Those "single authorities" you fear already exist in western countries, the mega-corporations that monopolise entire markets.
The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.
But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You describe a real problem and an attack vector on democracy that is being used.
However you make it sound like everything is already lost when it certainly isn’t.
Thinking of it as an attack vector is the problem with people. I'm saying what you have isn't democracy. Your market isn't free. Voting between the same 2 parties or choosing to buy/rent from the same few mega corporations aren't real choices.
Unless you guys start accepting that and find an alternative solution or system, you'll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole you're in. More debt, more wars, more homelessness, more crime, and no future.
I don't know where you are from (I'm really curious though), but where I live there are more than two political parties and more than a few mega corporations to buy or rent from. You seem to have an extremely distorted idea of what live is like in "western countries".
Can you please share your country of residence? Because in Germany I really don’t feel the choice. There are few political parties, but I don’t feel this variety helps in any way. There are few mega corporations for everything else, just check the list of richest germans.
Edit: I might be another troll, but from last few elections I don’t feel any progress. As an engineer I see continuous offshoring of well paid positions to cheaper EU countries. As self employed electrician I see regulatory and tax madness.
I lived in the UK for 10 years, I've also lived in a number of other countries, from democracies, communist (Vietnam), and varying degrees of democratic and economic freedoms.
I'm aware there are more than exactly 2 parties in the ballots in many western countries. It's not about the numbers, but whether any of those choices really give the people real alternatives, or just different ways to screw the majority of the people.
As you can probably can see from the above interaction, people resort very quickly to ad hominem attacks.
> But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
> You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
Address the argument rather than engaging in ad hominem.
You have tons of meaningful economic choices everywhere in American life. You can bank with any bank and look for competing offers for credit to do useful things. For example you can buy a home and shop for a better interest rate by taking an offer for a loan from one lender to another and 9 times out of 10 you'll come away with a better offer. But you can easily not take on a loan and choose to preference flexibility and therefore rent. This housing choice involves a myriad of sub choices about lifestyle, commuting preferences, school adjacency, and other elements you may want to balance. Because US state are often quite different in character and economic and social opportunity you have a ton of dimension along which you can exercise choice.
Someone posting here likely has access to remote work and can meaningfully choose to live in a quite mountain town in West Virginia with satellite internet where you never see more than a few people every week, or you could live in a mid sized city like I do and get involved in neighborhood organizations. Similarly you could move to NYC and live in a small apartment an spend all of your time going out to bars and restaurants. These are SUPER meaningful choices on an individual level.
Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights? Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
> Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
I've literally never heard of this.
> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?
All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.
Show me the Americans stuck in a black hole where nobody processes their payment, banks won't handle their money, they can't vote, they can't travel, etc. because of their deviations?
There are total nutjobs of all walks that are living just fine. There are actual Nazis and commies living just fine.
It's a big country. If our whole society already has dystopian social credit it should be easy to find examples.
Banks talk to each other via ChexSystems/EWS and stick Americans in a black hole where nobody processes their payments and banks won't handle their money. Felons don't have voting rights in 48 states. As far as travel is concerned, being imprisoned makes that hard, but no, we don't (yet) have internal border checks that prevent people from moving from place to place, other than the fact that it's expensive.
That's a lot, about 2025 million people! And while many felons deserve their prison terms, those who have been released have an extremely steep hill to climb to get functional in society again. I feel like there's probably some correlation with recidivism rates.
It's not black and white. For example I use an AI bot to act as a central knowledge base for my discord community. It nudges people to talk, even if initially it's with the bot, other people might jump in, and from there it snowballs into discussion between multiple people.
This worldview where one side is evil/authoritarian and the other is good/free/liberal is the root of a lot of suffering in the world.
It's a flawed worldview that made Americans end up with dysfunctional politicians, because you reward ideological rhetoric more than real, pragmatic long-term planing.
You might be meaning something smart and good or something not so smart and good, but I only realized on my second reading.
What I mean is there is absolutely room somewhere between the current situation (examples from Norway) where:
- every road end up costing more than in comparable countries because no decision is final and everyone has a say
- school problems because teachers are not allowed to act, even in clear cases of abuse
- police have no tools against people under 14
but the solution is absolutely not to give politicians (or bureaucrats) unlimited power, bring back harsh physical punishment in school and turning a blind eye towards police violence.
In my understanding the problem seems to be that of polarization (examples sourced more globally):
- Why do I have to choose between 1. people who deny that trans people exist and 2. people who think that it isn't a problem when one inmate gets another inmate pregnant in a women's only prison? Or in sports, were womens sports, were people who were male athletes who never had a chance can transition and easily win as women? There certainly is a lot of room between these options.
