There. It isn’t even a “real” racism, it’s more of a flamebait, where the more outrageous and deranged a take is, the more likely it would captivate attention and possibly even provoke a reaction. Most likely they primarily wanted to earn some buck from viewer engagement, and didn’t care about the ethics of it. Maybe they also had the racist agendas, maybe not - but that’s just not the core of it.

And in the same spirit, the issue is not really racism or AI videos, but perversely incentivized attention economics. It just happened to manifest this way, but it could’ve been anything else - this is merely what happened to hit some journalist mental filters (suggesting that “racism” headlines attract attention those days, and so does “AI”).

And the only low-harm way - that I can think of - how to put this genie back in the bottle is to make sure everyone is well aware about how their attention is the new currency in the modern age, and spend it wisely, being aware about the addictive and self-reinforcing nature of some systems.

Generating and distributing racist materials is racist regardless of the intent, even if the person "doesn't mean it".

Simple thought experiment: If the content was CSAM, would you still excuse the perpetrators as victims of perversely incentivized attention economics?

Racism is just less legally dangerous. There would be people posting snuff or CSAM videos, would that “sell”. Make social networks tough on racism and it’ll be sexism next day. Or extremist politics. Or animal abuse. Or, really, anything, as long as people strongly react to it.

But, yeah, to avoid any misunderstanding - I didn’t mean to say racism isn’t an issue. It is racist, it’s bad, I don’t argue any otherwise. All I want to stress is that it’s not the real issue here, merely a particular manifestation.

But, yeah, as weird as it may sound, you don’t have to be racist (as in believing in racist ideas) to be a racist troll (propagate racist ideas). Publishing and agreeing with are different things, and they don’t always overlap (even if they frequently do). He who had not ever said or wrote some BS without believing a single iota of it but because they wanted to make some effect, throw the stone.

And not sure how sarcastic you were, but nothing I’ve said could possibly mean if something is offensive it’s what somehow makes it less racist.

Exactly. Racism has nothing to do with what people say or do, it’s a sort of vibe, so really there is no way of telling if anything or anyone is Real Racist versus fake racist. It is important to point this out b

If you refuse to distinguish between someone who genuinely believes in concept of a race, or postulates an inherent supremacy of some particular set of biological and/or sociocultural traits, and someone who merely talks edgy shit they heard somewhere and haven’t given it much thought - then I’m not entirely sure how can I persuade you to see the distinction I do.

But I believe this difference exists and is important because different causes require different approaches. Online trolls, engagement farmers, and bonehead racists are (somewhat overlapping but generally) different kind of people. And any of those can post racist content.

I keep trying to explain that no, it’s not real racism because if you can imagine that it’s not real, it must not be real but then he says “Who made you the arbiter of racism?” and “What purpose on God’s Green Earth does it serve anyone, in any context, to chime in unprompted that you choose to sort racism into real and fake piles? Like what do you get out of that?”

Anyway I explained that it’s fake racism because it’s just somebody that wants attention and he said “racists can want attention too” and “seems like you’re just doing gymnastics to invent excuses for people online that you don’t even know why are you doing that” so I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye on this because he incorrectly defines racism as a “real phenomenon” that “affects real people” and is “perpetuated by people’s actions”, whereas I know that what he’s describing is fake racism, because real racism is a little thing people feel in their hearts.

Seems like anybody could plainly see that fake racism is when people say or do real racist things in the world and real racism is intangible, not really strictly “real”, but the guy’s a kook so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Admittedly that didn't satirize CSAM material, rather it cut hard into the reflexive reaction people have at the very thought of CSAM and peodophiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedogeddon

Moreover, that took a human to thread that needle, it'll be a while before AI generation can pass through that strange valley.

i.e. delete your facebook, your tiktok, your youtube and return to calling people on your flip phone and writing letters (or at least emails). I say this without irony (The Sonim XP3+ is a decent device). all the social networking on smart phones has not been a net positive in most people's lives, I don't really know why we sleep walked into it. I'm open to ideas how to make living "IRL" more palatable than cyberspace. It's like telling people to stop smoking cigarettes. I guess we just have to reach a critical mass of people who can do without it and lobby public spaces to ban it. Concert venues and schools are already playing with it by forcing everyone to put their phones in those faraday baggies so maybe it's not outlandish.

