He is in declining health grim reaper comes for us all.

if no one does anything about it, he is essentially correct

They obviously aren't any good at reading someone's character--or lack thereof--and therefore cannot be trusted to NOT empower a rising despot with immunity.

why don't you just come out and call yourself a KING, I Donald Trump is the fist KING OF THE UNITED STATES, I AM AMERICA'S KING. You should wear a Burger King Crown.

Last edited Tue Aug 26, 2025, 10:27 PM - Edit history (1)

He thinks he’s emperor of the world

which is why he wants longer term limits, and wants to be President for Life, and he first American dictator but his health sucks and he may not last another two years at this rate.

Horribly, horribly wrong…..

the accuser who said he raped her when she was I think 13, and when she tried to say no, he yellled at her, "I can do anything I want!" Of course there's no way to prove it, but I'll bet that i I had a nickel for every time he has said that, or some variant in shlightly different words, I'd be independently wealthy.

Earlier this year and he pointed out the folly of this type of thinking. Where you just start changing things abruptly ignoring all precedents.

It actually comes out of the Si Valley accelerationist mentality. But what people like the don’t get and certainly Trump doesn’t is that a basic facet of intelligence is recognizing that you simply can’t brute force control reality.

It’s nightmarish to watch people think they can because even if you know that they can’t just randomly break rules and live randomly, it doesn’t mean that you may not end up being a casualty or cannon fodder.

The issue with people who break rules and get away with it, cannot be fixed by more of the same. That’s a daft way to proceed.

It’s getting past appeals to decency and to sense by now. You may (people who think like this presumably) look at Putin, Xi or North Korea and think “that’s awesome!” Presumably that’s the reasoning. But those are different cultures and if you want to be a successful fascist you gotta go slower and do it more cautiously and sneakily..lol.. it’s so pathetic.

But it’s clear that appeals to better angels etc has no point in a large enough segment of society and then at that point it’s appeals to self-interest. Don’t break everything just because you can. It will take you down too.

https://www.ft.com/content/339418e7-405a-4028-a998-4faa622d6b23?shareType=nongift

Bookmarked to read tonight.
Thanks

Last edited Wed Aug 27, 2025, 11:04 PM - Edit history (2)

Normally FT is not available to read and they have interesting articles.
I can’t blame the publishing industry for setting up paywalls.

Ugh..You know Malaise, I just thought of how the next “app” -something even I would find useful-is going to be something that allows you to buy a monthly subscription permitting access of multiple magazines/newspapers etc for one monthly fee.

That would actually be useful except that I dourly distrust app makers and the net enough by now that I would find it too social experimenty and in the stupidest ways of course. So like Substack which I stopped using because as much as I like journalists like Yasha Levine, I can’t overcome my aversion to Marc Andreessen.

Besides I have very mixed feelings as a professional to interactions with journalists. It’s true that Yasha and his wife, Evgenia are the rare people where I go, “I would be real world friends with these people if I knew them”. But should one be friends with journalists at a time like this?

I was thinking of the only actual reporter I can think of at the WSJ, the one who broke that Elizabeth Holmes story. Presumably he didn’t know those two kids. Yasha is a good man, but it would be a waste to befriend someone who is the rare journalist I think would serve a real
function in society beyond lame tech criticism that’s part of the problem in being a cottage industry.

I have papers and magazines I like to support (the less tabloid articles in The Guardian
, Current Affairs). There are ones I read because they have interesting stuff and ones I hate read and would never give a penny to (The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NYT)..but I dislike those creepy app makers and would never buy into stuff like that.
Locally we already get proper newspapers and that works for me. Except Current Affairs I can’t see wanting to support anything else. They are a non-profit and I have seen a few cool things like that.
But there’s something about Nathan Robinson himself that makes me treat CA as a manipulation free space much like DU (thanks to Elad, EarlG)..Does Elad post at all? He is vegan I know..

Hi Malaise
How are you? You never remember me which means my handle is working.
I have been a DUer since 2006. But the web was very different back then. And I preferred that. DU is kinda whatever younger people call a safe space for me since I would never use those horrible social media things.
I thought Facebook sucked even in its .edu. I initially used to use DU like a “letter to the editor” thing where the average citizen anonymously engages with the press as a one sided, solipsistic thing. My mom used to do that and she was one of the sanest people I knew. She like me was not entirely asocial so she could be tentatively communicative socially.
I like DU because everyone here is as old as my parents. And most of the posters are just people. But again older people-and unlike with my parents I can swear here ;-/.

