The left is shockingly asleep about how bad this is. X still is the single most important platform for driving narratives about the news and politics. And it’s still important in part because Democrats and the left as a whole have been lethargic in leaving it. The fact that it’s blatantly being used to tilt the national political discussion in whatever direction Elon wants was probably one of many keys to getting Trump elected in 2024, and should be regarded as an ongoing emergency for Democrats and the left.

People don’t want to be corrected, they want to be validated.

deleted by creator

It seems that the woman has a penchant for believing mystical guidance. “A few years ago, she visited an astrologer and it took a whole year for her to accept that none of it was real,” the husband said.

That should’ve been the first clue. I can date someone who engages in fantasy for a bit, but if they never come back to reality then just put the relationship down humanely.

On the contrary it’s right, perhaps even acute

Assuming you actually believe I misunderstood their argument, perhaps it would be more useful to explain their actual argument that I’m not grasping?

So this version of the argument basically amounts to: people who have harmed society should contribute to social welfare that bolsters the economy and society collectively. Which while a solid effort and earning my upvote, 1) the_petty_auntie’s reply doesn’t show signs of making this particular argument and 2) in this particular case, it fails because society as a whole wasn’t harmed by her son’s actions - rather a particular victim was. And as the victim was a teen at the time of the incident, it’s unlikely that the victim would be able to take advantage of student loan forgiveness unless it happened many years ago.

The question asks why the audience’s student loans should be repaid now when hers were not. The response is that the reason is the same as paying for her son’s prison sentence for raping a minor, which is “betterment of society”. Let’s count the number of ways this fails:

• “For the betterment of society” is a justification that could be used for pretty much any defensible policy decision. It really doesn’t further the argument at all unless there is something specified about how paying student loans makes society better.
• RAPING A MINOR is in caps both to indicate shoutiness and to emphasize this aspect of the crime, which again, is hard to tie back to an argument about student loans
• The main failure - the fact that it’s a blatant ad hominem directed at the poster for having a son who raped a minor, which is an evidently successful attempt to hide the weakness of the purported argument by casting the OP as someone whom one would not want to be associated with by virtue of being a parent to a rapist. This implied argument, which is the real argument, is invalid in the absence of evidence that rapist-parents cannot have valid opinions.
• It’s also a particularly egregious example of an ad hominem because it relies on guilt/worthiness by blood relation, the same concept behind ideas like racism and even worse, inheritance.

Better answers might include:

• Education costs have risen to a degree that the fairness calculation is now different
• Student loan debt is a threat to the whole economy and just as bailing out banks sometimes makes sense, bailing out student loan holders might as well
• Financial inequality is out of control and we should dispense with antiquated notions of “fairness” to the wealthy when circumstances have been more fair to them overall than at any time in the past

But these answers would not get reposted on social media as much because they don’t play into tribalism and social drama.

All three people here are terrible

Differences in matters of taste leads to disgust

The most politically incorrect truth is this: People are not good or bad, individual people do a variety of good and bad things. Mister Rogers told his gay friend to stay in the closet and marry a woman. Hitler banned animal cruelty. We don’t like to talk about these things, but it’s a true principle and a useful one to live by.

People create content knowing others are going to get filthy rich off it and they’ll get nothing in return. Except total loss of privacy.

I get where you’re coming from, but in the interest of keeping my comment simple I left out that he claimed to be hiking in Dumbarton Oaks Park, which is not far (and downstream) from the picture I posted such that it wouldn’t be plausible that it would be that narrow.

But I’ll also point out the level of incredulity my comment is getting on a social media site, vs. RFK Jr.'s, which should strike anyone familiar with Rock Creek as almost certainly wrong. Yet everyone in the whole news media is either willfully ignoring this or just too lazy to look into it. And honestly it pisses me off because this lack of giving a fuck about basic facts from reporters who we falsely imagine as being employed in reporting facts shows how much we’re in a post-truth society and why we got a con artist as our president.

THIS IS NOT ROCK CREEK FFS

Everyone including major media sources is parroting what RFK Jr. said in his instagram account as if it’s gospel. Go to google maps. Look at Rock Creek. Look how big it is. This is not Rock Creek.

The country was in decline for at least a decade before Trump took office.

Well 4 years of that decade was Trump being in office, and 4 other years was the result of people being willing to vote in literally anyone who wasn’t him. So really 8 years of that decade was Trump’s fault. And the other two years? Not bad.

As for the rest, Trump is cutting funding for research like crazy. That won’t just affect things today, that’s going to make stuff shitty for decades. And that’s exactly the kind of harm that the emotion-laden American news and social media simply won’t cover. So I don’t think there will be a backlash, rather the opposite - politicians will realize bullying scientists, government agencies, immigrants, and other voiceless Trump targets is just good politics, and keep doing it.

Of course future prediction is hard, so who knows what will happen. But I’m not seeing the path for this to turn around anytime soon. The same media that created MAGA, and made it even more popular 4 years after it proved itself to be a horrific disaster is the same media we have today. Democrats will probably win the next two elections because people can see what Trump is doing in real time, but after that I have no hope for America. If I have to predict the future, I’d guess the EU becomes the new global leader, driven by relatively high democracy and pro-science policies compared to the rest of the world. This could even occur in a relatively short time frame, like 5 years.

I’m plenty open to questioning every part of copyright (has the idea ever actually been proven to be worth the enormous costs? It’s like an infinity-percent tariff on anything information related.) but the same copyright should apply to everbody. It sounds like this proposal gives a specific pass to corporations developing AI - anything these corporations can access should be accessible to the general public as well. If you can use a song to train an AI for free, a human artist should also be allowed to use it directly and turn it into a new work.

Not to derail the topic into the lab leak thing. It just annoys me that this is so commonly taken as gospel when the vast majority of disease scientists disagree. I’ll just refer you to: https://youtu.be/EuwpDY5uFNQ

What annoys me is that “doing your own research” actually makes sense in a lot of contexts. Our modern politics driven news is 90% bullshit and you’re better off fact checking everything they say by looking at reliable sources and tracing the origin of dubious claims. But these people have ruined that by acting like “do your own research” means “blindly trust some guy with a podcast who tells you what you want to hear.”

I can’t help but read this while replacing “rock” with “large language model”

Heuristics that almost always work. Hmm.

AI Project Manager: Create a button on a webpage that, when clicked, displays an alert saying “Hello World!”
AI Programmer: “What a sensible requirement! Here you go.”
AI Billing Department: “Project completed, that’ll be 10 million dollars.”
Client AI Payments Department: “Sounds right, paid!”