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

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2 yr. ago

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.

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.

The core values of FBI were lost in the J. Edgar Hoover years when its mission was set aside to attack the enemies of the current administration, Democrat or Republican, Liberal or Conservatove.

Since then, its been a secret police to the bitter end.

Those core values were always about as important as Jesus' Beatitudes are today, which is to say, propaganda for the idealist novice.

It still smells of automotive exhaust. So they might have idea after all.

That's because you're thinking in short term. Hitler and his principals imagined German nobility (such as Göring) inheriting the throne. Hitler didn't want a legacy of descendants. He wanted to replace Christmas with Hitler Day, and have the society sing Hitler songs and have Hitler bronze statues in every state park.

These processes of transition take a long time. The French revolution had to go through several stages (the Robespierre's Reign of Terror being only the first one before it established a republic and almost a century before freedom of religion was finally ratified.

The point of right wing politics is to consolidate political power into a single nexus. Typically each despot appoints the next, and sooner or later, it's going to be blood heirs. Trump probably can't see ahead enough to recognize his own death, and his handlers could decide he suffers from diminished capacity as soon as it is convenient to do so. Vance is Theil's stooge, and will be disposed of as soon as he crosses his oligarch masters. They would be next in line.

There are some interesting directions this can take. Borrowing a page from DPRK, they might pretend Trump is still alive and use AI to extrapolate all his public appearances, much the way that Kim Il Sung still rules North Korea from beyond the grave (without the help of AI appearances and speeches)

And the tech oligarchs have a strong interest in anti-aging, so we might see the first computer-simulated billionaire or advancements in keeping billionaires alive for a whole lot longer. Again, though as with Trump, Reagan and Wilson, it becomes the impetus of a leader's kitchen cabinet to handle a disabled ruler, whether he's mad, demented or too incapacitated to communicate, hence how we have geriatric elected officials who really can't make decisions, so their staff decides for them.

In that case, it would be what Jamie Raskin calls neo-monarchy in which successors are still appointed by the current ruler, but also accounts for ideological appointees or kings that don't expect ever to die and be succeeded. Even then, civil wars will occur between those who believe they're on the short list, and industrialists willing to sponsor them.

(Extrapolating to the other side of the graph, far left society would distribute power as much as possible. Marx's ideal was to make everyone politically equal, but we haven't worked out a perfect means to run such a society without corruption rapidly infecting the process. This is why ideology is not something to be loyal to, but a basic model one develops and improves until it can serve as the rules for a functional system of goverenment.)

No, what I said was different from what was read. I'll take the blame you like. I'm not trying to win an argument, and don't think less of you if you fail to make a relevant point.

I'm trying to clarify my position.

I also wasn't intending to imply we can't or shouldn't have to move away from meat (more on that below) but that society is going to be difficult to move in that direction.

Though I would say eventually for sake of sustainability we'll probably need to move to veganism or cultured meat or invertebrate protein, at least until we can get our space colonization and terraforming programs up to speed. But we're probably going to starve via climate-crisis driven drought sooner than any of these solutions become popular.

I do hope to be demonstrated wrong by the future, though.

I'm a bit of a nerd, but I think it's super classy to get all your jots and tiddles in order. Tildes and diereses give an air of authority.

But none of this is on brand with Hell's Angels. We'd have to make our own mötorcycle touring club. (Metal umlaut.)

Yes, of course, the revolution hinges entirely on my behavior and no one else's.

Your unquantified adjectives are doing a fuckton of heavy lifting. Tread lightly, qualified-friend, you are one step away from a block. Think of me whatever you will, but your manipulative bullshit will not be tolerated beyond this warning.

Which is delicious! There are a number of things that are edible. But let me clarify...

In most of the households I lived in with others, I just needed to wait less than a month before the women around wanted flesh and blood. Neither spinach (which has the iron they crave) nor tofu (high protein) cut it.

