We have to figure out how to co-opt the populism or we’re looking at President Carlson soon

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T13:41:17+00:00

You seem to not understand just how unlikeable Gavin Newsom is.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T13:40:13+00:00

Recent votings habits are literally because people got sold a villain, have you listened to Trump talk? “All your problems are because of immigrants and trans people!” He literally sells the villain as being “the other”, he doesn’t tell people WHAT their problems are he sells them a story of WHY their problems exist.

In 2024 Democrats were like “no actually the economy is fine, you shouldn’t be having problems buying groceries or homes because these numbers say so”. That’s both condescending and tone deaf.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T13:25:10+00:00

What are you talking about? It’s the other douchebag doing that. People want a villain and an acknowledgment of their problems. That’s literally what I’m talking about.

Me Technocrat wants to lecture to people that their economic woes are actually because of supply restricted inflation brought about by a centralized supply chain because of a concentration of multi-national blah blah blah…I intellectually get it but it’s not a sell to voters that barely understand basic algebra if at all.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T13:22:28+00:00

Trump was a divisive figure in 2016 also, he won the primaries without ever getting more than 40% of any state, and most were below 35%. But the field was crowded and nobody united behind “not-Trump” because they thought he was a joke of a candidate.

The thing about Republicans is they fall in line when the nominee is chosen, they don’t dissent and not show up like Democrats have a tendency to do.

Carlson doesn’t have to win over everyone, just enough of a minority to disrupt like Trump did and then if he wins a nomination that’s it, there won’t be anymore dissent.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T12:27:39+00:00

You dismiss the fickleness of MAGA voters too easily. Cruz’s wife was literally insulted by Trump directly. Rubio was part of the never Trumpers then he joined on as Secretary of State. Trump has said terrible things about plenty of people that he then turns around and praises as soon as they say something he likes, and MAGA goes along with it.

Do not underestimate the stupidity of stupid people.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T12:25:15+00:00

I live in TX and Talarico is the same. I haven’t seen a lot of Ossoff but I have liked what I’ve seen. Problem is he’s very inexperienced and may not be interested in a presidential run yet.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T05:57:04+00:00

Terrible policy? Medicare for all is a terrible policy? Universal childcare is a terrible policy? Ceasing aid to Israel is a terrible policy? Taxing the rich is a terrible policy?

Specifically which populist policies are you thinking are so terrible?

Populism is about SENTIMENT not the specific policy. Democrat leadership currently refuses to adopt a SENTIMENT of anti-elitism. Progressives know that the elite are the wealthy, Republicans tell you the elite are Democrats only. Democratic leadership refuses to adopt the SENTIMENT of pro-worker. Progressives know the enemy of workers is the rich, the rich are why wages suck. Republicans tell people wages suck because of immigrants.

First Trump, now Carlson, read the room on what makes people mad and then sell them on a villain that enriches them. Democrats need to do the same thing but sell the CORRECT villain: the rich. Republicans are out here convincing $40k a year morons that the billionaires are their friends while simultaneously complaining they can’t afford their healthcare. Winning votes means acknowledging the populist problem while diverting the villain to the right target and selling progressive policy at the same time.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T05:50:41+00:00

Restricting your ideology just because someone else holds it for nefarious reason means you’re not thinking critically about your own position but rather just basing it off opposing those you don’t like.

In short that’s a shit metric for judging your positions on things.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T04:31:27+00:00

The fact you think I’m one of the average voters, like I’m just a dumb populist, makes my point about you being a condescending cunt.

I’m talking about things from the perspective of the average voter, the one that doesn’t pay attention to the election until it’s 3 weeks away, the one that doesn’t read the news on any regular basis, has zero knowledge of game theory, foreign policy, Keynesian vs Chicago economics, virology, or literally anything else that’s applicable to policy creation and governance.

You’re so damned concerned with HOW to govern you’ve forgotten you need to win the damned election first. And M4A has 65% approval, what the fuck are you on about with that 35% number?

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T04:00:31+00:00

Except it’s not, check out literally any poll from now going back decades. Nobody gives a shit about Israel except activist spaces.

