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  • Before I used Google Maps regularly, I would be more aware of road layout while driving and soon become capable of navigating any town I visited regularly, without a map. It's weird to drive through a place I last visited twenty years ago, knowing that last time I was there I'd navigate based on memory, but now I'm completely leaning on that device to do it for me. That mental faculty might not be absolutely lost, but I don't use it and I don't suppose I would ever have developed it if I were learning to drive today.

    Perhaps it's obsolete, and a modern brain can now use those resources for something more relevant. Over the course of human history we have developed tools to use our finite mental resources more effectively, but never without a price. Socrates feared that the use of writing would weaken our memory and true understanding. I'm sure he was right, at least about the memory, but it was worth the price. Without writing, nobody would know what Socrates thought about anything.

    But with AI, we're not enabling ourselves to do more and develop new faculties, because AI seeks to be our universal crutch. Perhaps under other circumstances it could be better, but the entities pushing AI want us to be compliant consumers hypnotized by a endless stream of advertising slop. Fundamentally, they are not incentivized to help us develop our potential. They want to replace us.

  • It's also an education problem. Instead of "yay we're the good guys, we beat the bad guys", there should have been more understanding of how the bad guys got so bad, and why the USA always had the potential to go down the same road. But if you're looking at it on a superficial level, you can think you're automatically safe from that, just because you have different names, different locations, different flags. And because you're the good guys.

  • While you're not wrong, I believe it works for another reason. Almost nobody forms and acts on a political opinion in complete isolation; most of us follow the herd to a greater or lesser extent. And if we consider "herd followers", (ie. people whose choice of political action or inaction is primarily motivated by what they see other people around them doing) as a demographic, it would be an overwhelmingly huge demographic, the majority of the population. There's any number of reasons why people might act this way. Maybe they lack the resources or confidence to form an independent political opinion. Maybe they made a pragmatic choice for the sake of their own personal safety, or that of their children. Maybe something in between.

    But the important point is that this demographic is huge, so much so that no political movement could hope to succeed without courting them effectively. How do you get these people to join you? Well, that's simple, they are herd followers, so you have to be (or appear to be) "the herd". When you see 7 million people in the streets, the message is clear. That's the herd. That's the way the wind is blowing. That's how you get that demographic on your side, and when you do that, you win.

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  • Actually the veganism aspect went right over my head, just seemed like a random list of bad behaviour lol

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  • What kind of sicko does the corpse consumption before the raping? Eww

  • See ya.

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  • I was expecting one of the boys to get complete mastery of the word "the", then get the power of flight so he could leave the island. So disappointed.

  • And now you're older still

  • Sure, they never noticed because back then it was normal to consider Nazis as the epitome of evil. If you're going to do a fun family movie where the hero kills a bunch of people, Nazis were fair game. It's a chilling sign of the times, that the right wing has come to the point where they can no longer frame Nazis as the bad guys.

  • Imagine what kind of uproar there would be if Raiders of the Lost Ark were made today. It really is very insensitive to the feelings of Nazis

  • I'm pretty sure there's some fuckery going on here. The image on the right has more pixels, and while there is a lot of blur between columns, there's clearly more rows on the right.

  • That's still not doing it justice. If there were one person for every rational number there would be infinitely many in any finite interval (but still actually no more than the top track, go figure) but the real numbers are a whole other kind of infinite!

  • To be war ravaged, it must be at war. Trump is literally declaring war on the American people. And also encouraging the armed forces to kill civilians, unless you think "full force" could possibly mean anything else in a military context.

    It's amazing how people can look at stuff like this and say "gee this guy sure does use some crazy hyperbolic language, I wonder what he can mean by that". It's pretty fucking clear.

  • You spelt decapitated wrong.

  • English pronunciation is weird. It can be mastered through tough thorough thought though.

  • "well" is a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb and an interjection

  • Trump and Scotus figure out a way to not have a shut down without democrat involvement.

    When all rules are optional, that part isn't really an "if"

  • History suggests otherwise. Turns out quite a few people can be evil pieces of shit when they are given the permission and power to be.

  • militant leftist

    The word "militant" is interesting, particularly its use as a vague slur. It suggests extremism or even violence without requiring evidence of such (for example 15-20 years ago the term "militant atheist" got flung around a lot, referring to people who didn't believe in God and were outspoken and unashamed of it).

    It caught my attention when encountering the Italian counterpart "militante" which means anyone who gets off their ass for something they believe in. Carrying a sign in a protest is definitely "militante". And as such it's not a slur, or suggestive of anything scary. I guess the meaning in English isn't so materially different except for the bourgeois fear of activism which it conjures up.

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  • No but it expires every 30 days and you need to plant it and grow a new potato before you can log in again