Jared Diamond wrote about it in Collapse, where he covers how we handle extractive industries and how we could better regulate them. That’s where I learned about it. I tried finding an article about it, and I could find stuff talking about the policy indirectly, but nothing directly about it.

Let’s be real, has Trump ever been to a national park? Like really been to one and not just popped in for a speech or photo op? Has he ever, in his entire sad life, been on a fucking hike? Been farther than 500 ft from the next nearest human? These places aren’t even real in his mind, they’re just concepts. It’s impossible to really imagine consequences to actions against concepts. He’ll absolutely make our parks private property if given the chance. Don’t like it? Too bad, go get rich and buy your own national park, nobody’s stopping you.

I hope he and Elon live long enough to end up in the bread lines they’re going to cause.

Well, it depends. On short leases, it does work exactly like the lorax. They just clear cut that shit as hard as they can to maximize how much money they can make on it. Montana and some other northern states eventually figured out that you should set these companies up with 100 year leases that pierce the corporate veil, so that even if the company strip cuts the plot and declares bankruptcy, you can go give the owner a big fat financial wedgie for the next 100 years. I think it’s a pretty smart solution, and from what I’ve heard, the companies in these arrangements do pretty good forest management.

Thank you for that! I know you didn’t have to do it, so I want you to know that I appreciate your effort.

Probably

What’s the story here? I thought Goebbels was among those tried at Nuremberg

Most people have a very surface level understanding of various political issues. There’s only so many hours in a day, and people choose to use them in different ways. I can’t really blame them for that. I also can’t blame them for the fact that we’re probably one of the most heavily propagandized peoples on earth, with Fox and the right wing news networks being the crowning jewel of such. I can see how it’d be easy to take your infotainment of Jesse Waters smugly “owning” Nancy Pelosi over some stupid fucking bullshit she said or did without ever hearing a real dissenting voice and just stop there. I can’t agree with it, but a lot of the normies I know have made it clear to me that I’m a special case in that regard.

Brainwashing. Trying to understand the Palestine- Israel situation was something I casually worked at, off and on, for twelve years, which is 1000x more effort than most Americans put into it. I’d get about six hours into trying to untangle the propaganda and get what I felt was an accurate portrayal of the truth using what I felt were high factuality, unbiased sources and just get nowhere. I got as far as understanding that Israel is an authoritarian police/ethnostate, but I never had so clear of a picture of the situation as I do now. Israel has removed all doubt for me that they’re proudly undertaking a project of genocide.

Regex

Edit: to everyone who responded, I use regex infrequently enough that the knowledge never really crystalizes. By the time I need it for this one thing again, I haven’t touched it in like a year.

I would love to flip the railroad usage and cow pasture usage.

Also, mfs drinking too much corn syrup.

I think we are. If you can think of something awful for us to do, we’re already on our way to doing it. We’re probably a month out from shooting garbage and nuclear waste into orbit on spaceX rockets.

I’m worried, I’m afraid to say. Our government has been compromised, and the republic is dead, we will have no more legitimate elections and it’s likely (imo) that our legislature will soon dissolve. I wish I could say that we were ever the America you were taught about, but it was always a farce. I’m almost to middle age and I’ve never once seen my country try to be the place it tells itself it is. It’s always been a place that beats its chest while sitting on the couch and reminiscing about how cool it was on the high school sports team; that steps on the weak and the poor to satisfy the rich and the powerful. I’ve always believed we could do better, that we could be the place we tell ourselves we are, but we never choose to do the hard work to be that place.

Though Ukraine will likely persist as an ulcer for the remainder of Putin’s life. The good news is twofold:

• we still haven’t cracked immortality, and one day probably quite soon, Putin’s number will be called.

• Europe is stepping up to the plate now that the US has shit its pants and is currently waddling off the field. Take my energy, Goku!

Okay, here we go

• The US is fucking YUGE. Historically speaking, it’s very, very difficult to keep countries that span huge geographic areas together. There seems to be some fundamental limit of size per population that can be tolerated before your cultural and geographic differences start becoming significant enough to start forming separate identities. The US has like 14 such subregions, and each one has a little different idea of what “America” means to them. A strong single national identity is not the default case here, you’ve got to really work at it or have some big unifying cause, which we no longer have.

• We already have pre-fabricated governments in the form of state governments. State governments tend to be pretty strong, in the sense that they tend to have a whole lot of administrative capacity, much stronger imo than what I believe of European provincial governments. The whole original idea was that the states were mostly independent states joined together under a trade federation and its government. Of course, it hasn’t been that for a long time, but that’s the root that we grew up from.

• We have almost no history of state on state violence, and most Americans do share some sense of national identity. Maybe not a strong one anymore, but it’s there. I think most people would be pretty shocked about the idea of going to war with another state.

• This isn’t really an ideological separation, as much as the federal government is just, like, vanishing in a puff of smoke. There’s a lot of states where they’ve depended on the federal government’s administrative capacity to handle stuff, and that’s just going away in a real haphazard, scattershot way. At some point, these states will ask themselves “if we’re handling all this shit ourselves, what the hell are we sending the Fed tax dollars for?”

Okay, I’m not trying to be shitty with you, I’m actually interested. Why don’t you make your case for when you think the US republic died?

The problem that I keep seeing here is people saying “well, he can’t do that.”

Stop that. He can do it because nobody’s going to stop him. I mean, you surely don’t expect that little shit Mike Johnson to tell Daddy Trump no. The constitution itself isn’t going to rise up out of its case like Godzilla and crush him. The judiciary isn’t going to come and enforce their decision in person. That just leaves the military. They’re either going to coup him, or not, and I’m expecting the latter case.

X

Well, it depends on how you define the USA. You mean the Republic of the United States of America? Yeah, no, that’s dead. It is currently dead. It died when the SCOTUS made the president functionally beyond criminal prosecution, and everyone has just kind of been playing weekend at Bernie’s since then (though the Trump administration is dropping the pretense pretty quickly). Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dying for a long time, but that was the exact moment it was declared dead. No matter what happens, the republic as we knew it is dead and is not coming back. Nobody believes in the constitution anymore; among our leadership there are only either those who are in a hurry to destroy it, or those who are unwilling to defend it. I think a lot of the American populace haven’t sincerely believed in the constitution as an effective charter for governance for a while, too. Imo, we’re less than a year from the legislature being dissolved in some fashion of another, unless they just hang on like some ceremonial vestigial organ.

What we get to decide now is what comes next. That’s what nobody’s sure about. Are we going to have a middle-east style theocratic government? Italian fascism? Maybe the military defends the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic and we re-form the republic? German fascism? Neofeudalism? Peaceful balkanization? Hot balkanization? COULD IT BE?! BY GOD, it’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.

I know things have seemed a lot more comfortable since Elon’s little stunt, but you could stand to put yours back on.

For real though, who thought a little rag could cause so much trauma?