That sounds like an abstinence-type approach. Not saying that it's not a valid option (and it can be the only effective option in case of a severe addiction), but it's certainly not the only way that could work. Put simply, you don't have to give up on modern technology just because they pose some dangers (but you totally can, if you want to, of course).

I can personally vouch for just remembering to ask myself "what I'm currently doing, how I'm feeling right now, and what do I want?" when I notice I'm mindlessly scrolling some online feeds. Just realizing that I'm bored so much I'm willing to figuratively dumpster-dive in hope of stumbling upon something interesting (and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this, but I must be aware that this interesting thing will be very brief by design, so unless I'm just looking for inspiration and then moving somewhere else, I'm not really doing anything to alleviate my boredom) can be quite empowering. ;-)

> all the social networking on smart phones has not been a net positive in most people's lives

Why do you think so? I'm not disagreeing, but asking because I know plenty of individual examples, but I'm personally not feeling comfortable enough to make it generalization (because it's hard) and wonder what makes you do.

I think the harm done by circulating racist media is "real" racism regardless of whether someone is doing it because they have hateful ideology, are profiting for it, or just having a good time.

Gonna be hard to admit, but mandatory identity verification like in Korea, i.e attaching real consequences to what happens in the internet is more realistic way this is going to be solved. We've have "critical thinking" programs for decades, it's completely pointless on a aggregate scale, primairly because the majority aren't interested in the truth. Save for their specific expertise, it's quite common for even academics to easily fall into misinformation bubbles.

No offense meant, but unless you know of an experiment that indicated an absence of statistically significant effect of education programs on collective behaviors; especially one that established a causality like you stated, I would dare to suspect that it's not an accurate portrayal of things, but more of an emotionally driven but not entirely factual response.

> mandatory identity verification like in Korea, i.e attaching real consequences to what happens in the internet

I'm not sure I understand the idea. Is it about making it easier for law enforcement to identify authors of online posts, or about real-name policies and peer pressure, or, possibly, something else?

Last time I've checked, kdeconnect-ios was unable to read any third-party notifications, not to mention doing anything to them or modifying their text or appearance in any way.

Project readme still says "Notification syncing doesn't work because iOS applications can't access notifications of other apps" (https://github.com/KDE/kdeconnect-ios?tab=readme-ov-file#kno...) so I think it's still a thing.

Let the enshittified apps' ads interact with your AI agent and steal your fake "data" in the background without bothering the user.

Also important: It must be IMPOSSIBLE for any app to detect that its requests are being intercepted by your agent. (If they can tell, they'll refuse to work until you give them direct access.)

This is a real killer app for AI but you'll never get VC funding to build it.

But of course you need a rooted phone, and rooted phones can't run banking apps, tap-to-pay, Netflix, Pokemon Go, blah blah..

The notification "firewall" is probably not impossible to make. I use Pushbullet, it mirrors notifications to my computer (to the browser extension to be exact), and I can already dismiss notifications coming into my phone from the computer. It should be possible to make an app that intercepts all notifications, analyzes their contents and dismiss them if they're spam...

I would like to suggest a different lens to look at it through. In my understanding, we merely had a very brief period of time where a probability of mass audiovisual media from an untrusted source being an inaccurate portrayal of events was low enough we very rarely bothered to actively think about it and consider if it could be "fake". Or I would rather say "artist depiction", to make it match pre-mass-photography world more accurately.

All that changes is this probability. It used to take a lot of resources to make a good realistic-looking media, now it's becoming a commodity. What required a resources available only to a few, is now rapidly becoming cheap. That's really all what's happening - the rest is all the same, our senses can still lie, and we can still believe in things that never objectively took place.

And it's only about the realistic-looking audiovisual media. Other types of media (such as texts or non-realistic graphics) had those issues since forever. And we're still mostly fine (though the rapidly increasing scale of mass communications poses their own challenges, of course, but that's a related but different issue).

There are at least two ways I beleve this will be approached:

1. Updating mental models of trust, so we don't eagerly believe random people posting videos on the Internet anymore. Not easy (especially for old timers, as we are tend to be quite firmly set in our ways of thinking), but next generations would be born to the new reality and misplaced trust won't be an issue again. The obvious danger is the instability during the transitional period - societies have huge inertia, so a few decades could get quite messy.

