Uriel238 [all pronouns] @ uriel238 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

Diffusion of Responsibility

It's a Wikipedia day, today.

The last I checked, the stats are like this:

Range: ~70 miles

Accuracy: Likely to hit Paris

Effect: About a city block or too (1/10 mile radius)

So its a terror weapon.

Mostly because our ability to organize and unify against the wealthy is overwhelmed by the wealthy's tools to keep us factioned and distrustful of each other. Hence the necessity of the fascist enemy within rhetoric.

The problem is, we humans are simple emotional beings who are really credulous when it comes to being told stuff we want to hear, and the wealthy have crafted messaging catering to this bias and wishful thinking (hence "you are the chosen people and have to massacre all the others who are spiritual flesh-eating zombies")

That sounds way cooler to the lumpen-proletariat than "you're just another commoner, but if we work together we can topple the people who hoard all the stuff and make a fun themepark for everyone!"

I pick up dog poop left by dogs other than mine. And I do it in the name of comnunism and the end of monarchy.

Yeah, my other ride is a broom and similar stickers also imply if you cross my path you better be firm in your beliefs curses don't work, because mine will find your immortal soul and drag it, screaming and writhing into the very heart of Hell.

Also my coven depends on me for the sticky-icky and some amazing baked goods. And they don't want me sad.

I might be reading a lot into it.

This family has a LOT of activities. And is middle class, but ranking enough to have free time and money to buy stuff, possibly due to the oilfield worker.

Their neighborhood has family rivalries but is knit enough to have community barbecues. My daughter has best friends and ballet partners in the community, so at least we know our neighbors as fellow parents.

Oh and if you fuck with us, we have high-powered rifles and know how to track a bitch. We also have friends with a similar set of skills.

All of us are screwed. No one is going to get out of this intact. If you're very lucky, you'll just have friends and family who have perished or are alive, traumatized and possibly maimed or gone mad from the forthcoming era. The first step is to recognize your own future is FUBAR. Now you're living to fight so that future generations might have a chance at not having to do this.

Secondly, come to terms that you're going to be in harms way. The protests that matter will be sucking up CS gas. Paramedics will be digging less-lethal bullets out of their flesh. Riot police will beat the crap out of you, maybe permanently injure you, or kill you just as apathetically as Derek Chauvin nonchalantly murdered George Floyd. If you're lucky, it'll get captured on civilian video, there will be witnesses. You'll be dead, but that death will escalate the resistance movement. When the public sees the trauma it drives them to get involved, to take action, to realize that if they don't stand on the front line, the front line will come to them.

The protests that matter are ones that scare the MAGA movement, that scare VIPs, and they will either send the police to silence you, or get friends to send the police to silence you. So at the point you hear gunfire, or feel your eyes burn, or are facing a line behind riot shields and staring down the barrel of a sniper, it means the protest you're presently in is harshing the calm of the right people.

In proper COIN (counter insurrection) the police will want to contain protests, keep them from getting violent and let the protestors scream their heads off until they get tired. Meanwhile public officials make promises to fix the problem. Hearts and minds. Trump can't help himself but not do this. Nor can the rest of MAGA, nor the Seven Mountain Mandate or the general white Christian nationalist movement. They'll send the police in with full anti-riot ordnance, and it will suck. But this kind of behavior against peaceful protests will ultimately mobilize the public. When you have (about) 3.5% of the public active in the resistance, then it starts looking like an actual revolution.

When the police switch to real bullets (or let civilian militias do the same), it becomes a state of civil war. If you're a protest, the protest is over, and it's time to escape, rally, and look to serve the war effort. Expect everyone you know to end up either dead or not quite alive (maimed, critically wounded, traumatized, etc.) No one gets out intact.

Peaceful protests have a better chance of implementing change. The sooner we can face down the autocrats and their MAGA goons, the fewer people have to suffer trauma or die to stop them. In the worst case, Chinese bombers will hammer Washington until some official relays an unconditional surrender. Let's not let it get there.

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.

The eventual outcome of this sort of thing is more widespread use of steganographic data storage schemes. We already have plenty, such as ones that make your data look like unused LTS blocks of garbage and code blocks with multiple hidden partitions, so that you can open one block showing pedestrian data and the court unable to prove there are other hidden blocks.

These are technologies that already exist for those people who are really interested preserving their renegade data.

But if I own a business and I don't want my rivals reading my accounting, and open crypto is illegal, I may go stegan whether or not I have secret slush funds.

It sounds like you haven't observed the conversation.

And it's not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

You're asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You're asking for a mathematical impossibility.

And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.

Look at who owns the copyrights. It's not Mark Knopfler, it's Sony.

Copyright is entirely IP and does not serve its original function (according to the Constitution of the United States), To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts rather inhibits innovation by unlicensed actors.

Fuck copyright. Fuck patents. Fuck IP.

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.

