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.

For profit social media platforms are npt your friend.

As with for-profit newspapers and news agencies, they are biased more towards the ownership classn than the proletariat. They might present left-wing stories and positions, but never enough that it threatens their property and profit gains.

The same with politicians who have to raise money to campaign. Even liberals cannot ever push for policy that serves the public but not the ownership interests.

Rent-seeking is an evergreen relevant Wikipedia article

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.

The eventual outcome of this sort of thing is more widespread use of steganographic data storage schemes. We already have plenty, such as ones that make your data look like unused LTS blocks of garbage and code blocks with multiple hidden partitions, so that you can open one block showing pedestrian data and the court unable to prove there are other hidden blocks.

These are technologies that already exist for those people who are really interested preserving their renegade data.

But if I own a business and I don’t want my rivals reading my accounting, and open crypto is illegal, I may go stegan whether or not I have secret slush funds.

It sounds like you haven’t observed the conversation.

And it’s not the tech companes so much as the Linux community who have pushed for e2e.

Considering how many abuses (pretty clear violations of the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States) have been carved out by SCOTUS during mob investigations and the International War on Terror, no, the people of the US want secure communication. The law enforcement state wants back doors and keep telling tech folk to nerd harder to make back doors not already known to industrial spies, enthusiast hackers and foreign agents.

You’re asking for three perpendicular lines on a plane. You’re asking for a mathematical impossibility.

And remember industrial spies includes the subsets of industries local and foreign, and political spies behind specific ideologies who do not like you and are against specifically your own personhood.

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 content 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.

We quickly moved into the Joffrey Baratheon period of this regime, which is typically stopped when he pisses off the wrong powerful people.

As for us on the bottom, we suffer as the high lords play their games of thrones.

Um no.

A state can decide what it names itself or names a part of itself (e.g. Black Lives Matter Plaza). The story of Ukraine illustrates this.

But geographers and cartographers don’t decide what to name a place or get orders from states by fiat (unless the mapper is a state agent working for a department) They name things based on what they’re called.

The gulf is known to most of the world and the International Hydrographic Organization as Golfo de México or in English, Gulf of Mexico, and calling it the Gulf of America (say by Google Maps) is political allegiance signaling, that they are MAGA or MAGA collaborators.

If you want to be spicy you can call it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl or the House of Chalchiuhtlicue based on the South American deity of the sea. It has a nice ominous Siege of R’lyeh feel that reflects the tempestuous weather of the ocean expanse.

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.

As I explained to Google (from Dan McClellan) _references do not assert from fiat what things are called. A dictionary definition is not an official definition but what a word means or what a thing is called at the moment.

Most of the world calls it the Golfo de México or in English speaking regions, the Gulf of Mexico. Changing all the maps of the world won’t change this.

Now granted, a state chooses what to call itself (such as the changing of The Ukraine to simply Ukraine but that is the incorporated entity that is the sovereign nation of Ukraine.

As the US does not have sovereign control of the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn’t get to declare the name of a region of international waters.

This whole thing just makes the GOP, MAGA, the Trump administration and by proxy the people of the United States xenophobic and barbaric as hell. It’s not a good look.

John Oliver on LWT explained that the cap hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in decades, and should be around $10K now rather than $2K. It is not.

I have the social skills of a cholla cactus and so when someone says ѻɼﻭคกٱչﻉ ץѻપɼ กﻉٱﻭɦ๒ѻɼɦѻѻɗ กﻉՇฝѻɼᛕ I find it only confusing and unintelligible. I did consider making cookies for my neighbors with a notice saying I don’t know how to ዐዪኗልክጎጊቿ ል ክቿጎኗዘጌዐዪዘዐዐዕ ክቿፕሠዐዪጕ but maybe someone else does…here’s some cookies? Mind you, my neighborhood is a tad lower class and has an air of desperation so they may not trust my cookies.

It’s a thought. My kitchen appliances are lent out right now, and I don’t actually know how to bake.

But I seem to understand enough leftist theory to bridge those who, like me, have been brainwashed to see communism and socialism as derisives and terms of contempt.

I’m also going through a psychotic break because a lot of stressors piled up at the same time seventy-seven million voters decided to give the Genie’s lamp to Jaffar.

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.

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.