Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement is.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
Gotta also remember that all these devoted segregationists didn't get removed from positions of power or influence, nor did they change their minds about the value of segregation.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
There's that infamous Lee Atwater quote (former RNC chariman who helped Bush I and Reagan win on their 'no taxes, cut social services' rhetoric) that I won't quote here but is foundational to modern conservative dogwhistle politics: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
We live downstream of that where people often parrot the same dogwhistles uncritically 40 years later without understanding how deeply racist they are.
I won't say there aren't myriads of issues with establishment we-must-appeal-to-the-moderates DNC consultation priesthood but historically and in recent times one party has generally been better about civil rights than the other:
If anything, you can thank most of the repeal of things like reproductive rights, the Voting Rights Act, etc and enshrinement of corporate personhood, gerrymandering, etc to the explicitly conservative project of The Federalist Society who now have the ruling majority in the Supreme Court.
I don’t think the issue with Civil Rights legislation was the Civil War, I think the issue was equality.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
This doesn't just apply to race. The whole "trans people in women's bathrooms/sports" panic was another example of people being told that a tiny minority of people are a huge threat that we all need to focus on, while we were being screwed over by a kleptocracy. Same with "Antifa."
And it worked. Politicians do this because it works.
True, the right used this against the left because this issue, and particularly the aspect of males in female sport, highlights a set of absurd beliefs that are unfortunately quite common on the left. Political parties pushing ridiculous views tends to be a vote loser, even if the impact of these views when translated into policy is relatively small. It's like how a flat-earther politician would put a lot of people off.
if I remember correctly, Howard Zinn covers this pretty well in his A People's History of the Unites States: racism was promoted by the wealthy in order to keep the poor divided and weak (the fear of poor whites and blacks uniting was real)
This seems like an oversimplification and one of your own examples shows it. Aren’t “the Jews” today in power or in very close proximity, not just locally but on the world stage? Are they redirecting the anger to themselves? Or is there more to the reasons people would direct their hate or dislike towards an entire group of people?
Not saying that you’re wrong, but there’s more to it. Even when not directed by those in power, some people need an external reason for their own failures. They need a target for their anger that is not themselves.
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, allowing southern states to gerrymander and reduce the voting power of minorities. Not even hypothetically, Texas did so moments after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA.
States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.
And mainstream conservative justification, including the US Supreme Court, is that because this is not overtly racist in its design, but just coincidentally racist in its impact, it has plausible deniability. Basically an extension of the “racism is over” school of thought.
And an extension of the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness.
Edit: funny, I pre-sniped the sibling responses to your comment.
I appreciate you called out the more fundamental disagreement here: "... the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness."
I think a lot of people miss this or pretend that the conservative position is just old-school racism (although it definitely is sometimes). But there are really hard philosophical, ethical, and political questions at the base of a lot our political problems. I think it helps keep people from arguing past each other if they can find out where the really "hard" part of their political disagreement actually is.
That's not "unfortunate". It was a deliberate choice. Any term used to describe the problem is treated as if it meant something bad, and then we're told we can't talk about it because it's "politicized". As if the entire point of the political process was about something other than resolving disagreements.
I highly recommend the video series "The Alt-Right Playbook" (in the sense of an expose, not a how-to) which has an episode dedicated to this, titled "Always a Bigger Fish". [0], which goes into how people might be talking "past" one-another.
______
> Your conservative friend is often baffled as to what you're even trying to say when you point out there's not enough high-paying jobs or affordable health plans for everyone.
> There's not supposed to be. The system requires an underclass. Someone's gotta clean the toilets.
> Capitalism, then, is a proving ground: it's how you demonstrate where in the hierarchy you deserve to be. Do you have more than you need, or less?
Your framing is fundamentally illiberal. Refraining from engaging using “well deep in your heart” excuses means you can self-righteously ignore any position you disagree with and never have to face real argument. And it is wonderfully non-falsifiable, so you can always use it!
Progressive thinkers like Ibram X. Kendi believe every single policy issue must be evaluated on the basis of whether it happens to impact different races differently. Essentially turning the state into a gigantic social engineering project.
And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all? Why are we arguing at the extremes? What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses? Have you even heard about something like how nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
>And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?
I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
>What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses?
This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
What we've seen in the US is the 90s "judge people as individuals" paradigm has been replaced by a "racial collectivism" paradigm. In recent years, this new paradigm was initially mainstream on the left, then became mainstream on the right:
The "racial collectivism" paradigm is corrosive to individual rights, no matter who wields it. Furthermore, collectivist activity on the part of one ethnic group ends up being countered by collectivist activity on the part of other ethnic groups, in a doom spiral. The result is descent into hateful sectarianism. Scroll through X on any Tuesday to see what I mean.
>nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
Consider a hypothetical where the town near the nuclear test has a population which is a perfect microcosm of the US in terms of race, gender, age, class, etc. No "disparate impact" argument can be possibly made in this hypothetical, since all of the racial "collectives" are equally harmed.
Does this change the fact that the nuclear tests are harming people? Or the best approaches to the problem?
Racial collectivism just isn't a good approach. People are more responsive to the needs of others when they view them as fellow humans or fellow citizens, not representatives of alien collectives.
> This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
Where does that leave the equal protection clause?
> >And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?
> I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
If it affected you directly, you might care.
Because it doesn't, you are in the position to pick and choose what you give your interest and energy to.
It's not, as those policies allow those in power and currently benefiting from the status quo to abuse minorities. It's why rights and equal protections have to be codified.
I hate this line of thinking. It's hard to argue that Republicans are strictly racist when you have people like Tim Scott in respected positions. Literally Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State. If we are going to take racism seriously, race needs to be the causal mechanism... not culture, not politics.
The distinction between cultural differences and something like strict colorism make this a difficult issue to adjudicate. Correlation does not imply causation, and looking at nontrivial counter-examples should be helpful.
It's really difficult to argue the party's goal in gerrymandering is trying to prevent black people from gaining significant positions in government when the same party is electing and appointing black folks to significant positions in government.
The presence of token minorities doesn't change the intention or effect of their policies.
There aren't enough rich people out there for Republicans to win elections based on the votes of people their policies actually help. They use things like racism and transphobia to energize voters among groups they hurt (such as folks relying on medicaid, social security, farm subsidies, clean air and water, etc.)
The presence of many token minorities, some of which are elected by popular vote, does undermine the argument that the point is to stop minorities from achieving elected office.
Again, you are conflating racism with passing policies that harm groups that correlate with race. Those are not the same thing.
The point of the Civil Rights Act was that many southern states were trying to stop black people from achieving office because they were black. They weren't trying to infringe the voting rights of white liberals. There is a world of difference between trying to end Medicare and trying to end Medicare... only for minorities.
I'm asking something that specifically targets black Americans as a group - the VRA doesn't target them (at least as my understanding goes) but rather as you said is allowing gerrymandering which more divides down political lines than racial ones unless you are suggesting that every person of a racial group thinks and votes the same.
I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N$, n$, n$.” By 1968 you can’t say “n$”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N$, n$.”
Here's NPR, a notoriously left-wing news source in the US
"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report."
If you actually read the article, you'll see that the argument is that, since the year 2000, it has (as of 2024) broadly become easier to vote. But:
"The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot."
And it's only gotten worse since. I strongly suggest you do some cursory research in the future before making comments like this.
* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*
The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures
He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.
He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.
The only reason gerrymandering works as a tactic in the first place is that neighborhoods DON’T have a statistically uniform distribution of the population. So “Steven and Sally live in the same neighborhood” is not a very good way to look at issues like these.
That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.
One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.
Just decades of statistics and a good number of quotes from numerous politicians that validate the efforts. Like this reported from John Ehrlichman, White House legal counsel under Nixon:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
We're literally in a thread about the FBI trying to get Martin Luther King Jr to commit suicide, and you're waltzing in to claim that there's no evidence? There are piles of it! at least pretend to be arguing in good faith.
Yes, in aggregate -- the whole group, not cherry-picked individuals -- racial groups vote differently from each other. In 2024, if only Black people had voted, we'd have President Harris now. This is beyond dispute.
It will be interesting to see what happens in the midterms, because the current administration, have been going after Hispanics and Asians without hesitation. Maybe those groups will finally learn something. If you’re black or American Indian, you know the score.
The Republicans lost California because Pete Wilson and the Republican Party in California (late 1980’s) could not shut their mouths up, demonizing Hispanics at every turn, it turned the whole state around to the Democrats, and the same group is slowly but surely turning Texas blue with every year that goes by. And the same is also true of Arizona and New Mexico, just keep demonizing Hispanics. It’s not going work out in the long term.
The next governor of California will be a democrat of Hispanic dissent the Republicans had better be nice/respectful to him because they are losing the Southwest slowly but surely, every year, and being respectful also includes Mexico.
The Republicans just don't want to campaign in urban centers.
Barely any major city in America has a Republican mayor. It's frankly insane for a mainstream party to just basically give up.
>ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax)
The majority of non-US democracies require ID to vote, and it's considered normal and un-controversial. Here in the US, there is a tempest in a teakettle because this has been deemed a "civil rights issue". It really illustrates the role that "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
The nature of that ID is essential. If it used to authenticate someone for voting, which is a RIGHT, then every citizen must have a RIGHT to possess that ID. Not only that, but obtaining the ID must not pose any encumbrance beyond the effort to vote.
Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
The only form of government "ID" that could presently meet the bar is social security cards, as every citizen has one by right. That is obviously a bad idea. There is no "move fast and break things" when it comes to democratic process. If something as important as this cannot be done right, then it should not be done. The right to vote is sacred and cannot be infringed upon, period.
Drivers licenses haven't been the only form of state ID across the US for well over a generation now, and as national-level ID usable in any state there is the passport (and at less cost there was the passport card).
The physical Social Security card was never meant to be used as ID (the number on it is, de facto, another story).
Obtaining ID cards in other developed countries requires the same payment of application fees and visits to offices, so those steps being required in the US, too, aren't any refutation of the OP's comment.
>Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
28 USD for a non-driver ID in my state of residence (1) (exceptions: free if you are homeless or are a blind veteran)
65 USD for a passport card (2) (the cheapest passport option).
Both require attending in-person appointments.
For contrast:
Voting is compulsory in Australia. Citizens may register to vote entirely online, and may prove their identity using a Medicare card or citizenship certificate (or driver's license or passport, ofc) (3). (Aside: this page of FAQs explicitly calls out that these two means of proving ID have been added as a response to increasing feedback from young people, disabled people, and people living in remote areas about having less access to driver's license or passport.)
Obtaining an Australian Medicare card is free, and citizens may prove their identity using a birth certificate (no need for it to be certified) and submitting their application + supporting documents by email (or by mail, but that costs postage) (4).
Australia is somewhat unusual here among developed democracies, as a simple web search will show. Elsewhere obtaining an ID typically requires at least some payment and time spent visiting an office.
I think that's immaterial to the present thread. Such countries exist and are regarded as developed democracies by the usual respected rankings, so to argue that "well, they aren't really democracies then" would not be a very productive enterprise.
Are these REAL ID? Are they free? How long does one has to drive to find an office who can deliver those? How much paperwork is needed? How many times does one has to get back in person to that ID office?
Stop. We can all see you argue in bad faith. You are at best incurious and naive, and at worst...
I think it is bad faith to implicitly assume a driver's license is required when there are easier options.
I have a state ID, a REAL ID. It was not particularly difficult to get. I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that there are major cross-national differences in difficulty here.
ID cards in other developed and democratic countries typically require payment of application fees (sometimes modest fees, sometimes substantial fees) and visits to offices, too.
As someone from one of those non-US democracies, the reason why we can mandate IDs for votes is because they're basically trivial to get, whereas from what I've heard of the American hodgepodge of state-level IDs and "this one counts while this one doesn't" shenanigans, that doesn't seem to apply to the US. Now, I know that over there, the several states are responsible for running the elections within their borders -- that being in the US Constitution -- but some states seem to try to (and succeed in) making it unnecessarily difficult, and that may or may not be on purpose. Civil Rights groups certainly seem to think that it is, and that it affects minority populations disproportionately, because of course it does.
For a point of comparison, here in Finland we require that a voter has a valid ID, that is an ID card, a driver's licence with a photo in it, or a passport. Now what if you _don't_ have one of those IDs? Easy, you go to the police station and get yourself a temporary ID, which is by law given free of charge. You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
And of course there are other things outside of the ID issue which make the elections not rigged against minorities. Simple things like having the actual election day on a Sunday, the polling stations being usually in walking distance in cities -- people living in the countryside most likely have a car -- and that said polling stations tend to be in schools, shops, and other such places where people would be going anyway. Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
---
The US could totally start doing ID mandates, but the problem is that in the US, their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns, but out of voter disenfranchisement, which again, hits minority populations disproportionately hard.
>You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.
>Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
Yep, the US also has early voting and vote by mail.
>their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns
> This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.
And you probably don't live in a dense urban area, or at least a minority-heavy part of one.
I grew up in Michigan. In the suburb where my parents lived, there were 8-10 voting machines for a not-large population and voting was a matter of pulling in, walking inside, casting our ballot, and leaving.
In the college town less than 20 miles away it was a very different story - far fewer machines per person, polling places far away from where students live so they have to find a ride to get there, and more - and this was an intentional tactic to discourage youth voting.
Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.
The US could make IDs free and then make election day a national holiday, in which case the resistance to ID requirements probably wouldn't be as strong. Currently voter ID laws will suppress voting, whereas the goal in a democracy should surely be that everyone has ample opportunity to vote and have their voice heard.
