We are in a battle of top 0.01% vs. the bottom 99.99% where the top 0.01% has convinced us that our enemy is the "right" or the "left" such that we are distracted from our actual oppressors.
I think that this is ridiculous. The idea that grand sweeping proclamations cannot be curious is plainly false. We can look at numerous excellent works of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that produce grand sweeping proclamations that are nevertheless backed by years of archival or scientific research performed by experts.
While I don't agree with the poster that left/right is a distraction from class conflict, the idea that this idea cannot possibly be worth discussion or inspection is outrageous.
My comment is meant as a conversation starter more than anything, based on my observations of how both 1) the right (or at least MAGA?) and the left are against the Iran war AND 2) both the right (or at least some part of MAGA?) and left want to see the Epstein perpetrators locked up.
This hasn't happened, per my theory, because we are really in a top versus bottom fight where the top controls the narrative and shapes it to be a right vs. left fight amongst the bottom.
Yeah, remember occupy wallstreet? They got spooked and pretty much whipped up the whole identity-politics thing overnight in response. And unfortunately it did work.
Identity politics was the primary agenda well before occupy wall street. Think about the religious right in the early 90s pushing abortion and gay marriage as primary political issues to drive voters.
This is not an either or issue. There are policy issues all around. The "left" isn't creating an magical "other" in the form of panic about "woke"/"immigrants"/"terrorists cells"/"trans people"/"welfare queens"/"libs"/"gay agenda" etc.
The US government in general is not prioritizing the reality and needs of the people, it is supposed to be in service to. Instead it is serving the needs of the few, but there are many many fronts of injustice, as there are many different people in power with their own agenda. It's not necessarily a single unified agenda.
Edit: The astro-turfing in this thread is going to be interesting based on the bot comment just below my comment...
Nope. The right explicitly supports the policies that lead to the direct concentration of wealth and power and rise of fascism. If the right constantly sides with the oppressors, they are the oppressors. This should be trivial to see just by looking at voting records. It's all very public and you've got decades of history worth of it to review. Both sides are not the same. The right chooses to align with the top 0.01% making them firmly part of the problem.
I believe it's a bit more nuanced than that. Both democrats and republicans have had enough power to make meaningful changes to prevent such a wealth gap and thus the wealthy play both parties. I do see democrats trying to help people have a better life (medicare for all, etc), but the wealth gap grew nometheless. Though I do agree with you that republicans don't seem to give a flying fuck about the people these days, which does make it worse IMHO. Regardless, both parties enabled the wealth gap and is why the fight is the 99.99% against the 0.01%. The US needs to kill citizens united and take money out of politics, I think that'd be a huge step forward...and yet, it is basically impossible because the 0.01% have the power.
Tell me you don't know how US legislation gets passed without telling me you have no idea how legislation is passed. I agree Democrats have been failures at what they've attempted to do. But it's a cop out or disingenuous to say both sides have had enough power to make meaningful changes.
How often has either side had a filibuster-proof majority in the last 30 years? Once. Democrats had it in 2009-2010 for 72 working days. During that window they passed the ACA sans a public option thanks to Joe Lieberman. They have not had an opportunity like that since. And we live in a time when Republicans explicitly state they will do everything they can to oppose a Democratic president. Even filibustering their own bills.
Now take a step back and consider what each party is actually trying to accomplish and the mechanisms available to them. Budget reconciliation only requires a simple majority, but it's limited to taxing and spending. Tax cuts, the core of the Republican agenda, fit neatly into reconciliation. They don't need 60 votes for their top priority.
Democrats' goals... expanding healthcare, strengthening labor protections, voting rights, are substantive policy changes that don't fit reconciliation's rules. They need 60 votes they haven't had. So when you say "both parties enabled the wealth gap," what you're really describing is a system where one party can pass tax cuts for the wealthy with 51 votes while the other needs 60 to do almost anything about it.
Well, dethroning the 0.01% seems more feasible than starting and winning a civil war against the right. I think the right is not so pro 0.01% as you think, the killing of the United Healthcare CEO had strong bipartisan support, at the level of ordinary people.
the 0.01% have access to both the left and the right. They can fund and lobby both, however electors have considerably less flexibility given the paucity of options and how either of those options are to some extent; in thrall to the 0.01%.
