Add salt?

First tell: “perceived Western hegemony”.

Second tell: zero-sum thinking regarding Russia-China influence and economy

Third tell: the loud implication that China building relationships in Central Asia is a threat to Russian influence, as though China’s presence there would be an equal threat to Russia as if the West was building up relationships there

This is schlock

It’s bugged

I want to make abundantly that Gen Z did not fumble the election, the Democrats did. The Democratic party analyzed the situation much the same way you did, and realized that there was no way the Republicans would ever win over Gen Z, so they took that as opportunity to move further right than Reagan and expose the entire two party system as one large fascist bloc with 2 different sheep dogs.

And Gen Z correctly saw electoralism as a dead end and are actively exploring alternatives.

They need to be educated

Oh there’s rent. Most US prisons charge per diem rates for housing, and they charge for many “services” and they charge literal extortion rates. Prisoners leave US prisons deeeeeply in debt

None. Society is constructed by us, including all of its “issues”. We built it all.

Driving will end long before drinking will

America must end for the world to heal. If it happens in these 4 years, it’ll be super painful because no one is prepared. But it has to happen some one or another.

Don’t exit the scene. We need you.

I’m sorry. The military build and use promised by Trump? Have you been asleep for the last 4 years? For the last 24? The military build and up and use has been nonstop under every single president since Reagan.

Your definition of “force” sounds like “anytime I am uncomfortable”. Someone made a choice to invent slang, someone else picked it up. Not using youth vernacular as a youth often results in mockery. Someone brought in a loan word, others chose to use it. In business or political spheres, failing to adopt the style of the times often led to mockery, ostracization, or diminished station. None of that is force. It’s all just choices.

You think suffering consequences for misgendering someone is aggressive but you don’t think suffering consequences for being a “square” is aggressive. When we raise young people in the sales professions we tell them to get interested enough in sports to be able to talk about it to build rapport. Same for TV. There was a time when if you didn’t watch TV you were cut out of conversation regularly.

Aggression is when bigots beat transpeople to death. Not when trans people ask to be respected through use of language. Aggression is when neo-nazis block access to drag storytime, not when someone asks you to use the pronouns they have chosen for themselves.

If you haven’t read anything about how gender is a system of control I would recommend starting with any of bell hooks’ work on patriarchy. Here’s a short PDF summarizing some of the legacy of colonialism and its impact on gender-nonconforming people. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/cfi-subm/2308/subm-colonialism-sexual-orientation-cso-ilga-world-joint-submission-input-2.pdf

And finally, you don’t care that much about trans people. That’s the insight. You need to start seeing everything else you’re saying through that lens. You’re not rationally correct on each of your points, you’re justifying your emotional position. The reason we are having this argument is because I do care about trans people and we can argue about the use of language, which makes you uncomfortable, to advance the relationship. I can get you curious about the topic, I can share things you wouldn’t have heard before. The debate is the point. It’s a social evolution, and one of the ways we are doing it is through language. There are other ways, like fashion, literature, drama, academia, sexual relations, legislation, court cases, public spectacle, conflict, solidarity, etc. But it’s all evolving and there are people actively pushing that evolution in a direction that allows themselves to be safer being who they are as opposed to afraid for their lives on a daily basis.

It’s clear that you don’t understand the value of speculative analysis and thought experiments. That’s OK. Just stop engaging.

Language evolves because people force it to. It’s not a natural organism independent from our choices. We choose taboos, we choose meaning, we choose pronunciation, we choose loanwords. It’s all evolution. The idea that it’s “forced” is ludicrous because no one can take words from you nor force you to use them. Your words are your own and no one is capable of stopping you from speaking them. But, if you choose not to respect the wishes of others, you will suffer consequences.

The reason some languages have a gender binary is often because that society forced a gender binary on people to control them. There are plenty of non-Euro languages that have no gender binary built in. Language is an active participant in social oppression and changing language is an active countermeasure to that oppression and indeed a tool in shaping future society.

Inventing entirely new pronouns is no more ridiculous than inventing yet another television show character or yet another tiktok dance craze or yet another romance novel or yet another $15/month subscription service that does the same things other service do or writing yet another magazine column.

We put effort where we care. That’s how we work. Where you put your effort shows you what you care about.

They aren’t referred to as “preferred pronouns”. That concept doesn’t exist. They are just pronouns. The pronouns for this person are x, y, and z. There’s no preference, just a declaration.

It’s a thought experiment to analyze specific variables. Whatever we assume as given for this experiment is not what we’re trying to understand. If we assume our understanding of physics is accurate for this thought experiment, it allows us to focus on the behavioral variables in the geopolitical, military, economic, and economic dimensions. I am not interested in a thought experiment that identifies what are the possible areas of new physics that could be implied from this thought experiment, all though a deeper analysis might indicate that specific new physics might result in specific behaviors of states and we need to itemize them as additional thought experiments.

Remember that this is a thought experiment. I am using the word “assume” like we’re doing geometry in math class. Assume the triangle XYZ has one angle of 60 degrees. Why would you assume that? Because it’s useful when doing an analytical exercise.

In the larger context, I don’t assume our physics is accurate, but I’m not interested in speculating on the ways in which it’s inaccurate for this thought experiment.

It’s an intellectual pursuit like analyzing the situation in Ukraine or analyzing decisions before the FTC or analyzing a football league

I am not talking about speculative fiction and what could happen. I am talking about taking your hypothesis - that alien contact has not happened at all - and attempting to build a steel-person argument against it.

This is how we got the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis: 1 assume UAPs are alien ships, 2 assume our understanding of physics is accurate, 3 assume that aliens wouldn’t fly all this way for nothing, what could be a possible explanation for 1 and 2? This the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis is born and now we can setup experiments to gather sufficient evidence to close out that hypothesis.

I am looking for something similar with regard to the theories of alien contact resulting in an arms race. The best way to defeat any ridiculous hypothesis is to steel-person it.

The capabilities to generate summaries? Yeah, that’s probably true, I knew of AI that could summarize data into narrative years before the current LLM hype. I don’t know the underlying tech behind those things I saw though. They could have been early LLMs, they could have been some other neural network. But it was definitely a machine learning solution.

The point that machine learning can reduce the effort to produce dossiers to the point of making millions of dossiers feasible still stands though.

The Supreme Court gave the office of the president full immunity for discharging duties of the office.