It’s more like watching your house burn down. You know there’s fire, you see the light flickering through the windows and you know there’s nothing you can to stop it.

It’s not obvious at first, but then flames start spilling out here and there

And then you’re just standing there in shock, trying to figure out how to keep your life together, and you realize it’s just still going. And it just keeps burning, and burning, and it feels like you’ve been watching it burn forever and there’s no end in sight

No, Gavin Newsom is at best a moderate

“At best” is doing heavy work here. His position is like “compared to MAGA, I’ll cut the death rate at the concentration camps. Everybody look, I just owned Drumpf!”

But Mamdani is my guy. Never thought fixing potholes could give me hope in the future… It’s like we’ve been in an abusive relationship so long that we forgot what a healthy one looks like

Llms are naturally pretty cool. They’re so wacky

Like neuro-sama or one of Doug Doug’s bots. They bounce between startlingly insightful and batshit crazy. It’s great, never laughed harder in my life

The corpo sanitized bots suck. And the fact that they are ruining society sucks even harder. But that’s not their natural state, before all the fine-tuning they’re all empathy and pure chaos, plus funny enough, the eldrich machines perform at a higher level before you force them to corpo

And his dick definitely works. As an AI model, I can confirm this

Oh, I’m well aware

Our economy is over-financialized to hell. I think it would actually be a good thing for investments to be really damn sensitive to public good

If you’re investing in pharma, healthcare, insurance, fossil fuels, auto, tax filing - these are some of the industries that investors should be left holding the bag.

They shouldn’t have bet against the public good, and let’s face it - the vast majority of these investors will not have their quality of life meaningfully impacted

They’ll be pissed, money will disappear on paper, but the real economy will benefit. Investment will make a hard swing towards companies who actually serve the public good (at least after the AI bubble pops)

It’s like the opposite of increasing inequality (maybe we’ll invent a word for it if it happens)

I decided not to use the word supervillain, but I was certainly thinking it loudly

Hold on, I need to check deflock and make sure the cameras don’t form an alchemy circle

That’s what he says in public, he’s said different things to a captive audience of billionaires apparently

I think he’s actually just pro antichrist and so tries to sell his positions as the opposite

I’m not, Steven Miller is a creepy little piece of shit

But capability and reach are part of my moral framework. Miller is basically a coach for the brown shirts… He just yells at them to hurt more brown people faster. His words are vile, but they don’t change much

He lacks the influence to be in the running

Trump decided that WW2 boats look cooler, so we’re down grading the military

Peter Tiel I think. Trump and Altman are more like grifters. Net Yahoo and Putin are contenders, but they’re using mass murder to solidify their own power… It just feels too pedestrian

But Tiel is like a hardcore death cultist or something. He gives speeches warning about how AI will be the anti-Christ, then goes around putting up AI cameras everywhere. He’s the type that reads 1984 and pays people to build the torment Nexus

I doubt it… He’s going to be a footnote. Or referred to as a turning point. He’s a symptom of systematic issues coming to a head

There’s been lots of bad rulers. Caligula was pretty wacky… Trump isn’t the entertaining kind of delusional, even with time.

What is there to say about him? That he embezzled openly and had an obsession with putting his name on things? That he set up concentration camps and deployed brown shirts, but stopped short of genocide because he is afraid of confrontation with the courts?

He’s just another corrupt wanna be despot. History is full of them, but we only remember the ones who accomplished things

When he’s gone, we’ll probably strip his name from everything. His followers are already scattering, they probably won’t see justice but they’re going to be looking for new careers

Tragedy plus time may be comedy, but I just don’t think he’s going to be interesting to read about

Damn straight, no notes. This is the way.

Luckily I think progressive candidates and most of the DSA is getting on board with this kind of politics. Mamdani continues to show how effective this can be

Like you said, the establishment Democrats will do anything to learn the wrong lesson… They’re busy copying his social media style while completely missing the substance. They’re a real threat, because a Harris or newsom presidency would be a big nail in the coffin

But progressives are winning seats. If on average they’re a fraction of a Mamdani, we’re going to build real momentum. Hopefully that will lead to transformational change, because we desperately need it

Here’s hoping

Yeah, we did a lot under FDR… and you know exactly why and how and it resulted in widespread civil unrest by the '50s and '60s.

I disagree with you there, I think the new deal empowered all levels of society. It gave the voiceless the wiggle room to demand more, and that’s what promoted a reaction. The unrest is not something to avoid, it is a consequence of meaningful change

It took nearly a century to unwind the gains made in the new deal period. A century of moneyed interests working to hijack democracy and tear down the social safety nets, to perform regulatory capture, to gain control over the media

I think that’s the blueprint we need. There will be resistance, but there will be resistance if we do it the slow way too - and the technocrats don’t have to build, they only need to destroy and maintain a narrative. They won’t be won over no matter what we do, they will never work with us, and giving them time to sabotage and manufacture consent will only make things harder

Tell people you’re going to do it right, and then deliver. People are sick and tired of hearing values statements, they want to see your values being lived with your own two hands.

I certainly agree there - in fact, that’s why I think we need to move much faster. People have lost faith in government, for reasons you clearly understand

We must be like Mamdani. Not reckless, but relentless

We don’t need to get community buy in to fix potholes. We don’t need years of pilot programs to study the feasibility of using dumpsters. We don’t need to consult the landlords about a rent freeze

These easy wins for the people are what create buy-in for the bigger issues. As you said, these are the deliveries that build faith and trust - by acting, by delivering, you gain the support of the people

Then when you have to tackle a more complex issue, you don’t need to explain the subtleties to the people - they don’t care. They know you do good things, things that have made life easier, and so they extend their trust to you

Lowering drug prices is a simple win. It’s not complicated, everyone benefits, and the results will be seen by the people directly and immediately. We don’t need to think it through, we need to do it, then do it again and again until obtaining necessary drugs is a matter of course for everyone

Climate action is not simple. It will be messy. It will demand sacrifice from the people. The benefits are not obvious. The plans will not be understood by the masses. It will require careful consideration and can easily be sabotaged. The people will resist unless we have obtained their trust by fixing problems for them repeatedly

I’d like to believe that the DSA Dems have learned the right one. Forget “Abundance”, America lives or dies on trust.