2. Attempt to legally or technologically keep said probability low. Trusted cameras, AI regulations, extra online policing - those kind of things. The obvious dangers are that this could have all sorts of weird implications for freedom of speech, personal computing accessibility, and could also contribute to increasing power disparity.

Whatever happens in the future is unknown. All we can do it to try our best to steer it in direction we think is right.

Oracle is one of the leading researchers in JIT compilers, garbage collectors, and language interpreters.

How does working for Oracle compare to say working at Facebook or Google with all their privacy invasion tech?

Yeah. I don't like it either, but that's the world we've built. I wish an industry as important as ours had some standards of ethics, like doctors and real engineers do.

> Are the engineers working on OpenJdk completely lacking of morals?

Oracle attempted to make clean room reverse engineering illegal by arguing that copyright applies to Java's ABIs despite our entire industry relying on that not being the case, all so Larry Ellison could buy yet another yacht. So yeah, someone continuing to work on Java after it was acquired by one of the most evil companies on the planet definitely is consciously choosing to make the world a worse place and should no longer be employable.

> How does working for Oracle compare to say working at Facebook or Google with all their privacy invasion tech?

Facebook is also on my personal blacklist, yes. Less for their privacy invasion, and more for their eagerness to make a buck by helping spread misinformation and bringing about the end of democracy in the western world.

I don't feel as strongly about Google personally, but I wouldn't argue if someone else on the hiring team felt it was disqualifying.

But that said, I think it would be dumb to jump to conclusions just based on having Oracle on the resume. You should at least ask them why they worked there, and why they left. For all you know, they had no idea how bad Oracle was when they started, and they left because they saw how evil they were. That is the exact kind of person that I do want to hire

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

Interpretation on the fact and metric and the need to tell I leave up to you

Justice Sotomayor dissents:

> Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.

If that’s the case, I’m curious if it could be fixed with a class action, so everyone (or everyone born in the US) is a plaintiff? If that’s legally a thing.

I read the Wikipedia article [0] and I would point out that a class defined by birth place would pass easily Scalia's test for commonality. So it seems that using a class action suit that includes every person born in US of un-documented parents would work. (But who knows what other tests the Supreme Court would come up now...)

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes

> There is a serious question, moreover, whether this Court will ever get the chance to rule on the constitutionality of a policy like the Citizenship Order. Contra, ante, at 6 (opinion of KAVANAUGH, J.) (“[T]he losing parties in the courts of appeals will regularly come to this Court in matters involving major new federal statutes and executive actions”). In the ordinary course, parties who prevail in the lower courts generally cannot seek review from this Court, likely leaving it up to the Government’s discretion whether a petition will be filed here. These cases prove the point: Every court to consider the Citizenship Order’s merits has found that it is unconstitutional in preliminary rulings. Because respondents prevailed on the merits and received universal injunctions, they have no reason to file an appeal. The Government has no incentive to file a petition here either, because the outcome of such an appeal would be preordained. The Government recognizes as much, which is why its emergency applications challenged only the scope of the preliminary injunctions

This is a whole-sale shredding of the constitution.

Forgive a possibly silly question but in what sense does being "in" Florida mean you are bound by Florida state law when you leave? How long did you need to be in Florida before you became bound by its law? What if you fall pregnant after you left? Can you be in breach without ever having been in Florida, and a LEO can therefore take you there and charge you?

But let's look at the birthright case that this ruling comes from.

Let's say Nevada state sues the federal government. The ruling is made from their district court that birthright citizenship is clear and this EO is illegal. An injunction is placed against the EO.

The state of Kentucky does not sue.

Previously, the Nevada court injunction would apply nationally. The EO is unconstitutional. EOs are federal, the constitution is federal. So, clearly, it is unconstitutional everywhere and must be stopped.

The federal government can then go through several layers of appeal to prove that this was a mistake and the EO is legal. All the way up to SCOTUS, who makes the final judgement and cannot be appealed.

What SCOTUS just ruled is that the injunction against the federal government only holds the EO from applying to the specific litigant. That can be a whole state, a group of people, or a single individual. Even though the EO is now ruled unconstitutional in the eyes of the federal court de jure, it is de facto still the law of the land by default to all other entities.

And it gets worse. A litigant cannot appeal to the next court, only a defendant that loses. And SCOTUS only has to address cases that are appealed. There is no mandatory reconciliation process. That means, for an infinite amount of time, individual people will have different constitutional interpretations that require a background of every case that has ever involved them.

