It’s the same thing, for very different reasons. Sanders is, I fully believe, being genuine when he suggests that development needs to wait for the law to catch up.

OpenAI, on the other hand, have embraced the call for a pause because they’re out of money and can’t admit it. They need to scale back on their staggering training costs, but their entire pitch to their investors has always been “We can get to AGI if we just keep training hard enough.”

Slaanesh is all those things too, because it all comes down to how you’re reading it. Warhammer is a satire, it operates on more than one level. If you read Slaanesh strictly on the levels you’re describing, when examining a piece of media created in Thatcher’s Britain, then you’re doing a huge disservice to the original material and its intent. This is a satire of fascism written under a deeply homophobic government. You’re not supposed to look at the blatantly queer and gender-fucky god and think “Clearly the writers are being completely literal and expressing their own deeply held beliefs when they describe this being as pure evil.”

I’m offended by all of these comparisons. The point of the chaos gods is that they’re extreme and highly distorted depictions of the kind of things that fascist societies most fear. The Imperium / Empire are built on absolute and total control, and the chaos gods are the things that they cannot control.

Yes, in canon, the chaos gods are objectively evil, but they’re evil as distorted nightmarish examples of conservative fear-mongering. Depicting Trump as the god of “Fuck gender, do drugs, have sex, rock & roll” is pretty fucking nuts.

These guys are fascists. They’re not the chaos gods, they’re the High Lords of Terra.

But imo, the really high quality of Nolan’s visual directing does so much work distracting people from how lacking the movie is in actual substance.

Kind of describes most of Nolan’s movies really. As a technical director, he’s almost unparalleled, but his movies have often struggled to find a meaningful emotional core. They’re all polish, but often lacking in substance. Tenet was especially bad for this. An absolute masterpiece of directorial craftsmanship, but almost entirely devoid of basic elements like characters.

He’s made some absolute gems - The Dark Knight still holds up, Memento deserves its reputation, and The Prestige is a masterpiece - but I find that for the most part he seems more interested in technical flexes than in the actual story he’s telling. I’ve enjoyed every single one of his movies, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t stick with me the way that something like Prisoners or Only God Forgives does.

Genuinely incredible. Imagine if Studio Ghibli said “Fuck it, we’re doing TV now.” That’s the animation and directing quality in every episode.

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Fair enough. Even if I don’t agree with your assessment, I have a lot of respect for your attitude.

Genuinely, none of what you just wrote here is necessary. This person isn’t offering anything remotely close to reasonable criticisms. They’re just a faux leftist who has identified you as someone that it’s socially acceptable for them to bully.

There’s a stark difference between accountability and what you’re doing, which is insisting that no one ever gets to improve their behaviour or learn from their mistakes. That doesn’t make a better world, it makes the worst possible one.

If people can only ever be as good as the worst thing they’ve done, then why should anyone ever aspire to be anything better than the worst possible version of themselves?

Here’s the thing; at no point did anyone suggest that real life “muggles” are some kind of oppressed class or that you were engaging in some bold new category of ‘-ism’ by using that term. You can use whatever word you want for “people who don’t do magic.” No one really gives a shit. But if your purpose in using that word was to entirely divorce of it’s original context as an oppressive term for a biologically distinct underclass… Why use the word? Why not just invent a completely new term instead? If it’s going to mean something almost entirely different, why carry over those associations?

Now, this is the point where the sane thing to do would be to say “Honestly, at the time when we co-opted the term we just hadn’t done the work of interrogating how messed up the original context was,” and I would completely respect that. Because as I have just stated, I was a fan of those books too. I also let a lot of stuff slide that I really shouldn’t have, and it wasn’t until later that I went back and re-examined the material and started to really piece together just how fucked up Rowling’s worldview is, even as expressed in the context of her children’s stories. So I’m just as guilty as anyone else is in that regard. None of this is a call-out, just a call for further examination.

