Here’s how this works:

1. Network is created that doesn’t discriminate on speech.
2. The left wins debates and it becomes increasingly liberal over time.
3. Far right billionaires buy it to stop those process.

It’s the 48 Star American flag, thus it’s the German American Bund in the 30s. To be fair to the literal Nazis pictured it’s before the holocaust was discovered. It’s not AI, it appears in this 2017 article: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-the-1930sthe-german-american-bund/529185/

They’re really against anything nice that can be achieved through cooperation, aren’t they?

Nah they would just invent new races. What’s the point of race? What does it mean exactly? Notice that the races in the US at least roughly align with economic classes.

That’s not an accident. Obviously without the concept of races, people would still have different skin color and hair, but the implications would be entirely different. Culture, neighborhoods, etc. wouldn’t be separated. And most importantly, it would be ever so slightly harder for rich people to make the majority feel like they’re in the same group as them as opposed to some “other”.

So if there was only one race, the rich would need to invent new ones.

The Democrats had it during their entire presidency

Specificity is the path to the truth. People call out for “the list”, but don’t seem to know exactly what this is. Given that all this activity is illegal, there’s little point in storing a list of illegal sex clients in QuickBooks.

Instead, the closest thing would probably be a contact list, with people who were in on it and not mixed in. Prosecutors definitely have such a list, as it was shown in court - exhibit “GX52”. This list was partly shown in the Maxwell trial, but also sealed by the judge - not Democrats. Supposedly it contains “many, many, many, many names” including some with “massage at Palm Beach”.

Now you could say, why didn’t Biden tell the DOJ to release that list. Probably for the same reason he didn’t tell them to drop the prosecution of Hunter, which he later pardoned him for. Be cynical as you want about the separation of the DOJ and the president, (which Trump has consistently ignored) Biden did make a show of upholding it. And releasing the list to embarrass Trump would be a pretty blatant violation of that principle. It would also probably violate the seal order, making DOJ attorneys vulnerable to contempt.

I get that this is upvoted a lot due to being constructive but it also reflects a lot of Republican media tropes about the left that aren’t really true - and that’s why trying to “fix” these things won’t work - because it misses the real problem.

Examples: No significant figure on the left is saying “men are rapists”, or telling men to be more like women, etc. Reducing suicide, safer workplaces, and reducing excessive prison sentences are all priorities for the left and not for the right.

I think the real problem is quite simple: Republicans have invested heavily in portraying themselves as the “masculine party”, and in driving the narratives I’ve mentioned. And because Republican leaders like the Murdochs and Elon tend to be men, they’re best at driving those narratives.

Which goes to the real underlying problem with the left as a whole - no ability to drive or counter a media narrative. The right has Fox news and Elon’s control over Twitter, which they can and do regularly use to create whatever narrative they want. Notice how for example they just made white south African farmer killings a topic all of a sudden. The left has a bunch of corporate media whose top priority is selling truck ads. Sure, maybe the reporters themselves are left leaning, but they have no top down guidance as to what narratives to build.

And until the left creates some sort of media capability to create and control narratives, the right will always have a leg up. And because of that, none of the well intentioned ideas here will actually work. If the left tries to appeal to men, the right will decide how those appeals will be interpreted.

Bill Maher used to be a right leaning “centrist” when he was running politically incorrect in the 90s. His politics never changed, he just got critical of crazy Republican shit like the Iraq war and then Trump ignoring elections.

A certain percentage of all people are bloodthirsty monsters, especially when it comes to people unlike themselves.

And anyone who thinks this problem is caused by no one trying to use a bomb, gun, or flamethrower to solve it is the biggest idiot in planet earth.

To be fair, that grey tree trunk looked a lot like a road

The left is shockingly asleep about how bad this is. X still is the single most important platform for driving narratives about the news and politics. And it’s still important in part because Democrats and the left as a whole have been lethargic in leaving it. The fact that it’s blatantly being used to tilt the national political discussion in whatever direction Elon wants was probably one of many keys to getting Trump elected in 2024, and should be regarded as an ongoing emergency for Democrats and the left.

Differences in matters of taste leads to disgust

The most politically incorrect truth is this: People are not good or bad, individual people do a variety of good and bad things. Mister Rogers told his gay friend to stay in the closet and marry a woman. Hitler banned animal cruelty. We don’t like to talk about these things, but it’s a true principle and a useful one to live by.

People create content knowing others are going to get filthy rich off it and they’ll get nothing in return. Except total loss of privacy.

The country was in decline for at least a decade before Trump took office.

Well 4 years of that decade was Trump being in office, and 4 other years was the result of people being willing to vote in literally anyone who wasn’t him. So really 8 years of that decade was Trump’s fault. And the other two years? Not bad.

As for the rest, Trump is cutting funding for research like crazy. That won’t just affect things today, that’s going to make stuff shitty for decades. And that’s exactly the kind of harm that the emotion-laden American news and social media simply won’t cover. So I don’t think there will be a backlash, rather the opposite - politicians will realize bullying scientists, government agencies, immigrants, and other voiceless Trump targets is just good politics, and keep doing it.

Of course future prediction is hard, so who knows what will happen. But I’m not seeing the path for this to turn around anytime soon. The same media that created MAGA, and made it even more popular 4 years after it proved itself to be a horrific disaster is the same media we have today. Democrats will probably win the next two elections because people can see what Trump is doing in real time, but after that I have no hope for America. If I have to predict the future, I’d guess the EU becomes the new global leader, driven by relatively high democracy and pro-science policies compared to the rest of the world. This could even occur in a relatively short time frame, like 5 years.

I’m plenty open to questioning every part of copyright (has the idea ever actually been proven to be worth the enormous costs? It’s like an infinity-percent tariff on anything information related.) but the same copyright should apply to everbody. It sounds like this proposal gives a specific pass to corporations developing AI - anything these corporations can access should be accessible to the general public as well. If you can use a song to train an AI for free, a human artist should also be allowed to use it directly and turn it into a new work.

I can’t help but read this while replacing “rock” with “large language model”

Heuristics that almost always work. Hmm.

AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying “Hello World!”
AI Programmer: “What a sensible requirement! Here you go.”
AI Billing Department: “Project completed, that’ll be 10 million dollars.”
Client AI Payments Department: “Sounds right, paid!”

Notice how this gets so much less attention that it did during the campaign even though its only gotten worse. Just remember: many of the people who claim to care, don’t. And if you actually want to stop this, it needs to start with putting people in power who actually care about stopping it. If there isn’t one in the general, that means this didn’t happen during the primaries.

I mean that’s a pretty easy choice for me

BlueSky may not be ideal, but anything is better than X.

X is just a machine for turning billionaire cash into political domination.