Point is: had Americans bothered to show up voting, we wouldn’t be here. Yeah, I know, voting has already been made hard because Republicans only win if fewer people show up because they’re basically a minority, but they are vocal and dedicated. They vote. That’s why they won. Had Democrats or just plainly more Americans back then bothered to vote, we wouldn’t be here.

You may want to recalibrate how you think about the 2024 election. Yes, it had a lower turnout than the 2020 election, but that was a high point of the past half-century in terms of voter eligible population turnout. And as much as an impact that Uncommitted voters has on the Democratic primary, if we presume they all failed to vote in the General, they still would not have been enough to overcome the margin of victory. And given the way that the Electoral College is set up, unless we have geographic data on where those people who didn’t vote are, they may have simply contributed to the overvote that leads to elected presidents who did not win the popular vote (and demoralized voters).

Understanding that there is a concerted propaganda effort financed by billionaires to prop up conservatives across all borders (if you’re not in America, you should be paying attention to the rise of Trump-style politics in your country, too) is vital to addressing the situation. It’s not just people are disengaged, people are being advertised constantly that these billionaires have the common person’s best interests in mind, or, worse, that this cruelty is good and just.

And as much as I’m working to organize in my community and put a stop to this, the rest of the world really ought to be sitting up and taking notice of Venezuela (or the litany of transgressions already committed) and making their own plans on how to address this (and hopefully not deciding to support the tyrannical stooges in their own countries). For whatever reason, the organizations that claim they stood against the forces we’re seeing are not seen to be stepping up now that the moment is here, and this sort of tyranny has no respect for the structures and limits that were supposed to prevent this.

And it’s sentiment like this that makes it clear that the people clambering for people to “just do a general strike” or “just take up arms” have given no thoughts to how to do that without wasting the resources or lives of the people they demand take action. If you take part in union organizing, you learn that you have to make all of your attempts count, otherwise you’re blowing your chances and making it harder in the future by alerting the bosses. Yes, you have to impact their money, but just like “vote with your wallet” is an empty phrase if there’s no mass movement around a specific product/company, to actually deal with the structural issues that billionaires and the companies they represent present, individuals have to band together to create structures that can contend with them. Otherwise, it’s just proposing individual actions to address structural problems, and that plays enough into the hands of these tyrants that they’ll say that’s the “right” way to deal with the problems they cause.

It certainly a convenient place to lay the blame. Makes it real easy to tell flattering narratives. No need to examine what role the party has, since clearly they’re doing what they must to get their candidate elected. Why should they carry any blame? They voted for Harris, after all! Surely, pouring millions of dollars into candidates that don’t resonate with the people and that are unwilling to push the needle against the direction conservatives are pulling it has nothing to do with their consistent messaging that people should just settle for the options they’re presenting the country with?

Clearly, the DNC has some serious misunderstanding of the electorate given their choices over the past quarter century. But something tells me they’re gonna roll the dice on “we’re your only option” again and act surprised when that wasn’t enough to garner support rather than lukewarm acceptance. Maybe if they really hammer how little they’ll do to offset the damage Republicans have done over the past half century and tell us that they just want to get back to “working across the aisle” on “business as usual”, it’ll actually work this time!

Because the Democrat Party pretty loudly told people who supported an end to Palestinian Apartheid that they did not want their support let alone their input. That they thought it was more important to court Liz Cheney and other Republicans and lock the Uncommitted delegates out of the convention despite exceeding their goals by 10 times to show that not listening on this issue had enough votes on the line to close the 2016 Clinton-Trump gap, let alone the 2020 Biden-Trump gap that it got over halfway to. The party said they wanted more support from lean Republican voters than the voters asking for a Democrat candidate who would speak out against genocide, and, even with record turnout in one of the main states for the issue, the there were more voters for Trump then either of his previous runs. But, yeah, blame the voters, they only turned out at the second highest rate since 1908 (with only the 2020 election being higher) and even Democrats had better turnout among the voter-eligible population that any of the second-place candidates since the 60s (and better turnout than more than half of presidents since then as well). If you’re putting the onus on the relatively small proportion of non-voters instead of either the moderate showing of the Democrats, or, you know, the people that actually came out to vote for Trump, then you’re not really focused on the issue.

Protests against the second Trump administration

Gaza war protests in the United States

2025 United States protests against mass deportation

United States abortion protests (2022–present)

United States racial unrest (2020–2023)

These are just the protests. Note that all these links list multiple, recent protests, which actually get media attention on things.

If you want the stuff that the media doesn’t tend to cover as well, you have to look hard (and maybe deal with a paywall and local reporting and realizing that what makes the news isn’t all that’s happening): ICE raid in Rochester stymied as 2 workers evade arrest, 200 residents protest

Because there’s a extra system of measurement change hiding in the middle. The Inches, Feet and Yards system (with the familiar 12:1 and 3:1 ratios we know and love), and Rods, Chains, Furlongs and Miles system. Their conversation rates are generally “nice”, with ratios of 4 rods : 1 chain, 10 chains : 1 furlong, and 8 furlongs : 1 mile.

