261–270 of 872 posts
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Wow, John Mearsheimer is now a Russian propagandist? You can disagree, but you may want to listen to one of your best thinkers in international politics.
How can someone be proven so wrong about their life's work and still be called "one of your best thinkers in international politics."?
I’m becoming more convinced that the future I’ve been planning simply won’t be possible in the decades to come. The world is scarcely recognizable. And having experienced nothing but peace and prosperity makes me feel woefully unprepared. The WEIRD world is becoming increasingly more authoritarian. I’m already detached from real conflict and scarcity, knowing nothing but peace and prosperity, and the TikTok generatio…
Perhaps people want a more authoritarian world (without realizing it). The ratio of static to noise has been increasing year by year. People don't want to take (nor have) the time to balance alternate view points and spend the time to independently determine fact from opinion. I think the current lack of direction creates turmoil--there are too many options, too many sources of information, and the quality of all of them have gone down while they compete to pull at our amygdalas for seconds of our time. Maybe there is a higher percentage of people who just want answers from someone they trust so they can get on with their lives.
I think I've been on HN long enough to know that (re)implementing limitations on the control of information would make most of you scream. But maybe its for the best. It's already been proven many times over that people aren't going to research facts themselves. So having fewer organizations spoon feed choice bits of information can't be worse. Note that I am not suggesting to deliberately block information, but rather have organizations that are more selective (i.e. exactly like it was during the newspaper era).
I think it's incredibly unlikely for the USA to become a dictatorship. We have too many checks and balances, and the decision making is cordoned off into many compartments, and the country is split 50/50 on who they vote for. An authoritarian-bent president would have to fight three branches of government, 50 governors (all of whom have their own state-level army, by the way), 100 senators, hundreds of congressmen, thousands of judges and lawyers, 150 million citizens, and so on and so forth. And on top of that, manage the country on a national and international level. I just dont see it happening. Trump did not bring us any where closer to that reality by the way (name one legislative/judicial change that moved the needle closer in that direction).
All this to say, there's nothing to be scared about. The internet has been a fun experiment but it's given a microphone to too many people, and has crumpled the gatekeepers who had the job of filtering out the diamonds from the mud (and did that job extraordinarily well, by the way, because they had to, or die). It feels like our culture has been dying. The influence artists had up until the 90s was comparatively huge. If resources were pooled to support the most talented (be it artists, journalists, architects, musicians, corporate / government leaders, etc), I think we would experience another golden era of culture.
This is inexcusable. Just cancelled my YouTube premium subscription. All they did was play a clip from CPAC. I wish nothing but the worst for Google.
Over the past year I've switched from Google search to DDG; Google Maps to Apple Maps; Chromecast to Apple TV+; and Drive to Dropbox. I've held off on switching away from Gmail, but I'm switching to something else tonight. Suggestions welcome. By the way, not that I would support this at all (since I believe in free speech), but any idea if any speeches from Putin or Xi, or official government accounts from either co…
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Meming about and being afraid of WW3 is critical in containing/deescalating it. WW1 happened partly because nobody was afraid of it happenning.
WWII happened despite people being afraid of it happening. Could you elaborate on your point?
The problem was that there were not enough who were afraid, and that goes for WWII too.
There is also the view, which I think has considerable merit, which regards WWII in Europe as a continuation of WWI, and the Pacific war as a largely separate, though concurrent, event.
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According to Fiona Hill, we’re already in it. She doesn’t really indicate when we crossed the rubicon, but I guess there doesn’t always have to be a Franz Ferdinand moment? https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-...
If I learned anything about Tsars history, most of them do not get to have a natural death.
Source?
Nearly 9% of US presidents have been assassinated. Over a much much smaller timeframe. I would bet you would be less likely to have been assassinated as a Tsar than as a President.
Good. YouTube's platform. Don't like it? Don't use YouTube. There is a plethora of alternatives.
as a side note compare it to what current words Russian people are using to get around Russian censors to talk about the war When did Youtube become A Russian censor?
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Just wait until GPT3 deep-fake audio. Closely followed by Deep-fake video. And algorithms will amplify this content to the echo chambers that "want" to hear it to increase ad revenue a few percentage points. All this will enter society at a time when trust in institutions is already low; you already hear some people predicting that there may not be an election with uncontested results (in the USA) ever again. If we s…
The minute fakes are a serious issue we will sign utterances. Exactly the same as DNS or anything actually important. Deepfakes will not be a threat or issue.