The comic appears to be asking why the Rebel Alliance is fighting an autocratic regime with words rather than guns, and the answer is, it's a different segment in the timeline.

A better satire would be when Hydra ( ALL HAIL HYDRA ) took over SHIELD. That is essentially what happened. Only Hydra agents are instilled with a cartoony compulsion to out themselves, while the MAGAs often don't realize they are part of the movement, identifying with esoteric subfactions of the movement which feel different but are still loyal and still would kill liberals and immigrants if they had half the chance.

And part of the failing of SHIELD (and the Avengers) is they protect an untennable status quo that allows for people by the billions to do without resources. In the MCU, only the people who can actually afford Disneyland vacations matter. The homeless, destitute and displaced refugees do not.

I'm not an academically trained scholar regarding left-wing theory, but I'd assume that communists and social democrats are still part of the same group, with one naming themselves after a shorter-term goal-state, and the other naming themselves after a longer-term goal-state.

When we talk about state models such as republic, democracy, autocracy, we're either describing a current status, or a model we might want to follow or avoid. When we talk about ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, communism, feminism, etc.) they assert specific values and presumptions that might or might not be true or workable. For instance, in the communist ideal, every participant has exactly the same amount of political and material power; influence is perfectly distributed. But we have no idea how a state like that would look, or work, or if we could ever get there.

Every model and every ideology has problems and concessions we don't understand and have to correct for. The one-person = one-vote thing seems intuitive for democracy, but has terrible side effects, and we're still sorting out alternative election models that might work better.

All this is to say it's a really bad idea to treat any one of them as a racehorse or football team or a banner under which to rally and consolidate political power. None of the models or ideals we have are perfect or absolute, and we have to be prepared to adjust them on the fly, especially as we contend with corruption and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities.

I suspect everyone on the left ultimately seeks a society in which everyone is materially provided for, in which liberties are as extensive as possible while providing for protections and considering human biases towards certain abberant behavior (e.g. drunk driving) in which there are as few social strata as possible and power is as well distributed as possible. The models that accommodate all these, even to partial degrees, are still very fuzzy. (Western civilization has been working on them for only three hundred years or so.)

So we're at least in the same book, if not on the same page.

The Egg has to go through a LOT of cyanobacteria. Of course it could just be that patient.

It was the petit bourgeoisie that started the French Revolution after the Estates General of 1789 and the commoners followed them. I was basing the Rebel Alliance after them, hinted at since among the promoted soldiers in Rebel Alliance command were not-just-a-few nobles.

ETA: Of course the people should, if they can on their own, seize the means of production and overthrow the ownership class. WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS! 💣

A couple of points:

1) The Alliance formed after a good chunk of the Galactic Empire was feeling the pressure of being imperial rather than republic. Granted, the republic was corrupt like Chicago during Prohibition, but while it existed many of the public departments were still actively serving their role (more or less).

2) The Alliance was not formed from the proletariat, but the noble houses and companies pushed out (who fell out of favor) when the empire rose. Their plan was to restore the republic system that recognized their wealth and political power. And there might have been a period like this comic when Imperial interests were willfully lying to opposition parties and interests to prolong the time before they got serious and formed a military.

3) It was atrocities like Alderaan that really fueled recruitment into the Alliance. Every young person who had family lost in the Alderaan event at least considered joining up, and if they were sympathetic to the Alliance (or had no loyalty to the Empire) were inclined to do so even if their prior ambitions were apolitical, e.g. art or medicine or civil engineering or whatever. ALSO Alderaan was only the most recent atrocity committed by the Empire in the name of enforcing its political power. And (as per long-studied Counter Insurgency) every act of brutality by tyranny draws more of the population into the resistance. The Alliance was just the most popular and best supported movement.

4) NOTE: This is speculation based on circumstances, much like the Endor Holocaust (The EH is implied by the ROTJ events but was later rectconned out via additional canon): The final point of the Death Star is not merely to be a planet-destroying superweapon but a mining tool to crack open (lifeless or evacuated) planets to get to interior precious minerals. While its success as such a tool might be uncertain, had it not been destroyed, the hope by its crew, engineers and support staff was that the superlaser would not often be used as a military device (optimally never again!) but could still be used in the process of gathering necessary resources.

Recently Google decided to enforce its storage limits, which is how I discovered most of my Google cloud storage was backed up photos I never once asked Google to back up. It was... tedious getting them deleted, and I had to desync my phone lest it also delete my device's gallery as well.

It all seemed to be a ploy to force me to buy more cloud storage space. Thank you, no.

The Democratic Party needs to go hard into socialized services or just pack up. Right now it looks complicit in the GOP coup d'etat.

The same, incidentally is true for the Labor party in UK, and for the other neoliberal parties all throughout Europe. Serve the people for realsies this time, or pack up as the Neville Chamberlain party.

Our asses touched the same seat. We are brothers in revolution against the autocracy! ☭💣

Gave it a touch up.