Uriel238 [all pronouns]

No, this is a line of reasoning that leads to something different than what we got, which could be authoritarianism, or could be a better democracy… or we could try sortition, eliminating the role of the politician, entirely.

This was established in the Federalist Papers, that democracy works when the constituent a) knows their personal best interests and b) votes accordingly. In fact much of the post Southern Strategy GOP movement towards authoritarianist domination of the federal theater has been focused on getting constituents to vote against their own best interests, whether in favor of vibes or towards single issues (e.g. abortion access, gun control) or based on cultural pressure (liberalism = communism).

There are many directions we can go to make the system more democratic, many of which include moving away from FPTP elections (which promote a two party system, making third parties untenable) but we’ve also had some success in actually educating the constituency and instilling in them a sense of duty to do their civic homework and know what they’re voting for.

If people didn’t respond to these, then Trump would have won in November 2024 by a much wider margin than fractions of percents spread across several battleground states, and he wouldn’t have needed the support of the EC and gerrymandering to give the illusion of a mandate. The GOP and its vibes-based voting system is propped up by a trillion-dollar propaganda machine to keep Americans uninformed and believing in the Joe Rogan way of life.

If that’s the best that democracy can do, I will be the first to dispose of it for something better. But I believe democracy can absolutely do better.

Helen Cox Richardson advises general strikes cause division among the organized groups striking (possibly in what terms as appropriate to relent), that targeted boycotts seem to prove more effective in the United States.

I can’t be sure, having never seen general strikes manifest or boycotts that lasted. Boycotts also rule out those of us who live in poverty who can’t afford to have opinions. Or as Marge Simpson put it We can’t afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy. We just need a TV.

So boycotts are revolution by the petite bourgeoisie, rather than by the third estate, which is why France still contends with capitalism and authoritarian drift.

I, personally, don’t know the right answer, or the most effective strategy against the current regime. I’d argue both are good methods, but maybe we should look for third and fourth fronts of attack.

The warnings were there when the George W. Bush administration was doing all the things. We should have learned then never again to vote Republican, but we did. Twice. For the same monster both times.

We need to be having a sober conversation as to why and how that happened, given democracy doesn’t work when people vote based on vibes or propaganda feels.

I think the demolition of the White House is particularly poetic. It also shows us what our federal government is willing to let the regime do without input from the commonwealth.

The No Kings numbers was a warning, a bellwether. Let’s see if they’re able to pick up on what it means.

Nothing AI can’t fix (badly).

When my dog, Fester, was a puppy, he was chewing power cords and I am still surprised and grateful he never harmed himself in the process, at least not that warranted care.

He’s more constrained to his own toys and chewables now, but for a while nothing was safe. He has the epithet Fester The Destroyer for having chewed through over $1K of shoes in a week. His grand total it significantly higher.

Alexandrite doesn’t allow image downloading so I don’t know how to provide pet tax.

Here we go. Jackie on the right; Fester (The Destroyer) on the left.

And this is how you get a positive crackpot index.

Though I’ve known legit physicists and engineers take pride in [their] >0 CI.

For most definitions of supernatural, no.

I believe in unidentified areal phenomena, not that it’s ETIs or aliens, but that something’s up there doing its thing.

I believe in ball lightning even though we don’t have a model of electrodynamics that explains it.

There’s some weird shit out there, Horatio, that isn’t explained in our philosophy. I’m sure we don’t have all the answers. I just am okay with knowing we don’t know what those answers are.

As for ghosts, spirits, afterlife, etc. There’s strong evidence those things do not exist, just in the stark silence where there should be noise.

I do pretend that treating my cat well and wearing cat themed tees and keeping cat kitch does please the cat gods. 🐱‍👤

Curiously, while in character, it’s about the stupidest thing companies can do, at least according to Mike Brock

But yes, corporations are notoriously short-sighted when it comes to autocrats, even with a long history of ultimately getting their assets seized by the autocratic regimes they assisted into power.

I’d like to think this all might be a time to teach common end-users the joys of FOSS and, if necessary, jailbreaking, but that’s still a big ask for the general public even in the face of abduction and rendition.

The agents who implement state violence are not a group. They’re agents of the state.

And now Google is directly collaborating with an oppressive autocratic regime.

If ever you get a chance, check out the Soviet Union military medals (shiny gold plastic) from the last decades. This has precedent.

If they were smart they’d give them RFID chips, but that might cost more than the metal.

Isn’t the dollar due to collapse due to foreign sanctions against the Trump regime tariffs?

Poetic.

New currency might be plastic.

Hitler no longer exists. We do, and we have to confront the reality that people like Hitler still find their way into civic office where they can seize power and bring ruin to us all.

It’s not a good thing for us to imagine a divine justice that balances out the evil wrought by persons past. It may be a brief comfort to suggest that Hitler burns in Hellfire, that Mengele, after living a long life as a fugitive, died a free man, that Heydrich’s torment didn’t end with his dying battle against sepsis, but in the end we have to come to terms that nature is unjust and if we want a world in which good folk thrive and wicked folk fail to survive, this is a society and an institution we’ll have to create ourselves, from scratch.

