The framing of this as a difference of opinion or view bothers me. You wouldn’t use this framing for a math problem, “Partisans divided on 1+1=2” , because it perpetuates the idea that there are two reasonable sides. Media needs to start being more responsible in framing these findings, how about “Republicans more likely to be wrong about causes of extreme weather”.
Sure, but the media isn't going to be responsible about this so long as it's owned by the same companies that are profiting off of environmental destruction.
Republican obstructionism is worse than Democrat foot-dragging. Sorry, I know people get frustrated with the lack of progress, but one of those things is clearly a bigger problem than the other.
If a third party revolutionary candidate were actually viable and likely to provide even incremental improvement in the lives of real people, then I'd be on board. But it's not viable. Incremental progress is preferable to no progress or negative progress.
So, since you recognize the importance of tackling climate change, let’s focus on that for a minute. Even with the climate bill, we are still looking at a bleak future.
This “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good” speil is literally enabling a worse, more drastically dangerous climate future. Period.
It will get worse if not addressed seriously and the band-aids Democrats are offering will not prevent that bleak, bad future.
Scientists have been saying as much for decades and we are still not even close to taking it seriously enough. So the climate bill and how far it falls short is actually a mark against them, imho.
If it won’t prevent the worst climate catastrophes that could result in global mass extinction (already happening, arguably), then it isn’t even close to enough and we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a horrible hollowed out husk of a planet.
This matters, and so acting like it is “letting perfect be the enemy of good” is flat out disingenuous.
People will die because of decades of inaction. Lives that didn’t have to end that way. It is selling out the future of our species for so-called “stability” now.
Essentially, it’s a choice between Republicans: “Extinction NOW!” and Democrats: “Extinction for your great grandchildren!” Kicking the can down the road for our children and their children to fix when we’re long dead and gone is just as bad of a end result. Either way, if things aren’t changed, society at large will fail and we will face our own extinction. The people living in that future will not give one shit about the so-called “progress” we made here.
I get that the GOP wants to speedrun us into a Mad Max future, but slow walking us there isn’t any better.
Republicans are actively working to make it worse on purpose
What do you propose? Give me something that is viable.
People are going to die. Our stupid populace always refuses to come around and pay attention to an issue until they see bodies in the streets. That's the real reason we haven't seen major action on climate change until now. I don't prefer that reality, but it is sadly the one that we are working with whether we like it or not.
The climate bill isn't enough, but is that a reason to throw all progress out the door and allow the ones who are actively trying to destroy the world into power?
I have been very clear that I understand the clear and present danger the GOP represents and that I will continue to vote Democrat while gritting my teeth knowing people deserve better. I have stated as much in this thread.
Am I not allowed to critique them without insinuations that I must be making bad choices in voting or am a Republican plant? Why am I not allowed to point out the reality that what the Democrats have given still isn’t enough?
Ok, well you didn't say that in any comments to me, so I didn't see it. But also, let's not pretend like there aren't right-wing bad actors out on these platforms pushing that exact "both sides" message to discourage people from voting. Because you and I both know there are. These public comments have consequences
But a third party will likely never be viable in within the lifetimes of people alive today, unless the Democrats suddenly decide to overturn FPTP voting.
So understand what you are asking of people. People are more than "frustrated with the lack of progress", they are enraged because they recognise that the current system will NEVER deliver them real justice and dignity. That they will be faced with this exact same situation every single election. And you are asking them to be content living with their rights and well-being on a knife-edge, likely for the rest of their lives. Because while the Democrats won't give them justice, the alternative is fascism.
So you are correct, the Republicans are objectively worse, and people should vote for the most progressive viable candidates possible. But the neoliberal tendency to demand that leftists stop complaining while they give up everything in the name of "compromise", and then tendency to blame leftists for neoliberal losses anyway, is galling.
Id settle for “stop pretending neoliberals are the same as fascists” but something tells me the “less progress than all the progress is worse than negative progress, I’m so smart” people aren’t very likely to do that.
Edit: yeah so looking at some of the stuff under here…smh
Seriously, it's such a naive stance to think that just because progress didn't arrive hand delivered to your doorstep gift-wrapped with a bow on top exactly the way you imagined, then it's not worth having. What a ridiculous idea. Progress is progress. Every little step brings us closer to the next step. Demanding perfection all at once is going to get us exactly nowhere.
Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I've been voting regularly for 20 years and I've yet to see real progress on issues I care about. I still vote because it makes for a good example of how our system of government is crap.
For healthcare, researchers estimate the Affordable Care Act has saved tens of thousands of lives.
Income inequality is undeniable and I won't pretend to have much to offer there, though it's my loose understanding that, depending on the exact analysis, real inflation-adjusted wages haven't necessarily been as stagnant as some flashier reports describe. There have also been massive failures in things like housing and education policy that have led to some costs disproportionately exploding.
Regardless though, my point is just that, even if it's been slower than anyone might like, progress has genuinely been happening. It's not been fairly distributed, and god knows we still have problems, but I think it's important to not lose sight of that fact that we have come a long way too. That's to say nothing about a lot of very obvious progress that has been made on some social matters like LGBT rights.
I'm still paying hundreds of dollars a month for insurance I'm too afraid of bankruptcy to use, I will never be able to afford to send my kids to college, we're still on track for a catastrophic 2°C of temperature rise, and there's still ultra-rich assholes with too much goddamn money.
My vague understanding is that global warming is expected to peak - if current rates of progress continue - at 1.5 C, which is still quite bad, but not as harmful as 2 C.
To be clear, I'm very much not saying that everything is perfect. But at the least, for instance, that insurance isn't barring you for pre-existing conditions and doesn't come with a lifetime cap. And again, there are thousands of people who are alive and not dead. That's probably not much personal solace, but it is still real progress.
But if this is the sort of progress I should expect from the Democrats, it's no wonder they don't get people excited to vote for them.
What I'm taking from this discussion is I should drastically lower my expectations of what's possible. Maybe if I vote for another 20 years my kids will get a $10 credit on the $100k worth of student loans they're going to have to take out to get an education.
I mean, realistically, yes. Political change is extremely hard and very slow. When you have a good third of the country in abject denial of basic reality and political structures that give them a disproportionate amount of power and that are designed to make change difficult, yeah, progress is slow.
The fight for women's suffrage, for instance, started in 1847, while the 19th Amendment wasn't passed until 1920, a good 70 years later. The Stonewall riots were in 1969, and it took nearly fifty years for marriage equality to arrive. This stuff is hard. That doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for.
For what it's worth, the average student debt burden is around 37k right now, and for students of public universities, more like 27k. The difference in lifetime earnings that come with a Bachelor's degree more than make up the cost, by a very significant amount. It should be cheaper, and I won't deny that, but it's still nearly always a good financial decision. Many states also offer free community college that can massively reduce that cost.
I know you're probably just expressing a general frustration than anything else, and that's valid, and I know this probably isn't really that helpful and is more annoying than anything else. But it's not all bad news, and I think it's important to keep sight of that.
The fight for women's suffrage, for instance, started in 1847, while the 19th Amendment wasn't passed until 1920, a good 70 years later. The Stonewall riots were in 1969, and it took nearly fifty years for marriage equality to arrive. This stuff is hard. That doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for.
Worth noting that those rights were not won by merely voting, let alone merely voting for milquetoast candidates...
They were won by rather more extreme measures, precisely because merely voting didn't accomplish the goals.
I've been voting regularly for 20 years and the ACA was a massive move in the correct direction...until Republicans gutted the individual mandate and refused federal funds for Medicaid expansion. It's always the Republicans ruining any semblance of progress that we make. I find Dems most guilty of trusting SCOTUS to do their jobs for them.
I want to see Dems again get a solid, undeniable majority in both chambers in 2024. Then push the priority passage of voting rights and anti-gerrymandering legislation. Those are concrete fixes to the system.
I agree with you. Joe Biden has done some good things while he was president. I voted for him. I wish he hadn't ran for a second term. He is too old. He is too old. He is too old. BUT since he has decided to run I will vote for him again because if the Republicans or Trump get in charge with the Congress and the supreme Court, our democracy will not survive. They already don't want people voting, and they don't want young people voting. They want a Christian Nation and rule us.
Even with the ACA I'm too afraid to use my health insurance lest I go bankrupt. I fell and hit my head and the ER bill, even with "good" insurance, was over $3,000. I would have been better off if I set my nose and sealed the cut with super glue myself. I'm paying $600 a month for insurance I can't use without going bankrupt.
Health care is still broken after the ACA, and will continue to be broken until we get rid of the rent-seekers in the health care industry. But Democrats seem to like those folks so I guess I'll just buy my meds from Tractor Supply and invest in a good needle and thread.
