DFHippie

That's an evergreen template.

It's pretty good under Putin, too. Better, actually. They don't use the same narrative template, but they're picking tools with more power. It turns out it's really easy to manipulate narcissists and authoritarian followers.

(well, the Russian Federation, not the USSR)

I don't understand why the people manipulated with lies aren't offended at the liars. They are primed to believe the lies, but aren't they mad that someone sought to manipulate them?

This keeps happening because it works. But why does it work? Why isn't there blowback?

The world is turning to crap right now because of affinity fraud.

"He goes to my church/eats my traditional food/wears the jersey of my favorite sportsball team. I trust him!"

People decide someone is their friend due to some superficial similarity which a charlatan has dressed himself up in (and conversely that others are their enemy due to some superficial dissimilarity), and then their "friend" steals their political power to do bad things.

And people are too committed to their self-conception as savvy judges of character to admit their error. The error becomes a religion, a folkway, and is persisted across generations. You have to keep committing the error in order to honor your ancestors who were first fooled.

> And Americans voted for this! Twice!

For many Americans, three times!

And for many Americans, never.

Also, bear in mind that the first time he won he lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points. We have a voting system that favors less populous states. In 2024 he won the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points. He has never been very popular in this country. But his party controls all branches of government and he controls his party.

It turns out electing a stupid, vengeful narcissist and liar who is at death's door is not the way to go.

Europe is getting the same firehose of stupid propaganda and is looking a little shaky. Education and history give Europe an advantage but not immunity. There are stupid people everywhere eager to get their hate on.

Sometimes it's touching a hot stove. Sometimes it's putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger to see if it's loaded.

Most Americans agree with you at this point.

They don't want you messing with their poles/conduits because they don't want you accidentally electrocuting their linemen with shoddy work. There are abusive regulations. I just don't think it's so simple.

Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in. You get your water from one source, send your sewerage to one source, get your power from one source, etc. So then the question is how to make the monopoly well behaved and how to keep them that way.

This is not the experience on the ground in Vermont.

Most likely because you have a) buried power lines and b) less exposure to destructive storms.

> Politicians' only job is to get elected.

Cynicism is a variety of compliance in advance. It creates the conditions it decries.

Obviously there are corrupt politicians. But also obviously there are politicians who actually want to advance the public interest. It is the job of voters to tell them apart and ensure only the latter become the custodians of state power.

That's a pretty thin reed. Chomsky does a fair bit of argument by assertion and displays of confidence. And he's committed to this idea that language emerged in one massive mutation and thus functional analyses of language are pointless. This is a weird stance for a scientist to take.

How can we date the origin of speech?

> The supreme court will acquisence slowly piece by piece to ever more draconian constitutional violations.

It doesn't seem slow to me.

To each his own. I love Dickens, though I haven't read that much.

Dumas was also paid by the word. Still fun to read.

We've elected a president who couldn't care less about the country, much less its allies, has no knowledge or experience relevant to governing, and who chooses his underlings based solely on their looks and sycophancy. It's a fun experiment!

A web interface to classical texts is going to be anachronistic.

If its purpose is pedagogical, it should include macrons, spaces, punctuation, case -- the works. Making every word clickable but leaving the reader to guess at vowel length seems like leaving the job half done.

> Texas which are covered with turbines

Is "Texas" the plural of "Texa"?

Though there is likely life throughout the galaxy, it's probably difficult for one sentient spacefaring race to find another habitable planet they'd be comfortable on, i.e., one with a similar atmosphere and mass. If it's a long way from your planet to another you'd care to set foot on, you're left with lots of space stations. But who wants to live in that precarity?

> under miles of subduction

Subduction only occurs at plate boundaries and is not nearly this fast. Continental plates float on top like foam and do not get subducted. It's the oceanic plate that is created at mid-ocean ridges and gets subducted at the margins.

How churned is "churned"? Does this mean particular pebbles have have been found to have lain in their current arrangement for 1.8 million years, or just that not much has happened? I expect any arid region far from the poles or mountains and lacking dune fields will have similar patches of inert land. Much of Australia would fit this bill.

Right. You can vote for a government that will tax you and then fix misfortunes and injustices. It's probably a lot more effective and efficient than writing a check to a megachurch.

Qualia is an interesting topic, but "they don't have qualia so they aren't really slaves" doesn't have a great track record. This mental game is what tech overlords are engaging in when they characterize losers in their world as NPCs and deride empathy as pathological. It's what Descartes was doing when he vivisected animals.

It is my understanding that this claim about Americans' charitable giving does not disaggregate giving to food banks, Girl Scout cookie drives, political causes, the environment, cultural events, religious institutions, etc. Much of this charitable giving does not feed the hungry or house the homeless.

We used to live in a world where individual virtue was what everyone fell back on. That is the default state. It has many problems -- free riding by the selfish, for one, but also a lack of capacity to prepare for large-scale disasters like the Great Depression. We have a government precisely to solve this sort of problem. It works (when it is competent and not corrupt) for defense, international trade, and the enforcement of law. Solving resource distribution and aid coordination is right in its wheelhouse.

The US is paying developers billions of dollars to scrap renewable energy projects. This is Trump policy. We're in a league of our own for sure.

It's not all Trump, of course. It's also the people who put him in office twice, the folks who block upgrading the grid, etc. etc.

It isn't the fact of change but the rate of change which is anomalous.

Russia is great at stuff that can be automated cheaply like influence campaigns. They're not so great at physical hardware and logistics and so forth. Not everyone is good at everything.

Messing with elections by fooling the most volatile and eager to be fooled is not a genius move.