We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.

The problem is we haven’t figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism – government by force – became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.

Now there isn’t a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.

But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.

I just don’t know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we’re already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren’t waiting until July, but hitting in June.

My point was descriptive: I’ve noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I’ve noticed content creators and pundits who’ve been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.

It’s not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls’ schools, which I can’t understand how they imagined that was a good look.)

I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I’ve also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.

I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.

It doesn’t matter which. That does seem to be the way we’re headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.

Thr bird is the word.

We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.

I’m preheating olive oil on the stove.

Both homosexuals and Communist Party members were seen as subversive elements in American society who all shared the same ideals of antitheism, rejection of bourgeois culture and middle-class morality, and lack of conformity.

Oh holy cow. I am so pegged. I feel seen!

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

That’s not quite it.

Then thr 0.1% gets all the money, and the failing rich blame themselves for not being clever enough.

Then the 0.01% get all the money and fly around in golden zeppelins

And then the 0.001% gets all the money, and our elected officials tell us that if we charge them with crimes, the whole economy will collapse.

Now eight guys own more than half the population and we’re feeling lean and hungry.

I’m 56 and has to have the context explained to me when I saw it pop out of the meme-o-sphere.

The Wiccan Rede is one line and can be trimmed to two words.

It’s also a chief principle of preschool and kindergarten classes.

Wait, sheep can report their surroundings like scouts?

I remember in C&C: Generals the GLA can produce riotous mobs which are super effective, but have a no visibility, so you have to light up the region either with military units (say a few rebels mixed in) or with nearby surveillance vans.

Since sheep are livestock I’d expect them to have zero visibility also.

This was made clear in the Behind the Bastards two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity in which the industrialists thought the Great Depression was the good times, and were really resentful that FDR implemented the New Deal, which was a stopgap to prevent a communist revolution, since despite the troubles in the USSR, it had to be better than what we were contending with, and people were sharpening their hoes. (Those who still had hoes)

These days, yes, not only do they want you in tents, but they want you in tents in some other place, and they want you to starve even when you cannot commute to a jobsite.

I’ve noticed the guillotine memes have stopped and instead of saying how absurd violent uprising is, people are saying how this may result in violence whether or not that would fix things.

That’s just Russian propaganda, but who doesn’t relish good Russian propaganda?

As driller, yeah, making sure there’s a tunnel up is my main job. Usually Molly takes my tunnels, which means I did them right.

In the olden days, Molly’s pathfinding would sometimes fail, which is why the Drop Pod will open fifteen seconds before launch even if Molly is not collected. So some of us OG miners don’t trust Molly to take us home anyway… or don’t like to trust Molly. Sometimes we’re desperate.

We still have troubles sometimes during Simple Mining missions in which the cave has too much verticality, which can make a fail state for solo engineers in rare cases. As with Bulk Detonators at the end of Salvage, sometimes Hoxxes is unkind. Curiously, with all other mission types since, exfiltration depends way less on the vigilance of the crew assuring accessibility to upper levels.

Okay.

The answer is it’s all up in the air.

I expect there’s a massive GOP movement to suppress votes and gerrymander other votes. I suspect there are efforts to defraud the election in some counties or even in some whole states. But I don’t know how successful they will be.

I expect there will be an attempted coup d’etat if Biden wins the election, but I don’t presume it’s going to overthrow the US. We may break out into civil war, but then if the Republican party takes power, the US is going to be really hazardous anyway. I’m no expert, but by my understanding civil war is going to be inevitable so long as we can’t get relief from the mass precarity and enough election reform to empower the public. And since the Democratic party still treats its progressive wing as red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table, we can expect only table scraps.

Biden staying in the White House means I probably have longer before I’m collected to be processed as an undesirable. It could make a difference of months or decades.

That said, I’m pissed off, too, the degree to which the US is responsible for the Palestinian genocide, though the way I’ve been following it, Biden has been doing a lot more than the neo-liberal norm to quietly slow down Netanyahu’s offensive into Gaza. Not as much as I’d like, by far, but more than I’d expect from an establishment Democrat. Biden’s been slow-walking aid to Israel, whereas we expect the Republican party is glad to facilitate massacring Palestinians while simultaneously cutting off support to Ukraine so Russia can take over.

Assuming you are a voter, it’s up to you, and maybe it’s more important to you to symbolically support Palestine by not voting against the Republican party. But doing so might have material effects that make things worse in Gaza, hence I’m going to vote tactically.

Okay, if you don’t care which of the two guys gets elected (Democrat or Republican) then sure, vote for the third party of your choice. That said, we don’t know if Perot was a successful spoiler. If Perot pulled (approximately) two GOP voters for every one Democrat, then yes, he was a successful spoiler (the math is even more sophisticates, since this would have to be calculated for each swing state and then summed up) but we don’t know.

But in 2024, every Republican voted into office advances the effort towards turning the US into a one party autocracy. This means you have to vote tactically based on if you want that process sped up, slowed down or don’t care. Unless you’re close enough to a billionaire to get the fuck out of dodge (e.g. leave the US for extended leave) then a Trump presidency is going to lead to a lot of Trumpgrets, and a risky venture through the gravity well of a purge and holocaust.

I can’t speak for you guys, but I don’t want to risk dying in a concentration camp, and I can’t emphasize enough how much that is totally not hyperbole.

Infringement of IP is a crime according to specific states, but if you make art, and I replicate it, it doesn’t affect you.

If you write a story and I read it without paying you, it doesn’t affect you.

The only reason IP is a thing is because short-term monopolies on media (or inventions or methods) were enshrined by specific states as law, and then spread through trade agreements, and they were expanded on without concern for their original purpose or for the good of the public. In fact, we’re seeing fair use rights fade since states aren’t willing to enforce them, and platforms like YouTube over censor.

So at this point, in the US, the EU and the eastern market, no IP law would be better than what we have.

So no, you have not demonstrated any reason I should have respect for your IP.

However, if you’re going to insist, and be an IP maximalist, there is one thing I can do for you /to you (or Sony, or Time Warner, or Disney) that is worse than pirating your product.

And that, of course, is not pirating your product.

Third parties really don’t matter. You have one vote which is against the guy who will do his part for Project 2025 (end democracy – and Democrats – and install a one-party autocratic state, who doesn’t even have to pretend to care what you think). And you do that by voting for the other popular guy, the Democrat.

If you vote for a third party or you don’t vote, then you do nothing to stop the rise of autocracy. Obviously, a vote for the Republican is a vote to accelerate the one-party autocracy process. So those are your options.

Third parties only act as spoilers in FPTP elections, and the campaign machines for both major parties regard and will regard them as such.

Ross Perot ran for President as an independent as a third party candidate getting 18% of the vote and none of the EC, and is the record holder for the largest share by a third-party presidential candidate.