Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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The Constitution is dead. Abstract rules cannot, have not, will not constrain human will.
We cannot agree on what the laws even are, and you propose law as a solution?
Blues have spent decades building systems to divert public money to their perception-shaping apparatus. They finance their political operations out of our taxes, we finance ours out of whatever spare change is left in our pockets. We must destroy their structures and build our own. We should have done this long ago, and there certainly is no excuse for failing to do it with whatever power remains to us and with whatever power we are able to acquire in the future. This is the best use political power can be turned to in the foreseeable future; failure to do so is abdication.
Cooperation with Blues is impossible. Anything that requires cooperation with Blues to function is no longer an option, hasn't been for at least a decade; this obviously includes any foreign war. The Blues have no solutions to any of the actual problems, with one notable exception, so other than that notable exception all those problems are going to get worse. This will make people increasingly angry, increasingly policy-starved, increasingly radical. That anger can and will be harnessed, by Reds or Blues. The only viable path forward is to use that power to make things legibly better, better in terms of actual outcomes, legibly in terms of perception of those outcomes. Long term costs don't matter when there is no long term. It is still conceivably possible to secure wins through political processes, and we should secure as many of them as possible through whatever time the final breakdown of the political process affords us.
Past that time, Shai LeBeouf, Shai LeBeouf, Shai LeBeouf.
Would you be kind enough to explain this to those of us who don't want to read horrible web fiction to get the reference?
Horrible?
Tried reading it once. Bailed after a chapter. I seriously do not get the appeal of some of the works recommended in rat-spheres.
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In the story,if you speak the name Shai LeBeouf aloud, Actual Cannibal Shia LeBeouf appears and kills you and many other people in the immediate vicinity. In that chapter, the antagonist exploits this fact to use the name as a cognitohazard suicide bomb.
I am using the reference as shorthand for actively working to destroy the existing sociopolitical structure in ways that are notably effective and difficult to reverse. Sociopolitical scorched earth tactics, literal scorched earth too where possible. The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble; this process is information-based, and it can be manipulated purely by participating in the search in a conscious and intentional manner, thus greatly increasing information flow and search efficiency. This can be done legally, safely, covertly, a switch analogue to Blues' employment of the dial. There's at least an argument that past a certain point it should be done. We are not at that point yet, but we probably moved significantly closer last night.
If not being ruled by people who hate you is a priority, it's probably better to destroy the throne and the crown and the fields, the bridge, the mill, than to allow the other side uncontested control of them. Blues did not actually get more reasonable or moderate last night, just more powerful. Or maybe I'm wrong, and they've learned their lessons, and we're in for an era of moderate, sensible centrism, lol, lmao.
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