Screaming from the far left, there are a lot of people in scarcity or precairity in our society, a society that would collapse if they all suddenly fell incapacitated from their want.
It is our fucking duty as fellow citizens to stabilize them.
Conservatism at its core is ignoring their need in the name of tradition. To the ninth charnel circle of Hell with that.
A) He’s doing this stuff 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.
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.
I pick up dog poop left by dogs other than mine. And I do it in the name of comnunism and the end of monarchy.
Yeah, my other ride is a broom and similar stickers also imply if you cross my path you better be firm in your beliefs curses don’t work, because mine will find your immortal soul and drag it, screaming and writhing into the very heart of Hell.
Also my coven depends on me for the sticky-icky and some amazing baked goods. And they don’t want me sad.
I might be reading a lot into it.
This family has a LOT of activities. And is middle class, but ranking enough to have free time and money to buy stuff, possibly due to the oilfield worker.
Their neighborhood has family rivalries but is knit enough to have community barbecues. My daughter has best friends and ballet partners in the community, so at least we know our neighbors as fellow parents.
Oh and if you fuck with us, we have high-powered rifles and know how to track a bitch. We also have friends with a similar set of skills.
I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I’ll say this:
When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.
Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.
And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)
And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.
States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.
I’m not an academically trained scholar regarding left-wing theory, but I’d assume that communists and social democrats are still part of the same group, with one naming themselves after a shorter-term goal-state, and the other naming themselves after a longer-term goal-state.
When we talk about state models such as republic, democracy, autocracy, we’re either describing a current status, or a model we might want to follow or avoid. When we talk about ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, communism, feminism, etc.) they assert specific values and presumptions that might or might not be true or workable. For instance, in the communist ideal, every participant has exactly the same amount of political and material power; influence is perfectly distributed. But we have no idea how a state like that would look, or work, or if we could ever get there.
Every model and every ideology has problems and concessions we don’t understand and have to correct for. The one-person = one-vote thing seems intuitive for democracy, but has terrible side effects, and we’re still sorting out alternative election models that might work better.
All this is to say it’s a really bad idea to treat any one of them as a racehorse or football team or a banner under which to rally and consolidate political power. None of the models or ideals we have are perfect or absolute, and we have to be prepared to adjust them on the fly, especially as we contend with corruption and bad actors who exploit vulnerabilities.
I suspect everyone on the left ultimately seeks a society in which everyone is materially provided for, in which liberties are as extensive as possible while providing for protections and considering human biases towards certain abberant behavior (e.g. drunk driving) in which there are as few social strata as possible and power is as well distributed as possible. The models that accommodate all these, even to partial degrees, are still very fuzzy. (Western civilization has been working on them for only three hundred years or so.)
So we’re at least in the same book, if not on the same page.
A lot of cats that purr like it’s their national anthem drool while they do so. More so with older cats.
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.
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?)
Under Stalinist soviet communism, which was dictatorship with extra steps?
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 sector 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.
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.
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.
Actually, something that focused the report forward in a narrow wave would be super useful.
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
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.
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.
He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.
This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.