared to what it could be.
I suspect we'll start seeing meta-art soon with a much more interesting mix of creation, original thought, and execution.
A key difference is that each of the mediums you mentioned are deterministic and unbiased (to a certain degree.) The the work created can therefore be inferred to be a "pure" expression of the artists intent. A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.
The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.
> A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.
That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.
> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?
Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)
AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.
>That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.
Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter?
>Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium
Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.
All due respect to your mother, but a pro photographer would certainly achieve better results. Your mom may recognize something is not right but be unable to articulate it clearly to the tool. Same problem that's always been. The bar has been lowered, not removed.
Everything posted is fan fiction and far from "fresh." Not to knock it, I am sure people like this but the video is firmly in the uncanny valley and has a cheap plastic feel to it.
AI on its own is chaotic neutral.
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