And who is likely to nominate an antivax, anti-science lunatic with brain worms to head the dept of Health and Human Services?
And who is planning to eliminate the department of education and NOAA?
Previous administrations have done damage through incompetence and/or malice, but the plan this time is on another level. They’re going in with the goal of breaking everything.
It isn’t the same. For one, the Supreme Court ruled only this year the the president has nearly king-like powers and immunity – which was only made possible because of the far-right justices he appointed (put forward by the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, who are also behind Project 2025), and he’ll get to appoint two more, bringing the balance from 5-4 to 7-2. That will give him literally unchecked power, which he didn’t have last time.
Have you read Project 2025? If not, you should. They learned a lot from the limitations they faced in 2016, and have worked this whole time to make sure they will have free reign this time.
It isn’t about trump. He’s just the frontman for a larger fascist movement, who now have the House, Congress, Supreme Court, and have infiltrated the legislature at the state level. They will enact Project 2025 and all they need from trump are rubber stamps between rounds of golf.
The whole reason they chose him was because he’s practically illiterate and insanely easy to manipulate. He doesn’t need to do anything except put his signature on whatever shit they put in front of him. And they have a comprehensive plan to dismantle democracy this time.
I’m not saying he wasn’t progressive for his time in the context of those stories, but progressive for his time still meant the utter suppression of women within the culture.
Women weren’t allowed to have opinions, conduct trade, or own property, because they were property themselves. eta: and Jesus didn’t explicitly say women should have those rights.
If you believe the bible is the infallible word of god, it shouldn’t be controversial that women are like livestock.
Now, you can rationalise progressive values by saying if Jesus was alive today, he wouldn’t have gone along with all that, but that’s just not what the bible actually says.
Yeah, contradictions are baked in, which is part of why it’s endured this long. But for the misogyny and sexism specifically, there aren’t really any contradictions.
Jesus never said woman are equal or slavery is wrong. You could maybe argue he didn’t condone the genocide of his father by saying lepers deserved compassion or whatever (though that’s also a stretch), but there’s plenty of misogyny and racism in the new testament as well, so he absolutely did not counter any of that.
Anyone trying to argue Jesus (an apocalyptic preacher who was a product of his time) wasn’t misogynistic doesn’t actually know scripture or history. The preacher in the article is absolutely following the gospel, even if that’s an uncomfortable truth.
They do cherry-pick, that’s true. But my point is you don’t have to cherry-pick to wind up at awful levels of misogyny and racism. If you take it at face value, misogyny and racism is the message you should take from it.
They can hand-wave some of it away with the whole ‘Jesus fulfilled the covenant’ nonsense (which is 109% cherry-picking), but throughout the whole thing, both old and new testaments, women are property and some races are meant to be slaves.
This is what fundamentalists – who famously don’t cherry-pick, but believe the literal word – believe. It’s atrocious, but their interpretation is literally correct.
Well, yeah. The bible was written in a place and time where women were property, like livestock, and if you actually believe those teachings (without doing mental gymnastics), that’s what you should believe.
The 10th commandment makes this pretty clear:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.
Women are included in the list of property you shall not covet, on the same level with your neighbour’s servants and livestock.
Modern christians try to whitewash the religion, but if you take it as it was written, women are akin to livestock.
Paying bills is for poor people. Rich people don’t need to do that. How would they stay rich?
Upper management deserves everything it gets. Middle management is often underpaid and expected to do all the jobs of their own plus their superiors.
Some *organisational tasks will always be needed. Middle management does that plus fielding some amount of customer service, plus a lot of what upper management takes credit for.
The system is fucked, but we shouldn’t let the people doing barely anything to earn their yachts turn us against those grinding their own bones to glue the grind-house together.
(No, I’m not a middle-manager.)
This shouldn’t be surprising. There are only so many ways to productively arrange organic compounds, and convergent evolution is well-known.
Given similar environmental pressure, immeasurable responses will be tried, and the most effective ones will self-select.
