uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Capitalist Solidarity 1 week 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... 1 week 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... 1 week 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... 1 week 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 1 week 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] 1 week 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. 1 week ago:
Our asses touched the same seat. We are brothers in revolution against the autocracy! ☭💣
Gave it a touch up.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Sadly, during DADT, the rate of discharges due to outing was at a higher rate than before DADT.
In the US military, DEI is not merely about readiness, but about recruitment and retention as well. Seriously, we counter-recruiters already have enough material to illustrate how joining up is a Really Bad Idea.™
- Comment on Washington DC to be renamed to St Donaldsburg 1 week ago:
For a while it was Leningrad.
- Comment on Washington DC to be renamed to St Donaldsburg 1 week ago:
Trumpgrad!
- Comment on OH GOD 2 weeks ago:
This is, really, any choice terrain occupied by a regional people that is equally coveted by nearby empires. Another example is Korea, wanted by China, Russia and Japan so much you could make an epic RTS game out of the fighting going on there. It also features its own legends, like Queen Min who refused to stay in her place as a woman, ran a spy network that saw the industrialization of Japan (and the imminent threat that posed), and she was ultimately assassinated by a platoon of literal ninjas.
Poland has its own legends, including obtaining the Enigma machine and making sure the allies all had one and the current protocol two weeks before the Germans invaded.
I like the Polish Home Army version of the Molotov Cocktail which added sulfuric acid and a sugar–potassium-nitrate saturated (dry) rag, that didn’t need to be pre-ignited, but would self ignite when the bottled fluid mixed with the rag.
- Comment on It's like throwing Fabergé Eggs at walls for amusement 2 weeks ago:
I TELL YOU WHEN I’VE HAD ENOUGH!
- Comment on "Poetic take" on the state of the US 3 weeks ago:
To the secular and the naturalist, this tells us it was a problem even then.
- Comment on Eat that ramen 4 weeks ago:
A climate crisis! Global famine coming soon!
It’ll be like the Mad Max series with fewer cars and more cannibalism. (You think I’m kidding?)
- Comment on Have you tried coping harder? 4 weeks ago:
Under the Stalinist soviet communism, which was dictatorship
How about under Zapatista communism (which is still going on)? Or Black Panther communism, at least until the FBI (under J. Edgar Hoover, so acting as the capitalist state’s secret police) massacred the BP administrative leaders?
Tell us more about the joys of capitalist healthcare. At least for the common American, we get bare minimum socialized healthcare, and even it is on the chopping block. The rest is an insurance company that willfully (and oddly, legally) dodges its only job, and a medical system so hyperinflated it puts people into lifelong debt.
So STFU with jingoistic platitudes and virtue-signaling to your fellow MAGAs, and put up a real argument.
Or not.
- Comment on They're coming 4 weeks ago:
I downloaded Lemmy because social media fulfills some social needs, and it’s a nicer place than Reddit. And I avoid Twitter and Facebook like I do hipster singles bars.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 4 weeks ago:
We’ve actually seen the ubiquitous camera thing become an issue during the George Floyd protests of 2020, and yeah the police were brutal, pushed by President Trump, only causing the protests to double in size.
The French Résistance didn’t have the cameras, but the ill behavior of the Germans was ubiquitous, itself, despite e4fforts from the overseeing administration to advise them to be nice. They just couldn’t help themselves.
Technology is a factor, as are countless other circumstances. It’ll be interesting to see when video of the ICE raids start emerging again.
- Comment on someone tell Luigi about this 4 weeks ago:
Actually, something that focused the report forward in a narrow wave would be super useful.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 4 weeks ago:
Ministerialdirektor Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger of the Reich Chancellery: Who were those 30,000 [Jews] you say you shot, when you say, you shot?
SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Rudolf Lange, Commander of the Sicherheitsdienst in Latvia: In Riga, Latvia. 27,800 I have some responsibility for. And stood by with my men and allowed Latvian civilians to kill in mobs. I received memos directing the – one would say evacuation of Jews – who, shot and buried in soil and corpses, managed to crawl out, still alive. Not exactly war, is it? And gas chambers about to come?
Kritzinger: What gas chambers? Gas chambers?
Lange: I hear rumors, yes.
Kritzinger: This is more than war. Must be a different word for this.
Lange: Try chaos.
Kritzinger: Yes. The rest is argument, the curse of my profession.
Lange: I studied law as well.
Kritzinger: And how do you apply that education to what you do?
Lange: It has made me distrustful of language. A gun means what it says.– Conspiracy 2001, based on the captured minutes of the Wannsee Conference
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 4 weeks ago:
Fascism is a tool for autocrats to keep public discontent and unrest down for a while, but it is temporary, and invariably results in purge after purge after purge. Eventually the state has to resort to war against outward enemies, and if it’s not put down by assassination and revolution, it’s put down when the Allies are bombing the capitol.
The people lose a lot harder if the Allies reach Berlin, which is why there are thirty-nine known attempts to kill Hitler, culminating in the July 20 Plot.|
Scabs exist, but they’re expensive and universally hated by both sides.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 4 weeks ago:
Police brutality against the working class tends to make sympathists of onlookers, activists of sympathists, militants of activists and radical militants of ordinary militants.
So, one could only hope. They usually go this route, and then we have legendary responses like the French Résistance , or for that matter, the French Revolution.
Except in the twenty-first century, we get to record the brutality and fighting on video so the public can be inspired.
So until the general public is out numbered and outgunned by AI-commanded armies of swarming killer robots (a near future possibility), brutality by the state is always to the advantage of the movement, even if it doesn’t go so well for the individuals who perish in the conflict. Mahsa Amini never got to enjoy the uprising she started (and ended with negotiation) in Iran, and that’s a crying shame.
It says right there in the COIN manual (a running treatise of counter-insurgency in development for centuries) that you don’t brutalize the protestors, but have to capture hearts and minds, and also respond with good governance. And curiously, every autocratic despot seems to refuse to try this.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 4 weeks ago:
One way to escalate such a strike is to have a limited, general, recurring and escalating strike.
So it’s a day in January; two days in February; three in March, etc.
Its complicated, possibly too complicated for the typical worker, but it would give ramping escalation and allow for negotiation in process.
the problem remains the same: getting the general public to heed a strike. Short of people dying by hundreds of thousands, they don’t seem motivated.
- Comment on mrw someone tries to proselytize Christianity to me [Day 64] 4 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on I get dumped on at work all the time. The least I can do is return the favor. 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 4 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 4 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 4 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 4 weeks ago:
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 resources they consume, 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.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 4 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on Don't forget where we came from and what shaped us as a species. The Jungle. 4 weeks ago:
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.