There it is, I remember reading his Truth Social post where he was nice to Biden about it when it first came out and going “There’s no way he doesn’t say something horrible once he’s asked live on camera.”

They reserve the clever loop holes and actual fighting for when they want to stop progressives from having power in the party.

“It won’t be long before Democrats are back in the driver’s seat again,” Padilla added. “When that happens, all bets will be off. Every agency action that Democrats don’t like — whether it’s a rule or not — will be fair game, from mining permits and fossil fuel projects to foreign affairs and tax policies.”

Yeah I’ll believe it when I see it, I have zero faith in Democrats taking advantage of this expansion of power to do any good

It’s not even about dumbing down, it’s about presenting the information in an engaging and at least slightly entertaining way. People will watch hours long YouTube video going in depth on topics because those people know how to give the info in an engaging way. Experts either need to pick up those skills or start working with people who already have them. Because the people spreading disinformation focus a lot more on communications since they don’t have to do any real research behind their positions, they just have to focus on selling it.

Either that or they need to start hiring communications people and taking their advice. And not just like the PR speak communications people but people who have experience with creating something engaging and potentially entertaining as well that can then be merged with the educational message you’re trying to spread. Otherwise people on the other side are gonna focus on spinning their lies in a creative and engaging way and you’ll never win people over.

I think a good point related to this was made by a YouTuber called Atun-Shei Films. In one of his Q&A videos he talked about this emphasized the problem is that experts need to get better at communicating with the public in an engaging way. Otherwise you end up with experts who scoff and tell you to just trust them when you ask questions about why they recommend certain things. And that’s the space that anti-intellectual people will fill and provide their own opinion but can communicate it in an engaging way. It’s definitely not fair that you both have to be an expert at something but also have to be good at communicating it but that’s the reality we live in at this point.

Yeah I definitely agree, both Kamala and Obama are candidates that acted progressive in their primaries but as soon as they eventually got the nomination they went towards the corporate Democrat establishment. My main question is whether they were progressive at some point but let themselves be changed by the establishment, consultants, and donors or if they never really cared that much to begin with. The end state is the same but the difference is important as it gives us insight into how much power the consultants and others have over candidates vs if they didn’t really care then it wouldn’t have taken much to change them.

With Obama they just learned how to take a somewhat progressive candidates and bend them into a moderate. It’s the same thing that happened with Kamala, although of course it’s hard to say if either were ever really progressive or if they just used that for votes and didn’t mind discarding it once they got pressured by the party and consultants.

How much you wanna bet Musk told some employee to make this change and now they’re gonna get shafted for going along with it by other management at xAI? I’m not saying you need to feel bad for the person but this very much feels like they’re gonna shift blame away from Elon and on to someone else to cover it up and deny that he wanted this change.

I mean let’s assume he does support Hamas (he doesn’t, the furthest I’ve really seen him go is saying their resistance is justified in the face of genocide). But if we assume he does personally like them, should that put you in prison? It’s clear they were trying to get him to say something that they could detain him for, which is then pretty understandable why he “wimped out” in that situation. The fact that they were asking him about that to potentially detain him over it is insane and clearly a first amendment violation.

If we ever get another president after Trump they need to abolish ICE. It’s pretty clear at this point that the organizations vague ability to skirt the Constitution is a loaded gun for authoritarians to use to go after their enemies.

The CIA must have operation paper clipped Hitler’s soul.

I mean yeah if you’re grading on a curve he might be more up there but if you’re looking at it objectively as whether he did good or bad things I think he definitely did a lot of bad things, just like almost every president, which was the main point the comment above was making. I think we deserve better but it’s gonna take a lot of fighting against corporate interests to really get there.

I mean considering the amount of people deported under his terms in office and the normalization of drone strikes he created I would say yeah, he was a bad president, not anywhere near as bad as Trump but still pretty bad. And that’s before you get into him capitulating to the establishment of the Democratic party on things like Obama care getting heavily watered down and just in general losing his progressive edge as soon as he took office.