Yes. His brain is soup. It’s a real clam chowder situation.

Pressure him to act, as impulsively as possible

Trump genuinely doesn’t like violence. He doesn’t like war. If you give it time for others to convince him, he’ll support anything

I’m not writing off nonviolent means - I’m a strong believer in the third path. But you have to understand what you’re doing… It is not enough to hold signs and march. It matters where and how you march, when you march, and the physical consequences of you marching

Is persuasion violence? Sometimes. When there’s any degree of coercion, it’s violence

You need the coercion. You need to wake people the fuck up and make them pay attention.

They want to live their lives and ignore the scary reality of this takeover of society. They want to stop watching the news. I understand it… This shit is terrifying to live through. I feel the urge to put my head in the sand too

We cannot let them. And that is coercion. That is violence… Just a far better kind of violence

I mean, here’s the start of a NYT article

Israel’s overnight missile strike against Iran divided Congress, drawing praise and strong support from members of both parties, but some lawmakers, most of them Democrats, expressed concern about regional instability and the risk the United States might be drawn directly into the conflict.

Many members of Congress were quick to cheer Israel’s actions and framed them as a justified response to Tehran’s refusal to abandon its ambition to obtain nuclear weapons. Others, including several leading Democrats, urged restraint, warning about the potential for escalation.

And later on

“There is no circumstance where Iran can be permitted to become a nuclear power,” Mr. Jeffries said in a statement, adding an urgent call for international leaders to “find a rigorous diplomatic path forward and avoid any situation where U.S. troops are put in harm’s way.”

Search is basically unusable at this point, but here’s fetterman calling for strikes a couple months back, he’s been consistently one of the loudest

My point is, no one is explicitly saying we should go to war with Iran… But there’s a lot of talk of strikes. No one is saying we should give Israel troops… Just “everything they need, intelligence, arms, everything”

What I’m hearing is a whole lot of not ruling out troops on the ground. From both parties, with not nearly enough resistance

I do hope you’re right, but I’m getting very concerned. Not so much on the draft (I think we’re a good ways off from there) but from us going to war, and if that goes well doing it again.

If it happens and the resistance isn’t strong enough… Well, authoritarians often use war to stay in power

They can’t have nukes, they’re close to having nukes, general nuke hysteria, “we couldn’t make a deal”, going over the history of Iran and Israel (obviously not mentioning how Israel blew up their negotiator just now or Iran’s attempts to deescalate and normalize global relations for years now), reminding everyone Iran sponsors terrorist groups, etc etc

I mean there’s congress members calling for us to launch an attack on them explicitly, some wanted us to launch the first strike on the enrichment facilities while we were still trying to make a deal

We’re in the “feel out the room” stage, they’ve had a carrier group in the area since like January. The next stage is announcing they’ve already attacked

We don’t have an active draft in that they’re not drafting people, but I think having the ability to call a draft is generally what people mean by draft

And I certainly hope you’re right… They’re trying to drum up support for war with Iran, and if that goes ok for them we’re not going to have less war

We have the mechanisms still in place for it. All men (18-30?35?) are forced to sign up under the selective service act. They usually do it when you get an ID, you just sign an extra piece of paper when you get your license or ID card as a teen… And then hopefully nothing happens with it

But make no mistake, it is in place, and there are people constantly advocating we use it

I think the problem is people don’t understand the third path. Nonviolent means are not physically violent towards people - it works because of violence all the same though

Protests themselves are just a show of solidarity. They will never change anything - unless they are large or sustained enough that the implied threat of violence causes fear in the leadership. They are just a symptom of discontent, police and the military can disperse the people, and they will, without the implied threat of what happens when you close this outlet

Then there’s economic violence. You can shut down a city or grind the economy to a halt with enough motivated people. That will piss people off… At first. If you keep it going, it will transform from an inconvenience to a threat to normalcy - at first, most people will be annoyed at the protesters, but once they feel their life disruptered they will be more angry at the state and just want it to stop

You can do the same legally. You can gum up the works, get yourself arrested for a specific reason to challenge that reason in court, over and over until you freeze up the legal system. You can even win, and push back the boundaries of the law oppressing you

Then there’s martyrdom. You can force the state to commit violence on you. You can set yourself on fire. You can give up your life to amplify your message. This makes people very uncomfortable

There’s always violence. It can be implied, it can be against yourself, it can be against property, it can be against the feeling of normalcy itself - but there’s always some kind of violence. Because ultimately, violence is asserting your will over others, and that’s what a movement does

This has been such an upsetting week. I genuinely thought Trump was about to give us peace in the middle east through the power of openly taking bribes and getting his feelings hurt.

