That’s the author. If it were an old man would you care? The article is on point, this is almost as bad as running on voter reform and then going “haha no we aren’t going to do that actually, we like a two party system.”

And now, in the easy win for the liberals given the fascist shit across the border, I guess that means time for liberals to be more brazenly conservative.

This conversation is broader than most treat it.

The rugpulling bait and switch of the democratic party is something that needs to be recognized. There is also the corporate apologetics, and I do think directly supporting a genocide is also a deal breaker.

But also, divide and conquer is a thing.

Remember how atheists suddenly started hating women? Or is it that atheists suddenly had to stop protesting the heritage foundation, and had to pivot defensively when trying to get circumcision banned in the states suddenly meant they obviously hate women for daring to suggest male circumcision is also bad when female circumcision is much much worse. This type of interaction reverberates until feminist academia is fully contorted into a tool for opportunists to shape like a bludgeon, and atheist spaces empty of progressive who can’t deal with the emotional upset of being compared to Incels and Conservatives, and feminist academics are forced to prove they aren’t all the opportunistic SJWs that misinterpret their own tools to make intersectionality an oversimplified version of "define everybody exclusively by their surface features, and self segregate to not associate with their evil ‘surface feature attained at birth.’

Also now the heritage foundation is directly in power with a bunch of other opportunistic fascists, progressives all hate each other, and none of this means we shouldn’t be careful of opportunists derailing collective efforts in support of incompatible abuses of human rights.

Doesn’t mean we can’t work with the neoliberal counter parties in fighting the blatant fascists, but we definitely need to recognize the shape of the battlefield as we shape our collective response, and how our collective response is reshaped by those with the power to do so. And also solidarity is important for any group that doesn’t feel safe or represented in the current society. Usually such people are not your enemy, even if your social group is convinced that suddenly progressives need to start discouraging and being aggressive to people who actively want to be allies, because they have other needs, preferences, or surface features that don’t actually define their entire being. Even if they look like the majority surface features of the “bad groups.”

I don’t doubt these conflicts are instigated by weird media pushes, which lately I relate to the hasan dog controversy, or the Hilary emails (recognizing this doesn’t mean I like Hilary,) or media framing around antifa/BLM pushes.

There’s a bunch of stuff about larger groups, and subpopulatons that can be exploited for divide and conquer, or strawmanning the whole group by enabling the least thoughtful, and most aggressive, which can be blown up by the media so that the whole group is defined by it.

Although often the group fully accepts their role of being the very strawman, because in group solidarity becomes everything, and solidarity with other movements is evil for showing how targeted violence towards other progressive groups is not actually the best progressive effort. Etc.

I’m even more fun at parties.

I think we have a little more freedom around where we label colours, as all existing colours are just an active bounding relative to our usually-semi-aligned receptors. Someone who can’t see blue could call something blue because others see it as blue, but it’s technically still accurate to bound and define strictly from their style of receptors, we just appreciate cohesion in our heuristics due to the nature of our social way of being.

Perceiving something temporarily as a different colour due to the changing environment also altering our internal representation does not make it inaccurate to temporarily alter which made up words appropriately describe the made up boundings around an assumed relationship our internal model representation of wavelengths share with each other, regardless of whether surface contact changing the reflected wavelengths, or a doppler shift giving a temporary relative change in experience or classification.

Also see: why language is more suggestions than law, due to the valid growth of language happening simultaneously in myriad eco-niches with different salience or needs which may alter the ‘proper’ way of communication specifically within that eco-niche, or in relative shape to other locales. Especially when dealing with preference or style over function, but even bias for ‘function’ can have a proper local-niche optimization over ‘improper’ models despite ‘proper’ local models having functional conflict with broader models. meaning we need better ways to align while diversifying without enforcing the most large and salient local collective preference as law.

