Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Wait until automated freight delivery services (from trains and trucks down to little carrier bots) kill about a third of the jobs that exist.

In ten years people would be working less than twelve hours a week, but rich and powerful people will not give up a jot or penny of wealth and power.

The problem is, it’s plausible they are ice, and in the US hoodlums gathering near a van before pulling a heist are rarer than unmarked ICE guys waiting to acquire a target, so if this isn’t a movie set, they’re most likely ICE.

If they are this obvious, I’d see if I could get a flash mob of civilians with phone cameras.

Either they move, or if action goes down, there’s going to be a big protest soon.

Also we’ll know who they took.

Someone should meme this up as a bunch of dudes about to get jumped by Spiderman.

There are some pepper sprays that are mixed with red difficult-to-remove dye for the purpose of identifying those involved in an incident.

Legal in California!

Never let the assailant take you to the secondary location.

Urban self defense classes have been teaching this since the 1970s, at least.

So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

Peter Thiel is evil. Don’t work for him. Don’t use his products.

He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.

This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.

A) He’s doing this stuff to make the libs jump (or more accurately do something that MAGAs believe will make Libs jump.)

and

B) When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

Also, Behind The Bastards has done a deep dive on the life of Musk. Find it. Listen to it.

Then check your local officials and see if they’re die-hard ownership class, or can at least sympathize with the proles.

It’s time to activate. Don’t make Molitovs yet, instead find out where to march or stand. But do look at where your molotov-making supplies are.

As Richard J. Murphy notes, when money goes into the hands of billionaires, it leaves the economy, getting tied up in bank reserves (or corporate reserves if invested) and into literal vaults. That money is no longer in motion, propelling trade, but gets trapped dormant.

This is why when wealth distribution graph is deeply bowed, the economy gets austere.

And as Leeja Miller notes, historically the only way such wealth ever gets redistributed to public interest (either directly to the public, or into a good-faith public-serving state) has been through violence.

Disclaimer: This is not a call for violence, only that corrections in history have involved piling aristocratic heads high after a takeover by force. The 20th century has seen a lot of progress in non-violent revolution.

Right now the ownership class has a powerful propaganda machine to dissuade protest, and mass suffering tends to lead to violent reprisal, especially when families see their own vulnerable suffering and dying, so if we don’t figure out some peaceful action that creates movement, we’ll end up with a lot of self-radicalized folk eager to die in action just to express themselves.

I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I’ll say this:

When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.

Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.

On board with the mushroom kingdom

I’m making an executive decision and declaring this to be the slang for the position of seeking to end the current healthcare system for public healthcare. And to save Mangione from state justice law.

They did before in 1789, hence the immediate outcome of the Estates General of 1789.

And hence the response of the French public immediately following.

A lot of cats that purr like it’s their national anthem drool while they do so. More so with older cats.

In the late middle ages, nobility would wear make up, false moles, or adopt the verbal inflections of the monarch as a part of courtier parlance.

If there was a way to encourage Washington culture to get everyone to wear orange makeup, we totally should.

Not that our federal government isn’t already a parody of itself in countless other ways.

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.

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.

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.