we didn't get here in a day, or even a decade. So it won't be solved overnight.
But sure, in the ideal world:
1. Call every bluff Trump makes. Do not capitulate to anything. Drown him in lawsuits. He's lost at least a 3rd of the DOJ so they cannot handle suing every company, college, and state at once.
2. Anyone in a red and especially purple states, make it a habit to call your represenatives every day. emails can (and probably will be) ignored. Don't let their lines be anything but people telling these congressmen to knock it off and actually do their jobs. Collorary: anyone in a blue state calls in and makes sure their congressmen know they need to also resist, fight back, and not capitulate.
3. If you can, townhalls are even better than calling. If you see the local townhalls you know this scares the GOP congressmen stiff.
4. if you see federal agents in the wild, always be recording. The truth is the beth antidote to corruption. Make sure you livestream as well so they can't just seize your phone. The more live feed out there the harder it is to spin.
5. heck, if we're really dreaming big we plan some general strike. Shut down the country for a day and you'll have everyone reeling to try and backpedal.
Varying levels of realism there, but the theme is clear: resist and make sure others resist. They can't ignore us all if we work together. But that "working together" in such a hyper-individualistic society is the hard part. It may just be more realistic to wait until someone dies or midterms happen.
> - What Kimmel said was wrong (assuming you believe Utah state investigators) and deeply irresponsible and irresponsible.
Exactly which words were wrong/irresponsible/irresponsible? Do you have a video clip and timestamp of the specific statements?
> - Clearly the market was already deciding that Kimmel's show is irrelevant (Nielsen ratings quite clear on that).
Quite the coïncidence that this is the second comedian that has been canceled, the first being Colbert. As Timothy Snyder, a historian on Central/Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, and totalitarians regimes, commented: General pattern in regime change: the comedy gets better and then it gets banned.
> - ABC's distributors threatened to stop airing the network, which is what actually caused Disney/ABC to act, it's hard to say what impact the FCC Chairs comments actually had.
The owner of many ABC stations is looking to fulfill a $6.2B merger/acquisition:
Instead of deciding the deal on its merits, the Trump administration has made it known if you rub its tummy you will get what you want (export policy isn't decided on (say) national security evaluations, but if you give money: Nvidia 15% export tariff, UAE buying $2B of Trump-family crypto).
Instead of procedural government decisions (i.e., rule of law), you get government decisions based on the temperament of the boss.
"In recent months, both broadcasters have announced their intent to buy or sell local TV assets — Nexstar is in the process of effectuating a $6 billion merger with peer broadcaster TEGNA, and Sinclair is executing on a mixture of station acquisitions and sales — all of which require the approval of the FCC."
stop being interested in the content of what Peter Thiel is saying, and start being interested in the social and political function of what he is saying.
Content: Antichrist, prophecies, futurism; nothing that holds a truth value.
Antichrist prophecies have been well established for hundreds of years as making coded gematria claims about Nero Caesar, a mother-murdering tyrannical ruler of the foreign empire that had recently destroyed the Second Temple ~79CE by the time John of Patmos was bitterly writing in ~95CE. "Nero Caesar" transliterated from Greek ('nrwn qsr') into Hebrew and added up using standard gematria gives 666. "Nero Caesar" transliterated from Latin ('nrw qsr') to Hebrew and added up gives 616, which appears in the earliest manuscripts.
It's so plain and so obviously concerned with contemporary political goals of the author as to be almost boring.
Social Function: What is the social and political function achieved by Peter Thiel doing this in today's environment, styling himself as a Prophet of 'antichrist' matters?
It provides a swift pathway to an important role in unifying and binding himself to the anti-democratic theocratic Dominionists which he currently has little influence over, alongside the existing base that he already has vast influence over: the antidemocratic faction of the tech industry. By achieving a role unifying and consolidating power over the two major antidemocratic power blocs - both of which have built in tools of vast social influence (religion, social media), Peter Thiel aspires to place himself in a position of staggering influence atop a worldwide upheaval that is demolishing democratic power structures further every day.
I really think greater fluency in religion and in politics and history would help tech workers equip themselves resist be manipulated and controlled this way.
