mozz

News has been running explicit propaganda with 40% of the country believing it for about 30 years. It’s been working fine. As weird as it sounds and as bad as it might be, I think that fake videos are not as game-changing a part of that toolbox as they’ve been made out to be.

I think there's a lot of variation. I know people who have worked in politics who say the people they worked on behalf of were genuinely good people who got into it because it's a way to produce positive change in the world. I also know other people who have worked in politics who said the people they worked on behalf of were the biggest POSes on a personal level that they'd ever encountered, just absolutely like the worst people in the world, 10 times worse than you think, that made their skin crawl to even have to interact with them.

Whether the guy from my little story is 30% of the people in government or more like 1%, or 0.1%, I think people of good faith can disagree about.

I read "Mein Kampf." Hitler said something in it that really stuck with me. Basically: The people do not want democracy. They don't feel qualified. If you tell them they need to be the ones to chart the course for the country, they'll get uncomfortable, because they don't feel they have a good grasp of the issues and they have enough on their plate with their daily lives.

What they want is for someone to say: I understand the issues, I know exactly what to do, I'm strong enough to keep you safe and solve the problems. Don't worry about it. I can take care of it if you just put me in charge. I'll get rid of our anxieties about the world and make things good and everything will be fine. That's the type of leader and government they gravitate to, not someone who'll go into all the details or tell them that they get to make the decisions.

I do not agree with his prescription for what makes good government (hopefully goes without saying), but his grasp of how people operate, I think was spot-on.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The planet, from a human perspective, will die within most of your lifetimes. I'm just here killing time. I have no real ability to prevent the looting of your futures. The people who are profiting are so avaricious and stunted that they're not really even getting any enjoyment from the whole process. It's purely the results of their own pathology, and our system malfunctioned and put them in charge because it was never designed on purpose. It all just happened that way, and so we're all fucked." A small murmur went through the pin-drop silent press pool at the expletive.

"Me too," he continued blankly, as the silence returned. "I'm actually trying to help, but the system makes it impossible for me to produce the level of change that's required. All I'm doing is producing angst and anxiety for myself and my family. I'm simply outnumbered by, basically, millions of malfunctioning AI models in suits trying to maximize a goal number even if it destroys us all. I did my best. I tried, but I'm just as much hampered by my own personal human limits as any of you are. The system is immensely powerful, easily capable of rejecting and replacing anyone who tries to produce genuine change. Each of us in government must either work to strengthen it and be rewarded, or reject it and be cast out, or resign ourselves to working for change within its parameters and therefore accomplishing nothing of lasting value with our lives."

"I'm happy to take any questions. We've got plenty of time today, as ironic as that is to say. Anyone ...? Yes, Hodges? NBC?"

Yeah, looks that way. With my Easter Island example being a prime example.

This is my favorite thing that's happened to me all day and I had a nice pork chop this morning 😃

I laughed out loud many times on the first page and then I got to the bottom with the pagination showing God only knows how many more pages of it continuing, and completely busted out laughing. I want to give them all a warm cup of tea and a cookie and tell them to relax it's gonna be okay.

Oh crap -- you're right. My bad, I fixed. Is Jared Diamond wrong about lots of things? It was quite a while ago that I read him but I thought he was ok. Apparently not though?

I made the whole meme and then you edited your comment 😢

Anyway, I'm not surprised you're more interested in constructing narratives that fit the illusion you're trying to construct, than in answering basic questions about those narratives to test if they correspond to reality.

I'm not being, like, super friendly, but literally all I'm doing is asking you for details about what you're claiming is happening.

Things people know about Easter Island: Giant stone heads that’s so cool

Things (edit: ~~people should know about Easter Island~~) Jared Diamond says about Easter Island: They didn’t take care of their ecosystem and didn’t have a backup one to go to instead, so they all died when it stopped being able to support them.

Things people should actually know about Easter Island (edited to add since I guess Jared Diamond got it wrong?): They were okay until we started fuckin with em

Wikipedia's hall of fame of stupid edit wars has some pretty entertaining sections.

Good stuff. What is your estimate of the total predicted impact on emissions of Biden's climate bill, now that we've seen it in action for a little bit? And your estimate of the overall impact of what you're talking about here?

It's a challenging question I'm sure, but you weighed in on whether Biden's bill is good or bad and what he should be doing instead, so presumably you claim for yourself enough knowledge to estimate the impacts of these different approaches. Yes?

I support your effort to spread the message about the sand shortage

But I do have to tell you that the construction industry consumes 50 billion metric tons of sand a year and the semiconductor industry makes $650 billion... so every computer chip would have to cost 10 cents and be made completely of silicon and weigh 7 kg each in order to have parity with sand consumption for concrete. I think the price of sand is just gonna go up and they're still gonna keep making new ones. 😢