The efforts to divide and weaken the western world have been so massively effective that I sincerely wonder if there is not a state-sized adversary orchestrating all of it for years or even decades. The myopic glee with which people deconstruct their civilizational home from within is astounding, and it is hard to believe that is organic.
It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries. Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Oh also our lazy, clout-chasing fourth estate bears a significant portion of the blame, though I'm convinced their initial contributions were accidental.
No grand conspiracy, just a lot of assholes and idiots and people who should have known better found out that it doesn't take all that much power to damage institutional trust, and got addicted to the sensation of destruction.
> It's an informal coalition between the alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
> Basically everyone selfish and myopic enough that they'd rather upend the table than lose the game was elevated, amplified, and funded by legitimate adversaries.
Yeah, I kinda agree with this. You definitely have people who hate their domestic political enemies so much that they'll throw themselves in with foreign powers who oppose them.
> Though, at the end of the day, the real perpetrators are, have always been, and will always be our moronic electorate(s).
Perpetrators? No, come on. People seem to love to hate on the common man for some reason (maybe beating down on other common men makes some common men falsely feel bigger). But they're just easy targets, because they can't fight back.
The real "perpetrators" if you can call them that, are the elite people in places of power, who are trusted with responsibility but too-often prioritize their own parochial interests.
Case in point: the Democratic party. They've been screaming from the mountaintops since 2016 about the dangers of authoritarianism, many of which have come to pass. But what do they do? Compromise to form a broader coalition to meet the existential threat? No, of course not. Instead they cater to divisive special interests; wag their fingers at everyone they turn off who doesn't vote for them; and look no father than hoping they can eek out narrow, unstable partisan victories by turning out their base.
> alt-right, the dirtbag left, the extremely wealthy, and Russian, Iran, and China.
This is absurd.
The alt-right doesn't do anything. They have no power or funding and are suffering actual casualties through repeated assassinations. Pim Fortuyn was murdered, Trump's survived a few attempts, Charlie Kirk was murdered, 7 German AfD candidates mysteriously dropped dead before the election, and something like 30 politicians were outright murdered in Mexico ahead of the last election. To say nothing of the bodies of dead whistleblowers that have been piling up.
You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud? And all of these deaths just so happen to align to keep neo-Marxist agents in power across the west. Nothing to see here, I guess.
You cite an "informal coalition" between a bunch of unrelated groups while simultaneously blaming everything on the stupidity and greed of the electorate. You're not making a coherent argument, just throwing a bunch of lies at the OP and seeing what sticks.
> You say the alt-right are the bad guys, yet they're the only ones getting killed in broad daylight over demands to...enforce immigration law? Investigate NGO fraud?
Speaking of lies, this is a big one.
1) Heather Heyer, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, just to name three that were killed in broad daylight. Two of them were killed by fascist paramilitary agents of the government in broad daylight. So the first part of this statement is blatantly untrue.
2) I’m not sure if you differentiate the “alt-right” from the current fascists who are in power, but the president has publicly called for the extermination of an entire civilization. So that’s something they want to do, not just the things you list. So again, another lie, or at least a deliberate omission if I’m trying to be charitable.
It's not organic. A country's occupants are only taught that they are evil and should be ashamed of themselves as a means of subjugation after they've been conquered.
Self-destruction is the point of critical theory, and the explicit goal of its architects. For some reason this curriculum is only pushed on western countries.
I have tons of apps I installed (mostly from Play Store) since like 2012, and that were grandfathered in through Samsung Switch from phone to phone as I replaced them with one another. A lot of data in them, too. Will they, and the data, just ... disappear?! When exactly do I have to do the 24 hour song and dance to prevent that? All of this sounds too bad to be true, honestly.
There's no such thing as a single universal morality. TFA was quite political, therefore it's only natural for disagreements to happen. That's kinda the whole point of political debate.
Probably. I hate the AI boom too and see no need to get all political, or even outrught blame the politicians. What'd you expect, politicians with a master degree in every field there is? Not gonna happen.
If we're putting the blame on anything, it's on us hacker types for going where the money flows and not fighting the corporate overlords nail and tooth.
Speak at the same time, but in a slightly different place? If you really care about your speech (and not silencing the speech of others), that is clearly acceptable.
I'm not silencing you. We both have the freedom to speak at the same time, in the same place. Such as a political speaker and opposing protesters. Both have the freedom.
> Large language models can’t do much with raw notes or scattered documents.
Actually, they thrive with raw notes and scattered documents. I hoard project information in Obsidian with deliberately very little structure: everything lives in a single directory, with optionally one category as a frontmatter value, and very light linking. I do not have to think when adding to this vault at all, it's a low-friction drop box. But an agent in this infodump can do absolute wonders using just search.
No, the outright political warfare in the US you are alluding to began much earlier than 2020. Things were getting quite ulhealthy already back in 2015/2016, probably even earlier. The "black swan" for this deep division was (I believe) not the epidemic, but the proliferation of the smartphone and social media, and the earlier transitioning of traditional news to infotainment format.
I always viewed social media as a catalyst, not the main cause. We've always have this at smaller scales / more local scales, throughout the human history. Social media just lets bob meet alice in a virtual plane, while they couldn't meet and share ideas before. But the ideas, even if reinforced by tech, were always there.
Earlier than that, this brand of social/economic/racial/sexual/etc aggrievement and reactionary politics was bred via 80s-90s AM talk radio.
The talking points that were ascendent in the Tea Party era to 2016, and are still ascendent today, were honed at that time in that sphere. Limbaugh said words 30-40 years ago that breathed life into a reactionary movement 20 years later and shaped its theory.
You can keep following the thread back, but I think this form of weaponized aggrievement took its shape at that time, its literal memes were potent and virulent back then, they just needed the right environment to really spread.
Knowing what we know now, imagine how much it would have accelerated back then if the elites hadn’t been able to smother out the Occupy movement. Wild to think about
> It’s just incapable of the thing that makes a real architect valuable: saying “no.”
I have had Claude many times tell me "not really, here's a better way" when asked "hey Claude, is this a good idea?". Granted, Claude would just do it if I just asked it to just do it, but that's by design. LLMs, at least today, are capable of pushing back, if suitably prompted.
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