For the other bloc - the religious bloc being fished here- it has been fertile ground for grifters for decades now, so I hold very little hope that the theocrats (and in particular the New Apostolic Reformation crowd) have any hope of applying the appropriate scrutiny to Thiel's "prophetic religious claims" to allow that bloc to identify and somehow resist this cynical and dystopian power-play.
Some will say we do nothing, some will say we do better. Imho, the latter is winning over the former at the moment. That might change, hopefully it doesn't. As you say, this is an infinite ooda loop of humanity in the aggregate.
(1GW of solar PV is deployed every 15 hours as of this comment; battery storage is ~$52/kwh, half of new vehicles sold in China and 25% of global auto sales currently are battery electric or plug in hybrid electric; manufacturing capacity and uptake trajectories continue to steepen)
Somewhere in the 19 million people in the Southland, a car is burnt in anger or celebration every weekend. Lakers parades are famously family unfriendly.
Businesses are robbed daily and violently.
I mean, there was a huge deal about the trains for a while [0] and nothing happened with the LAPD+ for a long time let alone the USMC.
LAPD+ cops are assaulted every week with God knows what.
That's what 19 million people are like. That mass of people sees a lot of low-probability events, by pure math.
Honestly, what's going on is that Donny watches Fox a lot. Fox is a media business, if it bleeds, it leads. Fox also is reeling from the Dominion lawsuits and two competitors barking up their tree. They have to push for ratings. Donny doesn't know this, he just sees what everyone else is seeing on Fox.
Hence this whole autopen thing that no one else outside of the Fox bubble has a clue about.
Donny sees the story, rants about it in front of confused cameras, then Fox has to double down on it and Donny rants again. It's a oroboros of bad research and news junkies.
So with these LA riots (blink and there's another), you get Fox seeing if it bleeds, it leads. Then Donny fritzes on it, then he's sending in the USMC without food or water, because, duh. Then they report on that, and he'll be sending in a whole regiment (5000 marines) by the end of the week, then a battalion (1200 marines, because these words have no meaning to him).
Look, there is no plan with Donny, he's just reacting to whatever he last experienced. It is super clear from all the evidence about the very leaky administration that they are just reacting to things as they come at them. Again, there is no plan. And yes, that is somehow worse than some conspiracy to make the US an autocracy.
EDIT: I want to extend this idea about Donny having mashed potato brains a bit further. SInce the whole admin is just reacting to things by overexertion, that means that anyone trying to counter them (and that's like nearly everyone else on Earth) has it made in the shade. You let them swing, then just keep up the pressure after every blow. They crack, we've already seen this in the trade stuff (TACO), in the Greenland/Panama/Canada thing, in the signalgate thing, in the Kilmar thing, etc. All you have to do is just not let go of it. They get bored of it, because Fox's viewers get bored of it, so Fox switches the programming, and so the admin does too. They declare victory, and walk away.
ICE agents are also deporting a lot of people here legally. Just last week: they attempted to deport and ban the wife of a U.S. soldier visiting her husband on leave with a valid tourist visa ; several U.S. citizens working for at the Westlake Home Depot despite being shown proof of citizenship; a U.S. Marshall of Mexican descent who was born in the country to legal residents.
That doesn't include the hundreds of students legally here on student visas.
And of course, if ICE is going to deport people in the country illegally: it's well establish by now that Musk and Melania violated the terms of their nonresident visas when they first came to the U.S., rendering their U.S. citizenship null and void (Musk worked in violation of his student visa; Melania both worked in violation of her tourist visa and overstayed her visa by several years; if she hadn't married Trump she would have been deported and banned from the U.S. for 10 years).
I would note they aren’t guilty of a crime - it’s a civil infraction. “Illegal” is a pejorative used to imply criminality, being an undocumented immigrant is not in fact criminal or a crime.
The issue however that prompted the protests was the way they are pursuing deportations with militarized tactics, brutality, and snatching people off the streets as abductions. They do not declare themselves, do not present their civil warrant, do not produce identification, and subsequently frequently do not follow laws, regulation, or the constitutional requirements of due process.