The ACA was only ever meant to be a first step. It was never intended to be the end goal. The Republicans gutting the individual mandate is what stole that momentum because it leaves simply being uninsured as an unfortunately viable financial option for enough people that it reduced pressure to reform the rest of the system.
The end goal is single payer. But it's difficult to the point of bordering on impossible to shift from what we had instantly into single payer in the third most populous country on the planet. It's estimated that single payer will put nearly 400,000 private insurance middle-people out of jobs. That's not a negligible problem. We're going to need a way to address that in the process of making the shift.
The ACA open markets have allowed me to leave jobs that I otherwise would not have been able to leave because I can't afford to go 30-90 days without health insurance. That open market didn't even exist when I was a young adult 20 years ago. Insurance gaps between jobs were simply a fact of life that a lot of people couldn't abide
Single payer is the only actually viable option. The more change we make, the more obvious that will become. Probably single payer with private supplementation is where we'll end up because America will never settle for rich people not being able to buy nicer lives than the rest of us.
did nothing besides force people to pay for private insurance that covers nothing.
Which also as a result gave insurance companies even more money to use to fight against any reform to healthcare.
They use our own money against us, and it's insane we keep letting them, but rock and hard place.
I’m still uninsured, nothing has changed for me since the ACA. Here’s the thing – I’m not interested in “incremental generational change”, because I need healthcare myself in my lifetime. And I’m especially not interested in hearing that rhetoric from politicians who get a supermajority and do nothing with it.
I've lost good friends to healthcare costs. Incremental change doesn't mean shit to me anymore. They're dead, they're not coming back.
The Republican gutting of the individual mandate and refusal to accept federal funds to expand Medicaid is what crippled the ACA.
We only got to see the actual ACA in action for like two years and it was working. It always comes down to the Republicans actively working to ruin any progress we make.
What state are you in? Was it one that refused to expand Medicaid? Because here in Massachusetts, which is the model state for the ACA, our Medicaid (Masshealth) is actually the best insurance I've ever had in my entire life. The individual mandate HAS to be accompanied by subsidies and expansion of Medicaid or it doesn't work.
I appreciate that some people are able to afford to forego insurance, but most people can't in reality. (I can't. I have a chronic illness. I require daily meds for life.) And when they get sick, their cost still exists in the system and it's more expensive. It's not different from being forced to carry car insurance, if you drive.
That said, housing costs are out of control. I advocate at every moment to increase the housing supply. (Currently in polite disagreement with my NIMBY neighbors over a proposed new housing development near us.) Drug costs are out of control and need to be regulated. (I prefer nationalized, actually. But I know that's a nonstarter in the US).
The argument regarding the specific case of AI-generated images of real actors makes sense, but the headline overgeneralizes hugely.
If you write a book about carpentry, and someone checks that book out from the library, reads it, learns how to do carpentry from it, and goes into the carpentry business, they do not owe you a share of their profits.
It’s nice if they give you credit. But they do not owe you a revenue stream.
It is not. The AI's model does not contain a copy of your work, there is no "aggregate pool." AI is not some sort of magical compression algorithm that's able to somehow crush whole images down to less than a byte of data. The only thing that it's "including" in itself are the concepts that it learned from your work. Those are ideas, which are not copyrightable.
I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison. You wouldn’t instantly ingest that information and know it. It’s more like photocopying a book and including it in another book that you sell. It’s a paradigm shift, and I’m not sure what the answer is.
It’s nothing like photocopying a book. It is very, very similar to the analogy given above, of someone learning the information and profiting from it. For the AI model to “learn” the information during training, it takes apart the information one piece of a word at a time, and reorganises it for quick access. Information is categorised by metadata like topic, source, date, etc; there are approximately 1536 “tags”, so to speak, which OpenAI’s ChatGPT uses for categorising what it learns.
Copyright of words has the order of those words as an integral part of the legal standard, and the standards for what infringes are actually pretty strict (…stanford.edu/…/copyright_protection_for_short/). Training an AI is definitively transformative work which does not retain the order of the words in the finished product, merely a weighted likelihood of what word fragment will come next in a given context, so it’s protected under Fair Use.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Like I said it’s a paradigm shift. It doesn’t fit into existing laws well. My point is what we consider fair use now, summarizing a book or movie by a human, is based on the limited abilities of humans. When you have AI with limitless abilities, that will change things. The same rules abs considerations may have to be rethought.