Also a lot of our experience is relative or confabulatory in ways that we should recognize before rejecting other localization of experience. recognizing how we handle language at multiple simultaneous scales crafted around-and-for myriad locally/generally salient settings. Unfortunately this becomes difficult to communicate when a politician tells all the people seeing red flowers that the person in a different context seeing the blue flower is just ‘wrong,’ while the rest are ‘correct,’ even though the same people with the same logic would argue differently if positions were reversed. This silly hypothetical is the same kind of issue as conveyed around ‘the double empathy problem’ as a broader systems mechanic, for different boundings on building logic vs model growth purely through passive socialized affirmation, or the same vulnerability to sycophantic delusion you see with “AI” psychosis, but due to a sycophantic group rather than an LLM.

Reality is just weird and dumb, and our existing systems kind of a gauge around what is actively useful as we grow ourselves into new shapes going forward. We definitely need to be wary of socializing strict binaries around local relative confabulatory structures or preferences. Ergo: the rose can be blue, even if that’s not permanently useful outside of a strict communication around a personal position and experience. We can recognize the paradox from observer states with both confabulated classifications simultaneously, with both being true and neither being wrong, dependent on the acceptance of both states as valid experiences.

Been doing this for decades, and somehow the billionaires keep out-money-voting me.

Not that trying doesn’t help, but the world needs more than the few good people spending all of their energy and power in filling the gaps of a system designed to leave gaps, specifically to enrich the less generous people via a hoarding competition.

Almost as if having cultures built entirely around letting less good people amass power while punishing those who actually contribute to the world around them.

Some reason, changing our culture to something that rewards generosity is just never on the table. Those who care enough to affect anything larger scale have already given up their power out of basic decency in a world full of suffering, or had it taken from them by those who chose hoarding and extracting instead.

Or people could just tax the rich to the point they can’t spend their time and power rigging political objectives, rather than doing literally anything positive for society.

Etc.

That’s a lot of words for “people don’t like his pro-genocide stance, or his support for the same anti science fascist shit currently causing our southern neighbour to behave like a novel mixture of 1930s Germany and putin’s Russia.”

Love how much the whole framing just pretends there is nothing going wrong either south of the border, or in the endless livestream of children being mercilessly targeted by a campaign of genocidal zionists.

Don’t pay attention to the scientists or historians. Everything is fine.

You’re even being downvoted for an entirely sensible opinion. I feel like the type of people to downvote this opinion are the type who don’t comprehend that boardrooms were creating slop using real artists that they control through economic suppression. The bigger issue is that most consumers don’t have the media literacy to tell what is slop with a lot of money put into it verses the quality that independent artists are able to put out when they can’t afford a team of economic slaves to polish their work, and the lack of media literacy drowns them under the salience and market dominance of Disney and Warner types.

But if an indie dev uses a local AI to accomplish the same polish that is currently only available to big corpos, they could actually make their real artwork look more competitive with corpo slop,

But people don’t have the literacy on ‘why’ AI bad, the same way people don’t seem to have literacy around opportunistic oligarchs buying the whole political landscape giving you a choice between mask off corpo leaches promising things antithetical to their actions, and mask on corpo leaches pretending to combat it. The solution weirdly isn’t “burn the technology.” much like the phones in our pockets, there is zero reason for them to be useless bricks outside of the proprietary data collection and gambling pipeline that has been deemed the “only safe option” as if a Linux equivalent is more dangerous than the corpo data collection and limiting of our own autonomy over our own devices.

Similarly the cloud, which is literally just “let us organize all of your local data for you on our computers. Keeping your data with us is just easier or something.” rather than just enabling people in their own local networks.

So the landscape being built for us is the problem, but we can’t get there when most people can’t spend more time absorbing a topic before taking the strong socialized beliefs that are given high emotional salience, because they socially feel that it is bad, not because of the decades of encroaching systemic oppressing that we have to crawl out of.

It’s not the indie artist using a tool that’s the problem, and that tool is stealing nothing from anyone, rather than using systemic exploitation as righteous artistic accomplishment like pretty much anyone with actual money for “labour.”

I mean, most people can’t recognize slop vs creativity normally. I think the results affect less the anthropomorphizing issue, since oir brains do run similar predictive processes in how we generate words based on context,

Although it can’t actively update its weights while navigating novel concepts, which is why you need a person to create novelty alongside the tool, or correct its mistakes, much like when you say the wrong thing and backtrack and correct. Your word generating process isn’t perfect, but it’s a useful tool that is useful alongside all of your other ‘tools.’

