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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Is the judicial system different if a convicted felon’s base is energized?

    Technically yes, since the convicted felon is the president-elect and has literally changed the power balance of the judicial system already.

    Really though, it all comes down to risk. The more frenzied his base becomes, the more they let him get away with, and thus the more he will take advantage of that. Normally, I wouldn’t care about this, because if Republicans aren’t given this “feral consent” they’ll manufacture it themselves. But I pause because the actual benefits of this are so slim as to measure up poorly against even this low-level con. I mean, he’s in jail for a couple months — so what? Does that stop him from doing much of anything? Will he even care, when he knows he’ll leave it with just as much power as he had when he entered?

    Were it that he’d lost the election, I’d feel differently. But we don’t live in a sane world. What do we actually get out of this?


  • Trump is in a position where the rule of law scarcely affects him, regardless of what a judge sentences him to, because of the sheer quantity of political capital backing him. If this happened, he would spend a couple months in a cell and nothing else, at best. So if you think he should be arrested based exclusively on the law itself and no other reasons, sure, that’s justified. But I’m talking impact, here.

    I think the overall impact would be negative for the reasons given above. He’d face scarcely any truly proportionate punishment, would learn nothing, would lose nothing, and his supporters would become even more rabid. And all that would mean the political calculus for “is it worth it to commit fraud” either doesn’t change or goes even further in favor of “yes.” What’s the point, then, besides to make us feel a bit better until he inevitably gets released?



  • Maybe learn how to use it correctly in its current state

    The slop being talked about in this article was made by OpenAI themselves. You know, the company at the forefront of the genAI/LLM bubble, with billions of dollars of money behind it?

    I don’t know what kind of mythical standard it is that you believe generative AI is capable of, but when even the organization at the forefront of the tech can’t make this shit look good, you can’t exactly claim it’s a skill issue.




  • If they’re arguing that people should vote, or that they shouldn’t vote Green due to spoiler effects, then they’re not arguing with me, frankly.

    My position throughout this thread is that it’s folly to avoid pressuring Democrat tickets to improve their platform, not that anyone should abstain from voting or vote third party. I’m going to vote in November and it won’t be for the Greens. The key part is that I also plan to shame the Dem ticket for doing such a poor job in the meantime, too; they need to move left now, not later.


  • Believe me, I’ve got no qualms with you, in this thread or elsewhere. I upvoted several of your comments here because insofar as I can tell, you are right. I’m not defending the Greens in this thread and never have. I do not care for them.

    But I’m sure you’ve seen as I have the negative reactions that so frequently occur from so many when Harris’ platform or campaign are criticized. Anytime anyone tries to suggest that she is doing a terrible job of appealing to anyone left-of-center, all while playing ads that play up conservative talking points, it feels as though a barrage of comments is immediately launched to decry it. This is and has been extremely frustrating for me to constantly see, hence why I push back so much on it in this thread.

    And I can probably guess as to the feelings that motivate this; people quite possibly fear the criticism will undermine the election’s odds of not going towards a fascist. But this is still misplaced blame. If the Democrats lose this election, it’ll be their fault, not the fault of people like Flash Mob.



  • None of that changes anything about the fact that this is still the entirely wrong way to go about trying to win an election. The Democrats are letting people down and trying to win solely off of Trump being worse. You shouldn’t be surprised that this strategy does not resonate with people. If everyone here pressured the Democrats to do better instead of yelling at folks for not being jazzed about milquetoast-at-best non-promises, I can guarantee you voter turnout would be much better.







  • This is tangential, but am I the only one getting sick and tired of all the topics about China? The imperial core’s news industry’s obsession with the country has never been healthy, and none of the articles being posted have had me thinking any of that is changing. I’m seeing post after post, usually from the same two users, and I’m starting to worry that the line between “documenting the atrocities of an authoritarian country” and “sinophobia” might start to get blurry.

    To be clear, I’m not trying to point fingers. I don’t want to make assumptions about the users in question. I’ve just been seeing this for a few months now and it’s getting on my nerves, especially given the political climate of the United States.


  • I don’t personally believe everything’s so bad as it looks. There’s a lot to be mad about, for sure, but it’s worth remembering that fear and anger are some of the best-selling emotions the news has to offer. Doubly so if it’s about China. But none of that means that things are substantially worse than they used to be. Some of it is that things weren’t as good as we thought, some of it is that things are being made to look worse than they are.

    Either way, we didn’t start the fire.

    Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!” Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 — I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.” The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.” Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.


  • I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.

    That didn’t make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You’ll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.