token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
No bio...
User ID: 1737
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
8d ago
(2) and (3) seem pretty accurate. I'd disagree strongly on (1): the Democrats' failure in 2024 was in no small part because they failed to communicate their successes to the electorate. Unless you were watching closely, the Biden administration appeared to be merely keeping the government going and not rocking the boat. Policies on the left can be sold as popular. People on the left regularly claim polling shows their policies are popular as long as you don't use use language pattern-matching to existing right-wing attacks on them. The problem is the Democrats either don't try or aren't good at it. And they try to fight any candidate that is good at it like Mamdani.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9d ago
Not that any leftist/progressive was expecting good takes from Pod Save America, but listening to that makes it clear the DNC fully intends to repeat their mistakes of 2024. The only realistic path they have to a 2028 presidential election victory is some surprise candidate winning the primary over the wishes of the DNC like Obama did. Obama and Mamdani (NYC mayor being very different from a presidential election, of course) are recent examples of that happening, so it's not impossible, but the Democrats badly needed that in 2016, 2020 (sure Biden won, but it was embarrassing that beating Trump was a challenge at all), and 2024 as well. And this interview confirms the old guard is just as entrenched as ever.
The leftist/progressive position (at least the more practical leftist) is not that the Democrats are good, but that getting elected outside of the two-party system is infeasible and they aren't welcome in the Republican party, so the only remaining option is to try to co-opt the Democratic party. Which outside of a few exceptions (Mamdani, "The Squad") has not seen a lot of success.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9d ago
One way for Democrats to win is to half-repudiate peak woke. Admit some things went too far, stop talking about censorship and trans rights, pivot to healthcare and industrial policy, loudly promise not to let in thirty million illegal immigrants, quietly promise to be lefter than Trump. Voters might not trust this pitch, but they could be convinced if Democrats really did learn their lesson. Voters could be sold "let's be nicer to illegal immigrants" if it really isn't a workaround for open borders.
Another way for Democrats to win is to do the same thing over again and expect a different result. Everything is fine, identity politics, DEI, trans kids, amnesty, Democratic policies have always been correct about everything and there are no trade-offs for anything.
This is exactly the consultant-brained nonsense that the DNC is likely to continue doubling down on and losing with. "We're almost as Republican as the Republicans!" is not a winning message for anyone other than the DNC donors who want Republican policies and there to not be an effective opposition to them. Voters presented with "Republican-lite" or "Republican" on the ballot are going to continue to vote Republican or stay home.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
25d ago
Try telling them we need to stop requiring employers to bundle health insurance -- and that is the way to break the real principal-agent problem you mention -- and see how they respond.
"Medicare for All" is one of the main slogans among the populist left. I don't think you'd get the response you're claiming.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ is his blog. He also has a podcast https://www.betteroffline.com/ but the AI industry analysis there is essentially him reading/summarizing his blog posts.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
2mo ago
Inference costs can be covered with a reasonably priced subscription.
[Citation needed]
This is currently not true. Maybe if you freeze the models and wait for silicon to improve for a few years it will be. But the LLM companies are constantly increasing their inference costs as FLOPs go down in price.
At least according to Ed Zitron's analysis. Maybe you just don't believe his numbers.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
No, I meant what I said. There's no difficulty finding the stale public keys. The stale private keys should be published. DKIM can't provide strongly deniable authentication, but publishing the old private keys would give a weak version of it.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
This issue came up with the Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden email leaks. While basically no one signs their emails, modern anti-spam technology means nearly all modern emails are signed by the sending server using DKIM. Theoretically, a privacy-conscious email host would regularly rotate their DKIM keys and publicly post their stale ones (i.e. make sure it's trivial to forge old emails), but in practice GMail does not do this and a quick web search finds no one recommending this.
In short, given the full headers, it's possible to cryptographically verify emails really were sent by the user they appear to have been sent by. (Obviously, someone could have gained access to the account who is not the owner of the account or there might be other reasons why the server's signature might not correspond to the human who wrote the email, but those are a lot less likely than the ease of forging an unsigned email.)