There is no reason that their neighbors, family, and friends need to be happy with what’s happening. They are afforded protection in our society to be angry and disclaim the government without fear of persecution or prosecution. When they’re then persecuted and prosecuted for doing that, people are pissed by the injustice. Then when their governments responsible is to fly in the military, you should expect an explosive situation.
Indeed it seems pretty clear the explosive situation was premeditated and planned - using armored vehicles and riot armored police to invade immigrant neighborhoods and abduct service workers and day laborers in broad daylight when a simple standard ICE operation was clearly designed to provoke strong response in those neighborhoods. Everything after that has been pretty deductively arrived at to create this precise situation. Even the language of insurrection and rebellion - laughably absurd claims for even a riot - which hadn’t happened until the national guard were deployed - are carefully chosen words to provide pretext for what comes next.
I desperate miss the states rights individual freedoms libertarian leaning republicans. They would never have done these things.
A combined 42 arrests were made by the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the LAPD said early Monday. Alleged crimes included attempted murder, looting, arson, failure to disperse, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and other offenses.
is one source, others may have more or less detail. It supports arrests being made wrt looting, not the assertion that most of the looters were arrested.
I agree - there seems to be talking past each other about some very fundamental things:
How extensive is the violence of the protests? I saw some images shared of cars that were burned, maybe some buildings damaged. But also lots of images from other protests from previous years. Are the images of the same 3 cars and storefronts or many? Trump says the riots are out of control, Newsom says the protests are largely peaceful.
How much of a strain do undocumented immigrants place on the US? You can answer this question from a financial and criminal point of view. From the point of view of crime, Trump and ICE are parading every violent undocumented immigrant they can, but that is not statistics. Do undocumented immigrants account for a significant portion of violent crime in the country?
From a financial point of view, what resources are undocumented immigrants straining, and is it to a significant degree?
The economic picture is much more nuanced. On the cost side, a criticized study (FAIR) reported the cost at about $182bn annually (this is likely an over-estimate). For comparison, undocumented immigrants pay about $100bn in taxes, boost the GDP, and create jobs. Mass deportation is estimated to cost $315Bn.
I initially thought this was a joke or sarcasm, but not everyone has seen everything that happens (the lucky 10,000 and all that). But during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, police, especially in Portland Oregon, used brutal and indiscriminate violence against protestors [1]. Some of the most brutal and blatant cases were eventually prosecuted [2] but most were not and never will be [3,4]. There were also multiple cases of Federal officers without uniforms in unmarked vehicles grabbing people off the streets to take them to unknown locations [5]. But there were cases across the country. In buffalo, 57 officers resigned after two cops were suspended for shoving a 75-year-old to the ground and cracking his skull (better to find a new job than the slight chance of accountability, I guess) [6].
But there was countless incidents that were not high profile that went completely unpunished. The purpose was to terrify protestors. If the police beat, abduct, maim, and injure protestors, and a year or two later, a half dozen get some light punishment, are you going to risk getting your eye shot out by a rubber bullet or your arm broken by a baton to protest the police next time?
[1] “Police here routinely embrace the violent crowd-control tactics … indiscriminately attacking protesters with tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, and other “less lethal” munitions. The bureau has been hit with two temporary restraining orders from federal judges: one rebuking the PPB for likely violations of protesters’ rights to free speech and against excessive force; the other ordering the PPB to stop arresting journalists and legal observers for documenting police clashes with protesters.” https://archive.ph/39lib
[2] “Donovan LaBella, 30, was peacefully protesting outside the federal courthouse in Portland on July 11, 2020, when a deputy U.S. Marshal fired a “less lethal” impact munition that struck LaBella in the face, causing brain damage.” https://www.opb.org/article/2024/11/20/portland-protester-do...
[3] “A Portland cop who chased down and beat a protest medic, in one of the most harrowing incidents of police violence from the city’s Black Lives Matter protests last year, will not face criminal charges.” https://archive.ph/6ErUo
[4] “[N]ot a single federal officer on the Portland streets at that time has been held individually accountable for alleged constitutional violations over claims brought by David and other protesters. In fact, courts have not had a chance to assess whether constitutional violations even occurred. That is thanks to the intervention of the Supreme Court, which in a series of rulings has created an accountability-free environment in which federal officials interacting with the public on a daily basis…can violate people’s constitutional rights with impunity.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/portland-prot...
