A looming Christofascist dictatorship is not what I’d consider a minor political realignment, but potato potato, I guess

Idk, it's looking better than the ziopsycho control we are under now.

Just so we’re clear and you can be on record with it: you support fascism?

What is "ziopsycho"? There's one hit in DDG, and it's no more illustrative than your comment!

Would you accept a denial? Seems like you’re just spoiling for a fight.

They aren't looking for discourse

No comment re: recommendations on building, but if you're interested, alternative terminology often includes corporate intel / intelligence.

The dual posting it’s important but does not mark Nakasone as uniquely talented — the post is always served by the current director of the NSA.

For the interested, Tetlock wrote a book called 'Superforecasting', and also set up a company using his research to utilize the prowess of those forecasters (https://goodjudgment.com/about/). I don't know how good the company is at what it does, but the book was very good.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being caught in a pincer maneuver by contemporary US society where the far right is wielding increasingly concerning amounts of governmental power to force conservative changes, and the far left is wielding social power to force overly liberal changes. Not only is this very difficult to navigate at an emotional level, it's also just generally concerning that both legally and socially, radicalism is taking a stronger and stronger hold.

Everyone has decided government should be used to tell everyone else how to think.

I would like the option of a party that wants to focus on things like preventing fraud and ensuring freedom, but seemingly across the western world such things are uninteresting.

There is such a party. I've been a member for forty years. But there's not much point in naming it as it is almost entirely irrelevant to modern politics and that doesn't appear to be about to change. Our desire for this is quite niche.

But that doesn't keep the levers of power in power

What you need is not another party(assuming you’re American). What you need is a revamp of your whole system.

1) dismantle the federal state

2) direct democratic rule of the states. A hybrid system like in Switzerland.

In general, decentralisation and democratisation.

"some professors in Psychology may be self-censoring to avoid controversy"

solution: straight to "dismantle the country".

genius. this is some serious, next level shillbot-ing

We'll get right on that. In the meantime, what can be practically done?

>I would like the option of a party that wants to focus on things like preventing fraud and ensuring freedom

Where's the profit in that?

The benefits of these policies are diffused throughout the country, so advocates find themselves unable to organize.

If feels that way sometimes. I heard a joke the other day related to this:

Q: What is the most important priority?

Liberal A: Letting kindergarten teachers help kids transition their gender.

Conservative A: Banning abortion and contraceptives.

In reality these are priorities to an increasingly vocal tiny minority in both categories, it is as they say "terminally online"

In reality people care more about the prosperity of their local area, access to hospitals, etc

I'm not sure if they're increasingly tiny minority but they are becoming more vocal.

in 2024, "vocal" comes from internet traffic, be it tiktok, forums, reddit, or astroturfing campaigns to hit specific demos on facebook, etc.

It was intended to be read as a tiny minority who are increasingly vocal, rather than increasingly tiny.

I'm always down to laugh at liberals for the silly shit we do but this isn't really one of those things. Teaching children about gender isn't an actual liberal issue, that's just the conservative framing for trying to stop the some 500 anti-trans bills conservatives have been pushing, many (like Florida's) that explicitly ban teachers from asking someone's pronouns, banning answering questions students have about it, banning books about it being held in the library, require teachers out trans kids to their parents, and the whole bathroom/spots debacle.

There was no issue until state Republicans tried to weaponize the state to censor people and make trans kids' lives miserable for political points. Schools let trans kids play sports on their own, they stocked informational material on their own, doctors made their own standards for trans care on their own, and Republicans weren't happy about it so they brought down the legislation hammer.

So the joke either needs to pick something stilly liberals actually push for, or the conservatives issue needs to be one that uses exaggerated liberal framing like, "make women the property of their husbands again."

I don't get the joke?

I think the joke is that those issues arent important at all

But they are important to them. And social media bubbles maybe makes people think, the whole world shares the priorities of their specific bubble - and act enraged, when they learn that is not the case.

I mean, we tech nerds can maybe relate with our struggle of privacy, open source etc.?

I can't relate. Sure these are problems, but definitely not the most important problems in the World.

I meant relate to the concept of: what is important to your bubble might not matter to the rest of the world.

Most people don't care about surveillance, nor have they heard of open source. But being a tech nerd, I absolutely do think they are very importang for the whole world to embrace.

But on a philosophical level I can see that other people have other priorities. Or a different angle how to solve things.

