• 8 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.

    The problem is we haven’t figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism – government by force – became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.

    Now there isn’t a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.

    But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.

    I just don’t know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we’re already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren’t waiting until July, but hitting in June.

    My point was descriptive: I’ve noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I’ve noticed content creators and pundits who’ve been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.

    It’s not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls’ schools, which I can’t understand how they imagined that was a good look.)

    I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I’ve also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.

    I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.

    It doesn’t matter which. That does seem to be the way we’re headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.



  • We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

    We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

    If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

    A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

    And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.




  • That’s not quite it.

    Then thr 0.1% gets all the money, and the failing rich blame themselves for not being clever enough.

    Then the 0.01% get all the money and fly around in golden zeppelins

    And then the 0.001% gets all the money, and our elected officials tell us that if we charge them with crimes, the whole economy will collapse.

    Now eight guys own more than half the population and we’re feeling lean and hungry.





  • This was made clear in the Behind the Bastards two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity in which the industrialists thought the Great Depression was the good times, and were really resentful that FDR implemented the New Deal, which was a stopgap to prevent a communist revolution, since despite the troubles in the USSR, it had to be better than what we were contending with, and people were sharpening their hoes. (Those who still had hoes)

    These days, yes, not only do they want you in tents, but they want you in tents in some other place, and they want you to starve even when you cannot commute to a jobsite.

    I’ve noticed the guillotine memes have stopped and instead of saying how absurd violent uprising is, people are saying how this may result in violence whether or not that would fix things.



  • We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

    But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

    And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

    Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

    Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

    Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

    (But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

    What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

    So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.




  • You just don’t understand.

    Cord: How long have you been blind?
    The Blind Man: How long have you been blind?
    Cord: I’m not blind.
    The Blind Man: Am I?
    Cord: Do you answer every question with a question?
    The Blind Man: Do you question every answer?
    Cord: Talking to you is like talking to a wall.
    The Blind Man: Buddha once sat before a wall, and when he arose he was enlightened.
    Cord: Do you compare yourself with Buddha?
    The Blind Man: No. Only to the wall



  • We OG players asked all these questions with the Ring of Ma’rûf

    And yes, you can get any card (say a Jyhad vampire) into your hand, but we hadn’t figured out how to get it into play.

    A clever use for it at the time was to bring in a powerful but reasonable custom made card (preferably one with novel, interesting effects) and then cast that. This was especially cool at the time since this was before Tempest. Power creep was not yet noticeable and they hadn’t gotten in to the really wild mechanics of the later expansions.