Plus… Like, definitionally, Superman was not born on US soil or to American parents. He doesn’t have birthright citizenship

He’s a literal alien with a fake identity, at the very least he’s an immigrant, in every canon

I think Chinese food spread was more organic, they helped each other immigrate, shared recipes, and acted almost like a franchise in how new restaurants were chosen in unserved areas and given a general playbook

And then the Thai government did it more formally, Korean culinary movement copied the success (or maybe the other way around)

But that’s a response to “they took our jorbs!”. It’s a reframing for immigrants targeted at the reactionaries. But it is the reality - immigrants, particularly undocumented or agricultural visa recipients, are the bedrock of our society

It’s terrible that they are in such unethical conditions. It’s terrible that they have a carve out for child labor for seasonal farm workers. The entire power dynamic is akin to indentured servitude at best

But what we have to do is give them legal status and protections first.

They are not working the worst jobs because that’s what we tell them they can be, they’re working the worst jobs because they’re extra exploitable

Oh I totally agree with that… Just that these kinds of morbid people are drawn to death already. And only a fraction of them could deal with causing the death directly, especially en masse

But they’re outliers, they don’t make up the rank and file of Nazis or ICE. There’s no amount of ideology that makes a person like this… They’re basically high functioning serial killers, people who both want to watch (or participate in) people being tortured to death, but also have the executive function to do it in quasi legal ways

I mean yeah, radicalization is real, violence is real

But there’s a world of difference between violence and suffering. They’re full of hatred. They get off on the violence.

There’s not many people who can look at someone starving and feel nothing. There’s not many people who could start rescuing someone, then go “oh sorry, you’re black so I’m not going to finish digging you out”

I’m not even appealing to their better nature, I’m saying it’s genuinely traumatic. People get PTSD even from rescuing people in a flood.

I just don’t think most of these fucks have the stomach to see their ideals play out in front of them

They’re having trouble recruiting brownshirts. Sure, there’s a wave of them who joined eagerly… Initially. But once all the wannabe cop rejects signed up, it’s gotten a lot harder to convince people. They cover their faces for a reason… We all know there will be consequences on some level

We will see a lot of attrition as this goes on and they’re tasked with progressively more horrible things. It takes training to dehumanize a group, and even then everyone has some degree of cruelty they can inflict (directly) before breaking

I’m sure they’re going to try… But if they’re coming in with supplies, they’ve got to give them out. If they’ve got chainsaws, they’ve got to clear debris

You can’t just larp around a disaster area, not only is it hard to do as a human, survivors are not going to take kindly to it to say the least

Maybe they’re just going to go camping nearby and take some pictures. But if they do try to actually help, they’re find to see things that tend to bring out the humanity in people

Yeah… But I say let them try. Let them try to brush over people they can help, to their face

It’s not so easy to look them in the eyes. The suicide rate among concentration camp guards, and even the SS (who were picked for fanaticism), was insane

If they actually go and try to help, a lot of them are going to realize something. It’s easy to be a fascist in the abstract, it’s not so easy to confront the logical conclusions of fascism directly

Well it’s because FEMA, the national guard, and the army core of engineers would descend on the area like ants, and they would tell people “don’t help, you’ll get in the way, donate supplies over there if you like and go home - we need the local hotel rooms”

But when you cut disaster relief… There’s literally just parents out there searching for their children, they’re not turning anyone away

Yeah…wtf, I thought everyone switched to charcoal and salt and shit like a decade ago

No wonder we all have a plastic spoon in our brains

Do you not think the soundscape of a place matters? If you don’t understand why it makes a place better, I take back what I said about civilizational collapse

It’s subtle to some people, but it affects your emotions, and how you perceive an environment. We’re wired to go on alert when the forest goes silent, and to pay attention to loud noises… So when a plane, one of the loudest things in modern life, takes off and leaves the airport quiet, that’s deeply disturbing on an animal level. When you walk through long hallways in the depth of night, it’s unsettling no matter how brightly lit it is… Less so if a hundred other people are dragging their luggage and coughing

It’s why they play birdsong and music at Disney… The rattle of a rollercoaster in the distance is terrifying without it

The sounds of life make a place feel safe, even if the paint is peeling, a light flickers, and there’s no one around, the paths at Disney always feel safe

That feeling is civilizational collapse right there

The sign of a dying empire is when you no longer bother to etch designs on the buildings. It’s when you no longer give out swag. It’s when you cut everything that doesn’t make money, but does just make things nice

Doing things just to make things nice is good. It shouldn’t need a reason beyond that

Come on, resistance matters. Even if it’s just slowing it down slightly, it affects people in very real ways

It’s ok to take the little wins

Remind them what, that Trump says it’s good? There’s nothing to be gained there

No, just document it. Report on it. Ask the Democrats what they’re doing to stop it. Challenge Republicans to make them comment about the horrors to come on record

But the white house? They’ll add nothing of value, better to keep asking the questions that make them nervous

I mean… It is genuinely hard to work for someone not evil. Let’s say you’re an AI engineer… Meta is probably the best because most of the non-corporate LLMs flow from there… But they’re also using it to build personalized echo chambers, which is horrible

OpenAI is at the top and Microsoft has shown every inclination to make it a monopoly, so I could understand wanting to work on competitors

You could go smaller and work somewhere like anthropic, but then you don’t have the resources to be on the cutting edge (depending on your specialty)

I blame people who buy Teslas more than those who work at Tesla at this point. Especially when they slow walk the bad things…I mean, Twitter would probably be less Nazi if more talent stayed onboard to resist institutionally

You can change jobs if the new one also sponsors you, and it’s my understanding that xAI tapped people from Tesla, but I might be wrong about that

Anyways, what’s happening sure looks like malicious compliance to me… It’s really not that hard to get an AI to list far right talking points, it’s just hard to bake it into the model

So you have people that made a pretty good model, but also can’t figure out basic AI infrastructure? I find that very hard to believe

I’m not. What would you do in this situation? Let’s throw in that you’re on a visa, so you can’t just quit

I’d maliciously comply.

You want access to the prompt? Here you go boss man. You want grok to share your Nazi views? Sorry sir, we’ll have to totally start over with training data. Or we could use a modified RAG

You want help with the prompt? Sure boss man, what do you want it to do? Oh, you want it to notice Jewish names? Sure boss man, I don’t know what you mean by that, but now it keeps saying it’s “noticing”. That’s weird

Oh, you want to fine-tune it on your tweets? Sure thing boss man… Oh, would you look at that, it thinks it’s you. Nothing can be done about that, it’s too much data from one source. Well, should we roll it back boss man? Your call

I’d just keep playing this game… Elon isn’t going to come out and say “I want grok to be a Nazi”, and I’m not going to read between the lines for him. I’m not going to come up with ideas to solve the problem, I’m going to let Elon’s ego direct the course and throw out “we’ve designed grok to seek truth over all else” as much as possible

Do they? Because every time I’ve looked at the issue, it seems like they manufactured a crisis out of a small number of unrelated home invasions

Why? They’re going to brag about it and call the victims criminals

I mean… I can think of a lot worse things in recent days

This one is just extra transparent, because they’re panicking