Au contraire, it is that simple and it is covered by existing law just fine in the very specific case we’re talking about, which is whether training a model is “transformative work” by the definition in IP law. It is. The law looks very specifically at the fact of the case, not hand-waving masquerading as an argument.
You are making this technology out to be something it isn’t; there’s no mystery to how AI works, and it does not have “limitless abilities”. In fact, it is very limited, but that isn’t relevant. What the law considers “fair use” isn’t based on human ability at all, it’s based on how completely the work is reproduced and the context the original work is being used in. You clearly have access to the internet, you can verify the standards required to show breach of copyright yourself if you don’t believe me.
Analogies to humans are not relevant, and yours is a bad one anyway. LLMs don’t read a carpentry book and then go build houses. They chew up carpentry books and spit out carpentry books.
Your final line remains to be established in court.
If you write a book about carpentry, and someone checks that book out from the library, reads it
AI is not a person. That’s why its works aren’t eligible for copyright. You’re arguing that AI should have the same rights as a person in this regard and that’s not an established right, nor should it be.
Also the analogy makes zero sense. It’s more accurate to say someone checks out a book about carpentry, reads it, then writes another book on carpentry by moving the words around a bit despite knowing nothing about carpentry.
More accurately someone who knows nothing about German, writing, or carpentry but learns German and carpentry by reading hundreds of thousands of books and then decides to write a book about carpentry in German.
Corollary: if a corporation scapes the talk of the whole internet, which itself was shaped by the aggregate culture and knowledge of ten thousand years of human history, and their resultant product is an AI that can replace workers, it is morally valid to eminent domain that shit and divert its profits to a fledgling UBI program.
Edit to add: Not a statement about how UBI should really work, just a throwaway comment about seizing means.
UBI should be a government initiative, and funding for it should be collected in form of tax, irrespective of AI. Because more and more humans are getting replaced with automation and technology in general, and a lot of this being done so gradually that you don’t notice it, or think of it as a problem. Every time you saw headlines like “xx corporation has laid off hundreds/thousands of employees” in the past, had very little to do with AI, but could have to do with technology and progress in general, plus a lot of other factors. Every little new development could have a butterfly effect that’s hard to calculate.
Neither AI, nor the loss of jobs in general, should be a factor for UBI funding. AI is just another new technological development, maybe even a disruptive one, but it’s nothing so new that we need to pick up our pitchforks against.
As for compensating creative owners, that’s a bigger discussion on IP protection and ownership in general, and the responsibility falls upon the IP owners (and maybe appropriate laws). For instance, we’ve seen news sites, science publishers etc paywall their work, and that’s because they want to protect their work and get compensation for viewership - and this has nothing to do with AI. If people want compensation for their work, then they should take appropriate measures to protect their work, and/or come up with alternate revenue streams, if it’s impossible to paywall their work (for instance, how some youtubers choose to seek sponsorship or patreon donations). If people want to prevent their work from being stolen and redistributed, appropriate action should be taken against the persons/sites stealing their work (eg via DMCA etc). It’s not the AI’s fault for eating up copyrighted content on public sites like pastebin.com or Scribd, it’s the fault of the people uploading it.
UBI should not be dependent on its specific sources and specific destinations. It's universal, it's right in the name. It should be funded by a tax on the wealthy - regardless of how that wealth is obtained - and be issued to everyone.
The goal is not to "level the playing field" so that human employees can continue to labor and companies can't afford to hire robots to replace them. The goal is to make it so that if companies replace all their employees with robots those employees don't have to find some other job to continue living.
The difference is that when the robot reads that book, it maintains a verbatim copy of that book as part of it’s training material indefinitely and can reference and re-reference that material infinitely. That is not how it works when a human reads a book.
The ‘copy’ that the AI retains indefinitely is a verbatim copy of the original work, and the entire point of “copyright” is to control how and where copies are used.
Yes, there are ‘fair use’ exceptions to copyright. I don’t think you realize it, but your argument is less about whether this violates copyright (it absolutely does under the textbook definition) and more about whether there should be a fair-use exemption for AIs; you seem to think yes, I would disagree.
I’d also argue the AI example qualifies as it as ‘derivative work’ based on the original, which STILL would require honoring copyright laws and compensating the creators of the original works. Basically, before reading the book it was just “AI”. After reading the book it has become “AI + book1”, a derivative work, and on and on and on.
