knob
30d ago
I’m not sure if you missed the comment I was replying to but this is meant to be a steelman of a perspective I’m arguing against. These are not my views and I disagree with most of them.
Sure.
The very wealthiest people (some very small fraction of the top 1%) are now richer as a percentage of total wealth than they’ve ever been. They could not spend their wealth over the course of their lives, and they are all well past the point where an additional million or even billion makes a meaningful impact on their quality of life. At the same time, many Americans who arguably work just as hard as these people in terms of effort and working hours struggle to get needs like healthcare and shelter met.
The government’s job is to support the health and wellbeing of its people, but to make matters worse, the government is unable or unwilling to help regular working-class people. This is because this segment of wealthy people are able to buy political influence that cashes out either in government services being worse or nonexistent (because the wealthy buy themselves tax cuts), or in corporations (owned and operated by the wealthy) achieving regulatory capture, meaning laws are written to favor allowing corporations to make more money at the expense of customer experience.
Combine this with the emerging trend of companies actually abandoning lower-cost offerings targeting the poor and working class in favor of doubling down on high-cost offerings targeting the wealthy, and you start to see a society that treats anyone but the most wealthy as essentially discardable slaves that might actually be worth more turned into biodiesel. Even worse, these AI freaks are talking about completely replacing labor with capital, eliminating the need of the ruling class to at least act like they care about the working class.
The solution then appears to be to tax the wealthy more, and eliminate their ability to buy influence in politics. Taxing them would have almost no discernible impact on their lives but would have a very positive impact on the lives of normal people. But, the wealthy are now so thoroughly entrenched that there seems to be no way for the voices of millions of working-class people to effect change via normal, respectable, political advocacy. You can protest all you want, but tomorrow a billionaire will write a check to [insert politician] and that’ll be it. And so, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.
Edit: I’ve amended “top 1%” to be more narrow as what I said isn’t actually even true of the 1%.
knob
30d ago
A week ago OpenAI published an AI industrial policy document that lists many ideas for how to distribute wealth. Some things it includes are: creation of a public wealth fund that gives all citizens stake in AI-driven growth, increasing the capital-gains and corporate tax rates, and expanding workers benefits as an “efficiency dividend” (including suggestion of a 32 hour work week). They did not have to do this and yet they did. I don’t think actually following through on such an assurance is something any lone company could do, so their duty is to lobby the government to take such action. This is them doing that.
knob
30d ago
I mean the arsonist is known at this point to be an adherent to the Pause/Stop AI movement, they were active in the Discord and iirc their Instagram bio or handle references Dune’s Butlerian jihad. So I would lean towards that guy having at least directed his outrage in a fairly reasonable fashion given his views. I think he severely overestimated how much his actions will materially work towards his goals.
knob
30d ago
To my knowledge Sam Altman does not possess any of the characteristics you’ve listed here. He consistently states he wants the benefit of the technology his company is developing to be widely distributed and documents of his internal communications with Elon and his co-founders (from their ongoing trial) show that this a sincere concern of his.
Why should people feel any loyalty to an elite
No one is asking for loyalty to the elite, I’m asking for “loyalty” (if you want to call it that) to the basic expectation of liberal democracy that you don’t just try to kill people because you disagree with them.
Billionaires and corporations bad, wealth inequality bad, all my problems are caused by these things, so now they’re just getting what they rightly deserve. Same as the Luigi nonsense.
Edit: I’ll add that this all seems to me to be downstream of a belief in labor theory of value and a lack of understanding of what markets do and why they might be good. Same people who thought that pandemic-era inflation was actually just Greedflation. You can only come to believe such a thing if you have no understanding of supply and demand and the price mechanism, and what the government clamping down on these would actually cause.
knob
30d ago
As someone in that age range I feel complete contempt for the Luigi worshippers and anti-AI/data center people and can’t relate to their worldview at all. The friends I have in this camp are exactly the people I would expect, namely those who have a dogshit understanding of, well, everything, and have lived pretty coddled lives. I want this trend to stop immediately (I work not in Silicon Valley but at a company that is deeply important to the AI boom) but have no faith that it will. If the violence against AI companies proceeds up the supply chain in a sort of real life Butlerian Jihad I’ll probably be killed sometime in late 2027.
