It’s a good question. Her policies as mayor were very different from AMLO’s, and it’s frankly weird that AMLO (a fossil fuel fundamentalist and Trump-like populist) had a PhD climate scientist as his successor. But she is officially his successor and kept a lot of AMLO people. There’s no easy answers, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’ve been in multiple relationships by now but I pretty much never dated or only very sparsely through my 20s, depending on what you’d count. A few reasons:

• When I was younger online dating was much worse than today and had even fewer women, and I feel like approaching women in real life was much harder for several reasons, especially for me given my social anxiety, nerdiness, and lack of opportunity to cross paths with women in my life.
• Financial difficulties - I was living with my parents as an adult and was focused on fixing that situation, and was embarrassed/pessimistic about dating.
• I don’t really fit in easily with the vast majority of people in terms of race, religion, activities, or attitudes about several things like money. It feels like race and religion have become less of an issue today, but I still struggle to find women I can relate to in terms of attitudes.
• Overall questionable appearance - OK physique but with bad hair and clothes.

Sidenote: One thing that annoys me is the attitude of measuring people, both men and women, by their level of relationship success. There’s very little that’s fair or rational about attraction, in fact it’s the best example area where rationality would be almost entirely futile. So don’t feel bad about it, just do what you want for yourself and ignore judgmental people.

I’m just making an appeal to evidence. We can’t go back and know what changed minds, obviously many factors are at play. But what we can say for certain is that, because the stall-in didn’t happen:

1. The stall in was unnecessary for the civil rights act to pass.
2. We don’t know what would’ve happened if the stall in did happen.

I’m guessing most historians would say it wouldn’t have made a difference. But even if it were 99% likely to make no difference, if we had a time machine there’s utterly no reason we’d go back and risk that 1%. Point being, even in the best case scenario, the stall in logically cannot be evidence of such tactics being successful.

Speaking of riots, I think a more clear example is the protests following the killing of George Floyd, which sometimes descended into riots, with every last bit of chaos being lapped up by Republican media and used as an argument against reform. Ultimately that tactic succeeded and very little actual police reform has passed following a shift in the mood. It got so bad that Congress, with many Democrats signing on, took the rare and extreme step of overruling a DC local criminal code reform in 2022 that was actually quite ordinary, but was very dishonestly portrayed in the media as radical decriminalization. As someone who followed that closely, I definitely think the perception of criminal justice reformers being a brainwashed radical mob, helped along by the riots, was a necessary part of killing that reform. That reform effort also was started in 2016, before the Floyd protests - so it seems that the actual effect of these protests was to set back criminal reform efforts rather than advance them.

You also refer to suffragettes vandalizing museums, which is more similar to this action. It seems this was primarily a British thing, and as this article explains, art vandalism occurred in the sprint of 1914, while suffrage wasn’t granted 1918 for some women, and 1928 for all women. Notably, between 1914 and 1918 there was a world war. So it’s hard to imagine that in 1918 or in 1928, that the public was still thinking about the vandalism years before. And maybe that’s why it was able to pass.

I think we should recognize that these tactics persist for reasons other than their effectiveness. Mainly they’re a great way to get attention, even donations. But that attention is pretty much always the wrong kind, and those donations might be coming from the people who aren’t truly interested in the cause (see how Russia has donated to more angry/violent protest groups on all sides). In essence they’re good for protest leaders, bad for the movements.

MLK was brilliant at activism, but not all his actions were created equal. Notably it seems despite his protests, the stall-in never happened. Perhaps everyone realized it was a terrible idea. Then the Civil Rights Act passed without it. How do we know there’s not an alternate history where it did happen, pissed off a bunch of voters, and caused the Civil Rights Act to become too politically toxic to pass?

I do think blockading oil terminals would be much more sympathetic. But it’s hard to blockade enough to have a serious effect on oil usage, hence the lack of attention. A better example is the protests against the Keystone XL Pipeline, which included blocking construction. Public opinion eventually turned against the pipeline.

Instead of intentionally pissing people off at climate protesters, put effort towards educating people on the myriad of ways we actually subsidize fossil fuels and the corrupt relationships that keep that going, so people instead get pissed off at the fossil fuel industry, lobbyists, and corrupt politicians.

Of course some people do work on this already, Climate Town being a good example. We should be talking about those efforts instead of these.

Yeah but what are they saying when they’re talking? Most people are saying “look at these crazy climate people, something is clearly wrong with them”. Maybe the protesters should do something that makes people say “maybe we should care more about climate change” instead.

This is a common problem I see with modern protests. Protesters of a certain other cause I won’t name spray-painted my neighborhood. I try to be a logical person, and logically I’d like to think my perspective on the issue they were spraypainting about is unaffected. But I can’t help but notice that on an emotional level, I really do not want to be on the same side as the people who disrespected me and my neighbors by spraypainting our neighborhood. To the point where if someone says they find that cause important, I actually feel a slight uncontrollable pang of disdain for them.

I don’t think most people try to be as aware of how their emotions affects their thinking as I do.

This is invalid civil disobedience. The point of civil disobedience is to disobey unjust laws (see: Rosa Parks disobeying bus segregation). So unless they think laws against throwing soup at paintings are unjust, their point is lost.

