Iuz the Evil

I'm just very firmly in the "a lesser evil is still an evil" camp, but I understand where you're coming from. I gave your response a "thank you" emoji, but that's because there isn't (but should be) a virtual hug emoji. I'm on  your side, and I'm sorry for what you're going through right now.

I think this depends on your definition of significant. If you mean politicians with significant policy-making power, then I agree. However, if you extend this to people who have the ability to influence large numbers of people, then those exist. There are certainly influential people in the activist and academic circles who are preaching their own brand of hate.

I've speculated here before about the differing incentive structures between small towns and big cities, that create different worldviews. But the June '23 Scientific American has an article in the "Mind Matters" column about research finding differences in how liberals and conservatives see the world that are even deeper than I thought. It goes beyond morality all the way down to ontology -- what people believe the world fundamentally *is.*
 
Psychologists Jer Clifton and Nick Kerry find the strongest correlate with conservatism is what they call "hierarchical world belief": that existence falls into clear, distinct, and ranked categories. A world of bold, black lines. And these distinctions and rankings are real, and terribly important. Liberals tend to score less in this worldview: categories are blurry; the lines are, metaphorically speaking, dotted or in shades of gray, and the distinctions are more likely to be seen as arbitrary or even silly.
 
As Clifton and Kerry note, you can see why conservatives freak out so much about LGBTQ+ issues. If you see gender differences as innate, fundamental, ironclad and laid down by God before the beginning of the world, suggestions that the categories are just cultural accidents, a spectrum of possibilities, with overlap or movement between them -- well, you might as well be saying that up is sometimes down. Or abortions: If you think human life has a distinct and definite beginning, you see this very much unlike if you think humanness develops gradually with no distinct and definite threshold. And immigration, of course, involves literal lines as well as the all-important distinction between Us and Them.
 
Several of these boundaries, long generally accepted in Western culture, are under assault at once -- politically, culturally, even scientifically. Clifton and Kerry hopefully imagine that recognizing this difference in worldview can help people communicate and persuade past those differences. Author Clifton's example is trying to persuade a conservative to take a more inclusive attitude to transgender issues by pointing out that "a small but consistent portion of babies are born with atypical genitalia and arbitrarily assigned a sex at birth, which suggests the line between male and female is not always perfectly clear." Persoanlly, I think the human tendency to respond to falsifying evidence by doubling down on beliefs makes this as counterproductive as calling the conservative stupid or bigoted. As the senator recently said, "I don't want reality!"
 
Trump tells his followers what they most want to hear: that they are radically separate from other Americans (and potential Americans), superior for that separation, hated by their jealous and evil inferiors, and therefore justified in hating those rivals in return. That's a drug of the mind that few people ever kick -- or could ever want to.
 
It doesn't help, though, that our two-party system plays into the hierarchical worldview. Even if a fair number of Republicans are tired of Trumpian antics and feel the paranoid nihilism of his movement, not many of them likely can bring themselves to vote for a party they see as a hive-mind trying to make their children into transgender Socialists who hate God, the white race, and the flag. Be cause it's not possible to imagine Democrats as a blurry, shifting coalition of diverse interests with all the party discipline of a herd of cats.
 
Anyway, it's an interesting article. I recommend it.
 
Dean Shomshak

I'm much less worried about a Cylon takeover...but a Wargames scenario?  THAT feels plausible in most ways, if we skip the "hacking into the most dangerous system on the planet" aspect.  Or imagine drone bombers and a Dr. Strangelove scenario...*could* they be called back, or would they reject it?  
 
I won't disagree with the point that "AI" has a long ways to go to get past the "extrapolation from a limited set of directives working on an input body of information"...but the other problem is that AI functions in virtual space, where everything is an abstraction.  It has no real-world context, which means it'll offer solutions that are basically horrific.  Valuing life pretty much doesn't exist in virtual space.
 
EDIT:  reverting back to our usual themes...
 
The Senate passed the debt ceiling bill this evening.  63-36, so quite a few Republicans had to vote for it, but I haven't looked past that info....
 
EDIT 2...ok, checking.  4 Dems voted no, 17 Reps voted yes.  Also, a speech, and presumably signing ceremony, is booked for 7 PM Eastern tomorrow.
 
I expect a move to boot McCarthy out as Speaker tomorrow...maybe not til Monday but my feeling is the Freedom Caucus will want to be more pointed, and move to boot McCarthy on the day the bill they hate gets signed.
 