I have close to 0 sympathy for the world view driving this stuff. I myself suffer from at least a few of the grievances that people commonly ascribe to my generation (owning a house seemingly further out of reach every year, politically homeless, dealing with Boomerism in every facet of adult life), yet I don’t see how desiring to kill CEOs and protest data centers and burn down warehouses would solve any of it. It makes sense only if you have a completely cartoonish perspective on life informed entirely by fiction. It’s the mindset of a toddler throwing a tantrum. In fact, I think such things exacerbate almost all of the problems underlying the aforementioned grievances. I think due to fertility collapse the developed world essentially needs transformative AI to remain the developed world. It is the least bad solution by far. That people don’t understand this and actually believe the opposite enrages me. Young so-called progressives are now actually the most conservative (in the sense of opposing Progress) force in society. It’s environmentalists against nuclear all over again.
knob
1mo ago
How are you updating on last night + this morning's news? Peace talks totally fell through, the US Navy will blockade the Strait.
knob
3mo ago
To the people who object to Bad Bunny's raising of the Puerto Rican flag (setting the other LatAm flags aside), would you have the same objection to a country artist waving the Texan flag? I know many Texans who have a lot of pride in their home state and like its flag, and have bumper stickers of it and such. They definitely lean into the "Republic of Texas" thing a bit, and some would probably say they're Texan first before they're American. And Texas definitely has a distinct culture within the US. I only mention it because Texas, like Puerto Rico, was once a sovereign country and is now part of the US, with the difference being that Puerto Rico is of course not a state, it's a territory. Is the dividing line between the Texas flag being ok and the Puerto Rican flag not being ok that Texas the State is inhabited not by its pre-US population, but mostly now people who are closer to descendants of "heritage" Americans? Whereas that is not the case for Puerto Rico?
The other perhaps worse but comparable case is the flying of the Confederate Flag by American Southerners, which was maybe common at country events quite a number of years ago, but I won't get into that because I'm not really under any illusion that that would be allowed at a Super Bowl half-time show now, and (probably) has never been. I believe most if not all big country artists have also stopped that sort of thing at their own concerts too.
knob
3mo ago
DNI director seizing Georgia ballots just weeks after the takeover of Venezuela
Genuinely asking here, what is the connection between these two that you're alluding to?
knob
3mo ago
I actually disagree. The rhetoric from the administration over the last 24 hours is losing normies, independents, 2A die-hards, and probably even some formerly committed MAGA people. They're compressing their base into a small bloc of only the absolute most die-hard Trump cultists and it's going to cost them. If they'd admitted fault I think it'd buy them a lot of credibility with the remaining "normal" supporters. Doubling down alienates them.
knob
3mo ago
Yeah, after seeing more video it does seem like they disarmed him during (one of the agents is shown to have his gun, the same one that can be seen taking it from him during the struggle) and that one agent did fire the first shot. Real bad and none of the angles is redeeming the administration. No idea why they're doubling down on the "domestic terrorist" rhetoric. They're out of control.
I've watched the video a bunch of times and it's unclear to me where the first shot comes from, which this entire thing hinges on. IMO we need the footage from the lady in the pink who was right there. If we're to believe the posted photo of the weapon from DHS, it is a SIG, though I'm not sure if it's a P320. The only thing I want to add to the discussion is the dark possibility that if this is a P320, there's a small but non-zero chance that this is another case of a self-discharging P320, which caused the agents here to believe he had fired at them and caused them to unload on him.
Edit: her video is linked in this thread and it's not looking good for the agents but also it's still unclear if the guy could have pulled a gun. I'm leaning towards bad shoot.
knob
4mo ago
lib here, literally don't give a fuck about Bill Clinton, he can rot with the rest of them. Furthermore, nobody I know irl cares about him, and no prominent lib politicians or media figures I've seen care about it either. Everybody I've seen comment on it is saying if he's guilty he can hang. You're making up libs in your head and getting mad at them.
knob
6mo ago
I mean this is equally speculation on your part that the guy is just some libtard of the type you describe. I don’t have much else to say on this other than that I agree the bodycam footage would be good to see and I hope it comes out, though I’m not optimistic that it will. I do acknowledge that often bodycam footage shows quite a different story than what media reports, so if that’s the case here it’s in ICE’s interest to release it.
knob
6mo ago
bitching like a Karen
muzzle these retards first
If your reaction to this is to make fun of a guy acting the way most people in his situation would act, and then express anger at the people protesting it instead of the federal agents actually doing it, you’ve lost me and most Americans, and you’re gonna see it at the ballot box.
knob
6mo ago
So upfront, I basically think every illegal alien criminal has to go. Non-criminal illegal aliens I care less, but I do agree that it’s hard to make the case that they shouldn’t also go.
I object to the current DHS, CBP, ICE behavior on the basis of the collateral damage they seem to be ok inflicting on actual US citizens who aren’t even bothering them. One incident that hits pretty close to home for me since I’m a runner is this case in Chicago where a 70yr old white guy was driving back from his run club and found agents blocking his driveway with their cars. From what I’ve heard from friends in the area, the agents asked him once to back up, didn’t give him a chance to comply, and proceeded to drag him out of his car and kneel on his back, breaking 6 of his ribs. He was training to run the NYC marathon this past weekend, and this meant he had to miss the race. Months of work down the drain for pretty much no reason. You can find plenty of videos of it if you search.
