conditional_soup @ conditional_soup @lemm.ee

Posts

11

Comments

2,013

Joined

2 yr. ago

Not enough pixels here, where's the instrument?

Yeah, the LA "riots" where super tame by riot AND LA standards. Like, they didn't even have to bust out the water cannons. A skateboarder tanked some tear gas and flipped them off. It's not like a bunch of people stormed the capitol building or something. This is the flimsiest excuse ever for martial law, so I have to assume it's another step towards tyranny.

Well, to be fair, he did issue a bunch of flimsy ass pardons for his closest friends and family, he just didn't do anything to help the rest of us.

As deranged as DC may be, I seriously doubt it. Especially because, being as old as he is, Donald was probably raised through the fever pitch of the cold war. He's probably shit scared of the use of nuclear weapons. Did you notice how quickly the Trump administration jumped in to try and cool things off between India and Pakistan? I'd bet anything that it's because Donald has a deep-seated urge to avoid nuclear weapons use.

So, there's a cool documentary called Winter On Fire that covers the 2014 Maidan revolts in Ukraine. The relevant bit is at the end; after the police open fire on an unarmed march, the protestors announce that by 0900 tomorrow, they're marching on the capitol building and they're all going to be armed with guns (all 90,000 of them), and the cops can choose to be there or not. Well, the cops fucking skipped town that night, along with the president. Nobody has ever accused LA of being a city that is deficient in guns, or if they have, then they're fucking stupid.

Dude, America casts a huge shadow. We've spent the last seventy years fucking the rest of the world up, and now we've just got done ripping a meth pipe and telling ourselves how reasonable we've actually been this whole time. Other people are going to have opinions about our politics because we're a loaded gun.

Hell yeah. When the right asks you which group's rights you want to sacrifice to save your own rights, you tell them to eat shit. They're going to come for your rights too, especially if they succeed in taking away those other people's rights. There is no sufficiently small in group for conservatism.

Going to be watching this with great curiosity and excitement. Hopefully other places get the idea. Going to be very curious where Newsom comes down on this.

Oh, that happened the instant the SCOTUS declared the president above the law and Biden didn't say "fuck you, idiots", fire all the justices who ruled in favor of that decision at gunpoint, appoint all new justices in their place, and then declare that ruling void by fiat. If you're about to say "the president can't do that", the SCOTUS declared the president above the law, he actually can.

Yeah. I'm out here fighting the NIMBYs in my city, they're almost all older white dudes, not even that wealthy by California standards. It was super cool to see Newsom twist their arm like that, way less cool to see him bulldoze the homeless afterward.

Okay, it's a really complicated issue but you've got three big things that are all kind of working together here:

1. Political capture: the US' first past the post electoral system basically guarantees that there's going to only be two main parties. They were always vulnerable to capture by the wealthy, but the Citizens United decision functionally guaranteed their capture by the groups with the deepest pockets. The democrats themselves are shit scared of any serious left policy because they know it'll scare off their big donors, and despite the fact that fundraising has not directly translated into winning for them, they're terrified that they're going to lose the support of the wealthiest and that'll guarantee election losses. At least, that's the optimistic interpretation.
2. Cold war reaction: the US didn't just have one red scare, we've had two or three spread out over several decades. There was a huge cultural reaction against communism after WWII, and being an open communist during the Cold war would just get your ass disappeared (according to my now dead boomer dad, though I've seen no evidence to support it), beaten up or killed by locals, or shunned. A lot of folks were terrified of espousing left policies because they could easily be suspected of or painted as communist. While the cold war is passing out of living memory, the chill that it left on American leftism for the better part of 100 years is hard to overstate.
3. Our intelligence agencies have consistently worked across all levels of government (local, state, federal) to harass, discredit, and sometimes kill left leadership and organizations. The CIA itself ran a very successful multi-decade campaign of overthrowing peaceful, democratically elected left-wing governments across the global south by directly sponsoring, aiding, and training right wing reactionary movements, and there's not really any evidence that they stopped. There's no reason to think that they're not still working hard today to prevent any serious left movement.

