It’s interesting how much technology has slowed down.

We haven’t slowed down. We simply aren’t noticing the degrees of progress, because they’re increasingly below our scale of discernment. Going from 8-bit to 64-bit is more visually arresting than 1024-bit to 4096-bit. Moving the rendered horizon back another inch is less noticeable each time you do it, while requiring r^2 more processing power to process all those extra assets.

No we’re getting close to some 20 year old games still looking pretty decent.

The classic games look good because the art is polished and the direction is skilled. Go back and watch the original Star Wars movie and its going to be more visually acute than the latest Zack Snyder film. Not because movie graphics haven’t improved in 40 years, but because Lucas was very good at his job while Synder isn’t.

But then compare Avatar: The Way of Water to Tron. Huge improvements, in large part because Tron was trying to get outside the bounds of what was technically possible long before it was practical, while Avatar is taking computer generated graphics to their limit at a much later stage in their development.

the party standing for freedom

That died with the Hayes Administration.

it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity

You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.

That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.

Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.

And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.

Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.

They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.

Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.

That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.

Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.

More artists are coming up through tik tok now than the radio.

The radio isn’t a thousand independent stations looking to fill air time with local talent, it’s a handful of mega-monoliths looking to maximize advertising revenue with the Most Popular Thing (that fits the corporate agenda).

This relationship shows that being attractive will improve a persons odds of being successful in music.

Blandly conventionally attractive, to boot. Could we even do Amy Winehouse in the modern moment? Could we see Eminem or Maryl Manson or Buddy Holly or Ray Charles or Billie Holiday topping the charts? Idfk anymore. Seems like it’s easier than ever to blacklist anyone who is even remotely controversial. Plenty of attractive people who will do the Brittany Spears thing for fear of being the next Dixie Chicks.

Maybe if personality can shine through in those videos it can overtake appearance.

Unfortunately, the personality that shines brightest seems to be the kind that singles you’re an asshole.

Just ask P Diddy and Kanye.

Do you think music nowadays puts more emphasis on the appearance of the artist than before?

I think the question is backwards. What we have isn’t a prioritization of appearance but a reduction of advertised talent combined with a professionalization of cosmetics. When you’ve consecrated your industry around a bare handful of performers, you can pick out the fist full of people that check every box.

Beyonce, Swift, Usher, and Bieber cover all the bases.

But once you get outside that rarified niche of promoted talent? Do you really think Post Malone is famous for his good looks? Is Kishi Bashi just coasting on his pretty face?

I don’t really think so.

Young Mic Jagger was a snacc.

I think that those animals would absolutely do the same thing if they had the physical and mental capabilities

Definitely depends on the animal. Bonobos and Chimpanzees - our two nearest relatives - have dramatically different dispositions and cultural patterns. Go further back in history and you’ll find six or seven other close ancestors to homo sapiens spread across the globe, each of which developed their own distinct behaviors.

Even to say “they’d behave like humans” requires a very broad brush, because human behavioral patterns are also extremely variable. The Columbian explores had a dramatically different social pattern than the West Indies neighbors they initially encountered.

Since there are finite resources, if they’re too successful they start to become victims of their own success.

This goes back to the infinite growth engine of solar energy. If you can capture more sun - either directly or by proxy - you can grow with fewer bounds. Organisms best suited to this task fruitfully multiple. But there are still evolutionary dead-ends - patterns that seem fruitful in the moment but only because of a temporary state of affairs.

The engine of evolutionary development is an erratic oscillation between environmental compromise and conflict, exploration and exploitation, production and consumption. Because the rules are always changing, there’s no permanent winning strategy.

Every mammal on this planet instictively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment

That’s a cute line, but its not true. Animals regularly breed themselves into Malthusian collapse. Nevermind mammals, the earth was nearly rendered inhospitable because of too many trees. In fact, the fossil fuel economy of the modern day is predicated on this explosion in plant life that flooded the planet with excess oxygen.

Mammals follow similar trends, exploding through an ecological niche well past the point of sustainability. Species can - and have - overproduced to the point of collapsing their biomes and causing localized extinctions. Some mammals find an equilibrium, but that’s a result of selection bias. The species that hit an equilibrium point are the ones that stick around long enough to become present in the fossil records and major ecological zones. Plenty more fail and die out.

A virus.

