Not quite, even when Trump won in 2016, he insisted there was election fraud and that he should've won by a larger margin.

You're going to have so much healthcare you'll get sick of having healthcare!

I hope he never has that realization.

At best this post is letting perfection be the enemy of "not ceding to a fascist narcissist that aims to be a dictator and will do incalculable damage whether he manages to overthrow democracy or not".

At worst this post is bait from a Russian troll farm that's trying to demoralize leftists so we act against our own interests by making shallow ideological appeals.

Either way, get bent.

AI person reporting in. Without saying whether or not I personally believe that the current tools will lead to the end of humanity, I'll point out a few possibilities that I find concerning about what's going on:

• The hype around AI is being used to justify mass layoffs, where humans are being replaced by tools that do a questionable job and can't really understand the things those humans could understand. Whether or not the AI can do as good of a job according to some statical measurement is less relevant than the fact that a human is less likely to make an extremely grave mistake and more likely to be able to recognize when that does happen. I'm concerned this will lead to cross-industry enshitification on an unprecedented scale.

• The foundation models consume a huge amount of energy. The more impressive you want it to be, the more energy it needs. As long as the data centers which run them are dependent on fossil fuels, they'll be pumping a huge amount of carbon in the air just to do replace jobs that we didn't need to have replaced.

• As these tools are used more and more, they're going to end up "learning" from content created by themselves instead of something that's closer to a ground truth. It's hard to predict what kind of degradation of service will come from this, but the more we create systems that rely on these tools, the more harm it will do to us.

• Given the cost and nature of these tools, they're likely to yield the most benefit to moneyed interests that want to automate the systems that maintain their power and wealth. E.g. generating large amounts of convincing disinformation to manipulate the public into supporting politicians or policies that benefit a small number of wealthy people in the short term while locking humanity into a path towards destruction.

And none of this accounts for possible future iterations of AI tools that may be far more capable than what exists today. That future technology will most likely be controlled by powerful people who are primarily interested in using it to bolster the systems that keep them in power, to the detriment of humanity as a whole.

Personally I'm far less concerned about a malicious AI intentionally doing harm to humanity than AI being used as a weapon by unscrupulous people.

I think it's specifically meant to debunk the idea that meat is the only affordable source of protein-dense food, when in reality there are vegan protein-dense foods that are even more affordable.

That doesn't conflict with the fact that a well balanced diet is important; it's just addressing one sticking point that tends to come up in these conversations.

Give them sanctuary with protected status in your own country rather than driving other people out of some other country.

Astroturfing implies that a corporation or government agency with large amounts of funding are paying individuals or bots to spread misinformation for their employer's financial or strategic benefit.

You might not know this, but there isn't a "Big Vegan" industry with deep pockets to financially support astroturfing. Agrobusinesses that grow vegetation make more money off the meat industry than they would if they centered their produce around vegetarian or vegan diets. Businesses that do cater to vegans barely manage to scrape by and have no margins to support social media manipulation; they barely even have budget for conventional marketing.

What you're actually witnessing is legitimate grassroots efforts to inform people about the harm that the meat industry causes. You see "astroturfing" doesn't mean "a lot of people are saying things I don't like". It actually means "grassroots campaign but fake", hence the name "astroturf", which is a fake kind of grass.

This is the argument that I used when I was an adolescent who thought himself very wise and smart but in reality just wanted an excuse to not have to change the lifestyle that I was comfortable with.

Saying "life only comes from death" is a cowardly reductionism. It creates a false equivalence between plant and animal life that lets you ignore the fact that sustaining human life does not require the wanton suffering of animals. And it certainly doesn't require animals to be suffering at such massive scales and in such cruel ways.

You're probably someone who will cite studies which indicate that plants emit distress signals when they take physical damage, and you'll argue that therefore plants suffer the same as animals. But that's an intellectually dishonest argument. Suffering as we understand it is more than just a chemical reaction to stimulus; it emerges from an awareness of being alive and an instinctual desire to remain alive and unharmed. Plants do not have that kind of awareness.

There are predators in nature that only know how to hunt to survive. Their digestive systems are specialized to consume the bodies of other smaller animals. And their ecosystems depend on those predators to balance out the reproductive cycles of their prey, otherwise the prey animals would become overpopulated and wipe out life forms lower on the food chain.

The fact of the matter is that humans have not been a collaborative member of any ecosystem for tens of thousands of years. We cause massive harm to every ecosystem that we're a part of, and the mass slaughter of farm animals is the worst thing we've done to this planet yet, even more harmful overall than CO2 emissions. We're eroding the soil and using up the fresh water in ways we can't sustain, and then to top it all off we're inflicting the largest scale unnecessary suffering in the history of this planet. And all of it is being done so that humans can enjoy a pleasure that is both unnecessary and easily replaced with a small amount of agricultural and supply chain reform.

Humans are omnivores and the simple reality is that as an omnivore with options at your disposal you have a choice about whether the process of sustaining your life involves wanton suffering at a massive scale or not. If you think the suffering of animals is worth the pleasure you derive from eating their flesh then just be honest and say so. Don't be a coward like I used to be by pretending that animals and plants are the same.

I genuinely wonder what the kompromat is on Sensor Tuberville. He seems to do everything in his power to help Putin's military interests.

The post is literally describing existential nihilism, whoops.

The difference is that for one side the "violations of the Geneva convention" are not being carried out by the duly elected government 🤔