Note to all the concern trolls: This is what an argument looks like that is focused on Biden’s age as a problem and what might be done about it, out of actual concern for achieving a good result for our politics and democracy, without carrying a massive implicit or explicit message “and that’s why we should all be voting for Cornel West instead” and then whining about how everyone is in denial and trying to silence your innocently helpful message when you get a negative reaction.

So I am basing this on a book “How Democracies Die” that describes a series of case studies of nations that were threatened by a fascist movement, and those that succumbed, and those that defeated it, and what were the differences and tactics involved.

It’s fairly depressing, because a lot of times once it reaches a certain point there aren’t a lot of good options, but it is based on real outcomes and I think it’s instructive.

The Democrats’ “taking the high road” that they like to do is different. Assassinating the justices would be responding in kind. Growing the court would be a dangerous escalation. Making a crash priority out of impeaching them, like equal in priority with taking your fucking vacation for July 4th or passing a resolution honoring National Snails Day or whatever useless thing that are doing instead, would be a proper response (to me). Holding a hand-wringing press conference and then doing more or less nothing other than crossing fingers and hoping that this November doesn’t bring the end of the Republic - I.e. taking the high road, i.e. apparently what they’ve decided to do - seems like a pretty sure road to calamity. That, I’m 100% not advocating as the right course of action, although I can see how it might have sounded like I was.

This is the fascism trap. It’s tempting to fight back “in kind” once the rules start going out the window, and obviously by the letter of their decision it would be perfectly legal for him to just assassinate them as an official act and then nominate all new justices. But this is a trap. The further we all abandon the unspoken rules that keep things on the rails, the worse it gets. You have to fight back on the tilted table without yourself breaking any rules you can avoid breaking.

It’s a shitty situation but that is the strategy, as far as I understand it.

(And I know, or I assume, that you weren’t serious - but still it applies, even to more minor things like solving the problem by nominating 10 new justices or things like that.)

Haha glad you enjoyed; I have many more. I thought of Dwarf Fortress games like explaining your dreams or your DND sessions, in that they’re only interesting to the person who went through them, but if it’s not that way I may start making a habit of posting them in a DF sub somewhere.

If you’ve spent any amount of time among people who went to / are in college in their early 20s, and people who were working in their late teens and early twenties, it becomes clear that college arranges for the students to have a managed-for-them life to a degree that I actually think is severely harmful to them. It’s basically a big day care. Education is fuckin fantastic, I’m not saying it’s not, but the nature of the way your life is organized within it to me I think is very bad for people.

Like yes you know integrals, very good, but e.g. I spoke to a guy who had not paid his phone bill for months, who somehow still had phone service but was genuinely very confused about how the bills he was getting now could have gotten as high as they were. No matter how many times I tried to explain to him, I couldn’t get it across. I finally just gave up the endeavor.

Honestly, I think that impeaching all 6 justices is the right thing to do.

Just explain it to people in congress. You WILL lose your power when the whip comes down. You MAY be imprisoned or killed if you don’t get in line, and even if not, any power you had in congress will be stripped and discarded. There is no safety, even for the most extreme of the true believers. This is your chance. If you don’t try to stop it, then I think it’s better odds than 50/50 than within a couple of years you’ll be saying you’d do ANYTHING to be able to go back to today and do it, and have your old life just hanging out in Washington and doing legalized insider trading and collecting bricampaign contributions and not having to worry about what will happen to you or your family or your home, again.

I don’t know if the people will believe if it is explained to them. Groupthink and complacency are powerful things. But that is absolutely what’s at stake.

Nothing to do with anything, I just feel like some levity is needed:

So: I had a little guy in my Dwarf Fortress game who was a master at combat. All his physical stats were extraordinary, and he loved war. He was in the military and excelled at it; my military saw a lot of action and he became legendary in several fighting abilities. Then there was a great disaster which led to the decimation of my military, and a period of several years hiding in the fortress with all the doors locked until the goblin army got bored and went away on its own. He survived the disaster, but he was badly wounded. Like real messed up.