One place to start is this article from the Stanford Encyclopaedia on Philosophy: Conservatism.
It’s a lengthy read, but enlightening.
One highlight from the summary:
Most commentators regard conservatism as a modern political philosophy, even though it exhibits the standpoint of paternalism or authority, rather than freedom. As John Gray writes, while liberalism is the dominant political theory of the modern age, conservatism, despite appealing to tradition, is also a response to the challenges of modernity. The roots of all three standpoints “may be traced back to the crises of seventeenth-century England, but [they] crystallised into definite traditions of thought and practice only [after] the French Revolution” (Gray 1995: 78)
I recommend reading the sources linked in that article, as well.
eta: It’s worth noting that societies worldwide often see a resurgence in conservatism in response to social change, crises, and civil rights movements, which are without fail a fear response to threats to the social hierarchy. We can see this in real time.
It definitely did. I remember it vividly (I was alive back then). And I’m talking about the premium services, specifically (e: which was the point of my comparison: the premium paid services back then advertised no-ad service, then included ads, just like the premium streaming services are doing today).
Here’s an article from the NYT in 1981 on the topic:
WILL CABLE TV BE INVADED BY COMMERCIALS?
e: a quote:
Indeed, even pay television, once assumed to be secure from commercial interests, is attracting some attention as a potential vehicle for advertising. Admittedly, such leading pay cable services as Home Box Office and Showtime, whose programming consists primarily of theatrically released films, staunchly maintain that they will never accept advertising.
This has been studied, and the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires’ idea is actually wrong.
The real reason is because some people (especially conservatives, because it’s a core part of conservative ideology) believe that in order for society to work, a hierarchy must be maintained wherein the ‘deserving’ are at the top, and everyone else is in their rightful place. Any threat to the natural hierarchy will undo the societal order and bring chaos and carnage.
This is why Obama becoming president was such an affront – because his presence outside his ‘rightful place’ was an existential threat to the natural order.
This belief has its roots way back when feudalism began to fail and the moneyed classes needed to find a new way to retain their power – both capitalism and conservatism were born at that time, with ideologies shifting from birthright to ‘earned’ status, which enshrined the haves and have-nots into literally sacred structures of meritocracy and social darwinism, and colonialists specifically fostered strict adherence to the social order. It became ingrained culturally that adhering to your station, whatever it is, is crucial for society to function. That there’s honour in being a cog in the machine, and that not accepting your lot in life is a danger to everyone. (eta: this is mostly subconscious, but you can see it if you ask ‘why’ enough times of someone who idolises Musk, for example. You’ll eventually whittle them down to these themes.)
That’s a nutshell view of a complicated topic, but these people don’t believe they’ll strike gold one day. They believe people who are rich deserve to be treated as kings, for the same reason monarchist peasants did.
A: they’re betting most people will accept it, and they’re right. The same thing happened in the early 80s when cable television advertised themselves as the pay-for-ad-free service, then started sneaking ads in. People complained, sure, but we all saw the outcome. They got away with it.
B: Greed, capitalism, and fuck you.
Oh no. Now we’ll never hear from FlyingSquid again. RIP, fiend, we’ll mis
Have you tried doing this? I have, for *nearly a year, on the more ‘advanced’ pro versions. Yes, it will apologise and try again – and it gets progressively worse over time. There’s been a marked degradation as it progresses, and all the models are worse now at maintaining context and not hallucinating than they were several months ago.
LLMs aren’t the kind of AI that can evaluate themselves and improve like you’re suggesting. Their logic just doesn’t work like that. A true AI will come from an entirely different type of model, not from LLMs.
e: time. Wow, where did this year go?
The possibilities are endless.
Piranhas have dozens of uses. Food, bait, aesthetics/decor, pranks, weapons of surprise, scissors, evil lairs…
Where d I got karma???
Ooh, thanks for the reminder! Mine expires next year. Best renew it now before they fuck that up, too.