I live in the US, so I'd probably rather have the CCP snoop through my data than have the US government do it. If I lived in China, it would be the opposite.

I also work best in long bursts of up to 12 hours, with days of full rest in between bursts. I don't do well with a five days a week 9-5 work schedule.

And timeline urgency / time pressure tends to do well at putting me into deep flow state, whereas it can be hard for me to get into flow state for work otherwise.

The current situation is the result of free speech and consumers being able to choose the kind of content that they enjoy.

It is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that your argument in effect logically implies that free speech should be further curtailed and that elites (but the Right Elites) should be in control of the sources of content.

Which is a defensible position to take, actually. But people generally don't take it because reduction in free speech and consumer choice is anti-democratic. So the essence of this position is actually that we have too much democracy, not too little.

50 years ago, the President was supporting numerous brutal authoritarian third-world regimes that routinely used torture and murder. That still happens, but it happened more during the Cold War.

US foreign policy is actually a lot more moral now than it was during the Cold War. I think this probably has more to do with how much harder it is to hide things from the masses than it does with a change of heart, but the fact remains.

German post-WW2 distrust of anything seen as related to war, plus the fact that Germany has large coal reserves and so less need for nuclear than many other countries, are likely to have contributed to the phenomenon.

Probably yes. The world of 1990 was not much less modern than the world of today. So it would all come down to the question of, how disruptive the de-Internetification of the world would be. A pre-Internet world is recognizably modern in most ways. But since we have come to rely on the Internet, the process of losing it could be very damaging.

What's happening right now is more like, we're moving from a hyper-optimized era of just-in-time manufacturing (in software, this is called "Agile", "scrum", "sprints", etc.) to getting our manufacturing outsourced to another country. In software, the "other country" is AI.

As for trans genocide, I mean sure, you can make an argument that there is a trans genocide by really really stretching the meaning of the word "genocide" or by using certain parts of highly technical definitions of "genocide". But when trans activists speak of "trans genocide", they are trying to appeal to the emotional resonance of more popularly central examples of genocides, ones with mass killings. If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.

As for washrooms, note that I never said that I'm against trans people using their chosen genders' washrooms. What I said is that many trans activists pushed to do this long before the American public had become ready for something of that nature, which contributed to a backlash against the trans movement in general.

Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:

- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns

- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people

- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind

- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence

- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that

Etc.

So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.

The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.

Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.