So, back to our example. If the federal government loses in Nevada and there is no ruling in Kentucky... What the fuck even happens? Someone is or is not a citizen, that's literally the point behind Dread Scott and Obergfell, but they've contradicted those cases and invented a constitutional superposition.

So, in Nevada a naturalized citizen with non-citizen parents is... A citizen? Because of the injunction? And what if they're in Kentucky, but were born in Nevada? Or vice versa?

But, no, this isn't a state law. It's federal. Which means it doesn't matter what state you're in when you do it, it's still illegal. And federal LEO had the authority to try you in a different location than where you were arrested. So - born in Nevada or Kentucky, where you are now, that doesn't matter. Effectively, you have no citizenship. Again, this is quite literally Dread Scott.

This SCOTUS ruling effectively disables the constitution and dissolves the union of states. I'm not being dramatic, this is also the opinion of Sotomayor.

Curiously, this does not actually extend to other cases. So, say, if McDonalds gets in trouble and an injunction placed against them. That still applies universally.

Britain its mostly UK Law, with bits of "no, thats English law, this is Scotland" on top. I emigrated so long ago the national appeals structure has changed and I don't entirely understand when it applies and overrides. But immigration is clearly nation-wide.

I think "birthright" citizenship is pretty alien to most legal regimes. Ireland might be the one people think about in the Europe/Britain context. Used to be a lot of pregnant women flying in late stage. But, thats not to call it wrong or decry what the appeals in the US were trying to do. It was amended into the constitution a very long time ago, and until recently what the current WH is trying to do was seen as "fringe law" but now seems core.

However, there is no just world where you can revoke citizenship from existing Americans. Especially under the vague terms they used.

Furthermore, the constitution itself is what defines it in clear language. Birthright citizenship can only be changed via constitutional amendment.

Some people with no lived experience of "homeland" have been sent "back there" and in related cases, Australian indigenous have been threatened with never having had citizenship because of association with neighbouring countries. The courts came down pretty heavily on that one thank goodness.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5445398/denaturalizatio...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-test-red-line-denatur...

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/02/09/texas-abortion-trans...

Indeed, this is one of the concerns of the dissenting opinions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era

In the United States, the Constitution is federal law. In fact, it is the supreme law of the land. Full stop.

cf. US Constitution, Article VI Clause 2.[0][1]

[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause

It's written by the legislature.

>What does the court weigh against federal law when considering if it's enforceable or not?

When ruling whether it's enforceable or not, they weight it against the constitution, and against itself.

When ruling how to enforce it, they interpret it primarily against itself.

The Universal Injunctions were a one-way rule. If the government lost any one case, the injunction would apply against the government in every other instance. However, if the government won, only that one person would be deported and the opposition would be free to try the same argument again with any of the other judges.

Christ almighty. This is why we can't have nice things.

What you describe is voting

We’re in this mess because people are not interested enough, educated enough, or engaged enough politically to make their position explicit to drive the direction of legislation and executive action.

Citizens of The United States have every tool available to to work together to shape their communities. The reality is the overwhelming majority do not do that, and you can come up with a lot of reasons why, which are structural in many cases, but the fact remains that the majority of people are not involved in the political process at all, have no desire to be an actively reject any opportunity to be.

Assuming that citizens would all of a sudden become involved because it requires a lawsuit, means that there’s the capacity to do so, which does not exist, and all we need is a catalyst.

If the number of possible catalysts that have already happened in the last decade we’re not sufficient then nothing short of a literal terminator Skynet scenario is going to cause people to take action and I’m increasingly doubtful that even that would do it.

Based on my observation from my work position, people are ready to just roll over onto their backs and have robots slice them from the belly up, because it’s easier than actually doing something that would prevent it.

I would not have thought that this is what the Constitution says, but the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution says. That's not in the Constitution, either, but they've appropriated that job for two centuries, so we let them get away with it. The "it's not illegal if the President does it" part is new, though they've been leading up to it for decades, so it's not really surprising.

Edit: actually, even that is overstating it. This is an extremely narrow ruling that is mainly about the powers of federal judges. It's the sort of ruling that the "other side" will trumpet as settled law when they're the ones in power again.

Forgive student loans? No authority!

End birthright citizenship? Well, he's the boss!

