No it isn't. A democracy only works with informed voters. The amount of lies and obfuscation spewed by Trump's campaign is a successful attempt to deliberately break democracy. They don't have a mandate to do much besides mass deportation because they didn't talk about firing the entire federal workforce during the campaign. Project 2025 does talk about that but Trump lied during the campaign and said he disavowed it.
I think oligarch Peter Thiel gave away the game in this clip at 3:26 where he says "you can make pro Trump arguments but that's the democratic question"
> No it isn't. A democracy only works with informed voters.
By that logic we can never have a working democracy because collectively voters will always be ignorant and misinformed to some extent. We can't force voters to educate themselves on the issues and can't stop them from lying to themselves or to each other. We can do things to improve the situation, just as there has been a sustained and coordinated effort to make the situation worse, but (gerrymandering aside) we don't get to pick our voters in a democracy.
The last election was as democratic as we should ever expect it to be. Having the freedom to elect our government, by necessity, means having the freedom to elect someone who will take our freedom from us, and if we've done that we'll have only ourselves to blame.
My real problem is with the claim that they have a mandate to tear the government apart. That's not what they told voters during the election. They don't have a mandate for that.
They absolutely told voters during the election they were going to destroy government. They might not have said "Project 2025 is how we are going to dismantle the government" but he said he was going to give himself the ability to remove "rogue" federal employees and overhaul or remove federal agencies.
The public option in 2009 would have helped, let the profit-skimmers compete with the government program and prove that they really can deliver better service while taking their 20-30% cut. But the "free market" captains of industry are liars, they say that they want competition but they don't, they want market manipulation and safe cozy profit margins.
It's funny (not funny haha) how Democrats always seem to have a few undercover sabotagers in their ranks that get elected having lied to voters and then undermine Democrat's agenda, Lieberman, Manchin, Sinema, now Fetterman.
There's plenty they can do. For one, control all your media (for example banning of tiktok, since chinese oligarchs are not aligned with our oligarchs), with control over media they can prevent your message from getting out (e.g. Luigi Mangione's manifesto being disappeared), or if the message does get out they can spread propaganda to turn the population against you (see, BLM and many other movements). Also they can remove all your privacy so that any subversive action has a high social cost such as losing your job. Also they can overspend on a stifling police state even as surveillance and control tools get better and cheaper.
Really, they're getting better and better at this, they have tons of practice and their population control tools are getting better.
I don't expect that rule to survive. Last time trump took office he went on a petty vendetta through all government departments to try to undo every little thing obama did.
Israel has been mounting guns and speakers on long-distance quadcopters and shooting at Gazans. Only a short time until that tech becomes widespread. Israel seems to be a proving ground for mass population terrorizing tech like this. I'm having a hard time seeing how society is not going to devolve into capitalist tech fascism as we lose all our privacy and tech becomes more powerful than our governments, aka the will of the people.
> A retired surgeon who volunteered at a hospital in Gaza has told MPs that Israeli drones would target children who were lying injured after bombings.
I hate that people feel the need to so strongly attach the generic term open source to Open Source InitiativeⓇ OSI Certified™ license's marketing (anti Stallman) propaganda as the one and only true open source. Redis' license is open in all the ways that matter.
OSI has nothing to do with being anti-Stallman. (I think the most anti-Stallman person is, unfortunately, Stallman himself, having done so much to destroy his own reputation.)
Even Stallman would agree that nothing can be open source if the freedom 0, freedom to use software for any purpose, is not provided. SSPL does not grant this freedom.
Agree. These dangerous conspiracy theorists will soon be tearing our FDA apart. I just got my latest covid shot and pressured my doctor to get my 10 year old daughter's HPV vaccine a bit earlier than recommended to get it in before our vengeful extremist billionaire overlords take over. God save us all.
This COVID argument is weird to me. Go get your shot if you want. I have not gotten any boosters (only had the first two). I just do not need it. My roommate had COVID just last month and I did not get it.
The problem is not with the vaccine itself for most of us. It is about forcing it on us.
Oh. So you were forced to get it. We should fight against the law that forced you to get a vaccine. Can you help me track down the legislation so I can help you spread the word?
