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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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The narrative being circulated is that the NYPD “killed a man over a $2.90 subway ticket.”

This can be translated as "this is why America will never look like northern Europe in terms of transit"

Can you understand why I might look toward the decisiveness, the cold competence of a robot cop who’s not afraid of libelous press coverage or administrative leave or criminal charges by an anti-cop DA, and think, “Hell yeah, let’s get some more of that.”

We're getting a head start. This - and not some Brian Herbert Terminator bullshit - is why the Butlerian Jihad happened:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

It would be nice to have a technological solution to social problems. But all this does is centralize power in the hands of people who made things like Google Gemini a mess. You think they can't see ahead to the "imported" racial bias? They called it way ahead of time, and took steps.

For all you know, your cold robot is going to be given an androgynous body shape, will only answer to Xir and, in a twisted inversion of I, Robot, have a built in random factor to save a marginalized body every so often instead of doing the "rational" thing, for equity. It only makes sense. Getting stabbed in the subway is awful. But what about the violence done against black bodies and other justice-impacted folx? It's not an easy equation.