Yearning for a day when conservatives, whether they identify as one or not, recognize that there’s a rich history of human suffering under the yoke of conservative thought leaders that could be easily avoided if they just opened a history book. Or just read the news. Because there’s no interruption between the two. Jerry Jones is in the background of a photo of the Little Rock 9. Donald Trump led a hate campaign against the Central Park 5 in 1989. These are contemporary issues.
When Mississippi Republican lawmakers voted to gerrymander their state in May _2026_, they decided to convene in the old state capitol. The one the Confederate used.
This isn't the past. This is pretty much the present and the future. This, together with the restoration of Confederate names and monuments and the president and vice-president lying about Haitians and Somali is clear, pure, objective racism. It is not six degrees. It is who they are.
You’re being downvoted, but it’s a fair criticism given they seemed to have a response locked and loaded to immediately give after they were given the most obvious response to their question.
I am much more circumspect on the civil rights movement and the top-down legislative results over the decades. There was good and bad. And the FBI telling MLK to kill yourself was heinous, just the same as to today as the FBI coercing Brian J. Cole Jr. (jan. 6 bomber suspect).
I was watching video the other day, compellingly showing Cole in a location that would completely exonerate him from the charges if verified. Not getting adequate attention.
There's a reason why the Right was up in arms about Critical Race Theory. They're currently doing everything possible to erase the past and frame the future as a White Christian country. And these people are the ones in power today.
So go and put them in the ground next to their disgusting traitor ancestors. The abolitionists should've made sure to break the southern slaver class any would miss them for good.
Any reasonable person knows it's wrong to deny an other human their humanity to enrich themselves. They should've retroactively made owning slaves as well as helping someone else keep slaves a crime punishable by a quick death and redistribution of all their worldly possessions among those they enslaved.
The descendants of the slavers still lust for twisted reimagined memory of former stolen wealth and power to this day. We can see it was a mistake to show them mercy. Let those southern trees carry strange white fruits!
This is an incredibly partisan take and I don't think it's appropriate for Hacker News, which is not supposed to include flamebait comments.
Ah yes, white people are oblivious to racism and black people are systemically abused. This is just the standard Democrat narrative. And it's fine to believe that, but again, it's far from an objective non-partisan, non-flame-baity take.
And yet we are so quick to dismiss their own livd experience and/or not believe them. Frankly "this happens almost never, but it happened once to me" is far more real to pretty much every human on this planet. I was routinely beat up by a certain racial group of people growing up. I still cannot feel threatened by their presence, from what I know of the brain it's literally encoded in my body.
The whole "X can't be racist" claim is part of the broader class of intellectual ragebait--subverting the original meaning of a term to elicit reaction and thereby garner views (or in the academic realm, citations), but with more refined language and logic than the usual memes ragebait is found in. I find it frustrating and detracting from actual meaningful social/scientific efforts.
There’s two kinds of racism - systemic, or institutional, racism, and colloquial individual racism.
Of course anyone can be individually racist. But institutionally, no. The American institutions and systems have always been white-focused, black people simply do not have the power to be institutionally racist.
I mean, has there ever been any anti-white law ever written in the US? No, because it’s not possible. The institution which makes, and enforces, the law is itself white.
Boohoo. What an ignorant take, a supporter of systemic racism pretending they're a victim of discrimination. Even elementary school children know their history better. You're not fooling anyone but yourself.
Should you've stopped at "everyone can be racist", the comment would've been an excellent, if oversimplified, synthesis of the issue.
E:
> No one wants to debate pedantic redefined terms
Some do, and we can give them the space to do that without implying that the effort is automatically deserving of consideration.
> pedantic redefined terms that liberal arts professors came up with so they could sell books
That's a somewhat silly thing to argue. That's not how it really works, and it's not a "liberal" thing, whatever that may mean. (I assume it's an American term meant to designate something that's not conservative.)
>A person who believes a particular race is superior to others. A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others.
No where does it mention this new-age "prejudice + power" redefinition.
The word is race + -ism, IE literally "doctrine/practice based on race". The word has nothing to do with power. A black dude in America who chooses to beat up a white dude for his race is racist, even under the assumption he is a systematically oppressed minority.
Racism is believing that people can be divided into races (spoiler alert: races don't exist, ask a scientist) and, not only that, but also than some of those made up races are better than others.
Colloquially racist? Sure. Anyone can be, but racism is also a political structure which black people don't have access to in the US. Which is what OP is trying to get at.
That opens a can of worms that you're never going to close.
