uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on If our present was a dystopian future, you wouldn't believe it 3 days ago:
We live in a YAF dystopia that is way less cool than most of the storybook ones.
And while every kid’s story is their chance to veer away from the usual fate of becoming a corporate cog (laborer or soldier) in a billionaire vanity project, most will just end up stuck like Winston without his nook, or will get imprisoned or will just go homeless.
- Comment on We are so cooked 3 days ago:
We’re pretty sure it’s the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we’re speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that’s a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.
I’m a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you’re a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.
Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.
- Comment on Horror 4 days ago:
Yeah, but the police don’t hover over us in Spinners as in Bladerunner. They still have to chopper from helipad to airport and ride off in air traffic, so less in our faces.
Their superfluous greenhouse emissions fit the cyberpunk vibe though.
- Comment on Appreciate the effort, but I can't handle my own shit. much less a extrovert instigating a million things to do on top of all that. 6 days ago:
It my current state of five months into a long-term psychotic break, I have the joy of feeling lonely, walking to where people are, and needing to leave immediately, and feeling lonely by the time I get home again.
What a marvel the brain can be!
- Comment on Horror 6 days ago:
I’m glad we got ubiquitous smartphones instead of only rich people having flying cars.
Still, I’m promoting way, way more punk in our cyberpunk.
- Comment on This 18th Century French Doctor Has a Solution to Oligarchy… 1 week ago:
The point of The Terror was to burn the Révolution into the skulls of generations to come by making it so horrible the ownership class would be terrified into treating the working class nicely (this was before class consciousness, so it was the Petit Bourgeoisie that actually formed the Assemblée nationale representing the third estate. They, too, are ownership class, once Marx sorted it all out.)
This is why heads had to be piled high. We were supposed to be scared into civility. But as the early 20th century demonstrated to us, it didn’t work, and we still have people voting for far-right parties in order to vote against neoliberalism (which is happening a lot in Europe right now, and is a sound explanation of why Trump still got so many votes.)
- Comment on Creating new wage slaves is child abuse 1 week ago:
65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)
Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.
One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics) . We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.
Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.
The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.
Obviously we haven’t fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.
We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.
- Comment on He's just eccentric 1 week ago:
I was eccentric when I was seven years old. They had meetings about me.
Was diagnosed with ASD around 50 years.
- Comment on frenly warnin 2 weeks ago:
I hope he gets messaged every hour about how his name might draw the wrong crowd.
Also that he needs to take pills for a bigger penis.
- Comment on Which game is it? 2 weeks ago:
Years ago, I played Homefront: The Revolution which was a ridiculous premise (North Korea magically invents and develops microcircuits in the 20th century instead of the US, and invades the US) but had solid weapons and a really great remote-control car bomb.
Its version of the flying cameras from Half Life 2 that actually identifies you and calls for reinforcements also was spot on.
It also had a pretty cool pause-screen song.
Then it had trouble working with computer upgrades, and I moved on to other things.
- Comment on #EverythingHappensForAReason 2 weeks ago:
Giving the benefit of the doubt, it’s illustrating a process for near-readymade art.
- Comment on Which game is it? 2 weeks ago:
Terraria currently. Satisfactory and DRG before.
- Comment on Why can't you just be normal? 2 weeks ago:
This is a much cooler (and much more 3D) bone than the two nodules at each end flat bone.
I get that they flattened it to make it cheaper to stamp, but still. I’m counting at least three peaks at the top.
- Comment on You have to pick one 3 weeks ago:
This is what I assumed. Assuming its non-injurious, the marble will sting a lot more, on the other hand, I’d be under a bowling ball (or holding it.)
If its at a significantly injurious amount of momentum, there is no right answer.
- Comment on Musk shares post that Hitler didn’t kill millions, public workers did. Union rages 3 weeks ago:
A) He’s doing to make the libs jump (or more accurately do something that MAGAs believe will make Libs jump.
and
B) When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Also, Behind The Bastards has done a deep dive on the life of Musk. Find it. Listen to it.
Then check your local officials and see if they’re die-hard ownership class, or can at least sympathize with the proles.
It’s time to activate. Don’t make Molitovs yet, instead find out where to march or stand. But do look at where your molotov-making supplies are.
