uriel238
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 6 hours ago:
I am not surprised, nor am I impressed.
Don’t bother blocking me. I’ll do it for you.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 6 hours ago:
Smaller insular groups get wiped out by infectious diseases, but they don’t communicate them to other insular groups. And that is the going hypothesis of why we really like to organize in small bands about the size of our Facebook friends list, and want to throw rocks at people from other tribes.
Larger intermixing populations gain their immunity by first having a lot of them die off. This is one of the benefits(?) of ranching livestock, since they’re a vector for diseases that commonly get transmitted to their human owners. The epidemics happen, and then the survivors have the antibodies, and even pass them on to their kin.
Nowadays, we have centralized disease control. It may be failing in the US but the rest of the developed world still have a robust system. But human beings haven’t had time to evolve (very much) towards large pluralistic societies that combat disease through science and proactive prevention.
Given enough time, I’d think we might, since large pluralistic societies also develop science, technology and arts much faster in general, often much to the chagrin of moral guardians like religious ministries.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 7 hours ago:
You’re engaging in violence fantasy. If you were here and tried to carry it out, you’d be dead and countless innocents piled on top of you.
You’re also totally underestimating the size of the response necessary.
Additionally, far-right Charlie Kirks are sponsored by the oligarchs, while far left ones are labeled as terrorists and hunted down by regime paramilitaries. We’ve seen this both during the German Reich and during the US civil rights movement. Why do you think the entire developed world is determined to strip anonymity from social media access?
We’re not fighting against a unite-the-right rally. We’re fighting the entirety of the federal government, and cooperating state governments.
You’re also asking some of us to sacrifice ourselves, which is a huge ask on its own. But the least we need to do is make sure those sacrifices aren’t in vein.
Something tells me you’ve never been in a society under attack by a captured government. Something tells me that you’d cow in your own dwelling if the circumstances rapidly developed around you. But do feel free to tell specific tales if I’m wrong. I’ll read them.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 7 hours ago:
Such as?
To fix this we need to organize twelve million Americans. We could seize Washington by force. Occupying Washington with six million supported by the other six would likely be enough. Or we could stage a general strike and support those workers not earning a living.
But we need to create a larger organized revolt than has ever been done before. And we’ll need a manifesto that everyone can agree on.
It turns out that’s actually quite difficult.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 7 hours ago:
Firstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.
The whole point of post-enlightenment civilizations is to treat everyone equally. But the US’ economy depended on slavery, and we weren’t ready to give rights to women, and those left cracks fit for social wedges.
Secondly, racism is a tool and always has been. The owner class has always resented the working class, and now they can live so far removed from us that they don’t even pretend or develop empathy by sharing the street with us. Heck Thiel wants to make his own Rapture in which everything is automated.
Racism is the hook by which the massive, oligarch-owned, far-right, propaganda machine draws in its viewership before feeding them the MAGA ideology and encouraging them to isolate themselves from all other information sources (and the libs). It turns out in the last century we’ve developed a lot of psychology. It’s just not used as much to heal minds.
But the owner class hates us all. It may hate non-white non-Christians slightly more, but the thing that disgusts them the most about us, by far, is that we are poor. And they’re just as eager to deny us a means to survive as working-class white men would to black men.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 7 hours ago:
Oh it’s worse than that. Once America’s billionaires plunder the US treasury and tank the bond market (so we can’t borrow any more), they’ll make good their escape and then do the same to the rest of the developed world.
They’re richer than any royalty or industrialist robber baron has in history by at least a factor of four, and can afford to buy all the elections and capture all of the governments.
Quarries and data centers as far as the eye can see.
- Comment on The American Dream, minus 60% 7 hours ago:
We only need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
Sadly, we’ll need to organize twelve million Americans to counter this.
- Comment on Walmart actually teaches their employees how to get food stamps 7 hours ago:
Although, the billionaires and trillionaires are a symptom of the endgame. By far, most of our billionaires attained their wealth though financialization, that is to say financial shenanigans that do not produce value and wreak havoc on the economy.
An example is private equity, which is what happened to Toys 'R Us, Radio Shack, Claires, and countless other brands.
Normally, once the feds detect financial shenanigans, we outlaw them under fraud. But the owner class reacts by capturing regulatory agencies and/or defunding them so they can’t enforce their regulations. Citizens United was the death knell for the US.
It’s going to take ending the owner class to get out of this mess, and if wait too long, the ultra wealthy are rich enough to do the same thing to the rest of the developed world.