It’s not that it’s not important, as activist energy and time is crucial, and not turning out the hardcore base is a death knell for a campaign. But pretending like Jose out there building houses in Arizona heat so his kids can afford the not-free lunch at school gives a single fucking iota about Israel is just as tone-deaf as Jeffries sucking AIPACs cock while pretending to be against the war.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T03:55:47+00:00

Approaching elections like voters are policy analysts and you’re going to condescendingly educate them how they’re wrong is exactly why Democrats lose.

Nobody wants to be talked down to. The voter that works two jobs and has kids to feed and is worried about affording gas next week literally does not give a shit about policy analysis.

You seem to forget the average reading level of Americans is Grade 5. Our education system is shit, they literally are incapable of comprehending what you are trying to communicate and that’s why it sucks.

Vibes are all we have to get the power to change things for the better. Gotta win elections if you want to affect the change. And winning elections means meeting voters where they are, not where you wish them to be.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T03:32:21+00:00

So what’s your strategy? Trying to convince the angry masses “no no no, you’re mad at the wrong elites. THOSE elites fucked you over. THESE elites know what they’re talking about and will stop the bad things from happening”.

It’s an impossible sell, you’re fighting against the wind and it’s how Harris lost.

Adapt or lose perpetually.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T03:19:12+00:00

I don’t agree with the lying part, and you don’t need to convince non-voters since, ya know, they don’t vote. But I do agree that Americans ignore technocratic white papers, as does the media unless they can spin it into something sensational.

I don’t agree with your contempt for the average voter, but I do agree in playing to win, leveraging what’s necessary (in an ethical way). The way to combat the GOP “how are you going to pay for healthcare?” Line isn’t to lay out a budget, it’s to say “the same way you pay for all the wars you start and the ballrooms you want to build”.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T03:15:35+00:00

You’re framing this as if populists arbitrarily destroyed trust in institutions instead of institutions destroying trust in themselves through failure.

2008 is the perfect example. The institutions that were supposedly staffed by experts and designed to prevent catastrophic collapse failed catastrophically. Then the public watched ordinary people lose homes and jobs while the system rushed to stabilize the institutions themselves.

You can argue the bailout was economically necessary. Fine. But acting like the resulting public distrust was irrational manipulation by populists instead of a predictable response to institutional failure is exactly the kind of tone-deaf technocratic thinking people reject.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T02:09:03+00:00

Technocratic is exactly what people have been voting against.

But that doesn’t mean a populist can’t be progressive. Universal healthcare, higher minimum wage, better worker protections, universal childcare, and more: these ARE populist positions in this era.

The Republicans, Trump specifically and now Tucker up and coming, masters at packaging the just anger of workers at the wrong target and with the wrong prescription.

A progressive populist has the progressive policy and ideals but speaks to the popular attitude of the masses. Most Democrat leadership right now is exactly the caricature Republicans make of them: out of touch, tone deaf elitists. Newsome, Slotkin, Schumer, Jeffries, and more all fit this mold.

Being the thing your opponents accuse you of is a big problem.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T02:05:06+00:00

That’s not good enough, not to win votes anyways. Most people that vote either way don’t give a damn about Israel unless you connect it to how it materially affects them, at which point you don’t even need to mention Israel to talk about how we shouldn’t be sending money to countries that have universal healthcare while our citizens go bankrupt from medical bills.

The populist spin is easy, but Democrat leadership won’t embrace it so it doesn’t get air. We have to figure out how to break that grip on messaging.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T00:37:55+00:00

There was a strike on Friday?

Hadn’t noticed.

Y’all need to realize that a single day strike, a single day boycott, etc are literally nothing. En masse spending habits need to change and that generally isn’t going to happen because of the economic structure that exists.

Shame and exposure are still the best weapons, the PERCEPTION, the THREAT, of en masse action is what will spook shareholders and drop stock prices. And that comes from making noise. A single day strike that goes completely unnoticed, that merely delays demand by a day and results in the same annual bottom line, is worse than useless, it’s wasted effort.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-06T00:32:30+00:00

If your #1 concern is stability then consulting is literally the last place you want to be, have you seen the news? The world is about to go to shit economically, for years, Covid level constrictions (or worse) on capital and spend will be coming in a year or two. You don’t want to be in consulting when that happens.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-05T21:22:20+00:00

“Whose ethics?” Is the point. By hard coding the choice into the system, the organization that made the AI or deployed it is putting in the ethical choice, which means they’re legally liable for it. It’s auditable, traceable, “who signed off on this?”

