John Oliver on LWT explained that the cap hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in decades, and should be around $10K now rather than $2K. It is not.

To the secular and the naturalist, this tells us it was a problem even then.

Oh they’ll come.

The US will have to go to war to keep down unrest. Whether Trump makes good on Canada / Greenland / Poland, the world will have to form a coalition against us, and it’s likely China will take the lead.

There will be Chinese bombers over Washington just as there were Russian and American bombers over Berlin. Not that we’ll be around to enjoy it, and those that remain will suffer as collaborators (whether they were or not).

We really don’t want to let it get there. But then we really didn’t want it to get here, and we knew in the early aughts with George W. Bush’s administration this is where we were headed if someone didn’t chance course. Obama, who promised to change course, did not.

A climate crisis! Global famine coming soon!

It’ll be like the Mad Max series with fewer cars and more cannibalism. (You think I’m kidding?)

Under Stalinist soviet communism, which was dictatorship with extra steps?

How about under Zapatista communism (which is still going on)? Or Black Panther communism, at least until the FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover, so acting as the capitalist state’s secret police) massacred the BP administrative leaders?

Tell us more about the joys of capitalist healthcare. At least for the common American, we get bare minimum socialized healthcare, and even it is on the chopping block. The rest is an insurance sector that willfully (and oddly, legally) dodges its only job, and a medical system so hyperinflated it puts people into lifelong debt.

So STFU with jingoistic platitudes and virtue-signaling to your fellow MAGAs, and put up a real argument.

Or not.

I have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.

It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.

But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.

I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.

I downloaded Lemmy because social media fulfills some social needs, and it’s a nicer place than Reddit. And I avoid Twitter and Facebook like I do hipster singles bars.

We’ve actually seen the ubiquitous camera thing become an issue during the George Floyd protests of 2020, and yeah the police were brutal, pushed by President Trump, only causing the protests to double in size.

The French Résistance didn’t have the cameras, but the ill behavior of the Germans was ubiquitous, itself, despite e4fforts from the overseeing administration to advise them to be nice. They just couldn’t help themselves.

Technology is a factor, as are countless other circumstances. It’ll be interesting to see when video of the ICE raids start emerging again.

Actually, something that focused the report forward in a narrow wave would be super useful.

No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.

Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.

Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.

We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.

77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.

Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.

Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery: Who were those 30,000 [Jews] you say you shot, when you say, you shot?
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange, Commander of the Sicherheitsdienst in Latvia: In Riga, Latvia. 27,800 I have some responsibility for. And stood by with my men and allowed Latvian civilians to kill in mobs. I received memos directing the – one would say evacuation of Jews – who, shot and buried in soil and corpses, managed to crawl out, still alive. Not exactly war, is it? And gas chambers about to come?
Kritzinger: What gas chambers? Gas chambers?
Lange: I hear rumors, yes.
Kritzinger: This is more than war. Must be a different word for this.
Lange: Try chaos.
Kritzinger: Yes. The rest is argument, the curse of my profession.
Lange: I studied law as well.
Kritzinger: And how do you apply that education to what you do?
Lange: It has made me distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.

– Conspiracy 2001, based on the captured minutes of the Wannsee Conference

Fascism is a tool for autocrats to keep public discontent and unrest down for a while, but it is temporary, and invariably results in purge after purge after purge. Eventually the state has to resort to war against outward enemies, and if it’s not put down by assassination and revolution, it’s put down when the Allies are bombing the capitol.

The people lose a lot harder if the Allies reach Berlin, which is why there are thirty-nine known attempts to kill Hitler, culminating in the July 20 Plot.|

Scabs exist, but they’re expensive and universally hated by both sides.

Police brutality against the working class tends to make sympathists of onlookers, activists of sympathists, militants of activists and radical militants of ordinary militants.

So, one could only hope. They usually go this route, and then we have legendary responses like the French Résistance , or for that matter, the French Revolution.

Except in the twenty-first century, we get to record the brutality and fighting on video so the public can be inspired.

So until the general public is out numbered and outgunned by AI-commanded armies of swarming killer robots (a near future possibility), brutality by the state is always to the advantage of the movement, even if it doesn’t go so well for the individuals who perish in the conflict. Mahsa Amini never got to enjoy the uprising she started (and ended with negotiation) in Iran, and that’s a crying shame.

It says right there in the COIN manual (a running treatise of counter-insurgency in development for centuries) that you don’t brutalize the protestors, but have to capture hearts and minds, and also respond with good governance. And curiously, every autocratic despot seems to refuse to try this.

One way to escalate such a strike is to have a limited, general, recurring and escalating strike.

So it’s a day in January; two days in February; three in March, etc.

Its complicated, possibly too complicated for the typical worker, but it would give ramping escalation and allow for negotiation in process.

the problem remains the same: getting the general public to heed a strike. Short of people dying by hundreds of thousands, they don’t seem motivated.

You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?

That’s a post-biblical interpretation based on Greek philosophy (as is the omni-etc. god, which is contradicted a lot in the OT). Modern ministries are not only trying to lock people in by threat of Hellfire, but also keep their own members doubting their own salvation so they stay in church and tithing.

But science has advance amazingly far, to the point that we have many eyes, and centuries of looking for substance of the supernatural, and there is no place we’ve discovered yet where the material and spiritual interact. There are gaps in science. We still don’t comprehend how ball lightning works, for instance (and it’s definitely a thing) but curiously no religious ministry is pointing at ball lightning and saying see! a miracle and in the meantime lightning seems to be content to behave consistently according to the electrodynamics of static electricity.

But this all brings us to a nihilistic existential crisis: It takes ~20% of your caloric intake to run your brain, all that thinking, feeling, remembering, analyzing, receiving and processing stimulus through sensory organs and so one. That would mean ghosts and spirits, without a clear power source (and a noticeable energy consumption) could be at the heart of the sun and not notice the temperature, or have the capacity to care.

Oblivion is at the heart of zero energy consumption… unless we’re in a dream or simulation or something where the (extremely consistent) mechanics we deal with every day are computed, and some mechanics are deliberately hidden from us. As we’ve discovered a lot of our science through side-channel attacks, we’re prepared for anything that leaves a noticeable wake, and everything we know about does.

This is why enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophers start at nihilism and start from the foundation of what now? E.g. what does it mean that our warlords can commit so much atrocity and there is no divine justice? It means it’s up to us to lament justice lost, and to make a society that does better.

Or, as according to current events, not. And have to learn again old lessons of why it is imperative to do better.

When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.

1978 US Automotive Companies: If we make a product that locks our customers in, they’ll be our customers forever!

1978 Japanese Automotive Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works then customers will keep buying our stuff.

2025 US Tech Companies: If we make our products contingent on proprietary software and hardware, we’ll lock them in.

2025 Chinese Tech Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works and they can utilize freely, they’ll keep buying our stuff.

Not our first rodeo.

Relevant blog post from 2019

Agreed, to the bottom-rung investigators (which includes all the non-agent, non-administrative specialists who, I believe, outnumber the special agents) they’re there to investigate.

And according to Glenn Kirchner, the political leaning is a big regret and big resentment of the investigative staff. And yet, it’s shadow looms over them, as they pressured on issues like going dark seeking less information security and more surveillance powers, that allow for the authoritarian monolith we face today.

If they focused a bit more on seeing justice done and finding the truth through forensic science rather than getting the bad guy by any means including mass surveillance (and neutering fourth-amendment protections of civilians) then we’d be better protected from the autocratic coup / kleptocracy that has a stranglehold on the federal government.

We all sink with Titanic now.