As well as the original story as reported by Skynews before they replaced it in lockstep with other media.

How would you make it more reliable?

*third civil war

Everyone forgets about the coal wars, and the scenario you are talking about will likely look very similar to that one.

The “solid Democrats” of the last 4+ years have been putting people into camps ~migrant detention centers, prisons, enhanced interregation facilities, any other euphemism for camp that doesn’t come with the same baggage~, stripping legal protections and significantly reducing access to medications.

The “existential horror shit” does not stop with this election, regardless of outcome.

I think you are spot on with explaining the perspective of the Democratic party campaign strategists, but I would push back on some of those points.

Remember that the stock market is important to these voters (and his donors), and Trump had everything set up in his favor and still squandered it.

I don’t think they see it that way and honestly using the same “objective” metrics, removing 2020-2021 due to COVID being a major outlier, there isn’t much difference between the Trump and Biden presidencies from an “economic perspective”. If you include 2020-2021 it looks like Trump “squandered it” and Biden had “unprecedented growth” but it’s really a story of outliers and how they can be manipulated to tell whatever story you want.

It’s also needs to be said that those “objective” metrics have/are becoming increasingly divorced from “objective” reality but that’s a conversation for a different thread…

Corporate America does not want a repeat of this

Trump was great for Corporate America, Biden has been even better. The MAGA propaganda is that ‘Trump really stuck it to corporate America and was actively working against their interests’ or ‘he might suck but at least he’s hitting the corporations where it hurts them most’ but I really haven’t seen any good evidence for any of that (see the point above). If you’ve got some counter evidence to share I’d be interested.

convince some Republican voters who would have voted red “because that’s what you do”, to instead vote for Kamala.

But they won’t any more than you’ll convince many Democrats to vote for Trump. Those voters that the Harris campaign is targeting will be voting Libertarian, Green or (mostly) “holding their nose” and voting Trump.

Honestly, one of my biggest annoyances surrounding the Nader spoiler controversy is the assumption that all votes would’ve gone to Gore where the evidence does not support that conclusion and it’s subsequent use as a cudgel to support duopoly instead of the more accurate warning of what happens when you sacrifice your voting block to pander to the other half of the duopoly.

it’s easy to forget that just because they’re Republican’s does not mean they are MAGA

You’re right, and within that context it may be useful to use the self identify method the house tepublicans use (“the House Freedom Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, the Main Street Caucus, the Republican Governance Group”) to discuss who “is MAGA”, who Harris is pandering to and play the fun game of ‘which of those 5 groups is the lesser evil?’ and look at the ven diagram between those…

How is Bush the counterexample reason to vote for Harris while she is actively campaigning with Dick Cheney?

We can eventually have that conversation as a nation

That’s a good way to describe the last 50 years of American politics…

keeping a juvenile squirrel you’re not qualified to care for and just plopping it outside after a few months is naturally going to fail.

Yes, but the squirrel was kept because the owner killed their mother with a car on accident. This is not a case of “wanting a pet squirrel so badly” but trying to rectify a tragic accident.

This person then proceeded to get it zero medical care.

Professional medical care == medical care. Treating that sort of injury requires some training, but it’s a far cry from the extensive and critical medical procedure you’re trying to sell it as.

They want to be able to release it back into the wild, that’s the ideal resolution.

A juvenile squirrel without a mother to learn from doesn’t have a way to learn those survival skills without human intervention which will result in “lost their fear of people”.

get the education and certification you need to actually understand how to take care of them.

What education and certifications would those be?

deal with illegals

You mean be the one putting them in cages? Running the concentration camps immigrant detention centers? Using their legal status as leverage for the modern equivalent of indentured servitude?

It turns out people aren’t very nice when they’re being abused.

champagne communists

So let’s stop speaking in euphemisms. When you say “illegals” that is explicitly genocidal language, little different than the usual ‘insects’, ‘vermin’, etc.

So why don’t we just kill them all? Just set up a militarized zone on the border and shoot anything that moves?

I think you misread, he tried to do the “right thing” and release the squirrel back into the wild which resulted in the squirrel getting injured and coming back to him for help.

He didn’t seek veterinary assistance because often euthanization is the outcome. Personally were I a squirrel I would prefer substandard medical care over execution…

Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and then the house and Senate approve or deny the nomination. The current justices were nominated by Democrat majorities.

Kamala Harris is actively campaigning with Dick Cheney.

Electoral districts are drawn via bipartisan committee.

This is ultimately the problem with metaphors… What specifically are you looking for to confirm or deny?

Are Democrats holding a gun to your head?

Yes. They are called police, the gun isn’t figurative.

But if you want to change metaphors:

“if you leave him alone with your stuff he’s going to steal it, you better leave me alone with your stuff as I won’t steal it.”