- Comment on Why can't you just be normal? 3 weeks ago:
This raises a valid point. Why is the default bone shape an elliptic cylinder with two symmetrical nodules at each end. Even as a kid (in the 1980s) I noticed this was weird, since no bone we take meat off of or have in our body looks like that.
- Comment on I wonder if the "money can't buy you happiness" people ever lived in a car. 3 weeks ago:
Money absolutely does buy happiness until you’re in middle class and in a fulfilling job. (If you’re rich but in a shit job, it means you might have the option to work less or look for a better position.)
Money does not buy you happiness applies to people who are already rich and are looking for money to fulfill needs way high on the Maslow hierarchy. In fact, much of the tyranny and cruelty within stratified social systems comes from miserable rich people believing they should be happy due to their vast wealth and power yet are not. And our capitalist society has messages everywhere that promise that a new car, (yacht, vacation, lover, religion, etc.) will totally fulfill them and they don’t.
I mean we’ve had three billionaires shoot themselves into space. If that’s not an obvious plead to the gods or the cosmos for a taste of nirvana I don’t know what is.
Curiously, this is a thing that Jesus (and every other divine-ish wise guy) knew about: If we give away our vast fortune and live simply with that experience and wisdom, fulfillment comes. But it means overcoming greed for wealth and power, which is quicker, easier, more seductive.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 3 weeks ago:
There will be a lot of prodigal kids raised in conservative families who stay conservative. But then there will be a lot of kids who will be taught conservative values yet find as they grow up that those values don’t include them or friends, and they end up going through an identity crisis.
Adult children of conservative families grow up liberal or even radical left as they do conservative kids. There are enough unhappy childhoods to assure that’s the case.
We’re seeing this play out in Japan, which not only informs their population implosion, but also their significant rise of demographics like herbivore men who realize they’ve been culled out of the salaryman positions and are not going to be able to follow the path their parents set for them, so they stay single, and live on their own terms, even if meagerly. There is also a strong and rising feminist movement that’s emerged from a majority conservative population.
- Comment on Having a baby? Use this one weird trick! 3 weeks ago:
It’s a good era in which to not have children. Expect a lot of forsaken children.
Also expect some coerced birthing programs such as the Leibensborn program (which was also an excuse to recruit young women as sex slaves for the Schutzstaffel ) and the offspring were supported by the state and raised by the single mothers.
This is the program that inspired the Handmaid program in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, in A Handmaid’s Tale
And J. D. Vance is super thirsty for it, as is countless other Freedom caucus and MAGA Republican officials.
- Comment on The billionaires and politicians did it 3 weeks ago:
As Richard J. Murphy notes, when money goes into the hands of billionaires, it leaves the economy, getting tied up in bank reserves (or corporate reserves if invested) and into literal vaults. That money is no longer in motion, propelling trade, but gets trapped dormant.
This is why when wealth distribution graph is deeply bowed, the economy gets austere.
And as Leeja Miller notes, historically the only way such wealth ever gets redistributed to public interest (either directly to the public, or into a good-faith public-serving state) has been through violence.
Disclaimer: This is not a call for violence, only that corrections in history have involved piling aristocratic heads high after a takeover by force. The 20th century has seen a lot of progress in non-violent revolution.
Right now the ownership class has a powerful propaganda machine to dissuade protest, and mass suffering tends to lead to violent reprisal, especially when families see their own vulnerable suffering and dying, so if we don’t figure out some peaceful action that creates movement, we’ll end up with a lot of self-radicalized folk eager to die in action just to express themselves.
- Comment on Controversial question 3 weeks ago:
You’re not alone. Karel Čurda turned in Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš for assassinating Reinhard Heydrich (The naziest nazi of all the nazis, also the chief implementer of the Holocaust. Also the only assassination effort implemented by the Allies). Čurda got the reward of one million Reichmarks for betraying his own sabotage team.
Čurda would then be hanged for high treason in 1947.
- Comment on Council housing when? 3 weeks ago:
It’s a Wikipedia day, today.
- Comment on Controversial question 4 weeks ago:
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!”
- Comment on Capitalist Solidarity 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away... 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away... 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away... 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on No means no 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Bernie Sanders talking to progressives about how the Democrats' messaging needs to change [Day 82] 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Whatever it takes to get to solidarity amongst the working class. 5 weeks ago:
Our asses touched the same seat. We are brothers in revolution against the autocracy! ☭💣
Gave it a touch up.