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All you can say in this site's defence is that it, rather than reality, occupies the warped minds of some of the planet's most twisted people; gods know what they would get up to if it wasn't here.  In these arguably insane times, any lessening or attenuation of madness is maybe something to be thankful for.

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Messages - tyrannosaurus vex

#31
Aneristic Illusions / Re: So about these riots...
June 02, 2020, 08:52:33 PM
Quote from: Freeky on June 02, 2020, 07:24:25 PM
there's footage of cops, in full riot gear no less, protesting the murders by smashing cop cars floating around somewhere from this morning. or so i have heard, edit because i'm a sourceless bitch.

There's plenty of cops doing property damage, but they're not protesting shit. They're intentionally making a bad situation worse by instigating violence to give themselves and excuse to use excessive force. There's also footage of cops delivering pallets of bricks to planned protest sites to encourage protesters to throw them, for the same reason. Absolutely zero people wearing a badge (or hiding it under plain clothes) are your friends. There are no exceptions. All cops are shit-eating pigs who deserve everything bad in life.
#32
Aneristic Illusions / Re: So about these riots...
June 01, 2020, 02:03:39 AM
The protests are already well past the point where most protests (even widespread ones) get in the US, and there doesn't seem to be much sign of them slowing down. In fact tonight is the first night that I've heard constant sirens (it's only 9PM right now) and seen helicopters, so based on my admittedly limited and anecdotal evidence, it seems like the protests are spreading, not shrinking. It's also clear based on statements from law enforcement and government officials that state governments are just about at the limit of their patience. Problem is, if the protesters don't pack it up and go home on their own, and especially if the protests stay as intense as they are or get even moreso, there's really only one way to force the cat back into the bag (hint: it's a Schrodinger's kind of bag except without any mystery).

I am assuming that at some point in the next few days, law enforcement will actually succeed in stamping out most of the public demonstrations (jury's still out on just how bloody that will be but my money isn't on "not at all"). The real question after a widespread uprising like this is how governments will go about ensuring there are no recurrences. Given that the people the government actually listens to have already made it clear that they're not very keen on state-enforced measures to keep public activity to a minimum, I'd expect the emphasis to be on flagrant and more or less open racial profiling and over-policing of low-income areas.

What I don't know is how likely it is that such tactics will inspire more ... creative protests. I tend to think the level of anger and frustration out there is probably not going to drive a lot of people to just flat-out throw large masses of themselves at live rounds. But is there the will, the expertise, and the opportunity for a more underground and long-term insurgent type of movement? Are we looking at, effectively, a police state situation focused on minorities (I mean, even more than usual, which is already a lot), and are people getting to the point of organizing any kind of direct action against that?
#33
Aneristic Illusions / Re: So about these riots...
May 30, 2020, 01:40:18 PM
I'm just glad almost all the protesters I've seen are wearing masks
#34
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 08, 2020, 12:18:54 AM
Quote from: Faust on May 08, 2020, 12:01:46 AM
There's nothing I like about it either but the choices remain the same

  • Uprising and change the system - The logical and sane choice, therefore wont happen
  • Not just vote for Biden but promote Biden because as a lame duck he's not going to do it on his own, especially not when the only thing anyone hears about is the allegations
  • Resign to have already lost, remain morally intact, through another four years of Trump.

There is a fourth option nobody seems to even consider: organize and do the things you wish the government would do instead of waiting for Biden or whoever to climb down off their shitty poll numbers and lend a hand. The government is, after all, just a big fat organization of human beings. There's no natural law that says we're only allowed to have one.
#35
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 08, 2020, 12:16:28 AM
Quote from: Faust on May 07, 2020, 11:34:04 PM
OK I've been thinking about this, ever since Dimo's thread.
And its something I feel is morally grey and horrible, and if anyone dislikes it, they need to understand I feel the same way:

I don't think the grudging "I guess I have no choice but to vote biden" is going to work

When the perceived choice is:
The lefts old boring and perceived  lame duck
The rights golden boy and or Troll Entertainment Factory

Biden has a snowballs chance in hell of winning.

He is going to lose the election because his supporters have to do it in spite of dull, tired persona, the weird out of touch comments and of course, the rape allegations.
Those same allegations when levelled at Mr "Grab them by the pussy", inexplicably increase trumps support, not reduce it.