The major distinction between a virus and an organism is that viruses cannot reproduce on their own.

This is particularly ironic given the premise of the Matrix movie. It is not the humans that are the viruses. Even in confinement, they continue to bare fruit and multiple. It is the AIs that exist parasitically which persist only with a steady new supply of human hosts.

Consequently, Agent Smith’s genocidal plot nearly brings down the system that the AIs need to survive.

The real problem is that our concept of Infinite growth fails to describe the growth of use value. We only measure the growth of exchange value.

Strictly speaking, both are possible. But only one is good.

You could do the SMBC web comic joke about two computers that just trade bits of data as a form of economic activity and achieve growth capped only by the maximum processor speed of the transactions. Viola! Infinite growth! But its all exchange growth, no utility.

You could also describe the Cambrian Explosion as an “Infinite Growth” strategy. Rapid proliferation of species, new ecological niches that are filled by species specifically focused on occupying those niches, revolutionary new means of biologically observing and processing information, etc etc etc. Now we’ve got enormous utilitarian growth, but there’s no real exchange process (unless you consider organisms eating one another a market mechanic).

From a biological perspective, the real upper limit on growth is efficient use of solar energy to process planetary materials. And we’re still nowhere near that limit. Plants and planktons and insects and crustaceans have been lapping us on that front even into the modern industrial age.

Our model of economic growth just fixates on the exchange side so heavily that we end up with the Two-Computers-On-An-Island-Trading-Bits proxy for economic success. We’ve abandoned our conceptualization of utility growth in our quest to fully financialize. We don’t recognize volunteer labor as a form of economic growth. We don’t recognize procreation as a form of economic growth or mortality as a form of de-growth. We don’t recognize ecological destruction as a form of economic de-growth or extinction as a massive loss in economic value.

Until we adjust our measures, the infinite growth we’re aiming for is purely a growth in accounting statistics. We’re sacrificing real prosperity for a financial fairy tale.

I think US oil interests might have a thing or two to say about declaring Iraq not a country.

More specifically, the US interest in the Suez Canal. This critical piece of intercontinental infrastructure must be secured in order to efficiently transport material within the Mediterranean Ocean and out to the Atlantic. Also a BFD if you’re moving military hardware through the region (like aircraft carriers).

Israel is a gun pointed at the neighboring states, intended to keep them in line. But if that gun keeps going off randomly, it no longer serves as a meaningful deterrent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel

This is what the Founder of Zionism actually believes.

That’s not even on the table. The only thing Americans care about is the potential for Chinese surveillance. The potential for American surveillance and corporate surveillance (particularly for insurance companies) is considered a huge windfall that they’ll fight to continue.

Hell, I can see a future in which your car won’t even start without an internet connection.

Oh no. JK Rowling has entered the chat.

I also think they’ll fall well short of achieving time travel.

It’s crazy when something as simple as rejecting the Cass Report and ending the instructional abuse of Trans People is equated with SciFi tiers of impossibility.

The labour party is certainly flawed but you have to remember all they’ve given the people of the UK

You’re going to have to fill me in, because it seems Keir took office and immediately declared that there is no money left in the banana stand.

They couldn’t even restore funding to the H2 connection from Manchester to London, and that’s shit that was already paid for.

The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system

Spending decades to tinker with the mechanics of an election system that excludes 40% of the population via its baseline construction? Seems like you’re going to keep getting the same results.

What good is Ranked Choice Voting in a state like Florida, where 1.7M people are excluded through the state’s Felony Disenfrachisement system? FFS, the state voted on an amendment to reform Felony Disenfrachisement and the legislature just cancelled it out. Gerrymandering means you’ll never see a non-conservative state senate and you’re unlikely to see more than a moderate conservative occupy the Governor’s mansion.

That’s not a FPTP problem, its a problem of targeted state-wide ethnic disenfranchisement.

glances at the current state of the UK Labour party

It’s been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I’ve also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France’s En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.

And then there’s always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they’re persistently terrorized into voting the “safe” centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.

The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is “electable” because they can win the support of the conservative national media.

People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.

Its a doomed system.

That’ll fade by election day. Trump’s strength comes from the deluge of right-wing media that bombards people. These debates are going to blotted from their brains - if not completely subverted by talk show re-edits and talk-overs - in another month.