This is irrelevant to the discussion, which was not ‘Is it an alternate timeline/who likes it?’ but ‘does it possess certain qualities?’.

Yep. I just watched ‘Past Tense’ this week, where DS9 spends an entire two-parter advocating for the humane treatment of homeless and unemployed people through an economic policy of full employment. The characters succeed in bringing this about by staging an armed uprising largely led by a black man. It’s not only ‘woke’ but explicitly socialist!

For me, trek was about people overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other. Newer shows lack this ideas, in my opinion.

In Discovery, a Vulcan woman gets married to a seven-foot tall walking squid man. In seasons 4-5, Book nearly destroys the galaxy and they forgive him because they understand he was traumatised. These strike me as pretty clear examples (just two, I could add more!) of people ‘overcoming their differences and trying to work things out despite them, and being kind to each other’.

This is entirely separate from the question of whether those plots lines and character arcs were well-written - they largely weren’t, IMO. But they did happen!

Big Bird on the barricades.

Photons or protons?

Heh. Yeah, I can’t really hold up a country backsliding on trans rights as an example of an effective constitutional monarchy.

I think taking a broad view, there are quite a lot of constitutional monarchies that are really great places to live (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Canada, the Bahamas, Japan, to name a few). There are also quite a lot of republics that can claim the same. So, from a sort of human development POV, I don’t think it really matters very much.

[EDIT: Should’ve added that there are also plenty of republics and monarchies that are disasters, too. My point is that there’s no consistent pattern of one works and the other doesn’t.]

Sure, monarchies are a bit daft but I think ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ is quite a good rule. Especially since spending time on fixing things that ain’t broke is time you could be spending on fixing things that are broke. I live in the UK and we have a lot of major problems that need our attention. It’s better to focus on those than have a big argument about the King when, as we can see from international comparisons, the King isn’t really the issue.

People also makes this argument about guns, and yet gun controls work!

You are right, of course, that if someone really wants to hurt lots of people, they will likely find a way to do it. But that’s no reason not to put barriers in their way. As for ‘punishing the rest of us’, I’m not sure that making cars a bit lighter amounts to a punishment!

It’s what the people voted for.

The only people who can quit their “pointless” jobs in the name of “moral ambition” are those who are lucky enough to not need them in the first place.

The article does say exactly that.

So many philosophers did this! My favourite is Hegel, who ‘rationally’ reached the conclusion that German was the best language, Prussia was the best country and Protestantism was the best religion. Nothing to do with the fact that he’d been raised in German-speaking Prussian Protestantism, oh no.

This is it. The temptation to slap on reciprocal tariffs is obvious but it’s generally self-defeating. Much better to do things this way and free up trade elsewhere.

Her instincts are the worst. Imagine being a conservative and not being able to exploit a ‘rally round the flag’ moment!

The Newer Forest.

Always makes me laugh that the ‘New’ Forest is getting on for a thousand years old.

Again, you’ve written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.

Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that’s not the same thing.

Imagining the idea ‘I’d like to see an image of a lemming’, which is what you’ve done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your ‘prompt’ to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn’t entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)

You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don’t know you and I wouldn’t want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.

That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by ‘AI’ does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: ‘It’s statistically likely that the phrase “to be” will be followed by the phrase “or not to be”’. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI ‘art’ is not creative and therefore not art at all.

Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not ‘having ideas’; it’s an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you’re not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You’re saying ‘Show me the statistically likely output for this input’. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.

Yes. It can only exist through stealing the creative work of others.

Also, it looks terrible.

Yes, everyone here trembles under my tyrannical rule. I try not to let it go to my head.

Gosh, how strange. I expected him to say, ‘He’s a total cunt and I’m only pretending to like him because it’s part of my job’.

Destroying healthcare by… increasing funding for the NHS and for social care, ending strikes by negotiating with the unions, and hitting their initial appointment targets years early?