You're right, though, it is different; birthright citizenship is spelled out, very clearly, in the Constitution. It's an even plainer wrong.

It's Calvinball.

Likewise, in 1868 the writers of the fourteenth amendment probably couldn’t conceive of rapid international travel and the possibility that pregnant women could just show up weeks before their due date and their newborn child should “obviously” be an American citizen.

The amendment was quite obviously targeted at Native Americans and slaves, not any and all pregnant women the world over who manage to reach the US before giving birth. But as you’re noticing, there’s multiple ways people can interpret laws. It’s rarely as cut and dry as “this is obviously against the law!!!”

This is a better point than you realize, and in the opposite direction you intend.

Immigration in the 1800s was a… cursory process. Not only would those kids be citizens, but their parents would have had little trouble staying around.

We had very few rules beyond “don’t be Chinese” until 1891. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1891?wprov=...

Just to return to this for a moment… this is quite incorrect. Native Americans were explicitly not included. That came later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...

"Consistent with the views of the clause's author, Senator Jacob M. Howard, the Supreme Court held that because Indian reservations are not under the federal government's jurisdiction, Native Americans born on such land are not entitled to birthright citizenship. The 1887 Dawes Act offered citizenship to Native Americans who accepted private property as part of cultural assimilation, while the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act offered citizenship to all Native Americans born within the nation's territorial limits."

SCOTUS did rule on the anchor babies thing, in 1898.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark

Why am I supposed to be mad about people doing this, exactly? Because of hazy "rules are rules" talk?

For example, a president is granted authority to command the military and issue pardons. They have absolute immunity for any act performed using these authorities, including illegal acts such as assassinating or deporting a political opponent or accepting bribes in return for pardons. This is not a matter of opinion or a controversial interpretation, these consequences were discussed during the case and in the opinion, and the court accepted them.

> Mr. MADISON, objected to a trial of the President by the Senate, especially as he was to be impeached by the other branch of the Legislature, and for any act which might be called a misdemeanor. The President under these circumstances was made improperly dependent. He would prefer the Supreme Court for the trial of impeachments, or rather a tribunal of which that should form a part.

> Mr. PINKNEY disapproved of making the Senate the Court of impeachments, as rendering the President too dependent on the Legislature. If he opposes a favorite law, the two Houses will combine agst. him, and under the influence of heat and faction throw him out of office.

Ultimately it was decided that "in four years he can be turned out", so it was not worth addressing further. Indeed some argued that the President should not be impeachable at all because of this.

> Mr. KING expressed his apprehensions that an extreme caution in favor of liberty might enervate the Government we were forming. He wished the House to recur to the primitive axiom that the three great departments of Govts. should be separate & independent: that the Executive & Judiciary should be so as well as the Legislative: that the Executive should be so equally with the Judiciary. Would this be the case, if the Executive should be impeachable? It had been said that the Judiciary would be impeachable. But it should have been remembered at the same time that the Judiciary hold their places not for a limited time, but during good behaviour. It is necessary therefore that a forum should be established for trying misbehaviour. Was the Executive to hold his place during good behaviour? The Executive was to hold his place for a limited term like the members of the Legislature: Like them particularly the Senate whose members would continue in appointmt the same term of 6 years he would periodically be tried for his behaviour by his electors, who would continue or discontinue him in trust according to the manner in which he had discharged it. Like them therefore, he ought to be subject to no intermediate trial, by impeachment. He ought not to be impeachable unless he held his office during good behaviour, a tenure which would be most agreeable to him; provided an independent and effectual forum could be devised. But under no circumstances ought he to be impeachable by the Legislature. This would be destructive of his independence and of the principles of the Constitution. He relied on the vigor of the Executive as a great security for the public liberties.

And notably, exactly the same Republican-nominated Supreme Court judges did not do anything to interfere with exactly the same legal process (nationwide injunctions) when they were aimed at a Democratic president. See, e.g. Biden's student loan forgiveness executive order.

Yep, agreed. I already added an edit saying exactly the same thing.

"C. The District Court’s Remedy Was Improper" is a section of the petition for cert in The mifeprestone case from the Biden admin[0], where the SC overruled the district court's PI, but declined to address the question of whether it's PI was reasonable.

[0]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/...

The president absolutely is accountable. The problem is the Congress for their own reasons refuse to hold it to account. The Congress could remove any president in less than 24 hours with simple majority for no reason whatsoever.