- or why do I have to choose between 1. people who hate certain groups of people and 2. people who think it is OK when others arrive here and openly abuse our hospitality? Why did it take years to expel an internationally wanted terrorist?
> - Why do I have to choose between 1. people who deny that trans people exist and 2. people who think that it isn't a problem when one inmate gets another inmate pregnant in a women's only prison?
And how often has the latter actually happened? That is part of the polarization issue: absolute nothingburgers are blown way out of proportion or outright manufactured as a "strawman" strategy. Besides, the threat for women in prison aren't fellow trans inmates, it is guards whose power is completely unchecked in prison.
> Or in sports, were womens sports, were people who were male athletes who never had a chance can transition and easily win as women?
"Easily" is not the word I'd describe. An actual transition is very risky and taxing on the body, being on 'roids or whatever is more comfortable than that from what I hear.
In any case, segregation of men and women in sports is a relatively new thing in history, dating back to around 1920-ish when the first bans for women appeared under the guise of "protecting their health / modesty". Plain and simple, men were afraid that women were just as competitive as they were, most sports are skill sports and not brute-strength sports.
Additionally, what even makes a man and a woman? Simply nailing it down to penises and vaginas doesn't cut it, there's quite a ton of different hormonal disorders that give you an XX person presenting as a man or an XY person presenting as a woman. Often enough that's only caught when they grow up to be adults and discover they're infertile because everything else "just works". And then come all the other examples in the spectrum between the poles. Where does one want to draw the line?
The more sensible thing is to rank athletes on other metrics: body weight and body fat/muscle distribution, age, or skill level like chess (mostly) does.
> - or why do I have to choose between 1. people who hate certain groups of people and 2. people who think it is OK when others arrive here and openly abuse our hospitality?
It's not OK but JFC there is no 100% foolproof system that allows for no cheating like the anti-migrant crowd tends to suggest. No matter what there will always be a certain percentage of fraud in any system.
> Why did it take years to expel an internationally wanted terrorist?
Dunno about this specific case since it lacks context, but everyone has the right to due process, including non white people.
> There certainly is a lot of room between these options.
Yeah, not to even engage in discussions with people who just want to cause pain and drama and manufacture problems. A lot of that is manufactured by Russia or other enemies anyway - turns out "think of the children" can be modernized to "think of the women", it's a perfect wedge issue since it is very hard to argue against the emotional message with facts.
Often enough to demonstrate that incarcerating males in women's prisons on the basis of self-declared "gender identity" is harmful policy that needs to be removed and cancelled everywhere it's been implemented.
It's worth keeping in mind that the reason we have sex-segregated prisons in the first place is because mixed-sex prisons were so demonstrably harmful to female inmates, who were subjected to physical violence, sexual assault, rape, impregnation by male prisoners.
> In any case, segregation of men and women in sports is a relatively new thing in history, dating back to around 1920-ish when the first bans for women appeared under the guise of "protecting their health / modesty". Plain and simple, men were afraid that women were just as competitive as they were, most sports are skill sports and not brute-strength sports.
You are confusing two separate things here: access to competitive sports, and having a separate female category in competitive sports. The former was denied to women for the same reasons that women were denied access to many aspects of society that men could freely enjoy. Whereas the latter - eliminating male physical advantage from competition - is necessary for fairness and, in the case of contact sports, for safety.
> Where does one want to draw the line?
Evidence-based policy approaches typically draw the line at the male physical advantage of testosterone-driven development.
So for example a male athlete with CAIS (complete insensitivity to androgens) may be permitted to compete in the women's category because testosterone was entirely ineffective from development in utereo onwards.
Whereas a male athlete with 5-ARD (impaired conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone) won't be, as the phenotype of micropenis and less facial hair doesn't eliminate the male physical advantage in sport.
> It's worth keeping in mind that the reason we have sex-segregated prisons in the first place is because mixed-sex prisons were so demonstrably harmful to female inmates, who were subjected to physical violence, sexual assault, rape, impregnation by male prisoners.
The problem then are male prisoners, are they not? In fact, trans women are 13 times more likely to be assaulted in prison [1] than cis-male ones.
The solution is obvious - more guards in prison, segregate prisoners with a violence or sexual assault history, and maybe imprison less people in the first place because many prisons are plain and simple overcrowded.
> Whereas the latter - eliminating male physical advantage from competition - is necessary for fairness and, in the case of contact sports, for safety.
Regarding the safety aspect in contact sports - I think the better solution is to leave that decision to the women themselves, but generally I'd more argue to ban or seriously restrict contact sports because a looot of them have had very nasty links to brain injuries uncovered.
> Evidence-based policy approaches typically draw the line at the male physical advantage of testosterone-driven development.
