Strong disagree with your characterization. I went to a crunchy liberal arts college in upstate NY. I came in as a republican and left as a libertarian. I went hard left years later after entering the workforce and learning about how the world really works. K-12 did way more damage to my understanding of the world and college didnt really do a lot to change that. The idea that college is some kind of propaganda machine is itself propaganda. Of those who come out liberalized it mostly just has to do with exposure to people from different backgrounds and classes. Said another way, people get disabused of their parochial upbringing which can look like indoctrination from the perspective of small-minded yokels back home.

No, I do not regret my college education. It gave me the tools to understand the world around me, and to be a successful and more complete person. The cost is too high, but what else is true in the US?

Seconding kuhl. They sell cargo pants that look and fit like regular pants should.

Libs dont have a coherent moral or political worldview. They are preoccupied with aesthetics and decorum. It is why the libs will not be involved in material change for the better. They simply lack the imagination or will.

EDIT: I worry that people are taking that I am on the side of the Trump admin. I am to the left of the democrats and that is the basis for my disappointment and criticism.

Her career is not characterized by a principled commitment to leftist or even anti-imperialist values. She exists precisely to spoil elections in a first past the post system.

No chance anything that actually attacks inequality ever gets implemented through existing legislative channels.

Protests that are legal, time-limited, and non-disruptive while also having no specific demands are just angry parades. And while it can be personally cathartic to be around like minded people, this does literally nothing to affect material change. Instead, millions of people who were motivated to engage in political action have now spent a couple of hours walking around, chanting, reading signs made by others, have let off some of the built up pressure that might have otherwise motivated them to do something real. Imagine if 1% of the protestors who turned out yesterday blocked access to ICE facilities instead? Or donated time and money to feeding homeless people. Or donated time and money to helping immigrants (documented and otherwise) increase access to legal services. Imagine if instead everyone of those people decided to strike from their jobs until the shutdown was ended and healthcare funded indefinitely? My ideas are not the best ones out there, but they are all probably more impactful to real people than anything that happened yesterday.

Conversely, how many more brown people were disappeared off the streets by ICE while everyone was distracted with the no kings protest? What new, corrupt, immoral, expenditure of our tax dollars was allocated to some horrible imperialist cause or Trump ally? How many people who depend on govt services had to go without because the shutdown was in place? You get the idea.

Effective protest is disruptive, time-unbounded, and usually illegal. They always have specific demands like ending a war, passing a bill, or freeing the unjustly imprisoned, etc. I am glad that people were motivated to turn out. I am sad that they turned out for an angry parade.

Sure, but cells of disruptive activists are not the foundations of a nationally effective movement. You need a way for normies to show up and help. And placating their activist impulses with a demonstration of discontent while not also offering real channels for affecting change is a way of castrating collective action. That’s my two cents, at least.

Right, and private mockery contains the verisimilitude of their intent. They may not be ready to spin up a gas chamber but their chats are fully representative of their attitudes about millions of americans and fully serves as a legitimate basis of criticism and derision.

What people believe in the privacy of their minds is between them and their conscience. What people do is as much a representation of their beliefs, and more fundamentally representative of themselves than anything else. In other words, i do not have to prove anything about Putin’s beliefs or Russia’s beliefs (as if such a thing were possible). I merely have to prove that they act as if they have. That is much easier and more relevant - and most crucially, it is already evident.

It is almost as if the public criticism of antifascism is in bad faith.

You are aware that proof doesnt get more solid than repeated, collectively witnessed, action, right? A direct testament from Putin would be less significant than the current record of military intervention.

If the current trajectory of russian aggression has not yet convinced you, if Georgia’s annexation has not yet convinced you, if Transnistria has not convinced you, if Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson have not convinced you (despite pro-russian separatists in the region serving as erstwhile justification for annexation) then I do not know what to tell you.

I used to work in academic physics, and I currently work in data science. I am deeply familiar with both ends of the subject in question. LLMs are useful research tools because they speed up the reference finding and literature review process, not because they synthesize new information that does not need to be independently verified.

In the context of medical research, they could absolutely use LLMs to facilitate a literature search. What LLMs cannot do is hand researchers a proposed cure that they could sell to people. You still need to do the leg work of synthesizing the molecules, standardizing the process, industrializing it, patenting it, multiple rounds of testing on increasingly complex animals and eventually people, and then going through the drug approval process with the FDA and others. LLMs speed up the CHEAPEST and EASIEST part of the research process. That is why LLMs will not be handing us the cure for cancer.

I appreciate your capacity for giving people the benefit of the doubt. It is an honorable quality…but you have some context - these are the private chats of conservative staffers communicating in private. I can tell you, as someone who has been in private work chats, that there is room for irony but these chats are not using gas chamber imagery because they really believe in the intrinsic dignity of minority groups.

Crimea and eastern Ukraine would like to have a word with you as of 4 years ago.

Mobilization is not organization. Those in power already know the people are dissatisfied. They dont care. None of us are doing enough to make it their problem. We do not have the spaces to organize the kinds of actions that would be effective. Even this platform is not safe enough to talk about what needs to be done. It is too late. They won.

The guy to whom you are responding is deeply unserious. Look at their comments here and elsewhere. Dont waste your time more than I already have.

There is no way to exclude rhetoric from any discussion. That’s what a discussion is - a rhetorical exercise. Also, none of what I said was opinion. The GOP is the party of bigots and reactionaries. When neo-nazis and religious extremists vote, they vote for the GOP. That is not really up for debate. Im sorry I triggered you by reference to objective reality.

Right, that is why I originally said there is no money in a cancer cure invented by LLM. It’s just not a serious possibility.

I, too, was interested to find out. I hope they reply to you with more courtesy than they showed me.