The Court has long considered that the president has a duty to follow the law, but also that the Court can’t compel the president to follow the law. That is a political question. Congress alone can stop a president by impeaching and removing them from office. Not only can’t the Court initiate impeachments, impeachment is unreviewable by the Court.

If there’s a servile Congress, it means voters can elect a law breaker as president. They are going to get a president who breaks the law.

And this is what’s happening. People voted for an abuser, a rapist, a felon, a conspiracy theorist who lies about the outcome of elections, lies that VPOTUS can and should overturn them, and even sent a mob to have that VPOTUS assassinated for refusing to comply with that illegal order. Then boasted he’d pardon all those criminals who were in his service. And despite all of this, people voted for him again.

The people got exactly what they voted for.

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

https://act.represent.us/sign/problempoll-fba

And they actively vote against the will of their constituents 35% of the time. http://promarket.org/2017/06/16/study-politicians-vote-will-...

A prime example of this is the immigration system. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi... (“On the Ballot: An Immigration System Most Americans Never Wanted”). Americans never asked to import tens of millions of people from the third world. When Congress reformed the immigration system in 1965, they promised that wouldn’t happen. But for decades, there’s been a coalition of pro-foreigner liberals and pro-cheap-labor conservatives that have facilitated massive immigration that average americans never asked for.

Trump, ironically, is a reaction to the very thing the Princeton study identified.

The case when everyone agrees doesn’t tell you anything. It’s only when people disagree that you can find who has actual power and in this case the general public has effectively zero actual meaningful power day to day.

Systematic voter suppression plus gerrymandering etc may win you rigged elections, but ultimately voting isn’t about the system in place it’s avoidance unrest. We’re entering uncharted territory with how strongly people disagree with what the government is doing, which is where the general public actually has a say, namely by destroying the existing power structures rather than voting. It’s not even a question of insurrection, not having kids plus 60’s style dropping out at scale is ruinous.

1) General labor strike

2) General rent/bill strike

Either one results in an immediate liquidity crisis/credit crunch and the delegitimizing/insolvency of most institutions. The beginning of the COVID pandemic was, essentially, this.

I would add in "general bank run", but I imagine that they just... wouldn't let that happen. Ironically, an emergency "injunction" against withdrawals.

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

  > There is also the damage done by the Supreme Court ending the Voting Rights Act

  > Kamalah would have won by a landslide

and aside from some bread-crumbs like paid leave, she was very silent in economic issues that affected many minorities...

her campaign was in la-la land [1]

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kama...

[1] https://readsludge.com/2024/11/18/the-corporate-consultants-...

Remember, force is out of the question because it will provide justification for the oppression and make people more willing to accept it.

The illusion some want you to believe, is that it is.

Look at how history has played out. When a government is nearly universally despised by it's people it can be overthrown by mass action, basically bloodless and sometimes with a good outcome.

However, so long as the government has a reasonable sized core of support the outcome is always bad. Violent overthrow always brings the most ruthless, not the best for the people.

Note that this does not apply to throwing out a colonial power. There are multiple examples of good outcomes from throwing out colonial powers by force.

The world is always in flux.

I think Brian Thompson was a fuckface (and all the others who help enable the evils there in the name of profit) but he was basically doing what America has deemed not only fine but noble - make as much money as possible without fully breaking the law (or, more accurately, being forced to stop by the law - many routinely and intentionally break the law in their pursuit). Half the country loves and celebrates this behavior to the point where politicians _brag_ about how good they are at it.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_sentencing_of_Robe...

here's a success story: marijuana. WA and CO just.. decided to legalize it. blatantly against Federal law. even if it stays inside the state, by Wickard v Filburne and the supremacy clause it was a (mild) rebellion. we stared the Feds down and they blinked.

do more of that.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/26/nx-s1-5447450/trump-2024-elec...

The problem is that Dems are just culturally irrelevant. Most people don't care about issues, policy or the economy, they just want to cheer for a team and will justify everything their team does regardless of efficacy or outcome. Trump is the fun underdog team that everyone is talking about, the Dems are the boring party-pooper team we all love to hate. During covid, that boring became a source of needed stability, but after boring stewarded us through the crisis, nobody wanted to be associated with them again.

Donald Trump received only 49.8% of votes in the 2024 United States presidential election.

This is what the American people voted for.