What i think the study is a better answer to is the people who call it a theft machine because it learned from things that exist.

That being said, rich assholes should not be able to turn around and claim ownership of the result of the learning based on the collective development and accomplishment of mankind, or life more broadly. We ‘steal’. A lot of useful intelligent tools from nature.

It’s hard to start that conversation though when the ‘bad’ thing they are doing is just learning or training.

We had the slop of 90s-2000s Disney sequels, even if it was a bunch of human interns having their time and energy pilfered with the threat of basic survival or right to spend time creating art instead of flipping burgers. All proper and copyright safe, but closer to the actual problem than some artists trying to actually create novel things with these models replacing the Disney interns that only Disney has ‘rightful’ access to, despite gaining success off of public domain, and then lobbying to shrink the public domain.

But people are more eager to be mad at the technology than the complexity of dealing with the opportunistic assholes that will use every tool, technology or otherwise, to ensure they get to have power over our collective rights and autonomy.

*billionaires and Epstein elite flood media with noise and misinformation, while successfully propagandizing their global usurpation of power as the wealthiest monopolize and cause the world’s richest country to be a place where citizens are too stressed and individualized to resist the lies being pushed about trans people in bathrooms and sports somehow being more scary than the rich using political power to apply violence towards those advocating for cooperation and education. *

Obviously the monopolistic economic extraction, absurd media whitewashing, and capture of the social narrative within the political system directing fear towards trans people and leftists has nothing to do with money.

While id specify there are a lot of gatherings like the heritage foundation which aren’t exclusively billionaire, it is still just tied to consolidated wealth and power, which is being directed against the general public through divide and conquer. Whether it’s the ATLAS network pushing Alberta separatism, or the maple maga shit, is no small part due to rich assholes being able to do stuff like elon musk buying the world’s most popular social media platform to force an environment to serve his political goals.

There’s no single entity, but obviously psychopathic consolidating of wealth and power is the primary problem behind these other issues, and looking at history tells you the same fucking story more or less repeating itself through the political aspirations of aristocratic knobs creating scapegoats while they pillage the civilization into ruin or rebellion.

The inclination to separate billionaires/the ultra rich from the context is baffling.

Whether it’s Pierre trying to do his own fascist MAGA mirrir or Trudeau totally changing his mind on voter reform after swiping the narrative from smaller parties to get elected. (we don’t want the American two party system because it’s easy for billionaires to manipulate by pushing crazy fascist shit while also funding the “only viable alternative”)

Extremely baffling.

Is already standard for companies to further ‘optimize’ by creating problems that they can charge extra to solve.

I mean, advertising to begin with is just a way for people with existing capital to make themselves more salient regardless of their product quality.

But if you don’t even need a product and can charge people for the right not to have every experience made worse, or more annoying or time consuming, the whole point of the market has lost the plot at the expense of the people.

Like paying rent on features that have traditionally just been available after purchasing a thing, like vehicle seat heating.

Only going to get worse unless we change out of a system built entirely around individualized extraction and competition.

Yay for hyper individualization. At least we don’t have to question our beliefs at work or in other shared spaces, as it’s only polite to talk about such energy consuming topics in small sycophantic bubbles so we can do the group style “llm psychosis” affirming of important personal beliefs that heavily contradict highly confident known sciences. World is increasingly on fire? Must be mercury in retrograde, or them immigrants, and totally not the things the scientists keep talking about.

As long as we never communicate or compare our beliefs, or how we got there. nobody has to experience the terrible pain of unlearning things that you believed in, which shaped the current you. As long as bubbles are isolated enough, and never try to actually cooperatively compare and sort through which beliefs might not be globally consistent, how how to change our actions accordingly.

Also check out the info on the recent chimp civil war to see what happens to silly little ape brains when you remove their community bridges and communication between groups, while increasing anxiety and stress around the ‘other’ tribes.

