Dictatorships are built on narratives. To stop them one must break their narrative, which is an iterative process—they’ll change the narrative to explain away new developments, but if you force them to keep making changes faster than their adherents can absorb them, their shared reality will fall apart.

Uncle Tom had his issues, but he wasn’t hateful toward anyone.

When you say “by themselves”, you mean one person would still write the scripts manually, and AI would replace the grunt-work animation teams that shows like the Simpsons and South Park employ in East Asia?

If the AT protocol allows public access to content, they can’t create a proprietary training set. But the content is available for anyone who wants to add it to a public training set.

We can have AI control our metaverse avatars so we can ignore them both.

• Support for slavery before the Civil War

• Carter’s airline deregulation

• Clinton’s welfare “reform” and NAFTA

• Obama’s finance sector bailout

• Biden blocking a national rail strike

Biden has appointed three Latinos to his Cabinet, and Obama had five. (Trump’s previous administration had one—the Secretary of Labor.)

I think the controversy with Rubio isn’t that he’s Latino, it’s that he advocates for a more interventionist foreign policy.

There was a last major migration out of Africa starting around 70–50,000 years ago that coincides with both the disappearance of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and with the appearance of representational art. Earlier Neanderthals made artistic crafts like shell jewelry, but it wasn’t representational.

Prehistoric people leaving things in caves is practically the only way we still know about them, but that doesn’t mean humans normally hung out in caves as a permanent lifestyle. We have evidence of people making wooden structures in Africa long before the first cave paintings—and compared to structures, caves would have been cold and dark, unlikely to be conveniently located, and contested for by cave-adapted animals.

It’s because the caves were so shitty that subsequent people left them untouched for tens of thousands of years.

Are you talking about someone who’s deliberately claiming to have experienced something they only read about, or someone who’s genuinely uncertain of their own memories?

Legally, yes. (But of course, the Supreme Court has turned interpreting the Constitution into a game of Calvinball.)

If nothing else, it’s diverting views and revenue from whatever genuine right-wing media they’d be watching otherwise.

If it’s really just a matter of too many candidates, could they increase the number of signatures needed to get on the ballot?

My city (Oakland) has ranked-choice voting for mayor and city council, and (as far as I’m aware) doesn’t have a similar issue with under-voting.

Was there another factor besides the number of candidates on the ballot (e.g., no candidate statements in voter guides, or an ad campaign against ranked voting)?

If they genuinely don’t have a preference, is it a bad thing if they refrain from effectively voting at random?

If Trump tried to run for a third term, could Obama run against him?

…because Jeff Epstein was unavailable?

The only constitutional requirement is that cabinet posts must be made with the advice and consent of the Senate.

I don’t know, but there are some common names that are actually obscure forms of classic theonyms, and the people using them may not even be aware of the connection—for instance, “Dennis” is a form of “Dionysus”. Would you count that or not?

The elementary school I went to was next door to a crematorium. I have breathed in multitudes.