rational_lib

Here's how this works:

1. Network is created that doesn't discriminate on speech.
2. The left wins debates and it becomes increasingly liberal over time.
3. Far right billionaires buy it to stop those process.

It's the 48 Star American flag, thus it's the German American Bund in the 30s. To be fair to the literal Nazis pictured it's before the holocaust was discovered. It's not AI, it appears in this 2017 article: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/american-nazis-in-the-1930sthe-german-american-bund/529185/

They're really against anything nice that can be achieved through cooperation, aren't they?

the vast majority of people will always accept a pretty lie over an ugly truth

I'd argue this is true temporarily.

A lie is like putting something on a credit card. It can make things look better in the short term, but the debt builds. Maybe you can get lucky and win the lottery (or get a pandemic to use as an excuse) and pay off the debt temporarily, but keep following the same strategy and the debt will build again. And when the debt grows larger than what you can repay, and people figure this out, they start to get pissed.

Maybe Trump can survive the current crisis in his popularity, but eventually he's going to be no more popular that Pol Pot is today.

Well that would eliminate the whole point of corporations, which is to make it easy to raise money.

Let's start with an understanding of why corporations suck in the first place. The root of all good and evil in a corporation is limited lability. This allows investors to not have to worry that they're going to lose more than their investment, so they don't need to think too hard before putting their money in some company they just heard of. This is great for investors and for the corporation.

But this comes with a cost to everyone else. There's the direct cost that if the corporation ends up owing people money through excessive debt, negligence, or illegal activities, they can declare bankruptcy and the investors don't have to worry any paying for those (other than their losses on the stock). But I suspect the more pernicious effect is that the investors' lack of concern over their investment as anything but a vehicle of profit basically leads them to pick sociopathic CEOs and demand profit maximizing behavior at the cost of social good and even long term stability. And since all this sociopathic activity is really great at amassing money, it's kind of a big power boost for sociopathy overall.

However, the ease of investing can be a good thing for society too - basically it allows a lot of people to retire at some point, and allows for rapid funding of new ideas. So is there a way to get corporations back under control without throwing out the baby? I tend to think we should tax corporations higher if nothing else, as it is we do the opposite thanks to Trump's last tax cut plan.

I get that this is upvoted a lot due to being constructive but it also reflects a lot of Republican media tropes about the left that aren't really true - and that's why trying to "fix" these things won't work - because it misses the real problem.

Examples: No significant figure on the left is saying "men are rapists", or telling men to be more like women, etc. Reducing suicide, safer workplaces, and reducing excessive prison sentences are all priorities for the left and not for the right.

I think the real problem is quite simple: Republicans have invested heavily in portraying themselves as the "masculine party", and in driving the narratives I've mentioned. And because Republican leaders like the Murdochs and Elon tend to be men, they're best at driving those narratives.

Which goes to the real underlying problem with the left as a whole - no ability to drive or counter a media narrative. The right has Fox news and Elon's control over Twitter, which they can and do regularly use to create whatever narrative they want. Notice how for example they just made white south African farmer killings a topic all of a sudden. The left has a bunch of corporate media whose top priority is selling truck ads. Sure, maybe the reporters themselves are left leaning, but they have no top down guidance as to what narratives to build.

And until the left creates some sort of media capability to create and control narratives, the right will always have a leg up. And because of that, none of the well intentioned ideas here will actually work. If the left tries to appeal to men, the right will decide how those appeals will be interpreted.

Bill Maher used to be a right leaning "centrist" when he was running politically incorrect in the 90s. His politics never changed, he just got critical of crazy Republican shit like the Iraq war and then Trump ignoring elections.

A certain percentage of all people are bloodthirsty monsters, especially when it comes to people unlike themselves.

And anyone who thinks this problem is caused by no one trying to use a bomb, gun, or flamethrower to solve it is the biggest idiot in planet earth.

To be fair, that grey tree trunk looked a lot like a road

That overly simplistic view of things is a great way to be totally ineffective, if not countereffective, at keeping Palestinian kids alive.

You have one party that's a mix of pro Israel and people who question Israel. You have another party that's basically anti Arab Nazis who are totally supportive of murdering civilians. If your primary target is the people who debate supporting Israel as opposed to the people who have an actual plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and replace it with fancy hotels and condos (while deporting anyone they can who disagrees), you're actually harming Palestinian life expectancy.

Right now I don't think there will be a Palestinian people in 50 years because pretty much everyone who claims to stand up for them, from Hamas to US based protesters, seems to be glad to harm them in pursuit of vice signalling.

The left is shockingly asleep about how bad this is. X still is the single most important platform for driving narratives about the news and politics. And it's still important in part because Democrats and the left as a whole have been lethargic in leaving it. The fact that it's blatantly being used to tilt the national political discussion in whatever direction Elon wants was probably one of many keys to getting Trump elected in 2024, and should be regarded as an ongoing emergency for Democrats and the left.

It seems that the woman has a penchant for believing mystical guidance. "A few years ago, she visited an astrologer and it took a whole year for her to accept that none of it was real," the husband said.

That should've been the first clue. I can date someone who engages in fantasy for a bit, but if they never come back to reality then just put the relationship down humanely.