And we have to do it before we run out of water.
- Comment on Walmart actually teaches their employees how to get food stamps 8 hours ago:
Pro tip: They never did.
(on YouTube)
- Comment on A reminder 8 hours ago:
The problem with being at the bottom of the second estate is that the ones at the top are entirely cutthroat and exclusionist. As Corey Doctorow notes, the owner class thinks there’s just too many people, hence the AI fantasy of automating all the peasant and middle-class work. (Both the first and third estates.) But they also think the owner class itself is too populous.
It may be a while before the goon squads get down the purge list to come for the Thromby level plutocrats, but they are on the list.
The ultra-wealthy are also greedy AF. There’s a story about when Carnegie figured out that J.P. Morgan would totally knife him if it meant getting his assets. He stopped associating with Morgan soon after. People like Thiel, Bezos and Musk have revealed themselves to the public to show they are exactly that level of ruthless.
- Comment on A reminder 8 hours ago:
Larry Lessig made this point, that the people who get representation are the ones who donate the maximum allowable direct donation to their campaign. (Even that is peanuts compared to super-PAC money and dark money, but it’s worthy of an annual Christmas card, and even a fruit basket.)
The difference is that you still need half a brain. This is the 1970s George Lucas level, where he still has to listen to experts or (in the case of ESB hire experts to direct his movie for him). In fact, a note to boards of directors everywhere, this is where you want your C-Suite to be and stay, so that they use data-driven science to determine their management policies, which will maximize profits. Contrast our vindictive tech billionaires whose hiring and firing practice is brain-draining their own companies, and wrecking the entry-level job market which is where they would glean their future expertise. (Sorry. This is a specific rant of mine.)
Once you get sufficiently rich (a billion will more than qualify) then you make money whether or not you do anything, and, as Zuckerberg and George W. Bush have demonstrated, you can do an awful lot of stupid and still fail upwards.
- Comment on The good old days 2 days ago:
I recently used this as an example of how mass surveillance escalates suspicion. If you drive home from work the same way for months and then change your route, that can be grounds for suspicion and investigation. Nevermind, you just charted a better path home.
And as law enforcement works in the US, post PATRIOT act, if you can be investigated under general suspicion, rather than for a specific crime. And you will be charged for any crimes discovered. And if you are in sight of the police (e.g. in an ALPR database) then every possible set of behaviors and conditions are suspicious.
- Comment on An American city has been without power for 2 weeks, unacceptable. 3 days ago:
I’m pretty sure the US had its hooks into the rest of the Americas. It engaged in a lot of interventionism in the name of containment during the twentieth century. The stereotype of the banana republic comes from US political capture of tropical states in the name of large corporate fruit growers.
- Comment on US corporate profits surge to record as worker payouts wilt 3 days ago:
Sadly, it’s not easy to organize twelve million Americans.
- Comment on A reminder 3 days ago:
Because of that whole exponential thing, millionaires and ten-millionaires are actually closer to the rest of us working class folk than they are their billionaire owner-class brethren.
And this is going to be important when the ultra-wealthy decide to reveal their less-rich near-peers aren’t actually in the oligarchs club, and don’t get to live in Thiel’s Rapture-style hypercities with the real people.
- Comment on A reminder 3 days ago:
A good concept to pass around is contrived desperation or manufactured desperation. The notion that desperation circumstances like the affordability crisis are intentionally developed by the ownership class so that workers will accept low wages, poor benefits, harsh conditions and abuse by their management and colleagues.
An extreme fictional example is in the TV series Squid Game. The players quit in the opening episode after they learn that the stakes of the game are their own lives, and only one out player would survive. But then (in the second ep) they return to their prior lives in which their financial situation is so dire, it compels them to return to the game.
The Epstein child sex ring is a strong non-fictional example of contrived desperation. The girls under Epstein’s employ quickly learned they were being groomed to be sexually exploited. But they were drawn from communities that offered few opportunities.¹ Girls quickly learned that they could escape their dire circumstances at home so long as they agreed to play ball, and be complicit in their own sexual exploitation.
We’re seeing another example in the US armed forces. All branches are achieving their recruitment quotas. Despite the news of the dire circumstances of the Abraham Lincoln. Despite that the military is deployed in an active theater. Despite that rates of abuse of enlisteds, especially of women, has only escalated since Hegseth’s tenure as SoD and his warrior ethos. Despite that the US is considering putting boots on the ground in Iran and Cuba.