The fortress survived, and gradually things came back to life, but this dude was crippled. He had to walk with a crutch, and had nerve damage. He became a cook, at which he also excelled, and his excellent meals became another key fixture of the fortress. I would sometimes sell barrels and barrels of them to trade caravans when I was short of other stuff, at huge prices. But. He always had unhappiness because of wanting to be able to get back to fighting. It was clearly a non starter of an idea, but it bothered me somewhat that the guy had been through so much and now had any kind of sadness in his daily life.

Finally, during a period of needing some additional troops, I finally said fuck it and put him back in the military. I gave him a battleaxe to go with his crutch, honestly not really sure how it would work out. His physical stats were excellent but the fuckin dude's got a useless leg. I don't think this is going to work. But it's what he wants to do, and who am I to tell him no?

I watched him close during his first encounter in combat. He wasn't good for much, to be honest. It was clear that his physical ability was impaired. He kept falling down. Until, somehow, he lost control of his axe, and then he picked up his wooden crutch and BEAT THE FUCK out of his adversary with the crutch. Like absolutely took him the fuck apart.

I don't understand the combat engine well enough to say exactly how it works, but it seemed clear that the answer was to give the guy a steel crutch and have that be his weapon. He kept breaking wooden crutches across enemies' faces and falling down, which is an issue in combat obviously, so I didn't feel like it was safe to continue to let that happen and have him maybe come to harm. I made a bunch of steel crutches, and tried to manipulate things so he would pick one up and start using it, but I never quite got it to happen. I think I gave up the whole endeavor and put him back in the kitchen. But if someone can tell me how to assign a particular crutch to a particular wounded dwarf, I'd love to give him a brand new indestructible crutch and let him hobble his way into battle and go the fuck to town and finally come into his own.

Britain already figured this out, until Thatcher blew the whole thing up.

The government buys up a ton of houses and apartments, rents them out to people at reasonable rates, thus piercing the bubble of rent prices and keeping everything reasonable for everyone even from private landlords. We don’t have to have a big loophole ridden argument about what is and isn’t allowed to do, because any private landlord can do whatever they want - the market that they hold so dear just all of a sudden becomes such that they can’t send their tenants to work all day and then keep most of the money they made in exchange for literally nothing.

When they enacted it in Britain, a lot of landlords eventually just sold their properties to the govt anyway, because it became more profitable for them to invest the money in some business enterprise than to just sit on their asses and collect the pitifully un-parasitic rents that they were able to charge.

Literally everyone wins except the parasites. Which means it’s unlikely to happen on a large scale in America… except that it doesn’t need to happen on a large scale. Literally any city or state could do the same and all of a sudden could become the one place in the country where rent is reasonable and Bob’s your uncle welcome to getting reelected for life.

GET ON IT POLITICIANS YOU GUYS HAVE BOUGHT ENOUGH TV COMMERCIALS TIME TO DO SOMETHING NEW

I couldn’t really make head or tail of it and I’m still not sure, but Google’s announcement linked to the list of incident reports that they said were being mishandled, and I picked out this one at random, and I have to say it definitely seems like they kind of have a point. Certificates were being signed with SHA-1 for about 2 years, as far as I can tell, and most of Entrust’s responses over several months of people asking them “how are you taking steps to endeavor that things like this aren’t still happening or will not happen again” was basically, thank you for concern but fuck off stop bothering me.

You know what? I actually think the answers are almost all pretty solidly productive stuff. Like taking at face value the question and saying "hey here's how to help the Democrats win since you asked."

That was not what I expected. I am -- for real -- pretty surprised. I think I have well founded reasons for being suspicious of why you would have posted the actual "just asking questions" original post, but the answers (even the discussion from people being real critical of Biden) is fine. Has the Lemmy consensus, even on lemmy.ml, shifted that far away from "let's not vote for Biden what's the worst that could happen"?

Haven't you read their messaging? They are just perfectly innocent Democrat supporters who are super concerned about Biden's chances in the election. Also they talk about Cornel West sometimes. For some reason they are not concerned about his chances in the election; they just really like what he has to say, and they're going to vote for him. Flawless.

It's good to see that the propaganda accounts have learned the Fox News trick of having one person innocently ask a question so a bunch of other people can rush in and provide the answer (which is turning out to be, big shocker, that Biden is bad and we shouldn't vote for him.) As Fox discovered, it seems a lot more organic that way instead of just having someone stand in front of the camera and say over and over "DON'T VOTE FOR BIDEN."