[6] “the video shows Mr. Gugino stopping in front of the officers to talk, an officer yells “push him back” three times; one officer pushes his arm into Mr. Gugino’s chest, while another extends his baton toward him with both hands. Mr. Gugino flails backward, landing just out of range of the camera, with blood immediately leaking from his right ear… ‘These officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square’[John T. Evans, the president of the Buffalo police union]”. https://archive.ph/KYOIS
Honest question, because I don't see it here in Colorado: Who has it adversely affected? Crime rates among illegal immigrants are lower than the rest of the population [1] [2] [3] and illegal immigrants are the backbone of our agricultural system [4]
So ... who is hurt and how badly are they hurt? Because when I see the amount of perfectly legal murder, robbery and torture happening in the U.S. [5] [6] [7] [8] I just don't understand what the big deal is. I guess it's whataboutism, but when we have limited resources, why are we using them for this specific problem? How bad is it compared to this other stuff?
"one in eight Americans thinking women are too emotional to be in politics" [1]. Well, I don't know, maybe men should not holding high political offices /s
Fascism is always a big tent movement, that is surprisingly lenient in who it allows inside. Ultraliberalists (Thiel...), Christian traditionalists (Vance...), pro-Russians (Gabbard...), etc. They all find a seat in Trump's administration.
You have to remove this idea from your head that fascism is a focused ideology with a consistent system of ideas. It is anything but. There is no grand Machiavellian plan to build X, Y or Z.
My previous comment attempted to explain why Yarvin's ideas came into the public's eye: because he was sponsored by one of the factions that today occupies a prominent role in Trump's administration. Nothing more.
While fascism is internally inconsistent, it does exhibit some consistent aspects, explicited in the short essay I linked you. Close relations with the capitalist class is one of them, and indeed, this ties together Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Trump...
So to answer your question: no, I don't think we're likely to get a CEO-king. But we will get a generic authoritarian government, which is where Orban's ended too. Not out of sheer ideology but as a result of every faction's pull towards something like that.
You might want to consume less liberal media, as those are forever clueless about what's happening since they can't reason about the prevalence of capital in Trump's politics. Actual left-wing media has been pretty spot-on in my experience, in predicting the general outline of Trump's policies. Deporting citizens? check. Cutting medicare/medicaid? check. Undoing constitutional checks to power? check.
Wild guess. As far as I can tell this was the first such article: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-trumps-reign-fits-c... I posted it here, but it didn't attract much interest here or elsewhere from what I can tell. But as you can see it had interesting things to say. Those who make money from peddling words saw an opportunity, re-wrote and posted it as their own work.
It's grubby process in some ways, but looking at it holistically, it's not a bad outcome. The meme has gotten the interest I think deserved, even it's creator didn't.
It's around 900 pages. In NYC we have a study group to go over it -- we've covered just a handful of chapters. But most people can get a lot out of just reading the opening section.
You can understand, for example, most of their tactics about immigration by reading the section on Homeland Security, tariffs by reading the Economy section (by Peter Navarro), and so on. They are in fact hewing pretty closely to the plan.
For those with unilateral tinnitus that seems influenced by neck stretches or TMJ issues, try sleeping on your back or on the opposite side to avoid pressure on the affected ear.
Also, consider getting an MRI to check for possible causes; in my case, a vascular loop was found contacting the vestibulocochlear nerve inside the internal auditory canal.
While I consider my case largely managed, it still flares up a few times per month, usually triggered by irritation or inflammation (allergens, getting sick, poor neck posture, loud music for hours)
Indeed. We should not confuse manual labor with manufacturing.
Some assorted observations:
1. Most services are dependent on the use of manufactured goods.
2. Trade exists precisely, because no domestic economy is entirely self-sufficient with respect to the demands of its market. However, when manufacturing is entirely outsourced, you become somewhat of an economic rump state. In the best case, you are now an administrator of manufacturing possessions somewhat like a colonial overseer. This creates a condition of economic imperialism rather than one of economic exchange. It creates incentives to capture the political systems of foreign countries and to depress standards of living in order to maintain low costs.