I would no more treat my webuse as a whatever the hell an influencer is does, than I would run a creepy little cottage industry rolling out new creepy deregulated forms of living. God..if my dad saw how much I swear online..he is pretty cool though but he is definitely not naive being an ex military man with no intelligence ties and a wariness of spooky stuff.

If Yasha Levine has felt like the guy in the million credits thing, I have felt like Joan from Joan is Awful (well specifically the qomputer smashing scene) and not in America so Trump needn’t bother.

And our govt/society is like that thing in Nope. I am still hoping they would get how bad the PR would be for siding with industry (credit card companies, social media companies, defense contracting, streaming giants) over the actual common citizen.

I have no patience with a slow frog in boiling water thing. What kind of dupe would be taken in by such blatantly sleazy shit? lol..there are some peopel where for all that they are lame you would think people would have the sense to leave them alone. Well I am not an influencer or politician, but to the extent that I don’t want a nasty conflict I am “likable” enough if you don’t annoy me or creep me out and that is useful even as an anon complainant since it wouldn’t be possible to say “crazy lying Karen. It was all dark web! We are naive and care!”

Sorry …grappling with existential issues.

God..wouldn’t it be awful if in the future some creepy ai company created a “Duer Malaise” persona copying all your mannerisms or those of Skittles etc. And players would impersonate the posters.

These days I have these awful and creepy ideas run riot in my head. Each one more disgusting than the last.

I would like to think that the public would still be outraged where I live over a slow slide into the Metaverse without the public’s knowledge…

John Carreyrou..that was the name of the guy who broke the Elizabeth Holmes story. And Yasha Levine is cool.

I self deported to the Global South and am very glad I did and this is a good time for the average citizen anywhere to pushback against an extremely and correctly unpopular tech industry without getting sucked into the commercial web or politics.
I am on DU only because I already was. And besides EarlG and even the entirely silent Elad are safe.

I was looking at this and thinking that younger people have a very messed up relationship with the web going by this (not a generation war thing-a comment on how technology has become more insidious):

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/26/in-lurker-to-be-a-fan-is-to-be-a-parasite/

The whole point of an open web is that where you have to use it even for a ghastly sociopolitics adjacent function-it’s only useful for anonymous people and where somehow you can without a zillion captchas be clearly not an ai, spook, influencer (🤮 .

I used to be more buttoned down on du and I’ll probably go back to that. I just feel there is stuff I would anonymously complain about that is not connected to anyone I know and well because I did like all my mentors not any institution I worked at.
Most institutions and hospitals are run by horrible humans but the doctors and scientists working there are still largely cool people (who are themselves thoroughly exploited).

This doctor gets it-he is the rare non influencer (I have a lot of aversion for self promoting bores..this doctor is legit):
https://www.claytondalton.com/


The “data is oil” metaphor seems apt since oil resulted in climate change and anyone who failed to get that actually normal people who live their lives with no kayfabe, neither wanting the sort of sadsack celebrity of the net nor ..

Sorry I went into a ramble. I liked Lina Khan. The Black Mirror guy has an astute eye but his imagination is limited the way artists are in that a clever artist has to have a complicated relationship with content since it’s easier than creativity sans human life.
But well..peopel aren’t going to become “content” for someone else’s “art” or “game” human or ai. That’s why I felt relief having honed in on Yasha and Evgenia.

Lina Khan showed that you can destroy content without needing to do reality show adjacent things like smashing computers.
Which may be better copy. But really the point of rubbish like The Milgram Experiment should be that it should be scary and not “like a game or game theory or tacky moronic low rent social experiments or kayfabe” scary but straight up scary as in “oh shit I went and poked one of those anonymous, non-infkuencer, MeToo type women accidentally and they have no sense of humor about stuff like that on or offline”.

Without the healthcare, entertainment or any industry its not academic or medical data science or ai use I have a problem with and I stay away from combining my life or science with the politics tied to biases in hiring etc. Not my thing. I am a lousy enough scientist that my main concern is that if I am not anonymous my job and life become a joke and that’s not going to happen.
I may be a shit scientist but I am not stupid. And failing to get that is usually a big problem in the real world which is really the only real world.

But I strictly avoid industrial conflicts of interest. I don’t have any ties to people I buy anything from beyond the casual recs online under my own name and even there since I wouldn’t formally associate that with my real world identity I can’t see it being of any use commercially.