This is pretty much a summary of a lot of already public data. Could be valuable as an appendix of ways to attack Vance but otherwise not much new here.

My takeaway is the Trump campaign was too sycophantic to Trump to notice Vance’s actual problems. They have records of his weird views on domestic violence and other strange views but they’re buried in mountains of data about everything he’s said about Trump. And his obsession with childless women isn’t in the document anywhere as far as I can tell.

I mean wikipedia managed to do it. It just requires honest people to retain control long enough. I think it was allowed to happen in wikipedia’s case because the wealthiest/greediest people hadn’t caught on to the potential yet.

There’s probably an alternate timeline where wikipedia is a social network with paid verification by corporate interests who write articles about their own companies and state-funded accounts spreading conspiracy theories.

Well if you’re lucid, can’t you just like fly out of there or something?

“Hallucinations” is the wrong word. To the LLM there’s no difference between reality and “hallucinations”, because it has no concept of reality or what’s true and false. All it knows it what word maybe should come next. The “hallucination” only exists in the mind of the reader. The LLM did exactly what it was supposed to.

was a beautiful an example

This is Martin Luther King on steroids…I told that to Mark. I said, I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two

• Donald Trump on Mark Robinson

And to be fair to Trump, it seems like Robinson is comparable to MLK in the sense both of them would be deeply offended by the comparison.

As it is the US has no pedestrian safety standards at the federal level. I’m pretty sure if GM wanted to put out a truck with running chainsaws all over it then it would be perfectly legal as far as the NHTSA is concerned, although some state regulators might have a problem with it which is probably why it doesn’t happen in reality.

So when do I get my $0.34 settlement check

Yeah let’s just allow roving gangs of brownshirts to run around attacking and terrorizing minorities

Well that’s blatantly not the argument at all. The question isn’t whether to react, but what do you do about it?

The vast majority of fascist movements are destroyed through nonviolence rather than violence, which itself is typically inseparable from fascism. To refer to the post below, what ended Jim Crow? Was it a bunch of black people going around punching suspected Klan members? On the contrary it was the reverse. The Klan “lynching people and getting away with it” included key rallying points like the murders of Emmett Till, or the Mississippi Burning murders, along with state violence like the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Sure, maybe the fascists themselves got away with it, but fascism didn’t. The things the Klan and other segregationists fought for were dismantled, in large part thanks to their own violent efforts.

Nazis don’t need a justification for their violence, but their enablers - Von Papen, or the would-be modern equivalent Mike Pence - do. And these enablers need to tell themselves, their family, and their neighbors, that they have good reasons for their decisions. Exposing fascism as the senseless violence it is robs them of that justification, while giving the fascists a threat to refer to provides it.

I’m just gonna focus entirely on the common misunderstanding of the use of violence against Nazis in WWII because that’s such a common argument for punching nazis and it’s really quite wrong on so many levels.

“But Nazis were stopped by violence in WWII.” That’s a meaningless statement without the missing last word. Violence stopped Nazis militarily, after they had already seized power in Germany and were invading other countries. Today we’re not in a military battle with Nazis, we’re in an ideological battle.

So why did the Nazis seize power in Germany? Because they weren’t punched enough? Well the exact mechanism behind how the nazis seized power is a complex web of illegal political maneuvers, political violence, and yes, some degree of ideological success by the nazis. But a key part of that ideological success was the fear of political violence by their opponents - most notably the Reichstag fire - to justify the power that they were illegally taking. It was basically “desperate times require desperate measures”. So in the ideological battle, the perceived* use of violence by Nazi opponents was actually a key part of their victory within Germany.

Meanwhile, over in the US, the contrast between the violence employed by the German American Bund (the US version of the Nazi party) and largely Jewish peaceful protesters ended up being a massive embarrassment to the Bund from which they never recovered. Again, ideologically, non-violence proved quite effective.

Point being, and this should be obvious - violence is a really bad option for succeeding in an ideological battle. Yes, in a military battle, it’s the only rational option. But in an ideological battle, it’s actually counterproductive.

*Obligatory caveat that whether the Reichstag fire was actually set by nazi opponents remains debated, but suffice to say the political atmosphere at the time made it plausible.

“Another ‘debunked’ story that turned out to have merit.”

This is the most infuriating thing they do. They assume that any developing story is actually the most extreme version that favors their side. Then they ignore all evidence to the contrary and fish for any evidence that they can claim as confirmation, even if it doesn’t pass the laugh test. But they assert “It was confirmed!” with such confidence and shamelessness that it becomes easier for people to believe them, and eventually the media stops trying to debunk them.

Definitely not the first time this happened. If you wanna find other examples, look at anything where experts on the topic believe one thing but a majority of the American people believe the other. It’s pretty much guaranteed that the thing the American people believe originated as GOP propaganda.

Whenever I see these articles, I feel like it’s part of OpenAI’s marketing strategy to use the fear-based media to pump up the sense of how revolutionary their tech is. Kinda like how they marketed GPT-4o by openly tying it in to the movie Her, as if ChatGPT is gonna replace relationships. They’re clearly very aware of what gets attention and going for that.