We can also show elsewhere in nature or social systems where defining other life as exploitable environment is how you create the grand cacophony of suffering that we see in nature, and you think the oh so brilliant humans would be able to recognize that and not do it to themselves. Unfortunately a few wealth addicted assholes have already become so parasitic that they intentionally attack and disable learning, communication, and empathy, because we out here parasite maxxing, and it’s tooootally fine if it makes a better life impossible for virtually everyone.

there’s a lot of “if you don’t vote for the establishment party you are throwing your vote away, and trump is 100% directly your fault” rhetorics that are meant to discourage that kind of stuff, but i absolutely do wish people didn’t just give up actually getting behind something that isn’t just a temporary slowdown on the road to corpo fascist dictatorship.

The story is impenetrable

actually thought the story was much more clear than in any of the souls games.

largely boils down to a bunch of cosmic forces trying to do their own thing or gain their own gains. we understand everything from the abandonment of metyr and her fingers, to the classic nobility/mythology relationship between the gods, lords, and extended family.

we know that gods can have two bodies, and that they can act against each-other. we see how the finger’s influence has affected all of this, and how ranni the witch is actually in a state of escaping that whole situation by killing the important half of her older brother, and less-important half of herself in order to escape the two fingers.

there’s way too much to even summarize succinctly, but i always find it baffling when people say the story is more vague than their other titles. lots of meat, and it all makes sense in the larger world they built, even if some questions are still left open.

also everything around radahn. what a tragic badass.

really love how scadu DLC resolved the family conflicts around ‘kindly’ miqella creating a sycophantic bubble that justifies his usurpation of other people’s autonomy, etc. actions of mohg and malenia making a lot more sense when you realize that, just like everyone else, are just tools for the cause.

the cause being fucking his really cool older brother who doesn’t seem interested.

i don’t remember a whole lot in the souls-verses resolving anywhere near as clearly as a lot of the stuff in elden ring.

also i think it’s much less “you’re supposed to suffer,” due to the RPG grow-as-you-explore vibe they went for, and many people complain about how you can make the game too easy, but i think it’s a good balance that makes sense with the world you’re exploring and how you explore it. except for the scadu DLC. the scadu DLC wants you to suffer.

Also the voting thing ignores the failure of electoral reform in preventing the two party system, and divorcing of the peoples intent from policy for the sake of lobbyist and corporate preference.

While more can be done locally, there have been think groups and other money-lead influencers affecting local efforts for as long as the heritage foundation has been supplying fascist mandates to USA presidents.

There were a lot of people trying to make that salient, and decide action in response to it, when suddenly all progressive groups decided the true threat was other progressive groups for some reason, and anyone trying to resolve that or encourage better communication or cooperation between progressive groups is actually secretly supporting the fascists somehow, because we out here dividing ourselves to be conquered.

Issue totally isn’t rich assholes with too much time and money pushing some policy sitting between feudalism, fascism, and whatever the fuck you would call what putin did to Russia.

I’ve been complaining about self segregation and communication issues for decades, and have been chastised/banned from a weird chunk of progressive spaces I’ve interacted with over this exact problem.

at this point we’d get much more entrepreneurship just helping people afford their basic means. you can’t start a personal business or project if all of your time goes into basic survival.

similar with copyright. it was there to give creators some buffer room before big wigs copy their design and distill it for their own market capture. now it exists purely to facilitate the hoarding of IP and market spaces/public salience for IP which small artists must compete with. disney types pushing copyright law to be less of a few year buffer for artists, and more a century post-artist-death so that it can be sold to disney/warner by living relatives, and disney/warner types get to claim that they ‘do something’ by ‘supplying’ constant slop (lion king 2019 is a good example for slopifying their own creations.) but all of this is more funny when you think about how much of early disney was only ever possible with the rich commons available for artists to use.

now we get billionaires pushing their companies with impossibly low prices or deals until they capture a market, and then hike everything to the n’th degree with automated and targeted pricing.

too many rich people fucking up too many things. art, commerce, politics. all made worse by rich people with too much time, and an addiction to number go up no matter how many must suffer or die.

now we have rich assholes arguing that having more capital should mean you get more political voting power, because somehow things aren’t already skewed enough to give rich people more autonomy over those who weren’t born with a silver spoon up their arse.

the lie of “just trust the rich more and give them more” has done incredible damage to every part of society.