Excuse my poor knowledge and understanding of all this stuff - but he's absolutely depending on Aristotle, taking existence of telos as a foundation, doesn't he?

And from this, inventing a God isn't a far stretch - if something axiomatically has an intrinsic purpose, it's probably not too hard to state that there should be something with agency to define it all, or something that's has a perfect nature, or however else one wants to define "God".

This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?

Not the GP, but I suspect the GP meant that Aquinas's Summa and Aquinas's Contra (his major works) starts with discussing first whether there is a god.

> are any of those books a good read for someone

I am not Catholic. I wouldn't recommend Aquinas.

However, I would recommend "reasonable faith" book by William Craig. Or if you want his lectures to listen to, you can start from his lectures on the existence of God[1]

If you are talking about how can one believe in God in an "axiomatic" way, yet still be rational and warranted, I suggest Plantinga's "warranted Christian belief" or his more popular level book "Knowledge and Christian Belief".

[1] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-s...

I prefer modern apologetics like Peter Kreeft who taught at a Catholic university for a long time. https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/20_arguments-gods-ex...

My other favorite writer was Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict. The current Catechism was edited by him when he was the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P9.HTM

The basic Catholic argument is that God created the world and mankind out of love. We are incapable of understanding why there is suffering and death. But we believe God sent his son to partially reveal his plan. The bulk of his teaching is the “sermon on the Mount.” Matthew chapters 5 to 7. https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/5

And yes, you can indeed argue for the existence of God from telos, but this isn't question begging. The teleological argument Aquinas is famous for (his Fifth Way) is not the Paley-style argument some people think it is. Feser's article "Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way" discusses this at some length, beyond what his book "Aquinas" discusses (you can find it in this book [2] along with other material worth reading).

> This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?

I understand that you lean this way, but perhaps a better stance is to be fair and open minded toward the subject. Apart from the books I already listed (which are indeed good), I might even suggest beginning with this popular polemical tract [0] (polemical because it responds to the snark and ignorant condescension of people like Dawkins), and later, if you are interested in an introduction that focuses specifically on the existence of God from five different philosophical positions, you might find [1] interesting.

[0] https://a.co/d/7tSlbxk

[1] https://a.co/d/arJWT56

[2] https://a.co/d/jaG30ac

First of all, it's not really well done: there are no control questions, no inverted questions, no consistency checks (like re-phrased duplicate questions) or anything a well-designed self-test must have. All answers are obviously ranked, introducing perception biases. Questions like "how often do you interrupt someone" or "how often you were told" or "did parents notice" are highly culturally-dependent. The childhood questions do not discern between younger and older ages (where behavioral differences are drastic), and likely to introduce a skew based on one's age and long-term memory function (which, AFAIK, ADHD does not directly affect). To me it looks like nothing of value would be lost if the whole test would be replaced with a short description what ADHD is and then a single yes/no question "do you think you may have some of the described symptoms?"

I would understand something like ANT, which (as I understand it) tests way closer to actual brain behavior, than those distant derivatives smeared over social prisms, self-perception lenses, and dice rolls of life's [pseudo-]randomness.

I think the idea is that those people were put at inherent disadvantage due to unfair treatment of their long gone predecessors. Or at least that’s my understanding of it.

The validity of this claim, type and amount of corrective action (and from some viewpoints - its very appropriateness or necessity), as well as the relative importance of the subject - those can all be a matter of debate, but are any of those so obvious they render the whole idea crazy?

Apparently it's really common in Denmark to be a descendant of slaves in a similar way.

I think it's obviously ludicrous that my son should be entitled to corrective action for this. Yes, his ancestor was subjected to an injustice, but it completely drowns in the sea of other injustices or unfair advantages his ancestors have had.

If you want to sum up the historical injustice and unearned privilege someone's ancestors had, it's much better to look at their bank account than their pedigree. DoS-restitution suggests that but for transatlantic slavery, the present distribution of resources would have been just. The further back you are willing to go in asserting the right to restitution, the more forcefully you are asserting it.

As a practical matter, you have to have some level of material comfort and/or solid family relationships to be able to document your ancestry. That already biases it away from those who would need it most.

But my question was not about whenever far descendants of slaves need (or need not) to be compensated somehow. It was about the "completely bonkers" bit. Possibly, it was a mistake to reiterate the idea to ensure it is consistently understood - the third paragraph (specifically, the emphasized part) of my comment was the point, not the second one.