If Biden is going to win, if there is any chance at all, everyone who wants trump out is going to have to focus on whatever few positives he has going. I say this because the only active discussions I am seeing of him at the moment from either side, is on the sexual assault stuff.

It means putting that discussion aside (at least in wider quarters than here), it can wait until day one of his presidency, but it will have to wait or he will lose.

I understand if moral integrity don't allow for that. The preferable option would be to break the system that makes shit float to the top, but apathy and being literally unable to congregate makes that a pipe dream.

Or maybe that is exactly how the con wins: forced to silence complaints about the lesser of two evils.

The fact is that no matter what kind of clown faces we paint on, everyone is well aware that Joe Biden is the "at least he isn't Trump" candidate. If that isn't enough to carry him over the line, then it isn't going to matter how happy everybody pretends to be about him. He's already fighting the dynamic where Democrats do well when they feel like they're voting for something (as opposed to against something).

And while people who ought to be supporting Biden might damage his chances by shit talking him instead, I will always be amazed that it's the rank and file citizens who get the shit end of everybody's "goddammit be better" hate, and not the party bosses who put an asshole like Biden on the ballot in the first place. Why is it my responsibility to shut up and smile and do my duty, but it's never the Pelosi Wing's job to stop cramming horseshit down our throats?
#36
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 07, 2020, 10:49:21 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on May 07, 2020, 10:32:31 PM
Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on May 07, 2020, 09:09:52 PM
[It's incumbent upon each of us, to whatever degree we reasonably can, to take some kind of direct action and not simply throw up our hands and leave it at voting.

The next time that happens will be the first time since The Battle of Blair Mountain.

Which was 100 years ago.

Yeah. Which is why I am voting for Biden, and also why I'm not happy about it and reserve the right to say so.
#37
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 07, 2020, 09:39:27 PM
Quote from: altered on May 07, 2020, 09:21:45 PM
I wasn't oversimplifying in any way. I am taking actual quotes and putting them in ALL CAPS, nothing more.

Sure, maybe your leftist communities aren't doing outreach that way. But a lot of them are doing it that way and I can't hear whatever message you think is back there over the sound of "maybe if Trump wins 2020 people will realize we can't trust our system to fix things" — another actual quote.

The /only/ message they're sending is the one you call an oversimplification and misjudgement. And if the leftists are encoding a hidden message behind that, I don't feel like it's fair to get mad when people take it at face value rather than finding your PGP key scattered across your entire post history and converting the white space ratios of each post to encrypted text so you can unlock it and read the actual scriptures.

Also, before you say it, I've engaged some of them about it, and they said I was sealioning and probably a far-right sock. So you are literally the only person who I have the opportunity to put this shit to.

That's all a fair critique. As with any movement, there's a mass of undiplomatic and not particularly philosophically inclined cannon-fodder at the base. There's a lot of overlap with the purity-as-a-goal-by-itself crowd. It's like the Linux community that way - a whole lot of "if you don't get it by now you're too dumb to bother with", and that's sad and decidedly unhelpful. I can't change that about it, though. All I can do is be at least one point where the ideas behind it can get expressed and discussed in some way.

I think it's important to stop treating each other like the enemy. That's why I keep repeating this thing about berniebots didn't ruin Hillary's campaign. Leftists who won't compromise beyond Bernie Sanders are not an existential threat to whatever it is that the mainstream are trying to accomplish, and it doesn't hurt anything to just let them do their thing. And conversely, leftists shitting hate on liberals doesn't do anything except convince the liberals that they really are the enemy.
#38
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 07, 2020, 09:09:52 PM
Quote from: altered on May 07, 2020, 08:45:07 PM
I'm saying we can do both. And forgive me if I have misjudged your intent here, really. BUT: if you are agreeing that we can do both, you are literally the only one talking the way you are who thinks that way. Without exaggeration, every single solitary leftist off of PD I'm seeing is like "BERNIE WAS OUR COMPROMISE CANDIDATE," or "BIDEN IS LITERALLY JUST TRUMP," or other "fuck everyone who needs this I want you to suffer mightily for a potential better future" type of slogans and chants.

So forgive me for believing that the actual unicorn was yet another jackass with a seashell glued to its head.