They then invite the other guy over and help them steal it, but blame it on the other guy and say “we tried to stop it”. Who would you be more angry with?

Holding a gun to your head is “not doing anything”?

Yes, dictatorships and monarchies sometimes have a petition process, but they tend only to pay lip service. Not because they care, they will do as they please becaue they have the power-- hence a dictatorship.

You’re so close to getting it…

So if one person is holding you at gunpoint while another rummages through your pockets, you should definitely only be mad at the one going through your pockets right?

The promise is that Harris is essentially a continuation of Biden so with that in mind comparing to your list above:

Similarities ✓ the “Muslim Ban” on air travel, employing white nationalists as staffers, packing the supreme court with extreme conservative justices, giving permanent tax cuts to the rich, expanding the presence of immigrant concentration camps, cozying up to foreign dictators, directly pursuing strikes and assassination attempts against middle-Eastern military generals and diplomats, trying to start a trade war with China, discrediting his chief medical advisor on factual statements about Covid, saying Black Lives Matter protestors were “burning down cities”, wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, declaring “far left radical lunatics” part of his “enemy from within”, sexually assaulting over a dozen women and underage girls, being a generally abusive sleazebag, also funding a genocide (Israel has always been ethnically displacing Palestinians), also building the wall, also not implementing healthcare reform (and being against what we have), also not protecting abortion rights, and also denigrating anti-genocide protestors (but not as harshly since he wasn’t the one in charge when it happened)

Differences: X Popularizing the idea of the wall in the first place, calling illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists”, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, being an avowed friend of Epstein, stating he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler’s behind closed doors when his own generals refused to nuke North Korea and blame it on someone else, egging on a far-right insurrection attempt, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, calling Covid the “China virus”

They are faaaarrrr more similar than they are different as honestly some of the “differences” I’ve noted are just because the exact quotes aren’t the same, even if some similiarly spirit quotes have been said.

Okay, nobody I can vote for will change the process. Now what?

Also dictatorships, monarchies, etc. pretty universally have some form of petition process as well, so not actually a difference…

The history of that phrase and how it re-entered modern English is fascinating though!

LLMs would have no problem doing any of this. There’s a discernible pattern in any judge’s verdict. LLMs can easily pick this pattern up.

That’s worse! You do see how that’s worse right?!?

You are factually correct, but those are called biases. That doesn’t mean that LLMs would be good at that job. It means they can do the job with comparable results for all the reasons that people are terrible at it. You’re arguing to build a racism machine because judges are racist.

I think you’re conflating formal and informal logic. Programmers are excellent at defining a formal logic system which the computer follows, but the computer itself isn’t particularly “logical”.

What you describe as:

Action A is legal. Action B isn’t. Doing X + Y + Z constitutes action A and so on.

Is a particularly nasty form of logic called abstract reasoning. Biological brains are very good at that! Computers a lot less so…

(Using a test designed to measure that)[https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547] humans average ~80% accuracy. The current best algorithm (last I checked…) has a 31% accuracy. (LLMs can get up to ~17% accuracy.)[https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.11793] (With the addition of some prompt engineering and other fancy tricks). So they are technically capable… Just really bad at it…

Now law ismarketed as a very logical profession but, at least Western, modern law is more akin to combatative theater. The law as written serves as the base worldbuilding and case law serving as addition canon. The goal of law is to put on a performance with the goal of tricking the audience (typically judge, jury, opposing legal) that it is far more logical and internally consistent than it actually is.

That is essentially what LLMs are designed to do. Take some giant corpus of knowledge and return some permutation of it that maximizes the “believability” based on the input prompt. And it can do so with a shocking amount of internal logic and creativity. So it shouldn’t be shocking that they’re capable of passing bar exams, but that should not be conflated with them being rational, logical, fair, just, or accurate.

And neither should the law. Friendly reminder to fuck the police and the corrupt legal system they enforce.

It’s not a hierarchy per se so much as different categories/distinctions which I do think is useful. A serial killer is different than a hitman which is different than a soldier. I agree they are all functionally the same but they serve different purposes and have different characteristics which are important to keep in mind when talking about them.

That being said you’ve changed my mind on calling it a “soft” coup as it doesn’t really accurately describe the differences I was trying to convey. “Incompetent, halfhearted, and poorly planned autocoup” would be more accurate but it’s a mouthful and I don’t know if that’s the most useful distinction either.

Either case thanks for the pushback!

Several deaths:

six people died: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, three died of natural causes, and a police officer died after being assaulted by rioters.

I’ll admit it may technically be a mischaracterization, but I don’t think you understand the level of violence that is typical of “hard” coups.