Anyway, thank you for the offer of the primer, but if I want to learn more about spellcasting I have at least a dozen or so friends I can consult for their expertise on paganism, heathenry, witchcraft, or chaos magick. None of whom have ever tried to use the terms “chakra” and “sephirot” interchangeably, which suggests a deep misunderstanding of either tantra, kabbalah, or both. Lovely art though.

The thing is, even without Rowling ripping the mask off, muggle was always a fucked up term to use in this context because it’s literally describing a group of people who are treated as second class citizens on the basis of an immutable biological characteristic, a situation that is basically never interrogated throughout the books. The fundamental ideological divide between the villains and the heroes is basically “We should enslave or exterminate the muggles” vs “We should treat the muggles like unfortunate idiot children.” In retrospect, it wasn’t actually all that surprising that Rowling turned out to be a gender-essentialist (and I do say that as someone who used to be a fan).

Sidenote, this is why Witch Hat Atelier absolutely kicks the pants off of Harry Potter.

And that, kids, is what happens when you add energy to a system while simultaneously releasing the potential energy already stored there.

They’re not saying that Rowling co-opted anything. They’re saying that they used to use the term “muggle”, lifted from the HP books, as their go-to term for “non-magical people”, until Rowling went full mask-off TERF.

Which does mean that they lifted a term that is literally used in the books as a slur, and were like “OK, yeah, this is a good way to describe people who don’t share my interests.”

None of those things are arguments against having taxation. You’re just quibbling over how taxes are collected and spent.

Ah yes, regular BBQ parties are notably more valuable than healthcare. Of course. Turns out my $700 pellet smoker can do the job of an entire hospital and I never knew!

Completely correct.

There are plenty of examples of politicians like Mamdani winning all over the USA. The right message will resonate with voters. It’s just about figuring out how to speak to their needs. People are struggling and they’re looking for answers.

As for MAGA, I genuinely mean it when I say they don’t matter. MAGA are not the majority of the electorate. They do not win elections. Yes, they’ll always vote for Trump or someone like him, but Trump never won with only MAGA. They need to find a way to appeal to people outside of their base in order to win. In 2024 that was because their message of affordability resonated with voters who spent four years under Biden drowning in cost of living.

You’re writing the fascists’ victory speeches for them. Stop telling yourself why they’re strong and start looking for where they’re weak.

Been using Seafile for years, it’s fantastic.

Socialism strengthens from economic hardship just as much as fascism does. Just look at the surging popularity of the DSA in America.

It’s going to get harder and harder to make the case for MAGA to voters when they already had their turn at the wheel and only made things worse. Meanwhile Mamdani continues to get more popular every day because he’s actually doing things that help people.

Hopelessness only helps the oppressors in the end.

The infrastructure is the number one issue here. Everyone focuses on Anthropic and OpenAI because they generate headlines - and don’t get me wrong, both of those companies are built on sand - but the true rot in the industry is in the data centres.

The economics just do not work. You buy GPUs for billions and billions of dollars. Those GPUs are outdated by the time you install them, and then they burn out within 5 years. You pay ungodly amounts for electricity. And you make, well… Not nearly enough. There’s literally no way to sell compute on GPUs at or above cost. None. The math doesn’t math. The data centre CEOs know this, but they’re all convinced that everyone else knows something they don’t.

The promise for the data centres, the only thing that offered a glimmer of future revenue, is that OpenAI and Anthropic (the only companies in the world actually buying compute at scale right now) were going to continue to increase their compute spending basically infinitely. As those two companies scale back their spending (because they’re running out of money) it’s going to become increasingly apparent that there is no one else rushing to fill the gaps. Microsoft, Meta and SpaceX all supply their own compute and have more than enough for the absolutely trivial use their AI products see. The idea was that this would be a new internet; you build the infrastructure and an explosion of new companies flood in to use it. Be the guys selling picks and shovels. But that explosion of new companies didn’t happen, and never will.

Probably 95% or more of new data centre projects will be abandoned without ever turning the lights on. Most without ever even breaking ground.