Would that we could. “We the People” are the enemy of the State and they treat us accordingly. Of course, the easiest type of enemy to defeat is one that does not know they are your enemy, and they spent billions of dollars over decades to ruin our education systems and shove propaganda in our faces to ensure that we never find out that we were their enemy all along.
There are a couple evil yet competent people in the administration. Russell Vought is one, a hire direct from the Heritage Foundation. Another is Stephen Miller. Heritage seems to be full of actually competent yet completely evil men. But I guess that what happens when a majority of your funding comes from oil, gas, and now tech barons.
There’s a pretty radical idea going on in wiccan circles right now that believes the “Jesus” these Christian Nationalists are worshipping is actually something called an egregore. Now, an egregore is a non-physical entity or “thought form”, created by the shared beliefs, emotions, and intentions of a group. What’s more, I’ve met people who claim to have interacted with this being.They claim that it truly believes it is Christ and wants you to believe it, too. It desperately wants into Heaven, and it is vain, and narcissistic, and ugly. It butters you up with false flattery, empty promises and lies, and, if the true spirit of Christ is with you, it calls that spirit Satan. If you recognize it for what it is, instantly like a toxic person it flips to anger and threats to scare you into getting it to believe.
I was about to say I was grateful that human infection by screwworms is low, but then I realized that it will be worse if we lose tons of livestock to them.
If you didn’t scream “WITNESS ME!” before death, was it actually loud?
Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there’s all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn’t have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I’ve made over the years. I can’t migrate my friends list to another service. I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.
True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.
I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.
And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.
That’s an incredible show of force. Imagine if they could all be brought into DC. The police and military would be overwhelmed, especially if they were organized and given clear roles with clear objectives and steps. This is a movement that ActBlue needs to be kept away from. We keep lists, but not for fundraising, for activating them into action. Giving money is not action. Registering voters is action, canvassing is action, helping our communities is action. That’s what this movement should be. Just action, and achieving a goal.
Danes are the sons and daughters of the greatest monster slayer to ever have maybe actually been real, Beowulf. Perhaps they shall come to slay our “Grendel”, as their forefather did for King Hrothgar, so long ago.
Fuck rock salt. Load them shells full of Benadryl and send em to the Hat Man.
Yep. They basically never recovered from that 3rd bong hit they took in their freshman year of college and think because they’ve read the likes of Bastiat, Friedman, von Mises, Rand, and Rothbard they know everything.
And, really, it’s just Ayn Randian Objectivism, mixed with Christian Dominionism, mixed with neofuedalism, dreamed up by a dude who spent years after the Dotcom Bubble popped, doing nothing but staying in his apartment after accepting a buyout of several hundred dollars reading the works of long dead white people.
This. Every trick Orbán used is straight from Putin. After he fully seized power in Russia, authoritarians the world over flocked to Moscow to learn directly from the master. Then they went home and got to work. The Danube Institute, the Hungarian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, hosted a large neoreactionary conference where they laid out the case that democracy doesn’t work. That democracy is a well-meaning but fundamentally flawed system of government. The reason they think it’s flawed? Because it requires giving all people equality under the law. Women equal to men, gay equal to straight, non-Christian equal to Christian, Non-white equal to White, and this is really the only one that matters, poor equal to wealthy. The obscenely wealthy cannot comprehend a world in which the voice of those with less wealth is equal to their voice. By virtue of their enormous fortunes, taken through exploitation and inherited from their ancestors, they feel that they and they alone should have the right to govern. That they are inherently superior because they were fortunate enough to be born into lives of wealth, connection, and privilege.
He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.
Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)
See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire’s weather/disaster alert service.
For extra fun, look into where school districts allocate their funding and how it relates to their rankings. Some of the worst performing public schools spend a lot more on athletics than they spend on anything else. It’s like they want to be professional athlete mills instead of functioning adult mills.
This is just a meme, but it does touch on something important. There’s a journalist by the name of Douglas Rushkoff. He put out a book last year titled, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaire Elite, and he was invited by a group of 5 anonymous tech oligarchs out to the desert to talk about surviving what they call “The Event”, or when the consequences of their actions finally catch up to them.
He also says at the core of their desire to escape it is rooted in something he calls “The Mindset”, which is belief that with enough money and technology, wealthy men can live as gods, and transcend the calamities and tribulations that befall us mere mortals.
“The Mindset” is rooted in empirical science, that human beings are nothing more than the sum total of their chemical components, and that’s it, and only the “truly superior” (Billionaire Tech Broligarchs) understand that.