Many would say climate change is the most important problem, to which I would say, open source (hardware) has the best chance of solving this crisis. Making the tech broadly avaiable. (And anti surveillance so we do not end up in totalitarian states while trying to solve the other problems)

But to a conservative he sees no base of anything, if the foundations of (his) morals are destroyed.

Thesis and antithesis.

Where is the joke?

There is a little bit of joke in every joke. Most jokes are just candid observations of reality ;)

I get your point but only to a degree to be honest. I think more people are purple than purely blue or red when it comes to individual views on things. If you asked me for my opinion about a certain set of issues you'd probably think "this guy is absolutely a left-winger!" However, if you asked me about another set of issues, you'd conclude "this guy is absolutely a right-winger!"

I've personally learned to be careful about casually binary sorting people - life isn't that clean in my experience.

Eh. "Blue" and "red" are not the same as "left" and "right." Both blue and red are neoliberal (i.e. right wing) parties at their cores. There is no actual "left" in American politics to speak of at the national level.

This might come down to definitions, but I don't think "liberal" and "conservative" are good descriptions of the political left and political right.

Liberalism is, or should be, an ideology of democracy, human rights, and personal freedom. Conservative is, or should be, valuing the rule of law, traditional mores, and personal integrity. These two sets of values are in tension, but they aren't opposites. Giving up one doesn't automatically give you the other. If you're careless, you can lose both.

There's nothing "liberal" about a cancel culture ideology which equates speech with violence. And there's nothing "conservative" about a cult of personality that worships a mockery of moral character and undermines the rule of law.

How is liberalism not about the rule of law and personal integrity?

Both seem like a reaction to the other from where I'm standing, basically a series of over-corrections/reactions.

The endgame of that seems to be that you have two sides with some completely crackpot stances that they (hopefully?) don't even really believe in themselves, but use as a sort of identity marker.

I have to confess that personally I find some of it utterly laughable and it's hard for me to engage seriously.

Like, yeah, of course abortion should be legal, but also, being "non-binary" is just a little bit weird.

Both of those camps are, well, to put it politely, in search of a hobby.

From the evidence I’ve seen this is the explicit goal of anti-liberal forces in the world, particularly PRC, Russia, and Iran.

I understand those a-hole’s objectives and can emotionally write them off as a-holes, but the way people in the West play along as useful idiots does get under my skin

No, you're not. There is no "far left" in American politics. The Democrats are not a left wing party.

They are relative terms (though a bit reductionist).

I understand that the team at BlueSky is tiny and that they were firstly prioritizing getting a stable, core featureset out, but I firmly believe that keeping posts private to non account holders followed by the iron grip on signups during Twitter's implosion era last year was an enormous strategic blunder that they'll never recover from.

Which is a shame, because I really want them to succeed. But the amount of dead accounts I see made by people with followings on twitter, who were lucky enough to get an invite is telling. A total collapse of momentum.

In my understanding feral is a domesticated creature that has found it self adapting back to the wild, while a wild creature was never domesticated at all. How can pigeons be feral?

Pigeons are domesticated doves. Humans have used them for meat and, if memory serves, communication for a long time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_pigeon

Some pigeons are domesticated doves, the kind of pigeons you see in town.

Wood pigeons are wild and distinctly different from town pigeons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_wood_pigeon

There are over 300 pigeon/dove species, and nearly all of these are wild and have never been domesticated.

However, when people say "pigeon" without specifying a particular species, they are almost always referring to feral rock doves (Columba livia domestica) commonly found in urban environments all over the world.

Multiple types of Pigeons(/doves) have been domesticated through history. The pigeons most people are familiar with in big cities are feral domesticated rock doves.

I had an ATT unlimited data plan, grandfathered from way back in 2004 or something. It was wonderful while cellular data was still only available in limited amounts. I only finally moved off it about 3 years ago. ATT never seemed to care much. The only problems I had were when I had to make certain changes to my account, the staff could never find my plan in the system -- on more than one occasion we had actual ATT database admins on the line to resolve things.

I had the exact same situation. I stuck with it through the limited data plan era with my grandfathered ATT plan and only changed it once we got the unlimited data plans again. It was great, the only problem I had was even though the data was unlimited, the grandfathered plan had a 400 text messages limit which wasn’t enough.

I’d kill for a phone with proper music control hardware buttons. I miss my iPod, and being able to control it, precisely, from my pocket.