It's the gym, the trainer, the social environment, and a million other things you wouldn't think of until you have boots on the ground, eg a language model can't sign a vendor liability contract. People thought the rise of the internet would kill gyms because anyone can download the routine for an Olympic athlete for free. Turns out access to information is not the same as execution. It happened multiple times with websites/apps/Peloton. Every time fitness culture skyrocketed and gyms have benefited.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
I think a lot of the people behind the rise of fascism are ones who experience "status anxiety" as a constant baseline. Actual safety through a government of laws will never appease them.
I am theoretically eligible to get 60% of my income for 3 months after losing my job, while I look for my new job. But if I actually try to claim that, they demand so many documents and meetings that it's not actually practical to receive that benefit. The only people who can receive benefits are the people who are experts at navigating the benefit system.
For instance, if you do not file a certain form on a certain exact day, then your benefits will not start until 3 months after you became unemployed. That is exactly the same time period this unemployment insurance benefit normally covers. By that time you should already have a job anyway and they will ask you to explain why you couldn't get a job in 3 months, since the benefit normally only covers 3 months.
Nobody will tell you how to navigate this. Nobody will tell you the correct form to fill out on the correct day. If you don't already know the arcane rules, you don't get the money. This is how most European social benefits work. They aren't actually provided to normal people.
There is lot of investment going in to fanning those flames - just look at the way the edges of this are discussed in the Epstein files.
Here in the UK, it is amazing to follow just how much money has been pumped into the various 'right of the Conservatives' parties for the last 15 years, while it might seem like a grass roots movement, the majority of the cash has been coming from those with vast wealth inside and outside the UK.
No, it doesn't solve any. You know this because of all the lying and child rape and murder. That's not how people who genuinely want to solve problems and improve society act.
It's basically just a power grab by a tiny fraction (< 1%) of the population against everyone else (including the rubes). And it doesn't make the rich happy either because we are social animals. It's better to be poor in Finland than super rich in Somalia.
Are you talking about the razor wire that the supreme court allowed the administration to remove from the Texas border? If so, a little disingenuous to say fences and barriors when talking about razor wire. If not, please cite your sources so we can all be informed.
Sure, but I would consider mines laid in a strait a barrier or fence, and I would consider the radiation at Chernobyl a barrier to entry, and I would consider a hedgerow a barrier or fence as well. I think it's important to specify the type of barrier or fence when discussing the removal of it, it's a long gray spectrum and not black and white.
It it generally legal in the USA to put a fence around my property, but it is not generally legal to put razor wire around my property, so even the US govt thinks there's a difference.
It's important to consider the words and the portrayal of events when discussing politically charged topics.
I always wonder what people who say these things think about the fact that we have someone in the white house who was mentioned in the Epstein files more than Jesus was mentioned in the bible. Whatever it takes to get rid of those pesky aliens right?
These are completely orthogonal. That’s cool if you want to appeal to an in group, but I think you’ll find that a huge portion of the country thinks that we should have rules around immigration. So do most other countries.
You should probably argue your actual position instead of “your guy bad my guy good”. This comment is more Reddit than HN.
I'm sorry this the this kind of (far-left) political comment that usually starts the argument from 'basic human decency' and gets to calls for mass murder in the span of a sentece or two is as hilarious as it is sad :(.
And unfortunately very common. I'm not sure what you think when posting this, but this wont endear people to your ideas.
I'm sure there are communities where this is a standard stance that gets cheered, which I'm sure a lot of people would find quite concerning.
The problem with political violence is that the other side will do the same thing, and you end up with an IRA situation where the country descends into sectarian violence.
>is that the other side will do it anyway and you end up dead.
Preemptive first strike logic[1] aside. This logic doesn't work because political violence never gets out of hand so fast that an entire political movement can be wiped out. On the other hand by starting/advocating for political violence you're almost certainly going to get the descent into sectarian violence before you can wipe out all the "fascists".
That just leads to the second problem. Do you think a few car bombs would have stopped Nazis in their tracks? Or it would just create even more antipathy towards Jews?
The Nazis succeeded in wiping out their opposition through violence. Why is that you think that Nazis were able to, but the German left (in this hypothetical) would not have been able to do so in kind?
Remember posts like this and how they are so glib in the face of the autocracy. They will gaslight you, make you feel like you are the crazy one, and be the first to say you deserved it when you have finally have had enough and decided to push back.
It’s posts like this and how they are so glib in the face of autisitic-level lack of empathy.
You people seriously can’t even for an instant entertain that you have been misled, lied to, it’s always those other people.
There is no topic you are wrong on, wow, amazing!
You aren’t the ones parroting a narrative (that always seemingly for no reason at all favors say… China), no no, it’s the other side, they’re the cult, they are the sheep, and they’re controlled by Koch’s or Jews or whatever.
If you grew up in the life of a conservative person, you would vote and think like them. End of story. You aren't special, you’re just another cog.
You aren’t morally superior, you aren’t even actually all that different from the people you have been told to hate. You’ve been conditioned that the world is ending by a trillions of dollars media campaign your entire life and that every person in power that doesn’t play a specific game is Hilter and fascism is on its way.
Consider this… what if you are the crazy one? How would you know it? Because you’re smarter? Because you have an innate ability to align with a group but somehow also maintained the ability to see outside of it?
We’ve never had an objectively better world for all humans, and yet you been programmed to subjectively consider it never worse. Hedonic treadmill doesn’t begin to cover it.
All your claims just sound like game to me. The good people are politically homeless, and you seem to be not that.