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
The entire general experience of the web is built around advertising. An entirely paid model of web usage is not something we've ever really seen.
You're right, banning advertising would destroy the web as we know it. Was there also a downside?
advertising in media is a good thing because it supports neutral media motivated purely by capitalism.
... you might want to reread that sentence and see if you can spot any logical inconsistencies.
neutral[sic] media motivated purely by capitalism.
The media motivated by capitalism unsurprisingly has a very strong pro-captial bias. Which has been intensifying in the past few years with billionaires buying up the remaining reputable media outlets like The Washington Post and CBS (those being more recent examples, this is not a new trend).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
the right wing twitterati is frustrated with Trump for being too moderate with his priorities, slow walking immigration enforcement, etc. Is that, uh, objectively correct?
It's not quite the same, but, yes, I'd consider the claim that Trump was taking immigration enforcement seriously to be only slightly less absurd. The Trump administration is very interested in the theater of immigration enforcement, but has repeatedly avoided or backed down from doing anything actually effective. It's clear they don't actually believe in the goal (likely because it would be bad for the profits of their funders) and merely want theater for their base. That said, this is one, among many, areas where the theater of the Trump administration is itself at least somewhat advancing the long-term goal of destroying the cultural concept of the US being welcoming to immigrants.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
3mo ago
Ok, we've seen what the institutional left in the US trying to target the right looks like before. It was... the Biden admin. Not Biden personally, he was sundowning for most of it. But figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland are pretty core to the DNC apparatus- if 'democrats take the gloves off' has a face, it's one we've seen.
That's a wild take. Biden and Garland were pretty explicit about not targeting the right and slow-walking any legal action and a pretty common sentiment on the left (or maybe just the far-left? certainly not the NYT-wing of the "left" mainstream media) is to be upset at them for that.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
I think not. It's more like challenging the assumptions most progressives have that (a) you cannot be even a little bit racist and still have affection and friendship for members of that race. The whole reason "Some of my best friends are black" became a boomer-cringe punchline is that it was actually true for a lot of people! They did have black friends, and yet they also had racist opinions about blacks in general.
What progressives ever made that claim? The whole point of "some of my best friend are black" being a punchline is that it's not evidence of not being racist. That is, tokenism is still racist.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
4mo ago
I don't see how "the CEO killer was right" and "Luigi was not the CEO killer" are incompatible ideas. This comment below gives the argument more or less as I've seen it: the government needed to frame someone because letting someone who assassinated a CEO get away with it would break the social order. So they support the real killer for having killed someone they think should have been killed and they support Luigi because being framed is bad.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Is there a "not" missing there
Yes. Thank you, edited to fix typo.
Two screens, more literally than usual
There was a thread a few weeks back about Hasan Piker supposedly using a shock collar on his dog. I didn't think too much of it at the time, not knowing who Hasan Piker even was (I had heard the name, but couldn't tell you anything else). But a little later I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).
In the episode, she describes the shock collar claim as obvious nonsense that anyone watching the video can see for themselves, in addition to her having met Hasan and the dog in person and therefore she is sure the claim is false.
In comparison, in the Culture War thread post I linked above, /u/crushedoranages says
It is obviously a shock collar that is being used. No amount of denial or snarky comments can get anyone to believe that their lying eyes can see any differently. And if you think that's an overstatement - I invite you to see the footage for yourself.
I have not gone down the rabbit hole of analysis of the video, so I'm not going to try to defend Taylor's interpretation. But I was struck by seeing a case where both sides are telling me to watch the exact same video clip since in it is plain to see the events transpired as they claim. The "two screens" concept comes up here a lot, but it's usually about seeing different subsets of a population, often whatever your social media algorithm surfaces, or different interpretations of the same utterance (see: taking Trump literally vs. seriously or, more recently, the Young Republicans group chat). This seems like a whole new level of disagreement about reality.