The difference is that when the robot reads that book, it maintains a verbatim copy of that book as part of it’s training material indefinitely and can reference and re-reference that material infinitely. That is not how it works when a human reads a book.
However, that is how it works when a human memorizes a copyrighted work. If I memorize a poem, I may then reference it from my memory without further need for the original text before me. If I am an actor and learn my lines for a play, I commit them to my memory.
Which is not an infringement.
The infringement happens if the human performs or publishes that work; e.g. reciting that copyrighted poem or play from memory before an audience; writing that work down from memory and publishing it; etc., without a copyright license for that performance or republication.
I suggest merely applying the same standard: infringement doesn’t happen when a work is read, indexed, scanned, etc.; it does happen if that work is then recited.
For instance, ChatGPT currently knows the text of the Harry Potter novels, but it does not recite them when asked to do so. (Try it! It will answer questions about the text, but it will freeze up if asked to recite it; evidently because it has a filter against reciting copyrighted material.)
No, the reason ChatGPT can't recite the text of Harry Potter verbatim is because it doesn't actually "contain" it. It learned from it, but it doesn't "remember" it word-for-word. There is no filter against reciting copyrighted material. Try asking it to recite a scene from a Shakespearean play, for example - that's out of copyright and ChatGPT was almost certainly trained on it. It may be able to quote some famous lines because it's been overfit like crazy on them ("To be or not to be" is probably everywhere on the Internet) but that's not a verbatim chunk.
I've actually experimented with this myself on my local machine, I took one of the smaller open-source models and I gave it additional training using 20 megabytes of My Little Pony fanfiction. The AI knew a lot about the fanfic afterward but it was clearly just picking up tidbits of general knowledge rather than "remembering" the whole thing.
ChatGPT currently knows the text of the Harry Potter novels, but it does not recite them when asked to do so.
I tried that several weeks ago while discussing some details of the Harry Potter world with ChatGPT, and it was able to directly quote several passages to me to support its points (we were talking about house elf magic and I asked it to quote a paragraph). I checked against a dead-tree copy of the book and it had exactly reproduced the paragraph as published.
This may have changed with their updates since then, and it may not be able to quote passages reliably, but it is (or was) able to do so on a couple of occasions.
That's not how these AIs work. They don't contain verbatim copies of their training data. They get trained on terabytes of text, they couldn't possibly remember it all.
Oh sure, if a copyright holder can demonstrate that a specific work is reproduced. Not just “I think your AI read my book and that’s why it’s so good at carpentry.”
Reproducing a work is a specific thing. Using an idea from that work, or a transformation of that idea, is not reproducing that work.
Again: If a copyright holder can show that an AI system has reproduced the text (or images, etc.) of a specific work, they should absolutely have a copyright claim.
But “you read my book, therefore everything you do is a derivative work of my book” is an incorrect legal argument. And when it escalates to “… and therefore I should get to shut you down,” it’s a threat of censorship.
A person reading and internalizing concepts is considerably different than an algo slurping in every recorded work of fiction and occasionally shitting out a bit of mostly Shakespeare. One of these has agency and personhood, the other is a tool.
The problem is that the LLMs (and image AIs) effectively store pieces of works as correlations inside them, occasionally spitting some of them back out. You can’t just say “it saw it” but can say “it’s like a scrapbook with fragments of all these different works”
If that reasoning held, then every web browser, search engine bot, etc. would be violating copyright every time it accessed a web page, because doing so involves making a copy in memory.
Making an internal copy isn’t the same as publishing, performing, etc. a work.
There’s an implied license to use content for the purpose of displaying it for web content. Copies for other purposes…not so much. There have been a whole series of lawsuits over the years over just how much you can copy for what purpose.
There isn’t an “implied license”. Rather, copyright is simply not infringed until the work is actually republished, performed, etc. without the copyright holder’s permission.
Making internal in-memory copies — e.g. for search-engine indexing — is simply not an infringement to begin with; just as it’s not an infringement for me to memorize a copyrighted work, but it would be an infringement if I were to recite it in a public performance without permission.
Copyright simply does not grant the copyright-holder absolute & total control of everything downstream from the work. It restricts republishing, performing, etc.; it does not restrict memorization, indexing, summarizing in a review, answering questions about the work, etc.
Again: if the AI system is made to regurgitate the actual text of the work, that’s still a copyright infringement. But merely having learned from it is not.