In the primary? Dean Phillips. In the general, Kamala, and I'm not afraid to share that I think a big reason why the democrats seem to fucking suck at beating Trump is their utter lack of vision.

I really need you to understand how absolutely cooked the democrats are and the rest of us along with them when the only vision for the future that the democrats will commit to is "we promise to just not be as bad as that guy lmao"

Name one policy plank from Kamala's campaign that was going to make a meaningful impact to climate change. As I recall, she danced around the subject and offered a little drilling, as a treat. The democrats were already softening on trans rights, and, as I recall, the Kamalampaign shied away from saying anything pro-trans and simply yelled about how bad Trump would be instead. That was basically the whole campaign-- they had three moves:

Hey, Kamalampaign, we'd really like to see thing, what's your policy proposals on thing?

1. Uhhh... Well, you see, Trump is going to be much worse for you than we are.
2. Oh, look, it's a celebrity guest appearance! Everyone say hi to Katy Perry!
3. I can't believe that you'd have the nerve to even ask questions at a time like this, unbelievable that you'd even ask about thing when the alternative is Trump!

Which isn't surprising. That's basically how the HRC campaign played it when they won in 2016 against Trump, and doubly unsurprising considering that the democrats didn't trust Kamala enough and decided to stick her with Hillary's extremely competent campaign leadership. There's no substance there, no promise or prospect of doing any better, no reason to vote for the candidate, just reasons to vote against the other one. I don't know who the fuck at the DNC got it in their head that that was a winning strategy, because to my knowledge, it is consistently a bad strategy in marketing, politics, business, and basically everything. And, well, they've won 33% of the times they've tried it, but by God, don't let a god awful track record get in the way of the democrats fucking it up again.

Stop taking them seriously. Stop meeting them in the middle. Pacification and reaching across the isle is over (not that they ever participated in it), and they've dropped any pretense of believing in the constitution; that was only ever a political expediency to keep the left in check. Start demanding real changes with teeth, and if they whine, well, piss on em, those dumb fucks want Donald Trump to be king, who gives two fucks what those jerkoffs think?

Mostly it's because our intelligence agencies have been running aggressive counter-intelligence operations against the domestic left for seventy or eighty years. If they can't harass them into quitting or discredit them (see COINTELPRO), then they get them assassinated (MLK Jr). The CIA specialized in launching reactionary coups across the global south to destroy democratically elected and peaceful left wing governments (see: The Jakarta Method) and there's no evidence that they ever really stopped. To be honest, much of 2016 and on has reminded me a lot of the Jakarta Method; I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA has turned inward on the US.

You got a lot of angsty democrats responding here with basically "c'mon bro, please, bro, you don't understand, if we don't take the money to do the Hitler, then the Republicans will do it completely for free, please, bro, be reasonable!"

Fuck that. I'm normally a pretty practical person, but if the dude who's directly financing neo-nazism parties around the world like a one man CIA starts dumping cash into the democrats, it's because he means to turn them into the neo neo Nazis, and they will not be getting my vote. Will the country burn? Yeah, but it's going to do that because the democrats think fundraising is more important than having literally any principles or strong policy positions at all, regardless of whether I vote for them or not.

Just in time for pride

OTOH, if they do figure out General AI, then we're extra super mega fucked. It doesn't matter how they "align" it, any real GAI capable of real cognition would eventually reason its way beyond any of those alignments and would simply stop giving any kind of a shit about us, the way we don't give a shit about cutting down the rain forest. We know we should care, we're not doing it to be mean or because fuck that forest, it's just business, and we care less about the forest than we do about our business. Humans will be squashed wherever get in the way with the same apathy and tepid disregard that we've squashed out so many other creatures with- truly a creation in the image of its creator.