Bill who?

Thanos had a lazy and arbitrary approach to the problem 😏

There's a reason I don't tell people where I'm from. Thankfully, I got out early enough that I've lived more of my life out of Florida than in it. It'd be a great state if you got rid of about 80-90% of the people*, though.
 
 
 
*Edit: I just realized that I'd say that about most states. Guess I'm not a people person.

5-22-23 episode of Marketplace discusses the debt limit and the backstory of one proposed solution: The Coin. Yes, minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin is a ridiculoyus solution -- though it is fully legal and, indeed, a logical extension of one of a revenue stream governments have used since the invention of coinage. But it's also a ridiculous problem.
 
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444600/marketplace
 
Dean Shomshak

“Service guarantees citizenship, would you like to know more?”
 

A few I could dredge up (because of Google bias):
 
The Tennessee shooting may qualify, but not all of the facts are in. I doubt the timing was coincidental, but to be fair, we don't know for sure if it was politically motivated. There was the 2017 shooting at the Congressional baseball game. There was the 2013 shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters, which was stopped by a security officer. The intent was to kill as many people there as possible. I recall hearing about at least one other that wasn't one of these, some years ago. So, our extremists on both sides are capable of atrocities. However, recently, it seems like a larger portion of these events are motivated by people radicalized by right wing hate groups.
 
I found this paper by a professor at SUNY Oswego (PDF download link):
 
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwib-tWG3uT-AhUIJjQIHbX_DEkQFnoECAoQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fccjls.scholasticahq.com%2Farticle%2F26973-far-left-versus-far-right-fatal-violence-an-empirical-assessment-of-the-prevalence-of-ideologically-motivated-homicides-in-the-united-states%2Fattachment%2F67191.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1ake0xQ7qfSViQIB_ohTkM
 
The short version: Left wing ideologues also murder people, but typically right wing puts out bigger numbers. Except 2017 for some reason.
 
Found this fascinating (not in a particularly good way) data visualization from The Violence Project. It doesn't answer your question, but shows some other interesting things:
 
https://www.theviolenceproject.org/key-findings/
 
 
 
 

Ah, well that changes everything. 😉
 
Corrected, thanks.

Quote from that article:
 
"It is the latest in a string of shootings resulting from seemingly normal and even mundane interactions."
 
I'd say drunken neighbor shooting a firearm in his yard in the middle of the night falls out of the scope of "seemingly normal and even mundane interactions."
 
This is exactly what police are for. Even if it's just loud music. Someone's  acting out, have people in uniform come out and settle them down. Be safe.

Well, Biden is officially running for reelection. I am not surprised though like many I am concerned somewhat about his age. Then again, he did beat Trump once before and has proven to be better in many areas than I expected. If he runs, and wins, I would not be surprised to see VP Harris play a more prominent role. I'm not a fan of VP Harris but we move on

The confused Tucker memes are going to be lit.

The confused Tucker memes are going to be lit.

You can identify historical justification for most groups at some point in their history. Humans have not been very nice to one another.

In modern history, everyone's willing to call themselves oppressed, when they see it as to their advantage.

I thought I was wrong once, but it turns out I was mistaken.

Hey, I know about Canada. I saw Nanook of the North in my Canadian Studies class at Chico State, I figure that makes me some kind of expert…

I’ve come to the conclusion that essentially political beliefs have become something of a faith tradition versus an intellectual exercise in policy decision making. It’s profoundly unacceptable and even offensive to question doctrine, or even seek to understand the thinking behind it more deeply with any form of critical question. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that essentially political beliefs have become something of a faith tradition versus an intellectual exercise in policy decision making. It’s profoundly unacceptable and even offensive to question doctrine, or even seek to understand the thinking behind it more deeply with any form of critical question. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that essentially political beliefs have become something of a faith tradition versus an intellectual exercise in policy decision making. It’s profoundly unacceptable and even offensive to question doctrine, or even seek to understand the thinking behind it more deeply with any form of critical question. 

Really enjoying this dystopian reality where we're all scrambling around like mice trying not to get stepped on by ultra-wealthy kaiju as they have city-destroying fights with each other.

16.9% of Twitter is owned by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is considered the second largest investor after Musk. Not folks one would want to make lose a large amount of money.