3. When everything is imported, then the only thing you can exchange for them are services. The alternative is printing fiat money or borrowing.
4. When manufacturing is moved abroad, experience and expertise withers and dies. Entire supply chains and intertwined sectors of industry fade. This creates an economic and even political dependence that goes beyond the mere inability of manufacture. As technology becomes increasingly complex, this creates security exposure. The interdependence of these supply chains is nontrivial.
5. Manufacturing is a basis for technological development. This is the result of not just manufacturing capacity, but the combined and communicated expertise that manufacturing enables and propagates. Once a tradition of expertise dies, it is difficult or impractical to replace.
6. Domestic manufacturing creates redundancy that buffers both the domestic economy and the global economy against single points of failure. It also helps drive prices down.
I feel you. I could write an essay about Homebrew, instead I'll list the other alternatives. There's pkgsrc[1], MacPorts[2], and Nix[3]. In my experience, none of these are as comprehensive, and each comes with its own quirks. Worth a try, might work for you.
You can't build sky-scrapers without rebar (i.e. with un-reinforced concrete), but you can build some pretty large structures if you use curves, arches, widening bases, buttresses, etc. The Pantheon is pretty big, built from un-reinforced concrete, and nearly 2000 years old.
You have to adapt your building style to the material you're working with and tall, thin structures depend on the tensile strength of steel; concrete doesn't have much tensile strength, but does have tremendous compressive strength, so your structure will have to be wider at the bottom, although not necessarily wider than it's tall. It's all about directing the vectors of forces in a way that they stay inside the material of the structure, so no flying slabs, upper floors have to have arches or domes supporting them from below (or lots of pillars that widen into a small arch at the ends).
Here is an idea for a technique may be useful for building with un-reinforced concrete: instead of pouring whole walls into a mold, pour "lego"-style interlocking (large) blocks, layer by layer. Between layers you paint the surface with a thin layer of weak but flexible mortar or glue before pouring the next layer. This way you keep enough room for the structure to shift and settle without cracking and you can use the angle of contact between blocks to deflect the vectors of force back into the material. The article mentions that the Roman-style concrete hardens much faster, so that'll work well with this idea (you don't have to wait too long between pours).
It's fascinating that just last year, SCOTUS has determined that Congress couldn't delegate its powers to rulemaking agencies that Congress explicitly creates, charters, and funds.
Yet, somehow, this implicit 'delegation' (where Congress is very actively doing nothing) is somehow kosher. As long as they won't impeach the leader of their party, anything goes! The man could drop a nuclear bomb on Ohio, and as long as he had 34 surviving votes in the Senate, he'd be fine.
If this kind of congressional silence is endorsement, why the hell did SCOTUS get involved to start legislating regulations from the bench in the first place?
I’m all for creative disruption, but what worries me is when I see a pattern of stable employment being displaced by algorithmically mediated gig work and viral entertainer lotto tickets. This is a dangerous trend in general, but the US is especially poorly positioned because of its lack of strong safety nets. When the foundation of your economy is hollowed out to make it ever more top-heavy, you’re destined for collapse.
I just do not agree with the libertarian mindset. It is a “tragedy of the commons” situation for me. We live in a complex society and share/use the same resources and infrastructure, and the net effect of individual use can be huge. Power grid capacity is a perfect example, where each individual using a bit more energy doesn’t cost them much directly and there is little market pressure one way or the other. The overall effect requires higher infrastructure spending, that everyone pays regardless of if you use a bit more or less energy. Never mind how much pollution comes from energy production, and we all breath the same air. “The market” is absolutely terrible at solving for indirect effects like that.
I also don’t have the time, energy, and knowledge to be an expert on every single thing I buy or use. I know nothing about roofing materials, so having some bare minimum standards and left and right limits balancing societal harm/good and individual choice is perfectly reasonable to me.
Natural resources and infrastructure are a shared resource “owned” by everyone, collectively known as the nation. Protecting that value is what the government should be doing.