When the ownership class is sufficiently removed from the working class, it loses touch, and stops empathizing, and then starts contriving desperation to get workers to stay in their place. Unions can be an effective countermeasure, though they are often busted by the political class and the police.
And that’s because a growing number of people are finding they have no other opportunities to stay above water. People are going into credit-card debt and skipping meals, and working 40+ hours a week. They are three very bad months away from being homeless already, and their numbers are growing.
¹ Epstein’s early victims were girls from post-Soviet Russia. During the collapse, the most popular career for young women was wage prostitute and children in the streets offering sexual favors for money were commonplace. It was an entire failing nation of desperate teenage girls.
- Comment on US corporate profits surge to record as worker payouts wilt 4 days ago:
At what point do we, as the proletariat, swear vengeance on the ownership class, who actively conspired across decades to starve us out and enslave us?
- Comment on I guess they didn't Edge enough 4 days ago:
Humor about race or gender in the post-Trump era is typically about expressing racism or anti-trans sentiments as a means of virtue signaling they are MAGA. The racism is the joke. The transphobia is the joke.
And if you don’t get it. You’re not part of the MAGA movement (and therefore, according to them, an NPC).
- Comment on just sayin 4 days ago:
We’ve had this conversation.
Ten years ago I wrote a blog piece about the notion of computers gaining sentience. One of the problems is we don’t actually know how to define or test for sentience (id est, consciousness or self awareness). For most of human history, it was so clear to us whether or not we were engaged with another human being, sentience seemed intuitively obvious.
I get a little into the bushes about qualia (such as the quality of the hue of red rather than it’s composition as #FF0000) but even that concept is functionally shallow, and only serves as a way to differentiate human intelligence from non-human intelligence.
We’ve seen bigots use this kind of notion to argue, say, that Chinese people don’t think the same as western folk, or more recently that neurodivergents don’t think the same way as normal people.
- Comment on Oh no 4 days ago:
Oxford commas, people.
Also hyphens will work.
- Comment on I guess they didn't Edge enough 4 days ago:
AR-15 style rifles aren’t HPRs. 500 meters is long range.
Our active gunmen are not gun enthusiasts. They don’t squeeze a thousand rounds on the range to get good with their rifle. They don’t hunt.
They’re the equivalent of a would-be vigilante reading up on martial arts techniques and practicing a dozen reps before going out on the street to get curb stomped.
- Comment on Just checking in to see if anyone cares that the mumbling turtle is still on full salary while being MIA for two-and-a-half months 4 days ago:
Part of yhe problem is Mitch McConnell’s absence advantages the Democratic party since it leaves the vote vacant as absent.
If a special election were had, a Republican would surely replace McConnell, and they would vote on the Senate floor.
This lends evidence McConnell is still alive, and the GOP is unwilling to pressure his administration to step down. It’s a situation similar to Diane Feinstein.
No one gives up power until its pried from their cold, dead hands.
It might be proper to pass forcing officials to step down id they are absent for a set length of time, and to mandate periodic proof-of-life correspondence in order to keep elected office. Confirmations of life and condition by a professional under penalty of perjury during absence might also be in order. But this is all conversation for the post-revolution constitutional committee.
- Comment on An American city has been without power for 2 weeks, unacceptable. 5 days ago:
At this point, the federal government is divesting itself of its responsibilities to the states. The Trump regime is actively seeking to not provide services and support to those parts of the nation that didn’t vote for him, but in doing so is actually hitting red states (and red counties in blue states) harder than he is the blue ones.
But the message is clear: Some of us no longer count as Americans, according to MAGA or the White House. The individual states are responding accordingly, either challenging these denials of support legally, or creating state-level alternatives. But some places are being left in a state of disaster. Puerto Rico is rationing water (to the people while corporate interests retain water access) and Gary, Indiana has been without electrical service for two weeks now. Then there’s the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Here in California, we’re fighting wildfires without FEMA support, but that’s been the case since early 2025. And there are a few other natural disaster hot zones to which FEMA has been unresponsive.
So, the US is behaving like a failing state. That’s not a strict boolean. The decline and fall of a nation a long, slow, non-linear process. We don’t know if it’ll devolve into civil war or toward the fracturing of the US into separate allied clusters of states. It’s up to the individual historian (say a century from now) to decide exactly at what point the US actually failed. Rome, for instance, fell across centuries.
Right now, the federal government has pretty much abdicated its duties to the states, and only serving corporations who pledged fealty to the Trump regime early on. (Again, some government action is taking place due to court orders, but the administration isn’t always obedient to them.) The states are on their own for anything they don’t fight for.
