All Billionaires Are Bad.

I don’t think their hand is really that strong, as much as they’ve been trying to convince people it is. Their media is powerful, the image they project is powerful. They have convinced us to fear of a massively powerful military-backed surveillance state, as we should, but is that really something they can achieve? Only with a lot more apathy and cowing to authority than they’re actually going to get, I think. Americans (and even the military is made up of Americans) are an unruly bunch at the best of times, and the powers that be might think they have enough money and enough security in place to protect them as their popular support dwindles and the MAGA wave they rode to power begins to realize that these authoritarians are not giving them back “muh freedumbs” like they promised but are in fact taking more of them away. As the famous quote goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The regime has been ignoring and laughing at protests like 50501 and No Kings. They will have to fight eventually. Would the current regime survive more LA riots? Vietnam war protests? Another million man march? Probably. That’s obviously what they’re preparing for, as they should. But how far are they actually going to be able to go? And how far will the resistance go? I agree, we’ll see once the cards are all on the table. But I think there’s still plenty of room for hope that the actual future isn’t going to be as bleak as it may seem right now.

Interesting analogy, and a great point. I think it’s a lot like poker. They place their bets, we place our bets. They raise the stakes, we raise the stakes. Eventually one of us is either going to fold or we’re both going to end up going all in, and then we’ll finally end up seeing what our hands end up being once that happens. Are any of us prepared to fold on this? I’m not. Are they prepared to fold? I don’t know. Are they bluffing or are they holding all the right cards? I don’t know. If it comes to that, I guess we’ll find out.

See, the internet is just a series of pipes, and those pipes can get clogged, and then the water can’t get through…

So double down right back at them. What are you doing to stop what’s happening? How else should we disrupt the regime’s efforts? What do you recommend? Or do you think shitting on people’s efforts is helpful somehow and will lead to a good outcome?

As long as we’ve got some vestiges of free speech and free association available to us we need to do what we can to organize and sow the seeds of resistance. They’re not coming for us yet, although I suspect they likely will eventually. But if you’re already too afraid that they’ll be coming for you to do what needs to be done, then they’ve already won. And I don’t think they have. Resistance is the only choice that makes sense. But as you said, it’s just my opinion. I’m allowed to share my thoughts and opinions though, at least for now, and I will do so.

Without understanding the root cause of why the immune system became misinformed in the first place, and without knowing whether that cause still exists or has even become worse, you’re playing a very dangerous game telling it to forget everything it knows and just blindly hoping it will make better choices the next time around, treating it as if it were just a random outcome and gambling with people’s health. Imagine trying to treat someone with arthritis and after treatment their autoimmune situation gets even worse and they become diagnosed with MS, so you treat it the same way again and it becomes a very aggressive form of MS. That violates the hippocratic oath to do no harm, which is why there really isn’t much interest in such approaches unless they’ve been proven reliable and safe in carefully controlled studies, which your proposal hasn’t been (and presumably wouldn’t be able to be).

They should fear us. We outnumber the powers that be (governments, billionaires) thousands to one if not millions to one, and though they do everything they can to make us believe otherwise, we are their equals in every way except organization and motivation. Those may not be trivial things to change but they are not that hard to change either. Money and laws and ownership are only meaningful constructs as long as we continue to consent to their current implementation. When we stop giving our consent, they will have nothing to maintain their power base except force, and being so vastly outnumbered, they will quickly find the forces they (and we) imagine they can bring to bear are actually quite limited. How are they going to keep paying for their citadels and bunkers and servants and bodyguards and personal armies when nobody wants their money on their predatory services anymore? Money, and our collective desire for it and the things they sell to us with it, is their only real weapon, and if we stop playing the game the way they expect us to, they’ve actually got nothing.

The black power movement understood this. The hippies understood this. We need to start to understand it. The power of these people is a myth, it’s something we give them and it requires mutual consent even if we don’t understand that we’re giving it. The power that has been given can be taken back when we withdraw our consent.

Sure but I’m also actually encountering these people at work. Granted I never thought particularly highly of many of my coworkers to begin with.

Anyone visiting the US at this point is certifiably insane, so the extra background checks make sense… ohh, you meant on the employees, I see.

You made the right decision. Yes the community is small, but it will grow, and besides small can be beautiful in its own way.

On a similar but unrelated note, Lemmy also displays the two-hyphens as an em-dash, but unlike the trailing slashes, it does not encode that into the comment, so on piefed you still see the two-hyphens in both comments.

Fun!

And posting from piefed, is the result the same?

https://piefed.ca/ – has a trailing slash https://piefed.ca/ – does not

They should be treated like the violent gangs they are, we have lots of experience dealing with motorcycle clubs and these groups are almost exactly the same except they connect sports and racism instead of motorcycles and racism.

That’s some damn fine work, sir.

Those were the web-techbros. Then came the crypto-techbros, now we have AI-techbros. Very different styles, as you can see.

Yes, that’s exactly who I voted for. This is what attitudes like yours have wrought. They lost my riding to the Conservatives. Because they’re a fucking disaster of a party right now. Don’t blame me. I didn’t fuck them up. Their lack of credibility comes largely from their own members, organization, and choices. Not from voters nor any other external factors, and if you’re blaming external factors you’re wasting your time. Yeah there are some, but this was mostly self-inflicted and utterly predictable (in fact it was predicted). I’m a Peter Kormos/Charlie Angus style NDP supporter, and there’s a reason the people with actual grassroots support always get sidelined and marginalized. The NDP is a sucky choice too. The people who would represent me very well are out there. Unfortunately, I’m not given an opportunity to vote for them.

First Past The Post is part of the problem. The NDP is another part of the problem.

George Carlin already expressed most of the thoughts I share about golf so I won’t bother expressing them here. Nice work.

I have been spending the last few decades bottling up my anger into a very, very large tank. Let me know when you need me, I’m hoping I’ll be able to supply enough for everyone.

I always knew Carney could potentially turn this way. I was expecting it. I still would have voted for him (if PM was a position we voted for and I was not voting strategically, which my riding lost anyway) but my vote for him was mostly a vote for a pro-Europe alignment, which I still think he’ll deliver, albeit probably not in the size or shape I was hoping for. But with really only two choices, it’s really hard to pretend we’re still able to call this actual democracy. We need electoral reform, and badly, and I’m not sure if we’ll really get another chance. We’re on a bad path and I don’t see any escape routes.

Yes please.