AutistoMephisto @ AutistoMephisto @lemmy.world

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374

Joined

2 yr. ago

Like, I think someone in the DNC should be out there, putting out answers. What did they do with the money they got? Where did it go? Time for an audit.

https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/fourth-geopolitical-summit-democracy-2024-whose-democracy-what-rules-david-frost-danube-institute/

And, really, it's just Ayn Randian Objectivism, mixed with Christian Dominionism, mixed with neofuedalism, dreamed up by a dude who spent years after the Dotcom Bubble popped, doing nothing but staying in his apartment after accepting a buyout of several hundred dollars reading the works of long dead white people.

Not just the military. I draw your attention to this, emphasis mine

(a) In General. Process—other than a summons under Rule 4 or a subpoena under Rule 45 —must be served by a United States marshal or deputy marshal or by a person specially appointed for that purpose.

Section (b) says:

Enforcing Orders: Committing for Civil Contempt. An order committing a person for civil contempt of a decree or injunction issued to enforce federal law may be served and enforced in any district. Any other order in a civil-contempt proceeding may be served only in the state where the issuing court is located or elsewhere in the United States within 100 miles from where the order was issued.

The line:

a person specially appointed for that purpose.

is interesting because it does not specify who is qualified to be appointed. Now, I am concerned that this language means that Judge Boasberg may only appoint one person, but if he seems it necessary, he could probably get away with appointing more.

Judge Boasberg does have one other card he can play, according to FRCJ Rule 4.1(b). If the US Marshal service is unable or unwilling to carry out a federal court order, the Judge who issued the order can deputize individuals to carry it out.

This. Every trick Orbán used is straight from Putin. After he fully seized power in Russia, authoritarians the world over flocked to Moscow to learn directly from the master. Then they went home and got to work. The Danube Institute, the Hungarian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, hosted a large neoreactionary conference where they laid out the case that democracy doesn't work. That democracy is a well-meaning but fundamentally flawed system of government. The reason they think it's flawed? Because it requires giving all people equality under the law. Women equal to men, gay equal to straight, non-Christian equal to Christian, Non-white equal to White, and this is really the only one that matters, poor equal to wealthy. The obscenely wealthy cannot comprehend a world in which the voice of those with less wealth is equal to their voice. By virtue of their enormous fortunes, taken through exploitation and inherited from their ancestors, they feel that they and they alone should have the right to govern. That they are inherently superior because they were fortunate enough to be born into lives of wealth, connection, and privilege.

Exactly. You can't gaslight away a rumbling belly.

He's already done one in Iowa, with many more yet to come.

He can't recreate them out of whole cloth, you're right. But he's got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin's world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you've ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.

Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don't like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There's also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn't exist because you can be a citizen of one of those "network states" without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)

See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire's weather/disaster alert service.

Walz has offered to do town halls in red states where Republicans have stopped doing them.

Wait, so this is spam? And y'all knew about this? She sent me a DM, too. Guys am I compromised?

This is true, the US is awful big. There's work arounds, though. Balloons aren't hard to build and launch, but the fact that they would be sending and receiving data packets directly inside US airspace would make them ridiculously easy to track and take down.

Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.

If I were Green I'd have swung it upside the head of the Sergeant-at-arms. Wouldn't be the first time a cane was swung in the Capitol.

Either Al Green or Anthony Weiner. I watched an old speech of him defending a bill to fund medical care for the first responders of 9/11, and he spoke with such fire and passion. He put House Republicans on blast for sitting on their hands and hiding behind procedure before voting "no". While we don't need people with his character flaws (he sent unsolicited dick pics to someone who may or may not have been a minor, I've read conflicting reports), we definitely need people with that kind of fire.

It's what made Elon buy Twitter.

This. They just do the work, and then if they feel like it they do a video or whatever claiming responsibility and whatever afterward. That's how Al-Qaeda did it on 9/11/2001. They just hijacked the planes and hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, then Osama bin-Laden released a statement afterwards. He didn't announce the attack beforehand. That day would have gone much differently if he had. But this isn't like some comic book or Saturday morning cartoon where the villains go on some monologue about their fiendish plot before they do it.

I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileo's old saying,

"Measure what is measurable, and make measurable that which is not so."

They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.

For the landlocked, may I recommend the Dead Drop Protocol? Leave the message in a place that everyone knows about, but only the intended recipients knows a message is there to be read. Like the Message in a Bottle, it supports all encryption methods and is disconnected from the Internet.

There are a couple drawbacks, though. For one, unless you are watching the drop point, you have no way of knowing whether your message made it to the intended recipient or if it was intercepted. Vice versa, if you are the intended recipient of a dropped message, the only guarantee you have that the message is authentic is if the message uses a self-authenticating encryption method. Also, there is a potential that any drop point you use may be under surveillance, so make sure to not use the same drop point too often.

Removed the ability to communicate cryptographically. Our only tool.

Not entirely. The old methods still work. I'm talking about old fashioned pen and paper. OTP ciphers and dead drops. Messages, hidden where only the intended recipient knows it's there. The problem is, there's no dead drops in cyberspace. There's no place one can leave a hidden message that can't be seen by others in cyberspace. And while quantum computing might break OTP, it's too expensive to use for that purpose.

There's a certain artistry to the old ways. Invisible inks, dead drops, One-Time-Pads, and the like. Cryptography existed long before computers. Those who would be our rulers have bent so much of their energies towards preventing our communicating in cyberspace that they've neglected those of us who studied the pre-Information Age methods. And we can still use them. A guy walks by a trash can, and throws away a seemingly innocuous food wrapper, and a couple hours later another guy goes and collects it, knowing that there is a message written on it in ink that can be revealed with the use of heat and lemon juice. If their intent is to return the USA to the "good ole days", then let's use the spy tricks from the "good ole days".