mRNA technology premiering on the eve of a killer pandemic leaps to mind.

that’s fair. progress in medicine more generally has been good. we’ve started curing fatal genetic disorders, we found the cause of multiple sclerosis, there’s a new antipsychotic with a novel MoA for the first time since chlorpromazine…

None of this was indicative of better economics or a functional political system.

Obama, Reagan, Bush and Clinton weren’t fascists. even Trump wasn’t a fully-fledged fascist in his first term. he is now, and what’s happening to the Federal Government is unprecedented.

look, I know the Weimar Republic had its problems, but you can’t claim Hitler was just more of the same. so it is with the US in 2025.

Westoids live in the wealthiest, easiest, most affluent era of human history.

decades ago, houses were affordable, college was cheap, Americans weren’t crushed under mountains of dischargeable student debt, wealth disparity and effective wages were far better, and we had a far more functional political system.

I can’t think of much that hasn’t gone downhill since 2016. the world isn’t ending, but it’s ahistoric to claim that history is the steady march of progress. dark ages happen. empires decline. democracies wither.

The idea that, if all Trump supporters simply had access to better information, if they all had better education, if they were exposed to the right argument… then they’d see the light and turn into democrats - is a supremely liberal idea. We need to understand that no amount of epic slams, no amount of late night talk show roasts, no amount of facts and logic will steer us out of fascism.

Well said. And honestly, it’s even counterproductive, because that assumption is a core reason why people view the establishment Left as patronizing and elitist.

It also reminds me of one of my favorite Onion videos: https://youtu.be/lpzVc7s-_e8 (I like Judith Butler, and I’ve even read some of Gender Trouble, but the premise and execution just gets me in stitches every time.)

is this… somehow… real?

could you make this?

Lockpicks. One day the bathroom door somehow locked from the inside without anyone in there, and I really needed to pee. Really came in handy. ~Turns out you could just use a flathead screwdriver, there wasn’t an actual lock cylinder, but don’t take this from me!~

is there a matrix client for Android? last I checked there was like, one, and it wasn’t very good. whereas there’s like 14 different Lemmy apps, many of which are fabulous.

they thought the bird came from Turkey iirc, that’s why it’s named like that. 🦃

usually when politicians use Signal it’s because they don’t want their messages FOIA’d or audited. I can’t really imagine Vance or Hegseth worrying about that, though, which makes me wonder if it’s just horrible opsec, if they can’t be bothered to use a SCIF or what?

I read CS papers from the late '80s/early '90s and it feels like unearthing cuneiform tablets. Lots of good ideas, just everything felt so raw and new.

things I dislike Reagan for:

• ignoring HIV because he was okay with it just killing the gays (until straight people started getting it.)
• trickle-down economics (how we got the billionaire oligarchy)
• Iran-Contra.
• firing the striking air traffic controllers.
• doubling down on the War on Drugs.

things Reagan was kinda based for:

• actually wanting to eliminate nuclear weapons. everyone remembers SDI as a ridiculously expensive boondoggle (which it would have been tbf) or as a trap to get USSR to spend itself into bankruptcy (it wasn’t imo, since the Russians realized they could build MIRVs), but I honestly think Reagan sincerely wanted a missile shield to have a missile shield. apparently he was hawkish on nuclear war until he watched The Day After, which terrified him and left him depressed for weeks and completely changed his thinking on nukes. he got so close to bilateral disarmament at the Reikjavik summit, but it fell apart because of his insistence on pursuing SDI.

• not being a raging egotistical jerk like Trump. he was respectful towards Carter and Mondale. he even respected the Soviet Premiers he met with, despite his anti-Communism. he had actual principles and ideals, even if I disagree with some of them.

when the USSR collapsed, Bush ignored Russia’s pleas to help it restructure and rebuild, to secure its nuclear weapons stockpiles, to integrate its economy. so we ended up with a country with starving nuclear weapons designers trying to grow potatoes in their back yards, and a Mafia takeover, and massive distrust and antipathy towards the West. I think Reagan would have actually lent them a helping hand, and Putin wouldn’t have happened.

I really hope RFK Jr keeps drinking raw milk.

I’m switching to DeepSeek-R1, personally. locally hosted, so I won’t be affected when the US bans it. plus I can remove the CCP’s political sensitivity filters.

it feels weird for me to be rooting for PRC to pull ahead of the US on AI, but the idea of Trump and Musk getting their hands on a potential superintelligence down the line is terrifying.

wait, why would you need to bypass guardrails for this?

they’re both. they’re trolling us, and they’re deadly serious. it’s the “haha jk unless” approach to manifesting Overton window shifts with irony, aka meme magic.

my comment here analyzes it more: https://lemmy.ml/comment/17320556

definitely not playing it down. the whole point of meme magic is that it shifts the Overton window so bills like these can actually pass. it’s a kind of “irony laundering.” they “troll” the Left, the Left raises alarm, the Right keks and calls us hysterical, the Center sees us as crying wolf and tunes us out. the Right pushes the “troll” legislation as far as they can because “it’s just a prank bro,” until we’re weakened enough they can actually pass it.

it’s like how the Right goads us into calling them “fascists” because they’re literally being fascists, the Right gaslights saying we’re always calling everyone “fascists,” until fascism reenters the Overton window because the Center thinks “fascism” doesn’t mean anything anymore.

honestly, the Left should have used this kind of meme magic back when Republicans were calling centrist Dems Socialists. if we’d used this strategy as well as the Right did we could be executing Billionaires by now.

it’s legislative shitposting/meme magic. one of them gets an idea for the meme: adding “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness to troll the libs. it provokes a reaction in us, because it’s 2025 and for all we know the damn thing might pass at the rate the fascists are consuming the state, and the Republicans’ base feeds off of our panic and grief, fueling their schadenfreude. Republican voters are the real trolls; these legislators are just their proxies.

basically, this is the meme magic formula that took 4chan from “ironic” Nazi trolls to an outright fascist resurgence across the West, that took Trump from a meme candidate to the Oval Office, that took the 51st State rhetoric from obvious hyperbole to deadly serious. it’s “just a joke” when you’re defending it, it’s “just trolling” when you’re pushing it through, and it’s “owning the libs” when you’re executing on it.

I’ve heard that some people have difficulty with hypotheticals in general. not just on political issues, like it’s a surprisingly common cognitive issue.

the Ides is a big Tumblr holiday. I wouldn’t be surprised if more people learned about it from Tumblr than from history class.

I actually read the entirety of HPMoR to my elderly mother. I tried to sell her on Friendship is Optimal but I think rationalist pony fanfic is a bit too ambitious a leap.

oof, never thought I’d see the baseline for “normal” set to after covid.