This is different from those, and not at all tested in the courts. There are likely to be a whole bunch of lawsuits and several years before this is settled.
There is no possible basis in law for copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement isn't "you can do these things with copyrighted materials and everything else is banned". It's "these specific things (redistributing substantial portions of published works) are disallowed, unless you meet exceptions, and anything not explicitly disallowed is legal".
You are unconditionally allowed to learn from copyrighted works. There is no legal basis for preventing it. There is no possible basis in copyright law preventing it. It would take new legislation restricting doing so, and it would be impossible to apply to any training that happened before this new crime against humanity of a law was written.
If I was to read a carpentry book and then publish my own, “regurgitating” most of the original text, then I plagiarized and should be sued. Furthermore, if I was to write a song and use the same melody as another copyrighted song I’d get sued and lose, even if I could somehow prove that I never heard the original.
I think the same rules should apply to AI generated content. One rule I would like to see, and I don’t know if this has precedent, is that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted. Otherwise AI could truly replace humans from a creative perspective and it would be a race to generate as much content as possible.
That article doesn't show what you think it shows. There was a lot of discussion of it when it first came out and the examples of overfitting they managed to dig up were extreme edge cases of edge cases that took them a huge amount of effort to find. So that people don't have to follow a Reddit link, from the top comment:
They identified images that were likely to be overtrained, then generated 175 million images to find cases where overtraining ended up duplicating an image.
We find 94 images are extracted. [...] [We] find that a further 13 (for a total of 109 images) are near-copies of training examples
They're purposefully trying to generate copies of training images using sophisticated techniques to do so, and even then fewer than one in a million of their generated images is a near copy.
And that's on an older version of Stable Diffusion trained on only 160 million images. They actually generated more images than were used to train the model.
Overfitting is an error state. Nobody wants to overfit on any of the input data, and so the input data is sanitized as much as possible to remove duplicates to prevent it. They had to do this research on an early Stable Diffusion model that was already obsolete when they did the work because modern Stable Diffusion models have been refined enough to avoid that problem.
For those that aren’t yet aware: the trade off with the technology behind eliminating bot-detection here comes with a huge compromise. That trade off is that Big Tech companies need to basically certify that your device is capable and valid in order to access a website. “They” can decide at any moment to deny you access to sites that you request, which is a massive detriment to the free and open web. It’s one step below a censored internet and it’s already started rolling out in Safari.
So let me guess, the point is to get rid of AdBlockers isn‘t it? I liked my iPhone, but if they fuck with AdGuard I‘ll switch. Google seems to be spearheading this though, and if they get AWS/Azure etc on board, will there be any way to escape it at all? This worries me a bit.
If they manage to standardize an attestation API, they can swiftly kill off that possibility, as well as the possibility of any new successful operating systems / device manufacturers via the natural user growth that benefited the current hegemons.
There isn’t. This article is laughable because there is an astronomical amount of bot traffic that masquerades as legitimate human traffic. Things like puppeteer extra stealth and residential proxies have made it easier to hide a bots presence on the web. Also, the tracking they allude to via fingerprinting would very much be the same whether it’s a human solving a captcha or a seamless process where your browser solves one.
Historically, one reason that US conservatives turned so heavily against public services is — narrowly & specifically — racism; or rather a willingness to share facilities with other white people but not with black people.
When they were told they had to desegregate town swimming pools and let the black kids learn to swim too, they shut down the swimming pools instead.
It's ridiculous how the school lunches debate got turned on its head
Poor kids already get free lunch, nationwide.
This is literally a debate about using public money to fund free lunches for kids whose parents can afford it.
I haven't formed an opinion myself, I can see both sides of the issue. But there are SO MANY uninformed people jesus. Usually we (leftists) are the smart ones.
The thing about the swimming-pool example is that “town leaders” (rich whites) were okay with poor whites using town pools, but freaked out at black people using them.
While this is true, I think it's more of a symptom of the in-group expanding when it acquires an easier-to-distinguish bullying target. Excluding the Irish and Italians in the US was (generally) more difficult than looking for melanin or hair texture, and as they lost their accents many could blend right in before being noticed. And once you're in, you're much harder to dehumanise. These days a "no Irish" sign would be quickly laughed off or removed, but they were everywhere in the US once.