I am still waiting for them to learn to make accounts that are supporting Biden but doing a terrible job of it -- sort of a Lemmy version of Alan Colmes -- like "I'm glad the stock market and GDP are going up so much under Biden, as a rich person I think he's doing great with the economy and also he's sticking it to the Palestinians which I obviously support."

I've seen a little sporadic trickle of accounts with very bad semiconservative opinions and then also supporting certain Democrats, but they seem pretty chaotic and probably like authentic homegrown trolls. I think the real fake-Biden-supporting propaganda potential has yet to be unlocked. I do support this new development in innocent questions, though; it seems like it's got some potential.

Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) -- you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it's real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.

Turns out the answer was government, all along...

I'm just saying most left people I know who want to reign in the excesses of US hegemony care about US military adventures in the Middle East, or interventions in Central America, or immigration policy, or neoliberal trade restrictions against weaker economic powers... it's highly unusual for the second thing on the list to be this particular European military alliance that is highly consensual and pretty productive for everyone who's a part of it, and which is targeted almost entirely (now that it's not the late 1990s anymore) at one particular big geopolitical power that they don't have any particular love for any more than they do for the US. If we were talking about reigning them in back when they were bombing the fuck out of the former Yugoslavia, then yeah I wouldn't bat an eye at it, but... I'm not saying it's impossible that someone from the left managed to authentically arrive at the conclusion that out of all the possible awful things the US does on the world stage, NATO's the urgent problem that needs to be torn down. But I think in comparison to the other obvious explanation, it seems a little implausible, quite honestly.

😀

I learned today that Cornel West thinks the world would be safer without NATO. I won’t say that’s the only geopolitical opinion he felt strongly enough about to issue a press release about, but I had to go six months back to find another one, which makes a total of two that I’m aware of.

“Let’s not support Israel while they kill Palestinians,” of course, is honestly a pretty sensible and congruous number one… “why NATO is bad” and Ukraine, on the other hand, is a very surprising and unusual one to be number 2.

I haven’t really had a problem with it… maybe like 5% of the time it will want to do something a little bit weird like wrapping it in ``` but in general it seems like it works well enough to be able to parse with a program and just retry if it does something weird.

You do have to set it up a little carefully, I guess - like usually I’ll give it an example of what I want it to emit, and that’ll be good enough that that’s the form it will follow when it’s emitting stuff back to me. But yeah if you give it prompting and a specific machine readable thing to give back that seems like it usually works better than sticking with English and hoping it goes “yes” or “no” or etc like that.

“The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats”, by James Tiptree / Alice Sheldon, is a fairly good and fairly strange short story related to this exact topic.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what the right move here is. It's a shitty situation. "How Democracies Die" talks about it in quite a bit of detail, but basically, in the unfolding collapse of a democracy, there's a terrible temptation to start eroding democratic norms "in kind" in response to their eroding from the fascist side, but this is a mistake. You have to keep fighting on the tilted table without trying to tilt it back, because eroding the norms of behavior plays right into the fascists' hands and those democratic standards are horrifyingly hard to get back once you've broken the seal.

But, that being said, keeping in mind that this is satire to make a point: I don't think Biden should have Trump assassinated, or anybody. I do think that it would be a little more directly on the nose if he, as an official act, had Seal Team 6 ambush all the justices that voted for this (as an official act of course), take them with hoods over their heads and in ziptie cuffs to an undisclosed location, and then put up on YouTube the video of someone asking them a few questions in a bare concrete room in that undisclosed location, requesting that they clarify that this is really what they meant. Sort of bring some reality to what is the door they are trying to open, on a personal level, to them. Because I am 100% serious when I say that that is 100% very literally the door they have chosen to open. Sort of a "Let's close this door back up tight, right brother? Unless you are sure you want to open it? Really, like really for real sure with no backsies?"

Saying that it's okay if one group of people that someone tried to wipe out, does whatever they want, because of course they're the victims after all, is exactly how we got to this situation where Israel is creating on Earth a for-real biblical apocalypse and people are trying to defend their right to do so.