If you were living in 1930s Germany, you would have signed up to be a member of the Nazi party. Don’t kid yourself, you personally absolutely would have done it. Maybe you wouldn’t have been one of those actually enlisting in the SS. But you absolutely would have been one of those that joined the Nazi party to keep their job. Do you have any idea how many regular Germans did that, just to keep their ordinary civilian jobs? They convinced themselves that it was for the greater good. After all, let’s say you’re a judge or college professor. If you don’t join the Nazi party, then an actual militant Nazi might get your job instead. Wouldn’t it be better to just join the Nazi party, keep your job, and just try not to do anything too evil in your role? Joining the Nazi party is the lesser of two evils!

When you have no red lines, there is no limit to how deep into Hell you will fall.

Shove it up your ass.

I’m focusing my efforts on helping people in my own community, the people folks like Newsom and yourself are leaving for dead. I’m quite involved in political and activist circles. But I will be damned if I vote for someone that wants to take away my rights.

If you don’t have any red lines, you’re no different than the literal historical Nazis. They also thought they were doing what they did for the greater good. The road to Hell is paved with the lesser of two evils. You have to have some standards, some lines that cannot be crossed. Otherwise there is no end to what evil you will endorse. You’ll find yourself working as a concentration camp guard, after somehow convincing yourself you’re taking the less evil path. After all, who better to be a concentration camp guard than yourself? You’re not hateful yourself, better you than an actual militant racist, right? Why shouldn’t you work as a camp guard? It’s for the greater good.

Not my problem. You advocate taking my rights away, you don’t get my vote. What kind of arrogant son-of-a-bitch would think they’re entitled the votes of those whose rights they are dismantling? The sheer hubris of that is despicable.

Shove it up your ass.

Shove it up your ass.

This isn’t about sports and it never was. Turns out when you’re willing to give in to one aspect of unscientific bigotry (the trans sports moral panic), you’ll be willing to give into others. And yes, opposing trans athletes in sports is fundamentally transphobic. Notice you never see transphobes like Newsom proposing narrowly targeted regulations that only address sports where some large and clear advantage has been proven. You never see transphobes like Newsom proposing that trans athletes in individual sports be given some handicap that would cancel out an advantage they’ve been scientifically proven to have. Instead it’s all bigoted blanket bans that are no different from bans that used to exclude black people from whites-only leagues. They never start from a position of fairness and compassion and try to intervene as little as necessary. It’s all about just keeping the filthy trannies out of polite society. These bans prohibit trans women from women’s gymnastics, for fuck’s sake. So yes, if you support blanket trans sports bans, you are a transphobic bigot. I’m sorry, but you can’t just hand waive it away with, “well aside from this example of unambiguous bigotry, I don’t see any bigotry here.” You might as well be saying, “well aside from this person being a registered member of the KKK, I don’t see any evidence that this person is racist.”

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/newsoms-bizarre-interview-with-maga

When liberals tell me, a trans person, that I need to vote for militant transphobe Gavin Newsom after he’s handed the 2028 Democratic primary victory, I’m going to tell them to shove it up their ass.

She’s in jail, not prison,

Aww fuck right off with this pedantic horseshit.

If people literally living in jail can get a hold of alcohol, pretty much anyone can.

Bathroom access has long been used to punish undesirable groups and to keep them from public life. Women who chose to work outside the home were punished in the 19th century by not having access to restrooms. People of color were punished in the 20th century for daring to exist in society by being denied restroom access at white establishments. And now people are trying to punish trans and gender non-conforming people by denying them restroom access.

In case you haven’t connected the dots, the obsession over restrooms isn’t actually about restrooms. If you can restrict the ability of undesirables to access public restrooms, you can effectively bar them from public life. It’s a way of criminalizing innocent people without actually having to arrest or throw them in prison.

And yes, these laws do effectively ban trans people from any bathroom. I’m a trans person myself, but you wouldn’t know unless I told you. I would be violating the law if I used the women’s restroom in Florida. But if I went into the men’s, I would have people throwing me out, telling me I’m in the wrong bathroom. Hell, I could be arrested for trying to use the men’s room in Florida, the very bathroom the law requires me to use. There’s no easy way for me to even prove that I am trans. My legal documents have all been documented, and I went far enough in transition I couldn’t even prove my trans status by dropping my pants. And yet, the law in Florida requires me to use the men’s restroom. So if I use a restroom in Florida, I either have to violate the law and risk arrest if somehow someone were to figure it out and report me. Or I could follow the law and still face harassment, assault, and possible arrest.

Truthfully, to me, the law in Florida has done exactly what it was intended to do. I simply won’t set foot in the state of Florida, or any other state with a bathroom ban. The government of Florida has effectively barred me, an American citizen, from the right to visit the state. And all I did to deserve this banishment was be born trans.

Exactly. At this point, anyone still bitching about anti-genocide voters in the 2024 election should be assumed to be a conservative or Russian bot.

Amazing how you’ll hold every group accountable except the group most responsible for electing Trump: straight white men.

So an adult confronted a child in the restroom, banging on the door and demanding she prove her sex. The implied threat was that if she didn’t, she would be thrown from the restroom or the restaurant entirely.

You are using a deliberately thick-headed definition of “force.” The word “force” does not literally mean physical force. It means coercion, manipulation, requiring someone to do something against their will for fear of consequences.

I’m taught courses before. I don’t "force " my students to take exams. I’m not going to go to their home and frog march them at gunpoint into my classroom to take my exam. But anyone in my class is forced to take any exam I give, if they wish to pass the class. It’s optional in a philosophical sense, but not in the practical sense.

You’re splitting hairs because this is a trans-related topic, nothing more.

One of the lessons of the crimes of the Nazis is that the road to Hell is paved with The Greater Good. The Nazis themselves believed that all their crimes were necessary for the betterment of society. They thought though their actions were regrettable, it was the only choice they really had. Killing millions was the lesser of two evils.

You have more in common with the Nazis than you would like to believe. There’s very little you cannot justify when you have no red lines and you’ll always support the lesser evil. The Nazis themselves thought they were supporting the lesser evil.

You can’t practically “trust but verify” with LLMs. I task an LLM to summarize an article. If I want to check its work, I have to go and read that whole article myself. The checking takes as much time as just writing the summary myself. And this is even worse with code, as you have to be able to deconstruct the AI’s code and figure out its internal logic. And by the time you’ve done that, it’s easier to just make the code yourself.

It’s not that you can’t verify the work of AI. It’s that if you do, you might as well just create the thing yourself.

Presentation matters!

There is nothing morally wrong with killing health insurance CEOs. In fact, it is a morally positive act.

And yet people still voted for Biden in 2020. Maybe the idea that the left will simply never support Democrats and will always move the goalposts is just a shit idea.

Exactly. Because they’re not prepared to do what’s actually necessary - reform the filibuster to allow it to be removed. Democrats have all these high-minded plans, but they all require a margin in the Senate they will never reasonably achieve. And even if by some miracle they did get 60 seats in the Senate, there will always be a rotating villain to throw a wrench in the works. Mamdani won not just because he had plans, but because he had very specific plans. He could tell people exactly how he intended to pass those plans. Democrats don’t actually have a plan for repealing Citizens United. They just have vague notions about repealing Citizens United.