This is my claim: the narrative that these programs incentivize and facilitate freeloading is false. Let's use your example: NPR's exploration of Hale County [0], which I'm not sure you've read/listened to.
The first interview [1] is exactly what I've written: baby boomers got older and more disabled, and economic conditions pushed people into disability. Quote: "consider this: Since the economy began its slow, slow recovery in late 2009, we've been averaging about 150,000 new jobs created per month. But in that same period, almost 250,000 people have been applying for disability every month." What do you want these people to do, manifest new jobs?
The second interview [2] outlines how the definition of disability has expanded over the years and the way the legal profession has exploited that to increase the number and success rate of disability claims. Again, not freeloading.
The third interview [3] describes how welfare-to-work legislation put a higher burden of the welfare onto states, so it's actually in their financial benefit to move people off of welfare and onto Social Security disability--so much so in fact that they pay people to do it. Quote: "PCG estimates it'll save Missouri about $80 million with all the people that will be getting onto disability and off of welfare".
Interviews 4 [4] and 5 [5] describe how people and families get trapped in these systems where if they do too well they'll experience extreme financial hardship. Quote: "a lot of the letters that we got from people responding to the stories were people saying, I'm one of those 14 million people on disability and I want to work. But I get health insurance on disability and what job am I going to find that accommodates my disability, it also gives me health insurance."
If your model of this problem is "there's a bunch of people too lazy to work who are freeloading on the public dole" you will be unsuccessful at solving it, because your model is wrong.
This is exactly why I stake out such a strong position, so that positions like this poke their heads up. Individuals getting benefits when they're ineligible accounts for tiny amounts of the total fraud in these programs. Time after time we discover at least one of two things:
- The effort/cost required to reduce fraud usually overshadows the cost of the fraud itself and also dramatically reduces the benefits of the program. There were 640,000 SNAP fraud investigations in 2014 [0]. If they cost $1,000 each that's $640m, and I bet they cost more!
- The vast majority of fraud is either criminal, retailer, or both [1]
The "moral hazard" angle of these programs is wildly overplayed. You don't hear anything about:
- criminal trafficking
- retailer fraud
- program benefits
There's political reasons for this, but it doesn't matter. Our brainrot on social programs is intense.
Looking at the fact sheet linked from that release [2], that stat that jumps out to me is 3,500 individuals charged totaling $1.4b in stolen CARES Act funds (this isn't a direct stat, but the numbers only get worse if we presume even more money from this and other programs was stolen), which is $400k/individual charged. It doesn't really seem possible for a person or household to have bilked the government for $400k under the individual benefits of the CARES Act [3]. We're looking at white collar fraud here, again a thing you never hear anything about.
Finally, we should view some levels of fraud as indicative of broader social ills. For example the number of blue collar jobs has greatly diminished just in a single lifetime [4]. Could that be responsible for the dramatic increase in Social Security Disability claims (yes)?
But sure, in the ideal world:
1. Call every bluff Trump makes. Do not capitulate to anything. Drown him in lawsuits. He's lost at least a 3rd of the DOJ so they cannot handle suing every company, college, and state at once.
2. Anyone in a red and especially purple states, make it a habit to call your represenatives every day. emails can (and probably will be) ignored. Don't let their lines be anything but people telling these congressmen to knock it off and actually do their jobs. Collorary: anyone in a blue state calls in and makes sure their congressmen know they need to also resist, fight back, and not capitulate.
3. If you can, townhalls are even better than calling. If you see the local townhalls you know this scares the GOP congressmen stiff.
4. if you see federal agents in the wild, always be recording. The truth is the beth antidote to corruption. Make sure you livestream as well so they can't just seize your phone. The more live feed out there the harder it is to spin.
5. heck, if we're really dreaming big we plan some general strike. Shut down the country for a day and you'll have everyone reeling to try and backpedal.
Varying levels of realism there, but the theme is clear: resist and make sure others resist. They can't ignore us all if we work together. But that "working together" in such a hyper-individualistic society is the hard part. It may just be more realistic to wait until someone dies or midterms happen.