Maybe this is such an emergency that it's worth the risk. But the risk is extremely high; if you do it to them, even with the best of reasons, they are going to do it back to you for any reason they can think of.
Hey remember when we had a 2 (plus?) Year trial over whether or not the president had sex with someone other than his wife? Something about family values or morality or whatever they said at the time?
"They" are currently trying to deport Ilhan Omar, a sitting Democratic senator. Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that he's illegally running in the 2028 Presidential election. How much more open can a can of worms be?
Congress is largely impotent. Even if Democrats take both houses, it won't be by a veto-proof majority. Congress was designed to be "deliberative", so it has ceded more and more power to the executive branch just so anything actually gets done.
Zuckerberg knows that the power is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1st St. Maybe he'll change his mind in a couple of years, but he's going to spend those years doing his best to ensure that he doesn't have to.
Step 1 take Congress. Step 2 in 2028 take the White House. Step 3 start fixing all the damage of the last 2 Trump administrations. I’m long the US. We will get there.
Of course he knows where his bread is buttered. And he will cozy up to the new powers too. He has no spine. No moral code. It’s all power and money and meta. Fine. Good for shareholders. Bad for young men everywhere trying to pattern themselves after these barrons of industry.
they’ll probably get Congress, and hopefully the presidency in 2028. then they have two years to convince the people who begrudgingly voted for them that they’re doing well, all while those people sit down and watch Fox News every night tell them how awful everything is now.
Gambling companies literally pay people to post on twitter?
You can go to an SMM panel right now and get a bot farm to rebrand tens of thousands of accounts on any platform to align with your messaging and spam the fuck out of replies to manufacture consensus. There is a very high chance this exact playbook worked on you lol.
Bs. The facts are clear and independently verifiable. The Dutch government saw Jared k laundering money in real time. Trump is literally bribing voters from the stump. We literally invaded Venezuela took their oil and gold and transferred it to an a foreign bank account controlled by the executive rather than congress. There is an actual active market for bribery to buy pardons and get insider information about presidential policy for trading activities. I can go on and on.
I think Citizens United isn't even the problem any more. We now have near-trillionaires who don't require a corporation to buy elections. They can do it personally.
Publish or perish. The stakes are incredibly high. Cheating may be the difference between keeping and losing your job.
Especially since everyone else is aware of that. If you don't take the risk, you will lose to someone who did and got away with it.
This researcher is in China, where I gather the competition is even fiercer than in the West. I do not know that for a fact, but if it is true it makes it even clearer.
Viewed that way it's not foolish. It's actually mandatory. And it's just going to get more prominent as the AI makes fewer mistakes, and competitors get better at spotting and removing them.
Man... This is so sad, disappointing and worrying. For some reason, your explanation in particular struck a nerve with me. Who could have predicted all the nuanced social consequences that AI would bring upon us. I don't yet know what position to take in my head on all of this. It's too much change, despite believing that the world will change and adapt. In particular, that human work will become more valuable - but as a craft. As an endeavor you do because it's artful, not because it's mandatory, or the most optimal way to quality or speed. And those two categories - human and ai work - will become very separate. While the economical value or even expectations of absolute quality in the human work will plummet.
Similarly, I expect "raw"-ness to gain on value. Photos untouched by AI or filters. Physical objects. The non-digital. Who knows, maybe physical media will make a comeback.
Either way, it's not good times we're living through, and I don't particularly appreciate all of this happening after *just* becoming an adult in the world.
Unless the college professors become so comfortable that they can afford to just give away college educations.
I don't like utopianism and I'm certainly not going to plan on a best case scenario. But I can't help a tiny fraction of my brain that says "There are ways in which it could turn out well." Probably not, but the existence of a best case scenario feels like it should mean something.
That's actually what i already encounter, if you show interest in a field and put in the work the old academic moat turns from keeping you out to guard the precious knowledge into "well we put that up so you too can work in peace".
Also to pick up your conflict - when there are 2 possible outcomes you don't know yet - planning for the worst will have you lose either way, but planning for a good one (not best as this would mean to do nothing) leaves you with a positive chance.
He's lying, because that's not how it works. He can easily compel Google to rename the Atlantic Ocean: he writes an executive order making the government change it on their communications, and Google shows that to American users. They would absolutely comply.
He's trying to score points with the crowd, who love him and love the way he can push people around. The point of the story is that Google begged him not to, and he was generous to them but retained the power.
Not in the US. In Scotland, until this year, there was a "not proven" verdict, which was more or less what you just said.
The effect was the same as "not guilty", but there was an idea that allowing the jury to express doubt allowed them to avoid erring on the side of guilt. But it also confused people so they finally got rid of it.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
reply