People were forced to get it. Force does not imply government force, but government not protecting us from people who do force people to get vaccinated.
I think there is huge difference between past vaccines and the still experiment mRNA Vaccines. It is disingenuous of you to assume a similarity between the two situations.
There were vaccine related injuries that were not expected from the trials, as is usual in new vaccines.
I happen to think it’s disingenuous to assume the new vaccines are weird and different and therefore your reluctance is justified unlike other people in the past.
" It was hoped that resident and circulating immune cells attracted to the injection site make copies of the spike protein while the injected mRNA degrades within a few days. It was also originally estimated that recombinant spike proteins generated by mRNA vaccines would persist in the body for a few weeks. In reality, clinical studies now report that modified SARS-CoV-2 mRNA routinely persist up to a month from injection and can be detected in cardiac and skeletal muscle at sites of inflammation and fibrosis, while the recombinant spike protein may persist a little over half a year in blood. "
mRNA vaccines are absolutely weird and different -- their mechanism of prompting an immune response is fundamentally different as it involves prompting the vaccinee's own cells to manufacture antigens.
Even if they weren't weird and different, previous vaccine rollouts like Pandemrix show that caution is warranted in the early days of rollout for any vaccine. COVID vax fundamentalists couldn't accept that many people might reach a legitimately different assessment of the risks and benefits because in their absolutely hysterical worldview, SARS-CoV-2 was tantamount to a death sentence or lifelong disability.
The people about to run the health agencies of the US government aren’t of the opinion that vaccines are great but shouldn’t be mandated. They’re of the opinion that vaccines are dangerous and should be banned.
“ There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” RFK Jr, Lex Fridman Podcast #388
"He says, if you give me the data, all I want is the data and I'll take on the data and show that it's not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the market. So that's his point.” - Howard Lutnick, Trump transition team co-chair, CNN interview, October 30
“ There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”
Safe does not mean 100% safe, nor does effective mean 100% effective. Take the flu vaccine fro example. While the risk is small, there are cases of GBS associated with it. And even with the flu vaccine, you can still get the flu even of the same strain.
So it always comes down to an individual assuming what risks they want to take.
“I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccines,” Kennedy told NBC News when asked whether there were specific vaccines that Kennedy would want to remove from the market.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have [a] choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” he said.
“So I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them,” Kennedy added.
So who do we believe? When people say they’re not going to do a bad thing, but also lay out their exact plan for doing it, I’m going to put more weight behind the latter.
I do not think what they are doing is bad. Being more open with the data is something all of us should advocate for to promote safer vaccines and stop the conspiracy theories.
They want all vaccines taken off the market. They outright stated their plan for doing it. And you either don’t believe them, or you think that’s good?
Everyone is saying he is going to "take vaccines away" yet he can say he is not and you will believe a news media funded by the pharmaceutical companies because they are afraid that some of these vaccines might not be safe?
I do not need a hundred sources, I need only one, from the person himself, right?
“We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” he told NPR in an interview this morning after Trump’s overnight victory. He repeated the message a few hours later in an interview with MSNBC.
Instead, Kennedy said he wants to improve the science of vaccine safety, which he said “has huge deficits in it,” so Americans can have all the right information to choose whether to get vaccinated.
“I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them,” he told MSNBC.
The question is if i'll he able to get it. I wouldn't be surprised if all vaccine development is defunded. And HPV specifically since christians have a weird hate bonner against it.
I think the tech chauvinism (aka accelerationism) comes from the crypto-hype era and unfortunately has been merged into the culture wars making reasonable discussion impossible in many cases.
There was a step change over the last few years but that rate of improvement is not continuing. The currently known techniques seem to have hit a plateau. It's impossible to know when the next "Attention is All You Need" will materialize. It could be in 2025 or 2035.
o1 sort of techniques (tree search, test-time training type things) have not hit any recognizable plateau. There's still low hanging fruits all around.
I think oligarch Peter Thiel gave away the game in this clip at 3:26 where he says "you can make pro Trump arguments but that's the democratic question"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luTHVKFi3dc&t=3m24s