Taylor's thesis is mainly one of anti-surveillance (a major theme of her work), which is pretty well covered by this quote from the YouTube auto-transcript:
Just last month, billionaire soon to be Tik Tok owner Larry Ellison said that a vast AIfueled video surveillance system would ensure quote citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. This comment is a perfect encapsulation of the delusional fantasy pushed by so many in Silicon Valley. That the surveillance state will be used for good. The narrative is seductive. If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes. If everything in life is videotaped and archived, then the real truth of these messy situations would be indisputable. But Hassan Piker's dog collar incident shows that this theory is catastrophically wrong.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
6mo ago
Chuck Marohn (of Strong Towns)'s recent big thing (and more or less the topic of his most recent book Escaping The Housing Trap) is that a major problem with YIMBYs is that simply legalizing housing isn't enough, since the financing for housing is also broken. He's cagey about offering solutions but generally thinks federal level support for 30-year mortgages is a problem and that funding should be at the local level instead.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
borders in general are basically unethical, but outright saying that is still a bit outside the Overton window of mainstream political discourse
I don't think this is a particularly common view among leftists, but I've definitely heard statements to that effect in far-left media spaces (i.e., from people publishing, not just random comments).
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?
I'm all for limiting government surveillance, but the cell phone location of part of story does not seem to have anything to do with that. From the article:
However, geolocation data from his 911 call showed he was standing above the fire in a clearing merely 30ft from the blaze as it rapidly grew, prosecutors said.
If you don't want the authorities to know your location, consider not using the "tell-the-authorities-your-location" service.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
I'm going to start a social media site called "YourByte". User posts may be any byte 0-255. The algorithmic display will select and order these bytes in a way that coincidentally forms my preferred propaganda.
This is a post about TikTok.
It's completely outside of the Overton window and has been for several years, but this is all downstream of "algorithmic" social media being allowed despite it being a blatant violation of Section 230. If social media sites weren't publishers pretending not to be, then who controlled them would matter a lot less.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
The idea of deciding what content to view based on what an advertising company recommends to me instead of because an actual human recommended it strikes me as completely unhinged. It also seems to be how the vast majority of users interact with the internet for the most part.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
7mo ago
How are you defining "progressive" that people who supported Hillary over Bernie fit into that category?
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
The history of "credible accusations" against Bill Clinton has been noted for a long time
I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not asserting that popular opinion among younger people is that Bill Clinton raped some unnamed woman. I'm asserting that there's a significant portion of younger people on the left who would be straight-up confused by the question because his relationship with an intern is undisputed and that's obviously one where there couldn't have been meaningful consent according to their modern sexual mores (and this opinion is frequently expressed in /r/politics threads about Epstein). Since millennials are young enough that they couldn't have voted for Bill Clinton, they're a lot more willing to throw him under the bus than the older Democrats who actually control the DNC.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
While I agree that it's out of the Overton Window of what I expect to appear in the pages of the Huff Post or NYT, "Bill Clinton is a rapist" is something that is commonly stated on /r/politics (in the context of the right countering claims against Trump by bringing up Bill Clinton), and I'd be astonished if any millennial or younger person I knew would disagree.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
9mo ago
Wake me up when it's been independently verified that OpenAI didn't train on the test set again.
But Harris did back down on woke. The only candidate that mentioned trans people in the 2024 election was Trump. The Democrats tried to push for further right immigration policy. The result was a lot of left-wing voters stayed home and many others were upset but reluctantly voted for her and no voter had the thought process of "I like Republican policies and the Democrats adopted some, so I'll vote against the Republicans".
Even accepting the premise that it's impossible for a party to the left of the Republican Party to be electorally successful, the Democratic Party still doesn't have a path to victory by moving to the right because the Republicans will continue to put out attack ads insinuating that they're further to the left and that's bad.
This is all focusing way too much on policy and ideology which is realistically not a major consideration for the vast majority of voters. To a large extent the last three presidential elections were voting for Trump to do something or boring Democrat to do nothing; the precise "something" that Trump promised to do certainly mattered to some voters, but the fact that the Democrats couldn't communicate that they had their own something in mind to do was a major part of why they failed (although maybe they'll stumble into winning in 2028 for the same reason they did in 2020: after 4 years of Trump, "nothing" sounded good).
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