I don't want the country led by a malicious, bad-faith, sex predator, I don't care which side they are on; there is no amount of gas-lighting you can do to distract from that, no matter how much you want it to not be true.
I don’t like Trump, but I’m not programmed to hate either.
I am able to step outside a bubble. You think that everyone who doesn’t subscribe to orange man bad must be a cultist… that’s your perspective because it’s all you recognize in yourself.
When I am a fascist, I warrant being chucked into the sea. As far as I'm aware, I am not a fascist, even though actual fascists like to call everyone they disagree with a fascist and call for their execution.
That's the real problem: Fascists copy tactics, and most people are shallow. If you can call someone a fascist and murder them, fascists quickly learn to call everyone who isn't a fascist a fascist and murder them. There will not be a deep investigation into whether a person really is a fascist.
I'm not worried about political violence because I haven't been denying anyone's constitutional rights, stealing from The People, denying anyone's health insurance claims, or roughing up peaceful protesters and random brown people. I didn't layoff a bunch of people to make my quarterly numbers. I'm not so hated I have to live on a military base out of fear.
It seems pretty simple: Live a life where, if you get plugged, nobody's cheering and everyone's angry.
The Troubles had a lower per capita body count than Detroit during the 80s. Part of their doctrine was "bomb with warning", usually to maximize property damage without random civilian casualties.
(Still quite a bit of murder of informers, soldiers, lawyers, and a teenager who happened to be in the wrong car. As well as government snipers firing into a crowd, planting a bomb on a band, and so on)
>How many people died under the totalitarian regimes that preceded them? These oppressive regimes did not start in a vacuum.
You're proving my point. Political violence just leads to a cycle of more political violence and/or totalitarianism. The Chinese Communists, if you recall, were violently put down by the Nationalists in the civil war. Starting political violence to stop the "fascists", just condemns your society to that fate. Not to mention that people who engage in political violence aren't exactly the most sane people. What makes you think they'll stop at "fascists"? The Bolsheviks eventually turned against the Kulaks, once their allies, and Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to consolidate power and push out rivals.
Violence is coming whether you like it or not. People are already struggling and food prices will only go up this year given the buffoonery with antagonizing Iran. If we're going to have violence either way, I sure know where I'd prefer it be directed. I leave it as an exercise to the student to make up their mind on where it should be. I'm sure the answers are Legion.
What? No, it isn't inevitable that the US descends into sectarian violence. What a silly notion. There remains more that unites us than divides us.
If the US does descend into violence, the blame can be squarely assigned to the propagandists (typically but not uniformly supporting the right wing) for twisting reality and making people feel their lives are under constant attack. How many Baby Boomer and older Gen X relations in your life are afraid to go to the mall or fear an apartment building being built in their local neighborhood for perceived increases to crime rates (versus standard NIMBYism of higher traffic issues)? Anecdotally, the FOX and ONAN and NEWSMAX views in my world declare every summer will lead to a race war. None of the "mainstream" media views think twice about that before being threatened by the federal government.
We are definitely more in agreement than disagreement.
Yes, the communist regimes were absolutely awful - both from nuts-and-bolts logistics failures as well as what was described in an earlier thread here as "prerogative" application of the law.
Yes? At least in the US, the GOP has been working relentlessly for most of my life to reduce welfare, to reduce Medicaid, to make unionization difficult and to neuter existing unions, and most of all, cut taxes on the rich.
Right, so the idea is that right wing policy of cutting support systems is fueling right wing growth. People are dumb, or this is what they want? Both? Lol Seems weird though
The playbook has been to manipulate "low-information voters" by promising that you will attack a marginalized group of people. Get the voters to believe that you are on their side by echoing the fear and hatred they have for The Enemy.
Action against The Enemy replaces any action to directly address economic and social marginalization.
It's how we process information. Avoiding this cognitive glitch takes practice.
> Confusing, the right are the ones advocating for cutting these things?
This is where the racism comes in. As long as you believe that the social safety net cuts are disproportionally hurting the "other" more than you, you have plenty of space for the cognitive dissonance required to support the cuts even when they are negatively impacting your own situation.
Combine this with the fact that the right has two tiers, one of them made up of wealthy asset owners who politically push for the changes (and benefit from them in the form of extremely low taxes) and the second made up of working class people who can be convinced the changes are good as long it allows them to think those they see as below them will suffer more than they will.
Get yourself a nice feedback loop going in the form of hurting the poor, convincing them the source of their oppression is the "other" to get them to support even more austerity, repeat and you can explain a lot about the politics of much of rural America.
I would be very happy to do so if we had working infrastructure, education, and health care not coupled to the generosity of your employer.
Isn’t it the case anyway that if you add state, federal, local, property, capital gains, and sales taxes, add the money that you and your employer pays for healthcare, that you’re basically paying slightly more in taxes all-in?
What do you think “welfare state” means? Do you think “European-style” salaries solely occur because “European-style” people, for instance, have a different healthcare system?
The full translation took 7hrs and $400 in tokens. Applying diffs every quarter using AI is much easier and cheaper. Software engineering has completely changed.
except there are 2 go implementations already, and he burnt 500k per year to have a kubernetes clusters to parse json (???), so the total gain is -500000*year - 400 + 1 (deducting prompt to use existing implementation)
Yeah that’s called karma, the force of your intentions. It matters a lot. You can do good things with evil in your heart, and they come out evil. Like giving a nice gift, with strings attached.
> ... but was unable to renounce his hopes of what he eagerly desired. (Power)
Yeah that last bit is key. As MLK said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. You can't just sit at the beach, because humans are hungry animals and you're probably somewhere in that chain (Rome → Italy → Sicily → Carthage → Greece).
reply