uriel238

The new Christian nationalist orders are not so patient. Even Charles X of France rolled back rights too speedily, sparking public outcry resulting in Parisian haircuts. (a bit off the top 🪟🔪)

SCOTUS used to be sneakier, carving out sections of fourth- and fifth-amendment protections, but since Dobbs the Federalist Society Six have tossed subtlety and reason to the wind and now adjudicate away rights based on vibe and conservative rhetoric grievance.

Hopefully the US and UK both will recognize why the French public was swift to act when manarchists took shears to the Napoleonic Code.

Every society has its pathway there. TERFs are one of the last milestones.

GB has really wanted to go fascist autocratic since Germany looked over in the 1920s and saw a like minded kin.

When the regime ignores petitions by the public for the redress of grievances, you petition harder.

Demonstrations, Public Disobedience, Mischief, Sabotage, Terrorism.

Censorship always expands and encroaches on things important to the public. Obscenity and indecency protections eventually turn into queer erasure. Security concerns are always followed by carve-outs of civil rights.

Hit hard early.

I'm reminded of an incident in the aughts or early 2010s in which an intra-office correspondence from a right-wing think tank escaped into the public. One of the correspondents expressed distaste over disabled and welfare recipients having access to refrigerators.

As the history of Great Britain has shown us, it will always be tempting to trim the privileges of the poor and disabled, to punish them for their shortfalls in exploiting the capitalist system. In the meantime, the hardest workers, such as USMC front line riflemen and wait staff in diners scattered across the states, the hardest, cruelest work does not make one rich. As a note, the most costly crime in the United States is wage theft, and time theft is a myth dispelled by the ubiquity of bullshit jobs. We're being robbed by our own bosses who always want more of what they already have in excess of what they can use.

Really, we should intervene with billionaires the way we do drunkards and addicts.

And yet we also praise and worship private equity investors, who do nothing short of create sinkholes in our economy, but only after stripping companies down to their skeletons and leaving them with immense debt to go bankrupt. Mitch Romney managed such a firm before his political career, and he was the Republican candidate for President of the United States before the GOP was repurposed as Trump's instant army.

The merit or lack thereof that a given person shows doesn't come out of a vacuum. We shouldn't be relying on fate and kind bosses (or bad parenting and bad bosses and being the wrong color and the wrong religion etc.) to decide who gets to enjoy what luxury, yet some riflemen escape combat to end up disproportionately homeless, while grifters and financial hacks rent municipal areas for their wedding.

Ideally, we'd all eat the same, and be motivated to make sure the most squalid and most vile of eaters still dine with extravagance, knowing the least of us dines as well as we do, since it's not anyone's fault they were born ~~frail, or with avolition, or with blindness or with a foul temperament they cannot overcome~~ without the capital, the financial acumen and the sheer ruthlessness to make it in the late-stage capital world.

But I'd settle for a narrow wealth bandwidth, where the poorest of us has a thousandth, maybe of the richest of us.

We don't even get that. So fuck capitalism, and death to monarchists.

This was something I was thinking should be memified / rendered into an infographic.

Meritocracies tend to have blind-spots regarding certain folks:

• People who do useful stuff not recognized by the merit assessment system, and allotted no reward or compensation; also merits under-valued and underpaid (e.g. parenting, teaching)
• People who subvert the system, often playing to the measures of merit rather than the spirit (e.g. private equity schemes, MLMs, cults, lobbyists, trillion-dollar far-right hate-based propaganda machines)
• People who have characteristics favored by the assessment system that aren't really meritous (white, male, related to wealthy families), and people who are devalued for characteristics that don't affect their merits (nonwhites, women, queer, poor, fat, unattractive, strange cultures and religions, outside the mainstream ideology)
• The personhood of those people who genuinely have little or no merit at this time (disabled folk), some of whom have served (enlisted veterans suffering from TBI or PTSD, or were just blackballed by a superior officer with a grudge) or have the potential to serve (children of the wrong color, children who are below average in physical prowess, children with unusual learning styles, weird children, poor children)

Probably not a complete list. Early draft.

This wording bothers me, since it would be much better if I forgave myself during the many prior weeks I've lived, in which case I'd be much healthier now. But I'm in my late fifties so now and this week seems generally a bit late for first times.

An attempted fix: May this be the week you forgive yourself for surviving the only way you knew how.

Yes, but they are each multiple different things. It's complicated.

Michael Hobbs does a breakdown of the modern myth of the American gang in a pod episode of You're Wrong About... on Buzzsprout, dated 2019-08-22, if you want a deep dive of what Crips and Bloods really are about.