Yeah this is one incident, but I keep seeing stuff like it. Stuff like agents pulling their gun on citizens for almost nothing, etc. Again, US citizens minding their own business. I’m sorry but my desire to have all illegal immigrants go does not outweigh my desire to not have a risk of being attacked in that manner by agents of the state. You might tell me to avoid seeking out trouble by following ICE around like some people do, but this guy was literally just trying to get into his own house. I’m chalking this up to extremely poor training due to the pace this admin feels they have to deport people at, and the resulting increase in headcount they’ve had to do. But I simply don’t think that behavior like this is what Trump voters voted for when they voted for immigration enforcement. Assaulting an old man who wasn’t even impeding their activities is in no way a necessary part of deporting illegals.
knob
6mo ago
I see this “They just walked around a government building for a few hours” thing all the time and I think it’s a pretty dishonest way of downplaying what happened. Was it a real insurrection attempt that had any chance of working, like the most hysterical people on the left say? In my opinion, no. But a police officer died probably as a result of it, and by all outward appearances it was intended to stop the certification of the election. And intentions do matter. Republicans would rightly freak out if a mob of libs tried the exact same thing and entered the Capitol during the certification of Trump’s win in 2024, even if it didn’t work.
And because the BLM riots always get brought up as a counterexample, yeah, those were also bad and did much more damage. There is a lot of hypocrisy in how these two events were covered and the subsequent reactions to them. I don’t have a problem saying both are bad, and we should be honest about what actually went down in both cases.
knob
6mo ago
I don't believe the fake electors plan falls inside of that explicitly defined process. The memos and testimony we have now show:
- Trump's team knew the plan conflicted with the Electoral Count Act of 1887
- Pence’s own counsel told him he lacked the unilateral authority to pick or reject electors as the plan would have required
- The fake electors did meet and draw up their own certifications, showing that this was more than just some idea they dreamed up, they really did intend to go through with it
knob
6mo ago
What he initially did: make his case in court, where he had the opportunity to show evidence of vote tampering or other forms of fraud significant enough to change the outcome of the election. It was his right to do that, and it's good that we allow it in our justice system. After he lost all these cases, he should have conceded and let it be. Instead he continued to pursue hanging onto the office via other means with much less legal justification behind them.
knob
6mo ago
I consider myself pretty much a centrist. I don't like the left and I don't like the right. And I think Trump's actions during the 2020 election are inexcusable and, if not legally, then morally, disqualifying for holding the office of President. That was basically the line in the sand for me and my registered Republican family members who voted for him the first time around. They didn't vote for him again (as far as I know), and they might have if it weren't for 2020. So I do think I have at least some knowledge of what centrists think.
Seeing language on Wikipedia claiming he "devised a scheme" doesn't do much to convince me of the neutrality of the sources reporting on it.
This seems overly uncharitable to me. Of course we can never truly know, but say he had done what the Wikipedia article says. What language would you expect or want them to use? "Devising a scheme" is just straightforwardly what one would call that.
knob
6mo ago
that would push every centrist like me, who doesn't take anything Trump says about himself seriously nor takes anything Trump's detractors say about him seriously, into a realization that Trump is in fact a threat to American democracy. It would prove every leftist correct, that Trump is the worst thing ever, a wannabe dictator, the whole thing.
Strongly disagree. I think there's probably very few people who aren't already convinced of this that would then become convinced by him trying a 3rd term. He already tried to hang on to power after an election whose results he disagreed with via very legally dubious means. I don't get the reasoning that sees the fake electors plot and concludes "Yeah, now that he attempted that and faced no consequences, won reelection, and has a Supreme Court ruling now saying he can't face any criminal liability for his actions as President, he probably won't try anything like it again".
knob
6mo ago
In my view it's precisely because this would be complex that Trump supporters would be fine with it. Anyone opposed could be cast as a lame nerd quibbling over boring legal language.
They're following a leader, because they believe that in the big picture their leader wants what they want and fights for it, and what they want is for America to get back to being a great country ... If nothing else, those sort of shenanigans are too complex to appeal to anybody but political obsessives, they inherently turn off normal people.
a. ) I don't think this is incompatible with him trying to get a 3rd term? If he's fighting for them, why would they want him to stop? Bannon basically says as much in the interview I linked. They have a vision, the base likes the vision, and they need at least 4 more years after this term to complete it.
b.) Many, many things Trump does inherently turn off normal people, and it hasn't seemed to matter much.
“Top 1%” is what’s commonly used by the people I’m arguing against, I had a feeling it might not be literally be the 1% but I didn’t feel like looking up exactly what fraction of a percent it was. I’ve edited my comment to be more correct.
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