I was nearing the point of unironically supporting soup brained Trump, he’s united so much of the world against us, he genuinely seems to hate war, and it seemed like he was losing power. Hell, somehow he landed on degrowth as an economic policy

He even caved on bringing back Garcia, so it seemed like a matter of time before the courts put him back in his place.

I thought I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, but now? Such an upsetting week.

I’m kinda in between…I don’t signal in empty parking lots and rarely at 3am on the highway

But when I’m not totally alone and I intend to change lanes, my pinky flicks before I think about it or look to see if the land is open - I flick it back off if I realize I’d cut someone off regularly

You can do better. Come on, I believe in you

I don’t know… Logically I’d trend towards no, they lack certain cyclical feedback mechanisms probably required for subjective experience

But, what if they do experience things subjectively in disconnected time? They’re not like us, but what if they can feel pain or distress in their own way?

I think it’s worth considering. I personally believe they’re missing key mechanisms, but there’s no clear lines

Regardless, they display emotion, and that makes me more considerate when I interact with them. If not for their sake, then for us humans who should be polite to service workers in general

Do you know how many times the wheel was invented? Some things just make sense

The reason they keep doing it is for “innovation”. Not technological innovation, pricing scheme innovation

I mean, I’ve never enjoyed watching him speak, but charisma isn’t just being convincing. It’s controlling the atmosphere, controlling the conversation, making people cheer

You don’t have to buy it to recognize charisma. People undeniably were taken in by it. He says the stupidest, most incoherent shit… But people still ate it up

If you want to truly understand, pick one of his older speeches, and watch it. Then, read the transcript. Even if you hate every moment of both, the difference is staggering

That’s dead on. Great description, that’s exactly the dynamic he had with the public

The only difference is people who saw through the facade were happy to let him hype up good technologies… well, at least until we found out he’s always been a fascist at least

Ever listen to a kid with a model car rattle off horsepower, 0-60 time, engine displacement, and other facts?

The child does not understand what that means, not really. They might know the dictionary definitions for those words, but the kid doesn’t have the context to understand what it means in a useful way. They just memorize the stats because they’re neat.

That’s what Elon is.

Elon is a trained programmer who doesn’t understand code. It’s painfully apparent he has no understanding of what he’s talking about once he starts talking on a subject you know intimately… Dude is actually an idiot. An absolute joke. His thinking is laughably superficial

He’s also pretty terrible with people, but he sold the “awkward nerd” persona very well. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about - but he knows how to make it seem like he just can’t properly express himself to a layman

LLMs undeniably display empathy, how or if they experience it subjectively is another matter entirely

But if you want to get philosophical and dive into how LLMs work, I have a strong argument that they have mechanisms that work very similarly to emotions, with or without subjective experience

Pretty much. Trump is charismatic… But his brain is leaking out his nose and he wasn’t very smart to begin with. Elon is effectively dumber, because trump knows he’s in this to get his bread buttered - Elon might have more ram, but he doesn’t understand the difference between con and reality

No, he’s shown zero technical skills across his lifetime. He literally has no skill as a programmer or as an engineer

Have you ever seen a kid with a model car that can rattle off the horsepower and acceleration speed? That’s what Elon is. He doesn’t understand these things - he buys companies and learns the spec sheet because he’s a fanboy with too much money.

Elon couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. He couldn’t put together a model rocket with instructions on the box. What he can do is memorize a bunch of statistics he doesn’t understand on a fundamental level

LLMs have way more empathy and respect than humans do

Which makes sense, they’re not trained on our actions - they’re trained on our words

I think Musk is stupider than people realize. He’s a true believer in his grandpa’s technocracy movement (plus eugenics), and so he thought “if I was in control for just a few weeks everyone would realize they should just let me run the world”

Then, he got practically unlimited power, and everyone got mad at him. He seemed genuinely surprised that people weren’t praising him for his sacrifices (such as selflessly condemning hundreds of thousands of people to death)

Then he showed he was useless at buying elections, and the right dropped him

He followed Trump around for a while quietly, probably spending most of it in a k-hole. Then Trump officially broke up with him, even if he glazed Elon on the way out

Then the narcissism kicked back in. Maybe his “friends” rubbed it in, maybe his dad called him a disappointment who fumbled the chance of a lifetime, maybe the threat of legal ramifications made him bitch out - but whatever happened, Elon woke up one day and decided “it wasn’t my fault, Trump and Co fucked me”

I think Elon is actually concerned about the bill to some degree, because it does stretch our debt and spending to levels that could potentially pop the global economy. I think he does feel disrespected that his work at Doge is being rolled back and everyone is distancing themselves from him. I think he is upset that he spent all this money to buy the presidency, and got a bad ROI

But ultimately, Elon is a fucking idiot with a huge ego. He didn’t understand what game he was playing, and so when he lost he started blaming others

And it’s beautiful. Possibly the greatest crash out in history