I suppose there could be more severe symptoms that might indicate the failure of the federal government. Civil war between states, anarchy in municipalities, or the rise of martial law in some counties, whether by the National Guard, by local police departments, or by regime paramilitaries such as ICE.
For me, I’m still a Californian, but the Trump Department of Justice and Department of State would not consider me American anymore, for being a leftist and disabled, and in fact might regard me as a terrorist. I am, after all, the chief regional officer of Antifa.
- Comment on Meanwhile at Meta HQ 5 days ago:
Soon we’re going to learn that it’s all about de-anonymizing political speech.
They don’t want us to be able to show what’s happening on the ground in Gaza to the world. Or what’s happening at ICE raids. Or what’s happening at protests when the riot squads show up…
…Or what’s happening on deployed navy ships, or in classrooms, or in political meetings.
- Comment on Meanwhile at Meta HQ 5 days ago:
It’s really a good time to divest from Facebook, or Snapchat, or WhatsApp.
They’re going to try to set this as a standard, and it really needs to not become one.
- Comment on The sickness of infinite greed cannot be sustained on our finite planet 5 days ago:
There are a few discussions and even some studies about the rapid effects of wealth and political power, because they change how other people interact with you, it essentially gaslights you into thinking you’re less fallible than the rest of us.
We can kind of see it between the original Star Wars trilogy (when Lucas still had people able to critique him) and the prequel series (now that ILM was huge and he was ultra-wealthy).
Twenty-first century billionaires become two degrees of separation removed from commoners at all (except the help they hire themselves), and as Paul Krugman notes, lobbyists are better dressed and more well spoken than nerdy economists. It becomes very easy for a rich due to create a self-aggrandizing information silo, in which every rich-dude intuition and conspiracy theory is affirmed.
And the one thing that consistently feels good is seeing their assets and selves getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
So yeah, it really is an illness.
- Comment on There are solutions to our problems... 6 days ago:
Things are complicated but religious fanatics and low education people would rather think they’re simple. Specifically that good and evil are absolute and binary, that they are good and people who creep them out (blacks, LGBT+, Muslims, furries, etc.) are evil.
The ultra-wealthy like to think things are simple too. Specifically that they are brilliant and hard working, and that’s why they’re rich (contrast generational wealth, family connections and a great run of luck and opportunities).
They also believe working class folk are NPCs.
And once they’re rich enough, they surround themselves with sycophants who won’t tell them otherwise.
And the simple-minded rich guys hire the political class to manipulate the simple-minded working class (above) to vote for rich people interests rather than their own.
And thus, democracy is unmade.
- Comment on An American city has been without power for 2 weeks, unacceptable. 6 days ago:
The government is no longer serving everyone. It’s not even serving the red states that voted for the current regime. It’s serving the ultra wealthy. It’s even openly pay to play: You get access to Trump by bribing him.
Also the regime is incompetent and despises expertise, so not only can they not negotiate with Iran, but they can’t operate the US armed forces to engage Iran with military force. The administration serves as an adverse force multiplier. And is wrecking the lives and integrity of the units.
The US is no longer a nation. It’s a pile of debt and assets that are being financialized, picked apart like buzzards would a carcass.
- Comment on Capitalism is a strong argument for Socialism. 1 week ago:
The problem is, the wealthy and corporations will always conspire to get an upper hand, so the movement of wealth from the bottom to the top will always accelerate.
It really starts going when business interests capture regulatory bodies, or legislators, so that they can change laws to benefit the very wealthy and giant conglomerate corporations (and shield them from small businesses that have to innovate positively to compete.)
Then when everything’s deregulated, they go full anti-competitive, create monopolies, enshittify and engage in financialization, using money shenanigans like stock buybacks and private equity which is super profitable but doesn’t produce anything, often leaving sinkholes in the economy like the empty, abandoned Toys R Us stores.
And then, civilization collapses, and the owner class and political class are totally surprised because they believed their own master race rhetoric.
- Comment on Capitalism is a strong argument for Socialism. 1 week ago:
The media owns a lot of news media. Curiously, some platforms still allow independent media to leak though.
Hence, we know what the 2014 Ferguson Unrest looked like, or the 2020 George Floyd protests, or the current crisis in Gaza.
They’re trying to stop the signal, obfuscate it in disinformation and slop, but they haven’t stopped the whole signal yet.