Nope, it's 0.01% vs 99.9%. First, because they themselves are at the top — or, what, was Biden some sort of proletarian? Second, the left is okay with left-flavored dictatorships — just think, recently, of poor, poor Maduro. Third, from the outside, the drones kept coming whether red or blue happened to be in power.
when you couch it as a left vs right instead of a top vs down problem you will lock yourself (and your immediate circle) up in the hardline media items the people who lobby both sides will control.
as disclosure: i am socially liberal and fiscally conservative except in matters relating to education, which i believe should be free (and tuition rate controlled). never voted for trump, never will. wanted to write in bernie for the first pass until he dropped, then threw for the queen of england. i didn't vote in the last election. i consider ice to be an illegal and fascist arm of too large a state.
the most arresting argument i've heard a leftist say (which i agree with) is: there is a distribution of wealth at which a free market fails and we are long past that, especially given our failure to bust monopolies and enforce antitrust law.
that enables entities who lobby both sides of the policy spectrum to position us against each other. epstein played this well: how else do you get neoconservatives bubbling out of 4chan as an answer to thundercat tumblr kids? it's all divide-and-conquer (and over the most inane issues).
now, tell me: do you want to support eurasia or oceania? or do you want to put the puppeteers in jail?
This is such a fucking stupid argument because the "right" explicitly aligns itself with the 0.01%. If they are cheerleading it and voting for it and celebrating it, what the fuck makes you think they are on the side of the 99%. It's counterfactual. There is no evidence of it. Look at their support for Trump for fucks sake. He has made over $3B from his presidency ripping people off, and they fucking love him for it. They are on his side, not ours! Again. Look at how they consistently vote before pretending they are any sort of ally.
you flip on the news and you see the fat red faced wal-mart alcoholics raving about the latest ice raid and iran bombing. it's a pretty disgusting thing, isn't it? but count that number of people you see on the news and compare it to the number represented by 49.81 percent of people who are duped into leaning right in a two party system. then what you see on the news is an insipid and vocal minority by comparison.
they seem loud because they were born and raised in a 4chan cesspool, and relative to our ears (as we see them online), the 'enemies' are everywhere (ie overrepresented by our algorithms, since our outrage makes them money).
meanwhile both parties (in various states and layers of government) have made ranked voting either illegal or impossible to implement.
both parties (as well throughout the world) have pushed for greater government surveillance technologies and laws.
both parties have gone to the island, shot kids in sarajevo, staged military coups throughout the world, destroyed democracies, left migrant children starving at night in detention centers, sleeping on mattresses thrown into the mud. you think biden was blameless in that? i've seen those kids.
i hear you, and i am just as angry. but remember that there are a variety of reasons why people vote in the way that they do. they may come to regret those decisions when they send their kids to war, and perhaps that is some apt and just punishment.
however, don't fall into the trap of mistaking those people in your relative socioeconomic group from having entirely different needs and wants as yourself and your family.
if you vilify them, you will have aided and abetted in our dividing. the people needing to be put in jail are outliers in our system by far. they corrupt the islands, stage sarajevos, trade diamonds in war torn villages, and laugh their way to the bank while we squabble with ourselves as to 'whodunnit'. don't fall for it.
Nope. The left explicitly supports the policies that lead to the direct concentration of wealth and power and rise of communism. If the left constantly sides with the oppressors, they are the oppressors. This should be trivial to see just by looking at voting records. It's all very public and you've got decades of history worth of it to review. Both sides are not the same. The left chooses to align with the top 0.01% making them firmly part of the problem.
These people are drunk on power. They have been running around dictating things to everyone so for someone to push back is pretty novel _and_ it will inspire (I hope) other people to push back.
Listen, if the Government using it for legit and safe use cases wasn’t an issue, then they wouldn’t have complained about Anthropic’s language. Sam is just looking the other way and pretending for you employees.
Or Sam bribed the government to do this, which is also entirely possible.
Its about network effect - The biggest issue is that ChatGPT is a household name like Google at this point. Everyone and their grandma knows it or are learning about it, while Claude is very well known in the tech circles. Getting tech people to switch is relativity easy (ignoring Enterprise contracts), but getting everyone else to switch is going to be very slow.
Honestly, the best thing to happen is that someone comes up with a new UI (think claw...like) that everyone starts using instead. A very cute, well integrated system that just works for everyone, has free tier, and has something that the others dont have.
>> All of us can act too. Stop using the OpenAI models. Stop using the app. Design in other models no matter what. Screw these guys.
> Do you expect that to work?
Many years ago Tim O'Reilly (of book publishing fame) knew Apple would one day would become really big even though they were a small, niche player in the "PC" space as the time (2000s). How did he know that? By seeing what the 'alpha geeks' were doing: the folks that not just used tech, but were working at companies that were inventing the future. They were the ones where friends and families asked for advice. And the alpha geeks (at the time) were switch to MacOS X and telling their friends and family about it.
There's a good chance that if you're on HN, you're the person in your non-techies social group that many others ask for advice. You can potentially sway many people by your example and your advice.
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