The question remains: do we really want to require athletes to submit to full-blown genetic and hormonal assays? Do we really want to require minor athletes to submit to genital examinations for no medical reason? The obsession a lot of people have with genitalia is absurd.
The problem is male prisoners, yes. Which is why segregating prisoners by sex is an essential component of safeguarding. And then further separation of vulnerable prisoners within each prison. If, in a male prison, there are inmates who desire to be women and are deemed to be at risk based on this, they should be separated from the general prison population, like other vulnerable prisoners are. Not transferred to a female prison.
Regarding the female category of sports, a sample of cells taken via a cheek swab can be used for karyotype testing, which would be sufficient for screening female athletes. This is much less intrusive than the anti-doping tests - which involve having blood taken and being observed urinating - that for many athletes is a requirement to compete. In the unusual case that the athlete has something other than 46,XX sex chromosomes, further analysis could be done - with the athlete's permission - to understand the underlying condition and, from this, determine eligibility to compete in this category.
No-one is advocating for all female athletes, including children, to undergo genital inspections. It isn't necessary and it's not being asked for.
Exact amount of times it happen doesn't matter as much as the fact that one side tries to pretend it isn't a problem.
> there is no 100% foolproof system that allows for no cheating like the anti-migrant crowd tends to suggest. No matter what there will always be a certain percentage of fraud in any system.
That is not what I am suggesting.
And I think you are actually proving my point here.
> Exact amount of times it happen doesn't matter as much as the fact that one side tries to pretend it isn't a problem.
I'm not saying it is not a problem at all - I am simply saying that it is a nothingburger compared to the amount of "ordinary" rape and violence going on in prisons. Trying to blast on trans people while ignoring the much larger elephant in the room is dishonest and reminds me of a Bible quote: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" [1]
It's referred to as a "strawman argument" because it's like arguing with a person made out of straw (evoking images of a person fighting against a straw man for training); such a person is not a difficult opponent and one is not required to put in effort for a fight against them. One might consider who you are arguing against when you say "one side tries to pretend it isn't a problem".
Article describes what is happening in my home country. I'm not American. What seems more American is that all these articles are being flagged here in true spirit of American free speech: where everything is technically allowed, but in practice, there is lot of censure and self-censure.
I call a duck a duck. I had my criticisms of republicans and democrats in the past, but they generally respected the institutions and took their turns. The current regime is trying to scrap all that and make the President a King (or dictator?), that's why people are fighting back and calling what walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, "why that's a duck, tater!"
The worldview where "both sides" must have valid points is also extremely problematic. There's no need to give equal time to fascists. Sometimes one "side" is wrong and the only appropriate thing to do is say so.
The shift from “the President should surrender control of his peanut farm to avoid conflicts of interest” to “eh, this (gestures broadly) is fine, what are you complaining about?” has been really damn fast.
The shift from "The president can't partly forgive some student loans without congressional approval" to "The president's unelected tech support guy can fire entire government agencies without it" took a month or two. Roughly the same time, but clearly not held to the same standard. That seems a lot like the "permission to cross legal boundaries" that the original article mentions.
No, my point is Trump isn't bad because he's "authoritarian". He's bad because he's completely mismanaging the country, and putting oligarchs in charge of the government.
Even for "authoritarian regime", that'd be a horrible way to run a country.
It's not like the democrats aren't full of oligarchs themselves, like the likes of Pelosi.
> No, my point is Trump isn't bad because he's "authoritarian".
But, you're wrong, he is wrong for that reason.
> He's bad because he's completely mismanaging the country
He's also wrong for that reason, which is also not completely unrelated to the former reason.
> and putting oligarchs in charge of the government.
And for thet reason, which is mostly a rephrasing and slightly more specific form of the first reason.
> Even for "authoritarian regime", that'd be a horrible way to run a country.
Actually, its pretty typical of authoritarian regimes to (1) have a narrow elite (oligarchs) making decisions with no effective accountability for their own benefit, and (2) for this to, from any other perspective but the immediate perceived self-interest of those decision-makers to be complete mismanagement. (It’s also pretty typical for it to be mismanagement from any reasonable view of the elites actual interests, and paranoia driven by fear of being displaced either by outsiders or other members of the elite leads to suboptimal elite decision-making, because authoritarianism does not support conflict resolution processes that enable trust, and makes losing intra-elite disputes very high stakes.)
That's what I'm trying to say. You judge based on the denomination first, like how protestants use to think all catholics are inherrently evil. That was the ideological war of the 16th century, and looking bad do you see how pointless it was?
Sure the Pope and the catholic clergy were corrupt, but they weren't bad because they're catholics or authoritarian. Corruption was the issue, not catholicism itself nor authoritarianism. To think so is to force a narrative.
“Authoritarian” isn't, and isn’t analogous to, a religious denomination like “Catholic" or “Protestant”.
