But now, I wonder if supersonic flight could work today. We know a lot more now than we did when the first Concordes were built. There have been numerous advances in the fields of engineering, materials science, avionics, and such since the last Concorde jet was grounded.

True, but they had been riding a wave of Pan-Germanism prior to the Nazis. Germany had many diverse regions that didn’t see each other as equals prior to the Weimar Republic.

But could Germany have ever turned back from fascism on its own, without any help whatsoever? Let’s say the entire continent just let the Nazis have their way and let Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss play out their experimental new form of government out to its horrible logical conclusion. Could Germany ever come back from that? Could the world?

Is that what we said to you when it happened to you?

No, we’re about as far from OK as a country can get. The world needs to unite against us and muster the largest liberation force ever seen. And I mean the entire world literally every nation that can send warriors, send them. Germans, you have been where we are. You know, all too well, where this road leads. You could not turn yourselves back from it, and so you needed the help of 4 allied world powers. Now, one of those world powers is trudging down that same road you walked almost a century ago. And, I don’t think we will be able to turn ourselves back, just as you could not.

One of the things I wish we’d stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They’re more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.

They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they’ve convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.

And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that’s what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it’s only gotten much, much worse.

So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they’ve been marinating in some kind of “WH40K-esque” tech religion, it’s because they are, and they have.

Nuclear fusion has made great strides. There currently an experimental Tokamak in China that set a new record for sustained fusion in 2023, then earlier this year broke that record again.

What this guy said. Or, even better, why doesn’t Captain Aggravated just go make their own movie? It’s not super complicated to do, but it does require getting others involved, since nobody can do everything.

I don’t want them to “cure autism” by erasing it, either. I’d rather they try to “cure autism” by improving on what it can help a human be capable of doing. That way, if we have a real-life “Butlerian Jihad” like from the lore of Dune, we have Mentats (human computers) to replace “thinking machines”(AI and computers).

As I recall, the reason the Federation outlawed genetic manipulation is due to what happened with the Eugenics Wars, the details of which are murky due to temporal interference, but one of the root causes was clear. While the end results of genetic engineering (Khan Noonien-Singh and his Augments) were undoubtedly superior to normal humans in every way, they also incredibly aggressive and arrogant, a flaw their creators could not correct, as the science was still in its infancy. One of the scientists remarked that “Superior ability breeds superior ambition”.

And in the US, religious assholes want to ban IVF for exactly this reason, because it’s “playing God”.

Initially, wasn’t Occupy a protest about the post-recession bank bailouts? Then the production team for Good Morning America put a self-proclaimed representative of Occupy, a “female-presenting person” named Ketchup, in the studio to ask them questions about it, and they had no media coaching whatsoever.

No, they absolutely can help being assholes. But for them it’s not enough to win, those they see as “losers” must suffer.

Absolutely. They specifically avoid using humanizing language in their filing. Then again, legal language also avoids using humanizing language because there really isn’t a standard legal definition for “person”. No, I actually had to look it up and I could not find one. A lawyer wrote about it in a blog post and it turns out it’s troubling to define “person”, for a myriad of reasons. I quote the blog post in question:

Since Roman times, the law has classified everything as either a ‘person’ or a ‘thing’. But the legal term ‘person’ has never meant the same thing as ‘human’ – it is traditionally seen as a formal classification that simply says who (or what) can bear rights. ‘Things’, by contrast, are property – and as such, cannot bear rights.

So, they call us “consumers” instead. “Voters”, “Human Capital”, it’s all the same. But they will never see us as people.

Would that we could. “We the People” are the enemy of the State and they treat us accordingly. Of course, the easiest type of enemy to defeat is one that does not know they are your enemy, and they spent billions of dollars over decades to ruin our education systems and shove propaganda in our faces to ensure that we never find out that we were their enemy all along.

There are a couple evil yet competent people in the administration. Russell Vought is one, a hire direct from the Heritage Foundation. Another is Stephen Miller. Heritage seems to be full of actually competent yet completely evil men. But I guess that what happens when a majority of your funding comes from oil, gas, and now tech barons.

There’s a pretty radical idea going on in wiccan circles right now that believes the “Jesus” these Christian Nationalists are worshipping is actually something called an egregore. Now, an egregore is a non-physical entity or “thought form”, created by the shared beliefs, emotions, and intentions of a group. What’s more, I’ve met people who claim to have interacted with this being.They claim that it truly believes it is Christ and wants you to believe it, too. It desperately wants into Heaven, and it is vain, and narcissistic, and ugly. It butters you up with false flattery, empty promises and lies, and, if the true spirit of Christ is with you, it calls that spirit Satan. If you recognize it for what it is, instantly like a toxic person it flips to anger and threats to scare you into getting it to believe.

I was about to say I was grateful that human infection by screwworms is low, but then I realized that it will be worse if we lose tons of livestock to them.

Public healthcare also removes one of the few leashes they have on workers to keep them in line. My Father in law used to work at a local retail chain in my area, and the pay was straight dogshit, but the health insurance was phenomenal. It kept many workers from leaving for better paying jobs.

A free market is one that is free of corruption and unfair business practices. Which cannot exist without regulations and the enforcement of those regulations.

And the truth is that the oligarchs, the established players in the game of capitalism, do not want a free market. They want a market with the illusion of freedom. A free market like the one you describe is, in fact, a true free market. Because then they have to actually compete with new players. Players who don’t come from the same backgrounds as the established players. Who may have different beliefs, who might not have the same skin color. Who may have a superior product or service to one or more of the established players. Who are free to sit at the same tables as oligarchs and take up space because their government gives them the power to do so. De regulation gives the illusion of a market being free, by making it so that if you want to be a new player in the game, you can, but unless you pay obeisance to the top players, you’re not getting very far. Plus the top players will buy you out, which is essentially them bribing you to walk away from the table.