Uriel238 [all pronouns]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Oh they’ll come.

    The US will have to go to war to keep down unrest. Whether Trump makes good on Canada / Greenland / Poland, the world will have to form a coalition against us, and it’s likely China will take the lead.

    There will be Chinese bombers over Washington just as there were Russian and American bombers over Berlin. Not that we’ll be around to enjoy it, and those that remain will suffer as collaborators (whether they were or not).

    We really don’t want to let it get there. But then we really didn’t want it to get here, and we knew in the early aughts with George W. Bush’s administration this is where we were headed if someone didn’t chance course. Obama, who promised to change course, did not.


  • 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.




  • 1978 US Automotive Companies: If we make a product that locks our customers in, they’ll be our customers forever!

    1978 Japanese Automotive Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works then customers will keep buying our stuff.

    2025 US Tech Companies: If we make our products contingent on proprietary software and hardware, we’ll lock them in.

    2025 Chinese Tech Companies: The US gave us their required parameters. If we make a product that works and they can utilize freely, they’ll keep buying our stuff.

    Not our first rodeo.





  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zonetopics@lemmy.worldHappy Man
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    2 months ago

    The thing is Stephen King recently told a story in Billy Summers about how a triggerman fades into the woodwork after a pro hit. And King is someone who only does a bit of research (contrast someone like Chuck Palahniuk).

    So yeah, someone who is not quite dressed like the guy getting caught on camera and then held up by police as a suspect sounds like the police being lazy.

    It’s a hired killer. Follow the fucking money.









  • 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.



  • To be fair, in 2008 Obama and Hillary Clinton were viable candidates (despite not being a white Christian rich man) because the US public was really tired of Republican shennanigans, and of the Bush administration specifically. While McCain seemed reasonable Sarah Palin was scary and the McCain campaign took its cues from the ur-Maga Karl Rove / Tea-Party Republican talking points, who were only onto public benefits if no-one else got them.

    Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for simply not being Trump Bush and admitted as much it was rather silly when he promised to work to rise to the level of deserving it.

    Sadly, Obama retained a lot of Bush policies and was more neoliberal than we needed.

    I really thought after Bush, we’d never vote for a Republican president again, nor would we allow one to win by the EC. I was wrong and the US paid for it dearly. So I’m really sore and bitter about the whole affair.