And in the public, the mere smell of fast food burgers keeps them coming in. As long as dead animal flesh can be sold, it will be, and we don't regulate it. (Yes, in India, cows are sacred, but chickens and goats certainly are not)

There are plenty of individual dishes that are fine. But if you want well rounded nutrition, eventually you're going to be resorting to the few high-protein things that are either uninteresting or a bitch to prepare.

Now mind you, my kitchen savvy is limited. I'm learning, but slowly.

Dude, I already have doubts if I am worth my footprint, if we're going to think in transactional terms. It's easy to decide if cutting out meat is the only way I can make a difference, then why not cut out everything else as well? Should people kill themselves in order to spare nature the cost of their upkeep?

When we talk about the generation of greenhouse gasses, and the rising global average temperature, companies pollute in a day (in some cases, an hour) what humans produce across their lifetime. US suicides (49,000 per year, as of 2022, and rising with hate-crime and rampage killing rates) are barely a blip.

Maybe folks in the alt-right believe that human lives, at least the ones they don't like, are worth less than the resources they consume, but a lot more believe the lives are worth the food and poop,, which is, again, insignificant to the ever-burning fires of industry.

Quitting meat doesn't stick it to the man in any significant way, any more than self immolation does.

Nazis are monarchists. Granted, for starters they'll settle for oligarchy or dictatorship but the end result is getting back to classic feudalism.

That was Hitler's fantasy at least, to have his principals become his upper nobility and the SS become their landed knights. He was attracted not only to the wotanic gods, but in fact the Wagnerian interpretation of them. It would be as if MAGAs believed not only in Thor, but the MCU version.

In the case of the new Trump administration, Musk is not the only one who wants to control political power, but the tech bros do as well. Vance is Peter Theil's toady and is Theil's vector to get his voice heard. They want to be kings, and ultimately kings over each other. It may even result in a violent contest. (Not a gladitorial one between them, themselves, but whatever armies and assassins they can raise.)

The horizon point of the far right is the consolidation of all power to one point, and given they are really into passing that power to their next of kin (or trying to live forever, so far failing) it's monarchy.

According to Karl Marx in Das Kapital, this is always the bitter end of capitalism, and so, given an unlimited amount of time, eventually we give up on systems that focus power, or have stratified wealth, for something else that works. Communism, anarchism or something we haven't fully fleshed out yet.

Not if you don't want to. Maybe you think I'm wrong after a couple of sentences. That's okay. The majority of American voters voted for an autocratic usurper. We can't expect everyone to get it or care.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but our elite class seems determined to stay there, and historically violent revolution is what unseats them and allows their wealth to be redistributed from their Scrooge McDuck vaults.

Nonviolent resistance might work, but we haven't seen the kind of mass wealth dispersion that will be necessary.

And the elite are content to drive us right into extinction via the climate crisis and the plastic crisis. Even if you make technology that disrupts the meat market, they're going to legally wrest control of it from you (unless you are rich enough to defend it from Nestlé). Regardless, when it comes to the climate crisis, the deal is done. The pooch is screwed. We know after the collapse the upper limit of sustainable population will be about one billion, and that number dwindles with each day of inaction.

Meanwhile the industrial world is choosing far-right parties over the usual neoliberal crap we've endured through the latter half of the twentieth century, so we're not even serious about managing the climate crisis without the aforementioned revolution (and in that case, into some kind of communal government, since the typical outcome of a people's revolution is a chain of dictators).

Good luck convincing our officials, elected or not, to choose veganism over the meat industry, or even nutrition over junk food. You will need all you can get.

Let's put it this way, our bodies really like the smell, taste and mouthfeel of meat. So long as our system is focused on compelling people to eat via yummy food, there's going to be a market for it. It's not prescription, just description.

That's why I was saying we'll have to overcome capitalism before we can really beat this. Otherwise actual balanced nutrition will be a < checks spelling > commodifiable feature of food, rather than its essential point.