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’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.

I like the terminal because:

1. It’s the same everywhere. You don’t lose knowledge by switching to a company that has a different git client.
2. You know what’s going on, mostly. Most clients will assume you want to do things one way and do it that way for you, especially when it comes to fetching/pulling/merging. I’d rather go through all the steps in the terminal myself so I can assure myself that I won’t be reliving various past broken merge traumas.
3. If you like the terminal generally, you’re probably also doing other stuff there anyway. So you can get used to running whatever commands to test, lint, push, etc. without switching windows or even taking your hands off the keyboard and it becomes muscle memory.

“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.

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

“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.

In that case people would be dismembered, and then drown.

support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation.

So you’re pro-Russian in the temporary, tactical sense, in the context of imperialist liberation. And you would be pro-Putin too, but for not believing in great man theory.

I can think of several, but it’s so cringe to say any of them. There’s a disdain for do-gooders in all societies, but especially American society. Which means that it’s just not cool to admire someone who is simply a good person.

I can certainly see why people point to dementia, and given how dumb Trump is there’s little difference for practical purposes. But I have to lean on the explanation of general stupidity plus poor reading skills simply because his weirdest statements seem to occur when reading from a teleprompter, as opposed to media interviews and debates.

Look at the video you linked - almost every example is from him giving a teleprompter speech. Trump clearly doesn’t know big words like “rebuttal” “Venezuela” and “anonymous”. So when he sees it on a teleprompter he kinda has to sound it out in real time. Seriously, watch the video again but instead of Trump imagine the dumb kid from your second grade reading class doing a reading assignment. The Hannibal Lecter thing has been pretty well explained by Trump not understanding the difference between “asylum” in the immigration context and an “insane asylum” like the one Hannibal Lecter is in. Again, he’s just very, very unknowledgeable.

Yeah there’s some other stuff like the weird lean but that’s probably just explained by his weird obsession with height and some sort of lifts. Remember, when Trump got that terrible hair transplant, he was much younger. He’s never been functioning properly at a mental level.

My explanation is:

1. He gives a lot of speeches
2. He has almost zero knowledge of government and policy. He likely thinks the US Treasury is responsible for protecting the treasure that’s mapped on the declaration of independence.
3. He can’t read very well, and given his inability to sound the words out mid-speech he needs to fill in the parts of the teleprompter that has long words with whatever he can come up with on the spot.