Managed Democracy™

And Lina Khan will be right there!

Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

If you have multiple cats and kids, it becomes like The West Wing.

The goat scream?

Lemmy needs more Hazbin.

2008 DNC was oblivious to Obama until the caucuses started, cuz polling (except for one agency) was consistently missing his popularity with first-timers, so they didn’t get much of a chance to stop him.

This was also before Citizens United, so there’s that too…

What is naive realism?

People also drink coffee while driving. It’s a depraved world out there.

The liberal fantasy of putting someone in their place

I’ve been assured that AI will fix it.

“Done is better than perfect.”

Everything is political.

I thought that was the free space.

Canonical Strawman Leftist™ describing their utopia: “Everyone votes on everything, and we engage in thoughtful discussion to persuade our neighbors to make good choices with their votes.”

Same leftist describing today: “Voting is pointless, and it’s impossible to change anyone’s mind.”

Return to freakin sender!

He and Trump deserve each other.

You underestimate the power of whining online.

MAGA is the result of decades of talk radio and pseudo-journalism aimed at curating a very specific way of seeing the world.

They refined a narrative that was persuasive, easy to upload into people, consistent in how it framed emergent issues, and instilled a sense of urgency that encouraged its adherents to spread the gospel and get politically active.

Obviously, we need to vote. But if you think victory is getting a Bernie 2.0 to 51% in a primary, you’re gonna be sorely disappointed by the general. It needs to be a slam dunk. We need a cultural win before we can have an electoral win.

We gonna finally get a decent Zen 5 entry?

They’re all towers. But the buttons are all pretty shallow with very light actuation force required.

And they all happen to be situated such that the corner which has the button is the corner furthest away from the desk, so when she jumps up onto the PC as a platform to get ready to jump onto the desk, her feet are all grouped up right in that corner.

And you can imagine that if she’s crouched down ready to jump, and I put my arm out to prevent her from jumping from the tower to the desk, that’s a lot of pressure all applied to her little toe beans.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence. But that experience, together with seeing this Mac Mini design, has made me wonder why we tend to put a button with such drastic effects right out in the open like this.