Yes, not only would the goals of key figures require something like a totalitarian state to implement, they clearly want a crackdown for it's own sake, having an almost psychosexual desire for boot-on-face fascism. Both temperamentally and practically, 'soft' authoritarianism seems off the table.
This seems true, but it has pretty dark implications, because the consistent historical trend is for radicals of this sort, when stymied, to ramp up the violence in an effort to break through.
I think some folks are expecting a 'soft' Hungary-style tyranny and I don't think that's in the cards.
a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society
The practicalities are absolutely important, but my takeaway is the regime unambiguously wants to rule without congress, is floating ideas + taking steps towards doing so, and short of some at-present unforeseeable crisis, they have at least ~15 months to keep pushing.
There's a fair few of those hanging from the fences next to major highways, and I've been getting a real kick out of them lately :) My favorite one is a huge piece of plywood painted white with TRUMP in clumsy red letters like a child or a serial killer wrote it.
I'm not condoning a certain course of action, but frankly, I'm not sure most people have really grasped the real world stakes here. An ethnofasict neo-Confederate faction in control of the US Military + nuclear arsenal is like, 30 seconds to midnight shit.
I'm quite rapidly becoming anti-anti-doomer because nine months of frogboiling has shown the fascists really don't have to be competent or popular to pull off their schemes if no meaningful resistance ever materializes.
Yeah, I recently had the opportunity to watch a VHS tape for the first time in many years, and I went in knowing the quality wasn't going to be great, but goddamn was it bad lmao
Yeah, and in old novels too it's almost completely elided over--can be jarring. Now we've got TV ads for everything from dickpills to douches, and don't forget everyone's favorite family of buttwiping bears. We've come so far 🥲
Now I'm not saying that Satan (Prince of Lies, the Great Deceiver) had a hand in making the Perfect Visual Deception Machine, but I'm also not NOT saying that.
The feeling in the pit of my stomach when considering the political situation has gone from an anxious "damn this is bad" to a giddy "we're in freefall."
Yeah, a potentially powerful tool for expression, but in practice (as I think we're already seeing with Sora) I suspect this platform would dredge up so much of the vilest sludge of the human spirit that it would basically recreate the monster from Skin of Evil in aggregate.
The cyberbullying among kids/teens is going to be absolutely unreal. Now instead of just spreading a rumor, you'll be able to create high quality video of them doing whatever embarrassing or grotesque thing you can imagine and share it with everyone at school. Gen video will have a body count.
Yes, the ease, scale and quality of fakes is so different there's really no comparison to what came before. And verifiability is only one aspect of the problem unfortunately. There are plenty of socially harmful uses even assuming every video ever made came with a big indelible watermark.
Seems like it's going to get messy, then messier, and just stay that way, short of cataclysmic technological regression. The human brain didn't evolve to deal with perfect visual deception, and while we'll try to adapt culturally, this tech is almost certainly going to be a big negative on net.
And the shitty part is, even if by magic every video generated by anyone, anywhere, from now until the day of judgment came with a permanent watermark, there's still a visceral impact to perfectly realistic video that isn't entirely counteracted by the knowledge that it's fake.
At some point I think it's possible for tech to exploit human brains/behavior so well that it exceeds society/culture's ability to meaningfully adapt short of draconian measures which the public will never support (see TikTok ban - threaten the dopamine spigot, and people will riot).
I hate this shit so much, man. Bad enough that it's even possible, but why did it have to be dropped on us at such a precarious moment. We're out here scaling a cliff and these dipshits just appeared on the ledge above us and started stomping on hands.
Yes, I understand why people are looking forward to it, but it's very much not clear that it'll be an improvement and might just be the spark that ignites the powder keg.
Me and the homies stroking the silkiest beards imaginable and watching some episodes of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (1994) - Fansubs by @hanzhonglang.bsky.social
Yeah, but at some point though even the incremental volume changes become quite noticeable. The family size bags of chips for a bunch of brands are now like, halfway between the old versions and fun size. It's insane!
Lately I've been mentally estimating the cost of a portion and imagining myself chowing down on that much in straight cash. A fair number of things have been going right back on the shelf.