So where do we get 5,280 with prime factors of 2^5, 3, 5 and 11? Because a chain is 22 yards long. Why? Because somewhere along the line, inches, feet and yards went to a smaller standard, and the nice round 5 yards per rods became 5 and 1/2 yards per rod. Instead of a mile containing 4,800 feet (with quarters, twelfths and hundredths of miles all being nice round numbers of feet), it contained an extra 480 feet that were 1/11th smaller than the old feet.

What talking about predict? That was a weekly staple of his first term.

Actual answer involves looking at the timeline of getting the legislation through the courts before it affects the election.

“We had to come home for the legal battle,” Plesa told Morning Edition. “Our election experts told us that we, too, are on tight deadlines to make sure that these maps make it in the courts and they’re litigated on.” https://www.npr.org/2025/08/19/nx-s1-5506179/texas-redistricting-plan-democrats-walkout

It’s like supporting those companies, voting for politicians who support them then deny your responsability for that.

It really isn’t, particularly for those of us who have been getting yelled at for doing exactly not that, and being told that not having full-throated support for Harris when we were specifically told that the campaign didn’t need our support and locked out of speaking up. For those who have been told that our lack of support is why Trump got elected and Palestinians are being killed. Collapsing the entirety of electoral politics into “we voted for this” is harmfully reductive. We cannot keep telling ourselves that no matter what we do while working together, since the overall result was this it is our fault. It’s literally ignoring the actions of political opponents to blame ourselves no matter the outcome.

Placing a blanket blame on voters for this is still just electoralism. Voting should be one political expression of many; reducing everything down to the outcome of an election–even if you’re blaming just those who voted–doesn’t build political movements.

Focusing on the culpability of individual voters is just reputation-washing for Israel.

It’s like stepping over massive fossil fuel companies to blame someone who put plastic wrap in the trash instead of the recycle bin. This is not how to get people to stay engaged with politics between elections, and actually work together to do something now, which is how individual voters can actually impact the situation. Don’t instill hopelessness by focusing on the blame of those so far from direct culpability.

It’s not all that much of a conspiracy theory as those pushing this line at the payment processoers openly advocate that since LGBTQ+ references sex by way of sexuality and gender, then that is sexual content, and is therefore inappropriate for children. This, of course, completely ignores heterosexuality and cisgender because they consider queer people existing to be harmful to children. And trying to get through to them about how important age-appropriate sexual education is in combating child abuse is an exercise in frustration.

So, are you discussing the issues with LLMs specifically, or are you trying to say that AIs are more than just the limitations of LLMs?

I mean, I argue that we aren’t anywhere near AGI. Maybe we have a better chatbot and autocomplete than we did 20 years, but calling that AI? It doesn’t really track, does it? With how bad they are at navigating novel situations? With how much time, energy and data it takes to eek out just a tiny bit more model fitness? Sure, these tools are pretty amazing for what they are, but general intelligences, they are not.

It questionable to measure these things as being reflective of AI, because what AI is changes based on what piece of tech is being hawked as AI, because we’re really bad at defining what intelligence is and isn’t. You want to claim LLMs as AI? Go ahead, but you also adopt the problems of LLMs as the problems of AIs. Defining AI and thus its metrics is a moving target. When we can’t agree to what is is, we can’t agree to what it can do.

I mean, sure, in that the expectation is that the article is talking about AI in general. The cited paper is discussing LLMs and their ability to complete tasks. So, we have to agree that LLMs are what we mean by AI, and that their ability to complete tasks is a valid metric for AI. If we accept the marketing hype, then of course LLMs are exactly what we’ve been talking about with AI, and we’ve accepted LLMs features and limitations as what AI is. If LLMs are prone to filling in with whatever closest fits the model without regard to accuracy, by accepting LLMs as what we mean by AI, then AI fits to its model without regard to accuracy.

Calling AI measurable is somewhat unfounded. Between not having a coherent, agreed-upon definition of what does and does not constitute an AI (we are, after all, discussing LLMs as though they were AGI), and the difficulty that exists in discussing the qualifications of human intelligence, saying that a given metric covers how well a thing is an AI isn’t really founded on anything but preference. We could, for example, say that mathematical ability is indicative of intelligence, but claiming FLOPS is a proxy for intelligence falls rather flat. We can measure things about the various algorithms, but that’s an awful long ways off from talking about AI itself (unless we’ve bought into the marketing hype).

Maybe the marketers should be a bit more picky about what they slap “AI” on and maybe decision makers should be a little less eager to follow whatever Better Auto complete spits out, but maybe that’s just me and we really should be pretending that all these algorithms really have made humans obsolete and generating convincing language is better than correspondence with reality.

What I expect is all the “the FDA doesn’t want you to know this” grifters are really excited to have their snake oil supported by the government so they can sell their stuff better. No further thought that “we could make a lot of money doing this” and of the similar myopic thinking that cares about next quarter’s warnings call more than being in business next year

No, of course you fall back from your claimed reason, you just want more bloodshed. And I doubt you particularly care whose it is.

Yeah, I already got that you really want people to hurt people with the goal of causing fear, and aren’t concerned with with the fallout. How are you planning on dealing with the massive industry set up to cultivate and direct fear towards the ends of conservatives? Or is having a theory of change libshit?