> Corruption was the issue, not catholicism itself nor authoritarianism
“Authoritarian” as a descriptor is more like “corrupt” than it is like “Catholic”. Not that the claim that being Catholic—or, for those positively inclined toward Catholicism, Protestant or Muslim or Secular Humanist or Satanist (Church of Satan) or Satanist (The Satanic Temple)—is not bad in and of itself is an uncontroversial pillar on which to rest an analogy,
People portray everything in terms of the ideological war between "democracy" vs "authoritarianism", fitting everything into that narrative even when it doesn't make sense.
It's a nice, simple, easy way to understand what's happening around us, who's good and bad, yet deeply flawed.
There is the theoretical understanding, and then there is how it meshes with reality.
The theoretical understanding is that we are in an ideological war. If you strip away all the nuance and ask for a high level understanding of what is happening right now, that is happening right now.
When meshed into reality it is a bit more complicated... neither side of our government is on the side of democracy. One is straight fascist, the other is in favor of a corporate state or oligarchy. Both party's power primarily comes from news media (oligarch owned) and from legalized bribery (the richest have the most power), so neither can challenge oligarchic power, because oligarchic power is where their power comes from. The fascist party is currently in the process of giving themselves power by replacing enforcement institutions with loyalists. Once all the people who enforce the law are loyalists, they can decide what the law is, and then it's no longer people with money who have all the power, but people the enforcers of "law" are loyal to.
Neither party can fight oligarchy because to fight oligarchy is to disempower themselves. Bernie and AOC might be the only exceptions.
Well there's a cost to that abstraction, e.g. you'd have to pass the context into the component, so every time you need to modify the component's schema/props you'd need to change it twice, both in the parent and the component.
You must have seen some huge React components with 20 different props or even more, and you'd need to think about memoizing those props to prevent a re-render, etc etc.
I've also been a web dev for over 20 years, and 10 years with React. I'd say that going back to native HTML APIs for handling stateful things like forms and form validation is a breeze, rather than writing components and endless abstractions. It's enough for the vast majority of the time.
Those are just shitty codebases. I maintain a React app that's over 10 years old, almost milion lines of code and we have zero components with 20 props, no issues with performance or whatnot.
I am an oponent of over-abstraction but components are very light abstraction and provide just sensible encapsulation and reusability.
I'm really curious too, the only codebase I've seen that was like their description with react treated different pages/routes as one massive separate component.
Not exactly utilizing the benefit of JSX but it's a pattern you might blindly fall into if you only came from a templating background.
I can't, our app is enterprise SaaS built as SPA. Nextjs is imho garbage. The only reason I can imagine it is so popular is that average React devs are indeed very bad with code organization. If I needed server rendering I would go with Astro + interactive islands.
I see, you're talking about a fully client-rendered SPA. I guess you can always count on your users running modern PCs, with fast internet and no SEO needs. Things aren't that nice in the outside world lol.
Having used HTMX and Unpoly with Django, for over 2 years now, I prefer using Unpoly more these days.
Unpoly feels just like Django, it is a more of a framework than a thin layer, but that means it comes with a lot of productive features built-in, albeit opinionated.
It covers 95% of the use-cases of a typical web app, with its layers and forms concepts. E.g. I love creating "subinteractions" with unpoly, where a complex process can be divided into smaller modal forms for creating the "related" objects of a model, which then updates the main form of the model itself. Unpoly makes these simple, and its documentation caters for exactly these scenarios.
The one thing I couldn't get past when looking into Unpoly is that if you're in a deeply nested modal/layer, and then refresh the page, it just shows you the most recent modal as a full page. My expectation is that when you refresh, instead it would keep you on the base page, and then wipe all the modals.
Unpoly by default changes the browser's history to the url of the modal. Thus when your refresh you'll get exactly that. You can modify that behavior with up-history, see here https://unpoly.com/history-in-overlays
You can set up-history="false" and there'd be no navigation when opening the modal, so when you refresh the page it'd refresh the parent layer not the modal.
What's more arguable I think is how pressing the browser Back button doesn't preserve the layers, but opens the previous page as a full page. I think that can be changed in a config somewhere, though.
Those are nice questions and we asked the same ourselves twice before we started working on this http://flyonui.com/.
Preline is a great library with its beauty. It uses Tailwind CSS utility clasess may lead to cluttered HTML with numerous utility classes, which can be a nightmare to maintain.
Where DaisyUI is the most popular component library for Tailwind CSS, offering a wide range of components with semantic class names. However many projects require interactive features that need JavaScript.
This is where FlyonUI shines.
FlyonUI builds on top of DaisyUI by integrating Preline’s JS plugins, offering headless, fully unstyled components that are accessible and responsive.