We have an insanely complex system composed of multiple societies that may or may not exhibit some behaviors because of some antecedent events. Yet, GP didn't say e.g. "but it completely drowns" (essentially, claiming statistical insignificance) or that their understanding of possible corrective action has questionable effects (like @modo_mario's neighbor comment about universities), but rather that the whole thing has no rational basis to it ("bonkers") whatsoever ("completely").

This is something that I don't think I understand and that concerns me. Not whenever someone needs a preferential treatment for some injustices of the past (not that the latter doesn't concern me, but way less significantly).

Yes, it's completely bonkers. Starting by the fact that these descendants have now a much higher living standard than if their ancestor was left in the respective African country they originated from, where they were sold by their own neighbouring tribes to Arab slavers that then sold them off to be carried to the new world.

So, no it has no rational basis because, 1st, if you compare this people off with the alternative (their ancestors never left Africa centuries ago), they would be much worse off today. And 2nd, why are you expecting the last link of the slave trade to pay for compensation, but not the people that actually made them slaves and the people that traded them to Europeans?

Shall Nigeria start paying compensations to these people? After all, many of their ancestors were enslaved by Nigerian tribes? Shall Arab nations start paying compensations to them as well?

Shall Romans start paying me compensations for invading what is now my country? What about Arabs (yes, they were also here), should they?

By all means, I wholeheartedly agree that some arbitrarily-selected single factor that was present a long while ago is extremely questionable to be any meaningfully relevant, given that there were so many other things affecting it all. I also totally agree that there's a host of other issues and questions.

However, I fail to see immediate unsoundness in the basic premises that would make it bonkers, in a way I understand the word in this context ("not mentally sound, with an element of derogatory").

Generally speaking, momentarily going outside of scope of slavery - the idea that if some group was put at significant disadvantage, that could negatively affect them and their ancestry, is - at the very least - not obviously unsound, right? I think I've read that there are experiments that demonstrate this could be a thing, so I hope I'm not misinformed here.

So - back to slavery - exploring whenever it's the case for slave descendants is not obviously invalid. There could be arguments around the methodology, e.g. you have made a point about the reference group. But if we go as far as actually devising an experiment and looking at the outcomes (those who left are worse off, assuming it's true) does not it make it sound enough to not be bonkers? I mean, for this to be just crazy the core premise must be flawed, and it's not - even if it can be shown to be false. Especially so if this sparks further debate about methodology.

And then if someone is disadvantaged for any reason, it can be valid to ponder the idea whenever it should (or shouldn't) be addressed somehow, right? At least I fail to see how this question could be somehow fundamentally flawed either.

Summarized, I hear your arguments and they look valid to me (and I agree!), but I still fail to see how the fundamental premises that led to such line of thought are "bonkers", even if they're false.

It will also always be a mess even if you do compensate. See at the fights about who gets native american tribe status and benefits. On one hand you have people actually struggling with the faults of the past. On the other hand there's groups of people who genuinely believe it's them that bear the costs of the past with less measurable ancestral ties than the average african american looking to benefit decrying what happened.

People are quick to stand in line for money.

How long is a piece of string?

Is it really a rationality when folks are sort of out of touch with reality, replacing it with models that lack life's endless nuances, exceptions and gotchas? Being principled is a good thing, but if I correctly understand what you're talking about - surely ignoring something just because it doesn't fit some arbitrarily selected set of principles is different.

I'm no rationalist (I don't have any meaningful self-identification, although I like the idea of approaching things logically) but I've had enough episodes of being guilty of something like this - having an opinion on something, lacking the depth, but pretending it's fine because my simple mental model is based on some ideas I like and can bring order to the chaos. So maybe it's not rationalism at all, but something else masquerading as it, like probably being afraid of mismatching the expectations?

It meant a group of streetwise punks who used illegal tech and wore the same clothes for weeks on end.

Anyone stylish was a villain, or at least suspect.

I wonder why the cyberpunks became well dressed? Was it the Matrix? Or maybe X-Files?

But if popular media shows cyberpunk aesthetic as chic and cool, now we can sell shiny pants to 20 year olds.

Maybe I'm just extra disillusioned today, but it does seem like mainstream marketing and sales is the death of all things. Now I am become salesman, destroyer of worlds.