Uriel238 [all pronouns]

Some of us have had Cascadia dreams. The problem is that Canada has its own issues and is on the same oozing, shambling drift towards fascist autocracy.

But yeah, the problem is that the US is a big pastiche of purple, and we can’t even tell how much of the red side is pressured by peer pressure and the colossal far-right-wing propaganda machine that features the most popular media offerings in the nation. Huge swaths of people are literally being mind controlled, and no-one is addressing this. (On a related note, we keep allowing more loopholes to allow gambling outside Nevada and Georgia, not to mention have failed to criminalize lootboxes)

The US isn’t even trying to be democratic and hasn’t for decades, which is how seventy seven million people, many of them low-information voters, voted for the guy who campaigned on a fascist autocratic coup d’etat.

That is to say once we finally unseat President Donald J. Trump, we should get ready for a Pete Townshend scream:

Meet the new boss!
Same as the old boss!

The Heritage Foundation is a society of monarchists. It’s supported by oligarchs who want to be king to push the world towards that agenda, and such oligarchs routinely infuse it with capital.

I’ve come to assume We’re in danger from the state is the theme of this year’s pride.

Bring a brick.

Seventy-seven million people voted to unperson huge demographics of Americans which has included both legal aliens and American citizens, which is a breach of the social contract.

So yeah, the voters were wrong. Now we’re trying to figure out why, and whether the human species is just doomed to stratified societies and extinction through industrial pollution.

So there’s two factors that gave Trump (barely) the election (all the battleground states were narrowly chosen)

One, I speculate and no one seems to be addressing, is the trillion-dollar far-right propaganda machine. FOX News, OANN, Michael Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan and so on. It’s continuously pumping content out to the population telling them that liberals are all communists and women should all be tradwives. Also that everyone nonwhite or poor is a leech on the economy.

The other is the King Log vs. King Stork thing. In those industrialized nations where the left-side party is neoliberal (preserves the status quo), the far right parties get strong support. It was happening across Europe around when Trump got elected, though there’s been a left-side push-back since, possibly due to Trump providing a visible example of who they don’t want in office. Canada’s economist / banker PM was elected due to Trump, we are pretty sure.

Biden was as right wing as they come in the Democratic party, and for 2020 the party’s principals (who get their own votes) chose him, deciding that everyone else was too socialist for them. Biden was Biden (that is, an establishment neoliberal) with some efforts to appeal to the public. And then in 2024 he pulled out of the race, and Harris took over and in the last few months of campaigning appealed to less-nazi Republicans, which alienated her base.

The election was won by MAGA disciples voting only top ballot (for Trump and nothing else) and lost by low-information Democrats who weren’t motivated or decided to send a message by failing to show.

Regardless, figuring out how he won is more important than figuring out how to get rid of him, because even if he dies, the GOP is going to churn out Secret Hitler after Secret Hitler, and the Democratic party, determined not to go left, is going to fall into irrelevance, just before they are imprisoned / killed as political enemies.

In contrast, we far leftists want free stuff.

Basically, we want to be able to tune the production process of essentials so that potatoes 🥔 and drinking water 🥤are dispensed the way we do napkins, and people can take all they need. And with time we expand the free stuff dispensed to smart phones and rocket fuel and ice cream sundaes 🍨

The stuff isn’t absolutely free, and even these days napkin dispensers are adorned with save the trees signs but the price to the end-user is negligible. Sometimes we have to watch our systems for abuse, but then sometimes someone just needs a lot of potatoes. 🥔

Also tool libraries and eventually motor pools that can serve communities who sometimes need gear, but not always. It’s kinda creepy how big automotive has us buying two cars for every home and we can’t spare government funds for (eventually free) robust public rail.

The 2020 lockdown showed us that people are not turned into couch potatoes 🥔 by benefits and furloughs. (They do couch potato after burnout or due to depression) rather they take up hobbies, many of which become lucrative or are useful to the community. (Community projects were harder because we were hiding in our homes) This led to the Great Resignation during which companies had to offer higher than minimum wage for their bottom-rung jobs.

We’ve also seen government benefits programs facilitate great movements in art. The whole British Rock-&-Roll boom of the 1960s followed the post-war restoration programs to get everyone who lost everything fed again and back into homes. Then someone threw in an electric guitar.

So it’s not bad to want free stuff. It’s just assumed that you can’t have free stuff if someone else can make a profit by charging, ergo paid toilets and office bathroom tissue pools.

Yeah, I warn those who are challenging their own faith that naturalism isn’t for everyone. For me it was a stark process to come to terms that I’m thinking meat, and my species is looking at some imminent great filters even before we are able to create a dependent colony on our own moon, so mostly harmless is going to be more of a footnote than our society deserves.

As someone who had an early aspiration to add something significant to the collective community that it could take with it into the future, this proved to be a bit of a let-down.

c/politicalmemes has a quality standard for memes? Besides which the argument was they might still be useful, and the versions we’ve seen in the US so far have shown to cost way more than their value (and that’s before we get to asset forfeiture).