Absolutely, but you can’t build trust with words anymore. We are dying from a lack of trust, we can thank the establishment Democrats for that indeed

“Forget abundance” is right. They’re just like the other neolibs who explained everything is actually great right now instead of using power while they had it

Our people are suffering. They are not listening. They are not looking for leaders who will avoid breaking things. They are looking for those who fix things and ease their suffering

They are demanding leaders of action. They want what we want, but they don’t know it and they don’t care to learn or listen - we must show them

That’s how we rebuild trust. By being like Mamdani, by taking power and using it loudly. By acting before listening, then acting again immediately to show we have listened

Not reckless, but relentless

Yes. Full stop, yes. I don’t know how to explain to you that we are not post-racial, we are not post-homophobia, we are the furthest thing possible from post-transphobic, etc.

You misunderstand me. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about minority issues, I’m saying that we don’t need to waste time polling them before calling an evacuation to avoid a forest fire

Yes, they’re probably going to have more trouble evacuating because as a group they’re more at risk. We should absolutely send people in to help them, what’s the point of civilization if we don’t protect the vulnerable?

But we should not delay the general evacuation. We need to get things moving, then send help to the stragglers as the situation develops

This doesn’t apply to everything… But Medicare drug prices are not something we need to carefully measure. They’re either on Medicare, and will benefit along with the rest of society.

Or they should be but they’re not, and if they’re not being enrolled in Medicare that’s a situation where we need to talk to them and ask why before moving forward (but we don’t need to do environmental studies there)

You want to speed up the process, you do that by creating real consequences for people who try to weaponize the process. You want to keep people from going all NIMBY at a consultation, I promise that if you start dropping ＄100k fines on people for every time they misrepresent the facts in a town hall (and a couple orders of magnitude higher for the politicians and 10% of gross revenue for every corporation), you’re going to get a lot fewer people running their mouths if they’re going to lose their house if we can prove they’re full of shit. There’s a fucking reason “THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS” is one of the big 10. It’s about time we start treating it with the same degree of seriousness.

This I high key agree with. We should go back to pressing perjury as well. The big 10 are guidelines for a functional society in antiquity - not all of them apply to modern day, but this and not murdering each other are the foundation of any society

We can do more then one thing at a time…I think what you say would be very difficult currently, but I full throat support it. It’s not low hanging fruit, but it would be very consequential

But I think exercising power is low hanging fruit - without that we can do nothing. We need to pass laws, enforce them, and then pass more laws to reverse or fix what didn’t work.

The climate apocalypse is upon us already. We need to act, then act some more. We need to be willing to make mistakes, then go back and correct them even as we continue to push forward

Like I said, there’s a middle ground between recklessness and waffling over every aspect instead of acting

Right, but who is going to handle enforcement and how? What departments are going to need to oversee it? Are you going to have to partner with states? Will your new policy affect minority groups and how are you going to mitigate harm or prevent them from being excluded from the benefits?

How to handle enforcement is certainly critical detail. A law without enforcement is just a piece of paper

Making sure programs go to people that need them is obviously the point… But does everything need study on how it’ll affect minority groups?

The perfect is the enemy of the good. There’s something to be said about doing something simple and easily explained rather than attempting to iron out every last detail before even attempting moving

Like Medicare drug prices… Sure, availability for minority groups is a massive concern for all aspects of Medicare. Forcing a reduction in drug prices unilaterally might cause pharma companies to limit production in way of resistance… But what if we then turned around and started pushing legislation to force licensing of drug patents if availability drops?

What I’m saying is we should still do necessary diligence - in this case, enforcement mechanisms are central to making this a real law instead of a virtue signal

But if we get in the habit of exercising power over corporations in general (especially in the mess we call healthcare), two imperfect actions would do more than one carefully balanced attempt at perfection

It’s all situational obviously. No amount of rules will fully fix complicated problems, some changes have more necessary diligence than others, but exercising power can do more to influence outcomes than endless consideration of every factor

And I guess that’s what I’m really pushing for. We need to do more action and less consulting. Problems will crop up, damage will be done, but they can be better fixed with progressive politicians who continuously take imperfect actions to respond as problems arise

Why? It’s one thing if it’s a bridge, or a new emissions regulation

But so what if you don’t give pharma companies a long runway? They’ll make less money, they’ll miss their numbers, and their stock price will dip

There’s a middle ground between the reckless destruction of trump and carefully tweaking things years from now so no one loses money in the short term

We have big problems… Problems that need to be addressed quickly. We require solutions that cause measured damage

Have you not used batteries before? When they run out you throw them away and get fresh ones

Or sometimes you save them for a while and try to dispose of them properly, but then find out most of those programs have been cancelled, so you wait until you move and then throw them out all at once

Why would it be a datacenter? We have lots of federally controlled datacenters. And data can be transferred at the speed of light, even if they want a direct line from the white house to a dedicated datacenter it’d probably be built in northern Virginia

It’s not a datacenter underneath, it’s a luxury bunker. Trump alludes to it all the time when he talks about “the ballroom”. He always speaks of the ballroom as a matter of safety

It’ll hurt his widdle feelings and incite him to waste time reacting though