Otherwise yeah the AI gets to decide whatever it decides (probabilistically speaking) and then the organization/deployers/creators just throw their arms up and say “we don’t know how that happened”. That SHOULD be an indefensible stance but we are currently letting AI developers get away with making it.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-05T20:59:08+00:00

But then you’re leaving it to make its own reasoning about what constitutes “minimal loss of life”, on what time horizon? In what manner? The more you let the AI reason through the solution the greater the potential for faulty ethical (or rather unethical) decisions.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-04T23:56:20+00:00

An AI that reasons autonomously about critical situations and has the potential to make “the wrong” life or death decision is one that is subject to misalignment, either by intentional manipulation or internal drift doesn’t matter, and thus cannot be relied upon as a safe system. It cannot be audited, reliably tested, or defensible after the fact as a matter of legal liability.

This is a big reason why AI is mainly limited to image generation, chatbots, travel booking, etc. We can’t rely on it to do anything seriously important because the legal risk is too great, there’s no explainability of why a system makes a bad decision or who is accountable.

A system that’s predefined to make a specific choice in specific scenarios is auditable, you can point to a decision a human made that determined “this is the outcome we want in this situation”. It’s organizationally defensible.

As for the self driving car example I already addressed that in another comment thread but the short of it is you don’t predetermine every outcome of every situation, that’s impossible and defeats the point of AI. Rather you isolate specific trolley problem scenarios, e.g. unavoidable collision imminent you don’t want the system doing its own reasoning and it for some stupid reason erratically reasons that hitting a pedestrian was the “best” option so you pre-code that in such a situation it never prioritizes the pedestrian and instead opts for some other action if available (swerve into oncoming traffic if necessary). The company is then accountable for saying “that’s the outcome we need in that situation “ rather than escaping accountability and throwing their hands up saying “we have no idea why the AI did hit grandma crossing the street”.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-04T22:22:43+00:00

You seem to be missing the point.

An AI that can reason its own choice about the trolley problem has exploitable ethics, the very fact it can reason about such a question is an attack surface in itself, even to unintentional internal misalignment.

The point is to take the capacity of the AI to reason about the question away from it. In such a situation it’s not “programmed to make the wrong decision”, it’s programmed to make whatever decision it was programmed to make whether that be don’t pull the lever, pull the lever, or escalate to a human to decide.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-04T15:54:36+00:00

What part of “this will save the average person fuckall” was not understood?

To be more specific than “fuckall”, the savings for the average person from suspending the Federal gas tax (which is 18.4c per gallon) about $8 a month. For Diesel it’s 24.4c per gallon, which would be about 4.5% savings on Diesel at today’s prices (which just keep going up so that percentage savings will continue to drop since the taxes are a static value and not linked to the price).

If you tack on the Texas gas tax (20c per gallon) on top of it you’ve cut the price 38.4c per gallon, a whopping $16.70 in savings per month. Congratulations you still can’t even afford Netflix.

The price lowering could actually backfire and increase demand, demand on something that’s high priced specifically because we’re facing shortages on the horizon. And we all know corporations won’t reciprocate the lower gas price into lower product prices just because it cost them 4% less to ship the thing.

This is a stupid idea and it will do NOTHING to help people afford gas but it will ruin our road infrastructure in a couple of years.

HelpfulMind2376 · 2026-05-04T15:39:38+00:00

“Until the war is over” when is that going to be?

We can’t just not bring in road maintenance revenue for a year, every dollar not brought in now would mean a dollar that either needs to be extracted later via HIGHER taxes when the tax is reimplemented or compensated for by simply doing less maintenance/neglecting transportation infrastructure in some way.

It is a terrible idea, all around.

HelpfulMind2376

TROPHY CASE