hungry constituents will pressure their representatives to revoke the tariffs.

I’m fine with automation if we can have fully automated luxury communism!

China is likely to get AI before the US does. Innovation here is slowing down.

the 8bit FOX interview with Tucker Carlson felt incredibly on theme. you could seriously remake Papers, Please with these aesthetics.

I’m a big fan and longtime reader of Derek Lowe. He called attention to suppression of grant funding for hypotheses that challenged the amyloid hypothesis, and the shockingly partisan and dogmatic behavior of journal referees and NIH advisors in the field. I’ve been following his coverage ever since he started reporting disappointing readouts from clinical trials on the anti-amyloid mABs.

His concern that this class of therapy is “pathological science” (think cold fusion, or EmDrive, or string theory - not outright quackery, but hypotheses that are endlessly tweaked to justify the latest failures) are valid.

However, the newest mABs really do seem to have a small but statistically significant effect on slowing disease progression. Enough to justify the risks of brain swelling? Or the cost? Probably not. But I think Derek has perhaps swung too far in the opposite direction. It’s too early to call time on this therapeutic target. If it’s marginally but truly effective, we should try to figure out why, and keep tweaking the drugs to see if they can be improved.

Donepezil was a dead end, but it’s too early to say if Aduhelm is too.

So tired of hearing that the right is a champion of free speech.

the pie is getting smaller but the oligarchs are getting bigger slices.

usually when politicians use Signal it’s because they don’t want their messages FOIA’d or audited. I can’t really imagine Vance or Hegseth worrying about that, though, which makes me wonder if it’s just horrible opsec, if they can’t be bothered to use a SCIF or what?

you’re right, apparently. from Wikipedia:

The U.S. Army defines assault rifles as “short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges.”

AR-15 is semi-auto rather than selective fire, so it’s not an assault rifle. I had mistakenly conflated assault rifles with “assault weapons,” which is a separate (and more vague and contested) term.

you can still buy an M-16 or AK-47, but it has to be transferrable (grandfathered in before FOPA) and you need extra paperwork.

you can buy an AR-15 in any gun store. they even make a “JR-15,” for kids. no, I’m not kidding.

that they’re willing to let some of their kids die rather than get a vaccine they think might turn them trans or autistic shows how much they value the lives of trans and autistic people.

darkly hilarious that all they had to do was put a red bar behind the “APPROVE” and it tricked the three remaining brain cells of their viewers.

j00 r t3h f1r57 p3r50n 1v3 s33n 70 u53 1337 5p33k n s00 l0ng, h4xx0r!

perhaps followed by a Butlerian jihad against OpenAI and Tesla.

what happens when you ignore a court order? remember, he’s absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. he can pardon anyone he wants to. he controls the military. his cult of personality dominates the Republican party. Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas show absolute loyalty to him, and even decisions that should be slam dunks are 5-4 now. he’s cleaned house in DoD and IC, and replaced the generals with sycophants. he has increasing control of social media, and an extensive network of allies.

I think he could successfully lead an outright coup at this point. but what’s the rush? safer for him to follow the plan.

I really hope RFK Jr keeps drinking raw milk.

they’re both. they’re trolling us, and they’re deadly serious. it’s the “haha jk unless” approach to manifesting Overton window shifts with irony, aka meme magic.

my comment here analyzes it more: https://lemmy.ml/comment/17320556

definitely not playing it down. the whole point of meme magic is that it shifts the Overton window so bills like these can actually pass. it’s a kind of “irony laundering.” they “troll” the Left, the Left raises alarm, the Right keks and calls us hysterical, the Center sees us as crying wolf and tunes us out. the Right pushes the “troll” legislation as far as they can because “it’s just a prank bro,” until we’re weakened enough they can actually pass it.

it’s like how the Right goads us into calling them “fascists” because they’re literally being fascists, the Right gaslights saying we’re always calling everyone “fascists,” until fascism reenters the Overton window because the Center thinks “fascism” doesn’t mean anything anymore.

honestly, the Left should have used this kind of meme magic back when Republicans were calling centrist Dems Socialists. if we’d used this strategy as well as the Right did we could be executing Billionaires by now.

it’s legislative shitposting/meme magic. one of them gets an idea for the meme: adding “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness to troll the libs. it provokes a reaction in us, because it’s 2025 and for all we know the damn thing might pass at the rate the fascists are consuming the state, and the Republicans’ base feeds off of our panic and grief, fueling their schadenfreude. Republican voters are the real trolls; these legislators are just their proxies.

basically, this is the meme magic formula that took 4chan from “ironic” Nazi trolls to an outright fascist resurgence across the West, that took Trump from a meme candidate to the Oval Office, that took the 51st State rhetoric from obvious hyperbole to deadly serious. it’s “just a joke” when you’re defending it, it’s “just trolling” when you’re pushing it through, and it’s “owning the libs” when you’re executing on it.

I’ve heard that some people have difficulty with hypotheticals in general. not just on political issues, like it’s a surprisingly common cognitive issue.