And so far, we suck at it.

Better yet, ultimately we should recognize that people who make poor life choices are still surviving the best they could. In a working society, Hitlers and Trumps would not rise to power, and Heydrichs and Himmlers would not be able to exploit the biases of the system to elevate themselves to aristocracy-adjacent positions. In a working society, the only thing to gain with civic power would be the satisfaction of the fulfillment of one’s duty to society… and that one gets to direct the movement of mountains and the construction of bridges for the betterment of all the community.

It’s boring, but personally I’d rather constrain wars and torture and genocide to the confines of fiction. Make sports news, whether tragic or glorious, great again.

As in precocious puberty. Kids who are sexually activated (by premature hormone reactions which can be triggered – not always – by sexual abuse) so they get sexually interested before their peers, and ruin recess for everyone else.

When I was growing up (mind you, I was a late, late bloomer) precocious puberty in girls was punished brutally (say being grounded for life). Precocious puberty in boys was rewarded with early sports careers, unless you sucked, in which case you were punished for being a sex pest. This was a source of bullies that preyed on the rest of us.

This is to say, the US really doesn’t know how to parent or teach or otherwise administrate children. This is also to say I am way, way bitter about it.

ETA This is one of the purposes of puberty blockers, when it’s not used to let questioning trans kids decide to deliberate on what they want to be for a while, so I hope things are generally better. But then, considering how puberty blockers are now politicized, precocious puberty is also politicized, which ruins everyone’s Sunday brunch.

He’s more like a ten year old boy who fucks three-year-old girls who don’t yet have the language to say what happened to them…and when they get snitchy, he threatens them with violence to shut them up, often demonstrating on a small animal.

I think I’m trying to say he’s not just a precocious kid with anger issues, but a precocious kid with a cruelty streak and symptoms of physical neurological effects and poses a danger to himself and others.

There are problems with policing that are pretty universal, some of which are acknowledged in Peel’s Principles of Policing way back with the Bow Street Runners. But while those principles are taught to every cadet, here in the states we otherwise ignore them.

There’s absolutely problems with drift, away from participation of the community and toward control, and while I can’t speak for which part of the Americas you’re in (the RCM have enough annual incidents to fall neatly into the ACAB category) I can say there are problems with giving one group of people authority over the rest that we’ve yet to fully solve.

Still, it’s especially bad in the states, and when black US tourists find themselves in conversation with law enforcement in Europe, the extreme level of contrition they sometimes show is an embarrassment to everyone, but a shame of the United States.

Your province is not in the US.

All Cops Are Bastards, a sentiment that arises from the blue code of silence, so that even the well-meaning ones are obligated to lie in court to defend the violent ones, what allowed the loyalty-over-principle sector to rise into power, which is why there is such staunch resistance against publication of disciplinary hearings against police who misbehaved or broke laws, even though such documents are supposed to be public as per FOIA statutes.

When California passed a law reinforcing the notion that such files would be made accessible to the public, the precincts literally shredded or burned their files.

The institutions are corrupt through and through. It was especially evident during the Ferguson unrest, when the blue lines showed they had no trigger discipline for the military hardware they were wielding. It was laughable, except for the danger they were posing to the demonstrators.

Officers who seek to serve their communities quit. Some of them have publicly denounce police services and have become staunch police abolitionists. The only officers that remain are either violent killers, or the ones willing to cover for violent killers.

All cops are bastards.

I keep trying to formulate a plan in my head:

On one hand ACAB: They all promote the national security culture within the law enforcement sector that we civilians are the enemy. The departments are all corrupt through and through

On the other hand the non ICE officers hate being used as S𝑖𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑡 or Einsatzgruppen (German SD, or Death Squads, respectively) to pick on innocent civilians to be shuttled away to concentration camps. And I wonder if there was a way for the public to tell them we’re sorry they are being abused by being repurposed as general goon squads, and if that might encourage them to resist more than they do.

Also, ICE agents, either pre-Trump used to sometimes engage in action that at least had the appearance of legitimacy, e.g. tracking people with violent records. New recruits (post OBBBA Budget) were told they’ll be hunting the worst of the worst and then are picking up day laborers and ice-cream vendors, which is soul crushing for even MAGAs who wanted to be the hero.

We need to be able to take these sentiments and weaponize them against the system, and the policy-makers that are forcing them to be evil fucks for The Man.

I don’t know the specifics, but there’s a schematic in there somewhere.

I already suffer from psychosis

To be fair, I’ve already done something similar. In the aughts, thinking Miskatonic U’s Library restricted vault can’t harm me: I’m already crazy. Then thanks to Bush Administration efforts to consolidate power and persecute minorities, I went and studied the Holocaust, and the process within the German Reich that brought it forth.

And that figures into my current psychotic break, as of November 2024.