/rant

The issue is the ever encroaching line of “I need this for basic survival” while people who are extracting the means for survival can’t seem to understand why ignoring the problem doesn’t solve their anxiety or continuing societal failures ensuring more and more people fall below the line of basic autonomy and survival.

Like “why do the Gays need to make so much noise” meets society forbidding gay marriage and classifying that entire way of being a an “illness” to justify past and future abuses

I this case, those who don’t want to suffer a prolonged and more dangerous pandemic because a few people are still pushing the Andrew wakefield hyper debunked MMR autism narrative, or any other social issue that makes finding peace extra difficult because you or your love ones are directly suffering or dying from these problems.

It’s like, offering someone some mindfulness advice after your dad poisoned their dog. Doesn’t help as much as you’d think.

with a group of people that has a bias towards a certain delusion, and/or high acceptance of directly scientifically contradictory beliefs, you can get a bubble and affirm themselves out of reality in the same way. i also wouldn’t suggest banning groups of people, but i believe with groups or with LLMs, a good grounding in scientific thinking is the best way to keep ‘stable’ away from delusion.

a shame that grants are being filtered by a project 2025 author right now, and a bunch of important science got cut by this admin.

also see it like mobile phones, which instead of being useful mobile personal computers, we got data collection bricks that has a skeleton of a few practical tools built into the soft edges of a giant gambling and addiction pipeline.

there’s a whole rant about the high-level psychological manipulation employed against average people just to make them more comfortable losing their money, which does not mean that portable personal computers are bad, but the failure of anti-trust and consumer protection has allowed all technological and social development to be hindered purely for the extractive demands of the people who actually get to decide what happens.

as long as you keep the general public too tired to think about it, you just have to convince them that some other small group is their tribal enemy and that’s where your collective focus and energy should be going, rather than the more simple answer of rich assholes being opportunistic and stupid/evil.

And an advertisement. I’ve been convinced that any time I see label front and center it’s just the morally gray arm of the already morally bankrupt concept of rich people being able to use excess money to make sure that their products are always more salient than other smaller or local suppliers, ensuring sales regardless of quality.

I think both a lot more of that, and intentionally divisive instigating content than people realize.

Almost like extreme excess of wealth and celebration of greeds will inevitably fuel itself by extracting autonomy, truth, and value out of every other space for interaction we want to care about.

Making yourself openly visible to the public turned into an unnecessary contest of being the MOST visible, which somehow takes more of societies energy overall than services for public good. Funny that.

Some people think it is anti progressive to point out when the “only viable voting option if you don’t want the fascists winning” does a 180 on their progressive promises and just do the same thing the fascists would.

On the note of voting options, I wonder how many remember the smaller parties gaining traction via voter reform, so the liberals started running on voter reform, and after Trudeau won he was immediately like “i didn’t realize THAT its what voter reform means, yeah I’m totally not doing that, liberals benefit from the two party system.”

And all momentum for voter reform was lost.

Thank God our government will always put in effort to stop the poor from potentially affecting the oligarchs bottom line.

It’s totally fine that antitrust is long dead though. The rogers merger is fine, and $70 insufficient funds charge is totally ethical and fine, etc.

It’s totally fine that the priority is so blatantly skewed towards the people who already own everything and want to ensure everyone else has no choice but to exist in their proprietary rent seeking environments, etc.

American companies and politicians are pushing Alberta separatist propaganda, but lucky our government is focused on making American companies especially comfortable like always.

Everything is totally fine.

Canada should absolutely be worried about the same cult idiocy running rampant. The thing is that a large part of this worry is intentional USA meddling from the current regime and surrounding groups like the heritage foundation and ATLAS network pushing shit like the convoy, maple maga, and Alberta separatism.

The last one is freaky because it’s what the USA generally does to a country before trying to claim that the people want the oil to be liberated by the USA. Makes the aggressive threats about the smoke even more appalling.

We can’t do as much about our own problems when they are mostly coming from across the border. Hopefully progressives globally can cooperatively figure out how to actively prevent this fascist shit from taking over, or neo-liberal faux progressives from claiming to be the resistance while servings the corruption and oligarchs

To OP personally, you are appreciated and I hope we can all find actions and methods of cooperation that can save us from this spreading cancer.