We’ve been in an oligarchy for a while, according to an Oxford study of US history and the policy voting behaviors of elected representatives. It’s only gotten spicy since Reagan, when the Republican party decided it had enough power to take all the cake (and is trying to do so).
The Federalists tried this before, which caused the party to die out and the Democratic Republicans to split. (Source: Helen Cox Richardson) It’ll be exciting to see how this all plays out.
No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.
Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.
Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.
We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.
77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.
Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.
You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?
When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.
It is always morally preferrable to pirate things made by giant corporations
Fixed It For You.
Regardless of what is regarded as a crime against the state, it is wrongdoing against the public to support corporations that seek to extract more wealth than value they produce.
Intellectual property rights were a (very) temporary monopoly to give creators an incentive to create in order to build a robust public domain.
Copyrights, patents and trademarks no longer do that. So charging for content is now rent-seeking
Corporations, their share holders and the plutocrats who own them pull wealth out of the economy by hoarding it. The whenever you buy from anything but directly from the creator, you are reducing the wealth in the economy since your money goes straight into Scrooge McDuck’s swimming coffers.
And our public domain only contains stuff from a century ago. Steamboat Willie became public domain just a year or two ago. Copyright holders and courts even assert all content should be owned and licensed, including SCOTUS. (Though the US Supreme Court is a traitor to the United States and its constitution.)
Pirate everything. Steal from companies for they have already stolen from you.
Remember that in the US (whose laws have been extended by trade agreement through most of the world), intellectual property laws are To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts according to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 (or the Copyright Clause of the Constitution of the United States
(Europe has older stuff based on guild secrets and has had literal wars waged over things like cloth buttons vs. brass buttons)
Since we have a long list of instances now in which Science and useful Arts have been inhibited or simply robbed from their developers (case in point Charles Goodyear) within the current system, we might get better art and science without any IP law at all rather than trying to reform the system we have, which is used entirely to control and inhibit progress.
And the efforts by software publishers to inhibit the archival of old games, and the effort of book publishers to eliminate libraries are only the latest examples of how IP is only an instrument of oppression in the 21st century, and has been pretty much since Disney.
When you pirate, you’re not stealing from the developers or authors or creators. You’re stealing from the shareholders, and they are already fat and marbled.
So fuck intellectual property rights.
FBI is not a monolith right now and has multiple conflicting opinions.
The part that wants to save democracy says you should encrypt your communications by using an e2e provider, and they recommend Signal.
The part that wants to serve the country (by serving the current administration — the J. Edgar Hoover part of FBI) is terrified of going dark and has been nagging encryption experts for over a decade now to nerd harder and invent a backdoor only good guys can use.
The nerds know this is mathematically impossible. And in fact bad guys (industrial spies, black hats, other nations, etc.) have leaks readily available to uncover the backdoors.
And right now a lot of FBI is scared the new admin is the bad guys.
Once again the ownership class pirates freely while disparaging the common folk for violating copyright.
It’s almost if it’s not a real law, rather something by which to disparage the proletariat.
Clarification: The Mouse as in Disney Corporation not as in the thing you use to move your pointer.
More crime is committed in the making of media than in pirating it.
Also more wrongdoing against society and the public that the justice department couldn’t be bothered with (so doesn’t count as crime).
Pirate it all or don’t watch it.
Note that with rare exceptions, creators are not supported by your purchases. Rather the studios, labels and publishers wh cheat creators are.
If you want to support the creators, pay them directly, or go to one of their performances / signings / functions. But still pirate their work.
Public domain and abandonware and forgotten media are regarded by the media companies as a threat to their business model, since it is possible you can be entertained by them rather than their own for-cost offerings. It is no longer enough for them to control what you consume media, but insist on controlling whether you consume.
And the courts regard them as persons and members of the public as not. We don’t count as invested parties.
According to the US and the EU we common folk don’t figure.
It is now more ethical to pirate (or simply not consume it at all) than it is to obtain legitimate licenses.
I’m sure AGI is far off and AGI is impossible is exactly what AGI wants us to think.
Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.
These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.
Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.
Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it’s no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.
The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.
(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it’s not massacring refugees— but that doesn’t legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)
We have nothing to lose but our chains!
In my case enjoying life is not something that I can simply do. I manage mental illness which features chronic suicidality, but it’s been driven into me very hard that I am at fault for my grief and trauma. But having a sober understanding of why I feel the way I do, and the social forces that drove parents, teachers and authorities to treat me the way I did helps me counter those neural processes.
This cartoon illustrates the dynamic I’ve encountered, and I hypothesize the mental illness epidemic in the US is intergenerational and compounding.
That we’re also dealing with a couple of imminent great filters the human species is unprepared to navigate hits hard for me.
My doom and gloom is catalyzed by a lot of things including, yes, a novelty cookbook that appears to be made in recognition of desperate times. It isn’t the only thing that informs my doom and gloom, and this isn’t to say I don’t have hope. But it is a Goblins at the gates of Gondor kind of situation, in which a lot of things have to go simultaneously right before we’re out of the fine mess we’re in.
In the Great Depression, it’s not like anyone was starving to death. Rather it was like they were eating flour paste and dying of malnutrition.
That we are in an era that we need the SBC speaks to how bad things are. Here in the states, we don’t have food deserts, we have food swamps, where the only thing one can get is junk food.
Sink plungers without the flange work better on sinks, in my experience. So it’s nice to have one of each.
There are different builds for drainage snakes for sinks and toilets as well.
One way to be a better neighbor is to get a good drain snake and lend it out as needed.
For most definitions of supernatural, no.
I believe in unidentified areal phenomena, not that it’s ETIs or aliens, but that something’s up there doing its thing.
I believe in ball lightning even though we don’t have a model of electrodynamics that explains it.
There’s some weird shit out there, Horatio, that isn’t explained in our philosophy. I’m sure we don’t have all the answers. I just am okay with knowing we don’t know what those answers are.
As for ghosts, spirits, afterlife, etc. There’s strong evidence those things do not exist, just in the stark silence where there should be noise.
I do pretend that treating my cat well and wearing cat themed tees and keeping cat kitch does please the cat gods. 🐱👤