#Retvrn

Unfortunately, the people pushing AI are the same ones selling recreational flamethrowers

It’s great for getting off the ground in a language you’re unfamiliar with. But a recipe for technical debt when used long term. You’re inviting spaghetti code with some real hair pulling bugs.

4 hour planning

I’ve seen projects where this was comically too high. But a lot more where it was horrifyingly agonizingly too low.

They asked why it was set up that way. I explained why it was set up that way.

Democracy, as an institution, was insurgent within the colonies long before the American Revolution. Early local settler colonial governments preferred democratic governance over authoritarian rule because there was no clear overwhelming political force to exert this kind of control. Later efforts to consolidate power nationally failed for similar reasons - the territory was too large and too sparsely populated to be dominated from a distant capital, market economies followed organic and cyclical patterns that defied strict authoritarian policies, and the culturally diverse public reflexively rebelled when any single minority faction gained too much power.

Popular demagogues, divorced from the centers of intellectual orthodoxy and economic command, could still sway their peers and influence the Lockean social contract more easily than autocrats issuing dictates from a capital.

Democracy isn’t something a handful of intellectuals created from whole cloth. It is a mass movement that those intellectuals sought to steer through formal institutionalization.

rich and educated landowners

uneducated masses

Living in a historical moment in which the US is on the cusp of tipping into full on autocracy, and I get to hear about how our problem is “Not enough rich people with advanced degrees making the decisions around here”.

The whole premise of democracy is that individuals bring useful perspective at every walk of life. The education system exists because the uneducated masses desire them and construct them and socially replicate them, not because the elites foist it on the public unwillingly. The accumulated social wealth exists because the masses build it, not because elites magically summon it into existence. The institutions that define normal public life persist because the masses endorse them and gladly participate in them, not because landlords own and operate them.

Without the “uneducated masses” you do not have a social contract or a labor force capable of implementing any meaningful public policy. Leaving decision making exclusively to landlords gets you to theocracy and cult demagoguery, not modern post-industrial plenty.

I mean, “We’re starting a new party! The Infograph Party!” was a loser to begin with. But coming straight out of the gate with “You’re already a member, you just don’t know it yet” naive dogmatism certainly isn’t helping.

The Internet will continue to function just fine, just as it has for 50 years.

Sounds of intercontinental data cables being sliced

You’re either with the oligarchs or you’re with the terrorists

DOGE is already tearing wiring out of the walls. Crazy to get weeks of “Half Department X has been fired and the budget has been slashed” articles only to hear Schumer take the blame in advance for further defunding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick

Freedom of Speech has been dead for some time.

If you don’t want to pay more for eggs, you should simply be like me and raise chickens

No, I will not explain why I was upset about the price of eggs two months ago. That was Biden’s economy. This is different

The Spanish Civil War did not end well for antifascists. People were making fun of Francisco Franco well into his late 70s.

Lemmy: “Haha! You fucking idiots! That’s not what Transgenic means.”

DOGE: “Don’t actually care. This is just some bullshit to distract the rubes while we finish our bust out of the US Treasury.”

i don’t think this forgive and forget narrative fixes the problem

I don’t think this is forgive-and-forget. Its recognizing the source of the conflict as fascist propaganda, not some intrinsic impulse within some subset of people.

Rather than trying to debate bro your parents on Trumpism, try cutting their cable line and see how their opinions shift without a steady diet of reactionary TV.

Encapsulating people in these little ideological bubbles and walling them off from one another with technological barriers in order to more cheaply extract labor from them is more-or-less the thesis of “The Network State”, the guiding doctrine behind the modern Trump administration.

You need your Red Team and your Blue Team to be fully alienated from one another, insisting that each side is this horrifying inhuman entity incapable of reconciling with the other. And then you can have the Gray Team - the Objectivist neutral rent-seeking arbiters - moving between them as overseers and police agents, to extract surplus and compel obedience by implicitly setting the rules by which the Reds and the Blues live.

MAGA exists as this hyperactive immune system, intended to polarize a segment of the population against the whole. And on the flip side, you have these ultra-orthodox neoliberals doing the same thing but from a “Woke” side of the fence. They’re both fiercely capitalist. They’re both fiercely identitarian. And they’re both obsessed with compelling obedience from the top down - whether its crushing campus student protests for being antisemitic or purging RINOs from state and local governments or consolidating media markets into mega-corporate behemoths like Sinclair and Clear Channel and the Gates/Bezos monolith.

You’re not going to get people to leave the MAGA Cult because they’re not going to hear you. They’re segregated and pumped full of anxiety such that they don’t dare leave their enclosures. At the same time, you’re being walled in yourself. You’re told not to set foot inside a church or show up at a rival political rally or otherwise have any social contact with anyone in a Red Hat (except to participate in some kind of retaliatory violence). Don’t talk to your neighbors if you see them showing the wrong kind of swag. And always be wearing your own colors, so people can instantly identify which team you’re on in public.

Its an ugly state of affairs.

The best way to spot a fascist is to see who the US national media has decided to line up behind, unequivocally.

The only people I can think of who get more fawning and sycophancy are Steve Jobs, King Charles, and Mohammad bin Salman.

Israel is the gun pointed at the head of Egypt, to prevent them from ever exerting serious control over the Suez Canal. Americans have turned that defense pack into a religious fetish, but the roots of the relationship boil down to the simple question of who gets to do business between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Control of this pivotal choke point of trade, along with Cape Town, South Africa and the Panama Canal and Singapore functionally dictates global trade. What’s one more psychotic ultra-reich wing ethnostate on the map for control of that kind of wealth and military power?

Anarchists recognize class as a social construct rather than a biological imperative or a free market condition. As a result, they will often make a point of transgressing or undermining the pageantry that class-centric organizations cling to.

Its not that they think “no classes” will be a result so much as they think “explicitly defying class” is a political act.

Real State of Exception Hours