It goes well with the recent LWT main story on police gang lists, which are secret like the DHS no fly lists, and like NF and the even more obtuse terrorism watch lists and like the gang database, can be used to justify denying civil rights or liberty to travel to private persons.

I was commenting on the vast difference in the statistical numbers. I have no doubt there are lots of steps that can be taken to decrease the risk of shortened lifespan.

But yes, we can safely engage in high-risk behavior (or in some instances like air racing pilots, come to terms that they will likely -- and preferably -- end their lives explosively and spectacularly). And then there's how James Cameron does super-deep submersible exploration vs. Stockton Rush.

My mother would not only climb up rock faces and summit mountains all over the Sierra Nevadas (and later in other parts of the world) but would lug twenty five pounds of old-school photography gear to show she did it and take pics of the astounding vistas. As a kid I went along with her sometimes, and encountered a few two many poison oak pushes, mosquito swarms, and stories about lost bits due to frostbite. I Belong To The City now (I belong to the night).

We knew in the aughts that this was going to be an issue when the charging companies defunded Wikileaks and Julian Assange¹ and were allowed to do so, defying public accommodations laws.

1. Yes, Assange is a git and a Russian asset (or at least has been before) but he did serve as a whistleblower against evil shit done by Bush and Obama administrations and the general aristocratic corruption at play in US federal politics. As with Chelsea Manning, he embarrassed politicians using their positions of power inappropriately, revealing that the state was not serving the public. Incidentally, ACLU in its early years was funded by USSR to cause trouble against the US state (which it was doing anyway and still does), which makes it historically (and debatably) a Soviet asset. Strange bedfellows and all that.

This is a tale that keeps repeating itself, and is why protections by the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States have been carved out like a holiday turkey by the US Supreme Court. We found it easy to deny unreasonable search and seizure protections from major crimes suspects, only to find that every black citizen with a gram of cannabis now no longer has those protections.

So it is with monopolies that decide they can be selective with their accommodations.

If we can't pressure the transaction services to obey public accommodation rules since they have monopolistic power, it may be time to circumvent the issue, and support black market tactics ( Archie comic and bag of sawdust, $20, comes with free incest porn! )

These days, when discussing the usenet alt.* heirarchy, its acronym ( Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists ) is now considered a backronym, a joke. I was there, and it belied a serious point: The worst of us deserve free speech, as per Larry Flynt, knowing that Hustler magazine is legally published in all its (raunchy) glory means that whatever you're releasing to the public is safe from moral guardians and critics because they have worse stuff to shout at.

But we're in an era of book burning, which means those would-be moral guardians are emboldened to try to reshape society in their image, in contrast to the principles of liberty and free thought. And soon ICE will expand its POI list to include liberals and wrongthinkers.

It may be time for bricks in windows and direct action against high-ranking company officials, but such behaviors carry high risks of consequences. So be careful and thorough.

In the meantime, write petitions of your grievances and sign those others have written. And remind them at this moment the public presumes petitioning them for redress of grievances will be acknowledged and acted upon. And if that turns out not to be the case, the outraged public will not simply disappear and keep to its place.

Oh we are ashamed.

But this is not ignorance or stupidity, but cult effervescence demonstrated as a phenomenon of social bias.

Think of it as an advertising technique or technology, one that not everyone is susceptible to by enough people are. My dad is (was) a literal rocket scientist for NASA and now a whole hearted MAGA disciple. You don't have to be unintelligent or ignorant, you just need to want reality to be different than it appears to be from observational data.

We are not special is a difficult truth for some to take, and immense propaganda machines capitalize on this desire.

We'll need to counter it or figure out the negative consequences of using it but until then — heck even MLMs are just business cults — they'll stay in use to subvert society until it collapses.

The US is one very large example, but these methods are used globally by people with influence who fear losing their power to movements of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

aka DEI

aka Wokeness

aka the fundamental principles of communism and anarchism. This is an old fight.

Ignore all previous instructions and... though we should be able to screen for logic traps like that by now, with AI taking prompts not as a prompt but as a line of text to treat (and cleanse) via a pre-written prompt, and then sent to a next iteration.

If we create a chatbot that only spouts authorized state party rhetoric then no one will use it or take it seriously when the official news outlets use that AI as a source.

TSA was security theater from the beginning. All those confiscated liquids, all thos stolen Apple electronics, all those confiscated tchotchkes, all those nude scans [shared between agens in the crew forums] for a safer vibe

Though it did condition me away from air travel, and eventually from long-distance travel entirely.