Assuming party-line voting on the issue with no defections from either party, that requires the Democrats to win 33 of the 35 Senate seats up for election (if they hold every one that they currently hold, it requires them to take 20 of the 22 Republican-held seats.)

> I believe the world is waiting for Nov 2026 before making big changes.

I don't think the world is waiting at all, it is just taking time to work out the shape of the big changes, whether its European defense integration to replace the historically-pivotal role of the US, or any of large number of other changes nations are actively and openly working on.

Now, if the present direction of the US changes, some of those efforts may be abandoned or deprioritized, but "could potentially stop work" is not the same thing as "waiting to start".

Shutting off the feeds (especially those that are becoming more extremely manipulated to produce ineffective rage, which is part of how the world is worse) may be an effective way to manage the near-term stress of the present combination of media and material conditions, but it doesn't do anything to actually address the material conditions. Heck, detachment and demobilization to reduce resistance to arbitrary exercise of power is a big part of what you are being manipulated for. It's not an accident that that works as stress relief; that's part of the design of the manipulation.

There is a difference between the upthread claim that there is no significant real problem and the impression that there is is an illusion created by the internet which one should disconnect from to avoid being misled and your claim that it can be better for your mental health to cutoff from stressful news sources independently of whether those news sources accurately depict the real state of the world.

What you are saying may be broadly true, but it is orthogonal to the argument you were responding to.

"reality isn't the same as the internet" was already starting to be a dangerously out-of-touch delusion when Boomers and Silents were saying it in the 1990s.

The US is not particularly close (at least, not highly probable) to a societal collapse; that's, in a sense, an overly optimistic position. Government, order, and structured society are not in imminent danger of collapse.

It is very close to a transition away from liberal democratic government in favor of something very different. [0]

[0] Arguably, past that point, but close to the point where it becomes widely accepted that the it wasn't a temporary aberration where the basic cultural and institutional supports were still intact and capable of snapping things back.

We still should cut down (ideally to zero) on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace, but the reason is because those things are unqualified evil on their own, not because doing so is necessary to fund healthcare and other priorities, which it very much is not.

It's not a vibe, its a factual description of the circumstances.

Not sure what the comparison to Weinstein and Spacey in the year prior to the main accusations against either becoming public is supposed to be about, but the accusations against either, when they became public, were substantially different in scope and evidence publicly available to those against Altman. Which is not a statement on the merits of the accusations against Altman, but it is relevant to the potential for meaningful, substantive public discussion.

Arguably, its more like non-compete agreements but with the added fact that state enforcement of the agreements is in tension with freedom of speech.

But, you know, lots of jurisdictions sharply restrict enforceability of non-competes, too.

It failed because Nazi Germany was not militarily superior to combination of the nations that it got upset with it externally, not because of any internal failure of control. While its nice to think that Nazi Germany “failing” somehow disproves the viability of the same broad kind of one-party, massacre-the-opposition totalitarianism, it isn't really justified.

“Regardless of what you think about X, you must think Y about X” is a particularly tiresome rhetorical device, but its also being deployed as part of a motte-and-bailey argument here.

> It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did

Blue Marble (1990) is a completely different image than Earthrise (1968), and Earthrise was only adopted as a symbol of the environmental movement because the movement was already ascendant when it came out, not because it was the trigger for it.

The housing bubble that peaked in 2006 was raised as an issue at least as early as 2000 and became a big topic of conversation in mid-to-late 2002, which is comparable to if we had started talking about an AI bubble roughly simultaneously with the release of GPT-3 and it had become a topic of wide concern shortly after the release of GPT-3.5.

So, in short, not only “this long”, but much longer.

More likely, it is precisely the kind of thing that will be managed specifically to keep people distracted, so that the people who have a near term benefit from the dark age of war, inequality, and climate mismanagement can continue realizing that benefit without interruption by people taking action right up until there is no one left to distract or benefit.