Same problem with excluding poorer whites of all varieties from pools, you might be able to do it by looking at clothing, but even that's harder and there will be infiltrators to the niche in-group social sphere. The Great Gatsby infiltrating the ultra wealthy, and the kid from the wrong side of the tracks makes friends with less-poor kids at the community pool.
You can see it in England as well, the old-money Londoners will look down on another equally white English person for having an accent that indicates they're from Manchester or Sussex. Or even worse, gasp Yorkshire! I've seen that happen to Bavarian and Saxon Germans too - people ashamed to speak because their accent identified them as out-group.
I'm glad this is slowly changing as more historically out-group people make it into in-group leadership positions, and people aren't as shamed out of intercultural relationships. But I think that there will always be some arbitrary group of people who are considered to be the bottom of the social hierarchy. And those people will generally be the people who are most obviously different from the equally arbitrary 'ideal'. Like people who rely on assistive technology, or people who are very overweight, or people with 'bad' teeth.
Maybe in the future it will be all humans if we're conquered by an alien species who we can't easily blend in with. We'll all be inferior to the many-tentacled, who are clearly the superiorly limbed species.
I dunno. Closing facilities in response to mid-20th-century desegregation was a very specific movement. I’m not sure it has anything whatsoever to do with Irish or Italian immigration or any other group. It was really, narrowly, specifically about black Americans — making sure that they could not share in the public spaces that their white peers enjoyed. The pools were closed only after town authorities were told that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors, the same black families who had lived there for generations.
The pool closures were a reaction of "I'm taking my ball and going home" that caught widespread attention and was easy to copycat for other small-town "elite" who resented being forced to treat out-group humans as in-group humans. It definitely a response to desegregation, which in itself is the deliberate barrier removal for a social out-group that is gaining widerspread acceptance. Which groups are the outgroup and ingroup change over locations and time, this time it could be roughly distilled to 'white' vs 'black'.
Pool closures are definitely still inseparable entirely for the context of the time, the civil rights movement and 'race relations' and slavery and the US. But the same patterns play out all over the world regardless of why one group has power and the other doesn't.
Small anecdote: one of my grandparents was concerned about my parents marriage. Because 'mixed marriages don't work' (actual words). Both of my parents are visually the same 'race', their family heritages are separated by around 2000km / 1250mi. Almost nobody in the world would think they are somehow 'different' in any significant way, let alone incompatibly different. It's really bizarre, but a hint of previous social expectations and how narrowly in-group and out-groups have been defined.
It's also ableism! The wealthy and powerful often think that because they "succeeded", everyone else who didn't is less of a person than them and deserves their position in life. They frequently believe that everyone in life has the same opportunities and were just too "stupid" to take them. I have also seen this internalised - many people have said they're "not smart enough" to be rich, which was always patently untrue. The truth is that growing up in richer families often leads to better health outcomes (less contaminated water, regular doctor access, better pregnancy education and maternal health, etc.).
Sometimes Prosperity Theology kicks in too, with the premise that God rewards those he loves most. The corollary being that poor people must be somehow sinful and hence deserved their circumstances.
And then, when the poor are malnourished and contaminated with lead and chemicals dumped in their water supply and can't perform to anywhere near their potential had they been born to a rich parent... well. That's just evidence they were right about them all along
The common problem is the unwillingness to share. Our power structures reward a lack of empathy with money.
Yep a theater company in my town recently put on a play dramatizing the closing of the city's pools. Instead of integrating they filled the pools frequented by white patrons with concrete and the one frequented by black patrons with garbage. It also touched on the fact that the lack of availability for safe public swimming locations has led to needless deaths of hundreds and hundreds of black people who opted to swim in fast moving creeks and waters connected to industrial facilities. All because racists were unwilling to share a body of water with someone with a different color of skin.
He likely wasn’t responsible for shortening it, Washington post did it automatically when sharing the article. Everything does this nowadays Google maps adds trackers to the url when sharing as well. I agree it’s annoying but not many good ways around it.
Nope. It’s only double jeopardy if it happens in the same jurisdiction. A Federal trial would mean federal charges, which aren’t the same as state charges. Not the same charges, not double jeopardy.
Once again, Governor Hot Wheels and his Cavalcade of Corruption are doing what they do best: being completely and totally ignorant as to the desires of the population.
By attacking his wheelchair instead of his actual policies you are saying the fact that he is handicapped is worse than his policies.
You can choose plenty of words for the cancerous anal fissure leakage of a person, but don’t attack his wheelchair, because then you are attacking everyone in one.
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