At this chapter it’s long time to start implementing programs with the goal of completely replacing law enforcement in the US with other systems, including enough benefits to assure people aren’t driven to crime by desperation.

Those kinds of crimes are exceedingly rare, and many (such as rampage killings) are the result of systemic issues that could be addressed in other ways (not merely just regulating firearm access).

They’re not a very good one considering how they have a very poor case closure rate for serious violent crimes, and the state and federal justice systems of the US are disturbingly okay with false convictions and excessive retribution.

You lost some of us at the presumption of restaurants and servers.

Maybe imagine no countries (nothing to kill or die for, etc. etc.)

Presume that everyone is a person and has all the rights you do.

The fundamental objective of leftism is the dispersion of sociopolitical power as widely and evenly as possible, with an ideal (neither realized or considered possible) in which each person has no more and no less power than any other.

My dad was a contingency engineer during the Apollo moon shots and worked for JPL most of my life. I was sold the dreams as a toddler of reaching for the stars, Seeking out new life and civilizations etc.

And I’m really sore that we gave up that for a global religious supercult and a slow death killing the global ecology.

The typical FOX News watcher assumes that criminals are bad guys by character, are caught red-handed and identified by a perfect means of detection, and still dress like The Hamburglar.

So no, they do not understand that a robust due process is the right of any given suspect before they are even fined (though a one-year sentence is usually the bar for a mandated jury trial, depending on the state / county), and this is a controversy in the US because a lot of people are not afforded their full rights, or are often coerced into surrendering rights by law enforcement who is more interested in putting a warm (brown-skinned) body in jail than actually seeing justice done.

In this era, no one is asking exactly whom CECOT is supposed to be imprisoning. Here in the US, our death row inmates are treated better, and US prisons are notoriously squalid for industrialized nations. CECOT is Edgar Allen Poe caliber cruel-and-unusual incarceration for tens of thousands who are allegedly worse than the people the US would execute.

Mara Salvatrucha members don’t deserve CECOT incarceration. Tren de Aragua members don’t deserve CECOT incarceration. So who was thinking what when the CECOT facility was built?

And then we’re sending people there for life who have mere visa infractions – a grossly disproportionate sentence – and the US is skipping the hearing before a judge.

So yeah, congratulations, United States, you’ve become one of the worst offenders of human atrocity… again.

Make tea and have a seat, because this is a bit of a story.

After the era of J. Edgar Hoover, FBI engaged in a lot of internal soul-searching and wanted to actually live up to its name as an investigation department, rather than what it had been under Hoover, which was a paramilitary force in the service of the current administration, (see FBI’s interest in far-left activists like Dr. King and Malcom X and the Black Panthers) it changed its focus in the 80s to organized crime and serial killers (though they were very few in number, and hot cases when at large) Reagan used the DEA for stings against political enemies, but political activists were able to act more openly as elections and campaign money was deregulated.

In 2001 the 9/11 attacks happened, rapidly followed by the PATRIOT Act which was passed, largely sight unseen, which put FBI under the Department of Homeland Security. Soon after that ICE was formed intended to be a paramilitary department that served the interests of the new regime current administration, and it’s been that the whole time.

And this is how ICE appeared in New Zealand for the raid of the Kim Dotcom estate on < checks wikipedia > January 20, 2012 (the same day as the Wikipedia blackout in protest of the SOPA act, incidentally). Also there were representatives from the MPAA and RIAA since the arrest of Dotcom was argued to be based on media piracy infractions (that Dotcom was getting a slew of hip hop artists to ditch the labels and use the new MEGAupload music distro service had nothing to do with it we swear). These days, the raid was credited to the New Zealand police, but in the January and February reporting of the incident in 2012, it was US Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (on loan to big media). As Dotcom noted, they could have just arrested him in his workplace parking lot. His work routine was consistent. Someone wanted a show,

ICE appears in a number of other weird places, including busting a number of repair shops in Florida that were fixing Apple products without licensing to do so. This would forshadow the wave of right-to-repair legislation and litigation that is still moving through the states (with John Deere and Apple making strange bedfellows).

On their website ICE does customs work within the US while the CBP is supposed to operate along the US borders, but really ICE goes where it pleases, and arrests who they like, and it was this way right up to the George Floyd protests in 2020 when Trump used them as his private police force to interdict where the local departments were not doing (in Trump’s opinion) a sufficient(ly brutal) job. And this is how the ICE office in Portland Oregon became a focal point where every dispersed crowd of demonstrators resulted in double the numbers the next day (and lines of moms and dads). That’s how Abolish ICE became a rallying cry during the protests. I wonder why we stopped chanting.

So ICE was developed much the way the German SS was, as a paramilitary service loyal to Dear Leader rather than loyal to the office of the Chancellery / Presidency, because when you’re a despot trying to put down democratic features, you need a force that’s loyal to you and not the law.