Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): “We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task.
“I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?”
Brow-beating people over whether or not they are a “true” conservative or progressive is an inherently dumb activity, because it relies on the false assumption that there’s a fixed definition of “conservative” or “progressive.” The reality is there’s a hodgepodge of goals and ideals and differing ideas of how to achieve them, and denying that in favor of purity tests is more about social signaling rather than having an honest debate about the best paths to take to reach shared goals.
I also really liked this Amanda Marcotte piece for Salon about the post-Iowa repositioning for the Sanders campaign. If this campaign wasn’t wacky enough before the Iowa caucuses, it’s been even moreso afterwards.
But as soon as the Bernie Bro materialized, the conversation around it deteriorated. As the meme gained momentum, some popularizers stopped bothering to marshal any kind of evidence that Sanders supporters were sexist. The argument bottomed out with a Mashable article branding Sanders supporters as “a sexist mob” while doing little to justify the claim beyond conjuring the word “Reddit.” On the other side, Greenwald centered his debunking of the Bernie Bro narrative on the shakiest specimens of the genre. He chose to ignore the most substantive accounts of Bernie Bro behavior, like this piece from Sanders supporter Kathleen Geier, who says that a fellow #Berner accused her of “angling for a job in the Clinton administration” when she took note of anti-Clinton sexism online.
This is a familiar online phenomenon. Just as mansplaining “morphed from a useful descriptor of a real problem in contemporary gender dynamics to an increasingly vague catchall expression,” as Salon’s Benjamin Hart put it in 2014, the Bernie Bro argument has been stretched beyond recognition by both its champions and its critics. What began as a necessary critique of leftist sexism has been replaced by a pair of straw men waving their arms in the wind.
A really good piece on the BernieBros phenomenon, from here.