There are 2 problems here. First is messaging on the part of the leftists you identify who are (understandably imho but nevertheless) still in the disappointment/anger phase of watching what they thought was a reasonable compromise be shot down and/or are bad at explaining their positions in general. I'm probably in that camp to some extent, but it plays into the second problem which is

Everyone who is is to some degree happy to have Biden on the ballot seems to hear criticism of Biden and immediately stop listening. They think we are saying "BIDEN IS LITERALLY JUST TRUMP" because that's the extent of what they bother to hear and they are under the misguided and unfounded impression that someone's failure to toe the party line in 2016 is somehow responsible for Trump in the first place, which again, it isn't.

You also might be mistaking intragroup messaging that assumes everyone in the audience already has some grounding in the basics, for intergroup messaging that doesn't skip so many bullet points in the diagram. Equivalency between Trump and Biden doesn't make sense (obviously) if you're actually talking about Trump and Biden per se. But in the wider "leftist" community, they are just two points on the spectrum and Biden is much closer to Trump on that spectrum than he is to any actual leftists -- that's what they're saying, not that there is somehow literally no difference, even if the words they use don't bother to express that nuance. Discarding their arguments out of hand is a kind of willful ignorance that contributes nothing.

The main disconnect really seems (to me) to be in people's concepts of what constitutes meaningful political action in today's climate. If you take the established political system in the US as the fundamental and inescapable basis of social action, then of course Biden is preferable to Trump. That is to say, if you believe that your civic responsibility begins and ends with the vote you cast, then there's no question who you ought to be voting for -- and again the vast majority of Leftists will be voting for Biden.

But Leftists reject the idea that we can (and must) accomplish anything of any real civic value by casting votes in the system that exists right now. That system is too old, too slow and too corrupt to genuinely respond to the needs of the modern populace. It obviously can't just be abandoned and ignored (yet), but there is an expectation that individuals contribute to social change outside that system, including to the point that whatever the shitfucks in DC are doing becomes more or less irrelevant to the actual experience of everyday life in one or more places. It's incumbent upon each of us, to whatever degree we reasonably can, to take some kind of direct action and not simply throw up our hands and leave it at voting. The real disdain among Leftists isn't for Biden, but for people who think they've done their part when all they have done is vote for Biden (if they could do more than that).

TL;DR: Yeah, you misjudged my intent, but only because you've misjudged and oversimplified the political position of leftists in general.
#39
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 07, 2020, 08:10:40 PM
Quote from: altered on May 07, 2020, 07:39:15 PM
I want to remind you, vex, that I stand a very real chance of actual, factual death in the next two weeks. You don't get to socially distance when you're on the streets.

Apparently there's a huge wave of cold weather about to hit the East Coast, which is literally the only place I have a hair of a smidgen of a chance of survival. And I do not have winter clothing.

Oh, and I need to remind you that there is no organization in the continental US that isn't overwhelmed by this to the point of turning away people who are already there, so there is no support to turn to for an outsider for sure.

If I survive this, and the shitstain in chief remains large and in charge for four more years, I might very well be rounded up as a political dissident, dangerous mental case, and sexual deviant.

That sucks and I wish it wasn't that way, and I very sincerely don't want to do anything that makes your terrible situation worse than it already is.

Quote
This is in some sense a war. "Our side" is fighting defense on all fronts. You want to fight offense on the moonshot front, and redirect all momentum from every other offensive front.

While we are being beaten into oblivion from ALL sides.

But that isn't what I want to do. What I plan to do, and what I hope every sane person plans to do, is vote for the authorized representative of the downtrodden, in this case Biden. More importantly I want everyone to participate in their local elections, which have a more direct and less filtered effect on the situations of people in their immediate region than any federal officer has. But at the same time I believe it's important that people remain aware of the abject inadequacy of the choices we are given and engage in loud and disruptive protests of the system that gives them to us.

Quote
I might die already. How much worse will it get if you have your way and fail? And you need to understand that you are (like me and a good many others here) a fringe radical, and you cannot win except by mass murder, so failure is damn near guaranteed.

We need people working on rapid change, yes, absolutely. We also need to be working on everything the fuck else, because otherwise things get so bad that no one can save us, even if you find the magic solution to rapid change. I am begging you to step back from this fucking abyss.

Ultimately I want people to realize that there is no electoral solution to our problems. It isn't that I am mad because my guy didn't get nominated, and it isn't that I want people to sit on their asses in some kind of hopeless and meaningless "protest" of a system that's just tickled pink to have them sit on their asses. What I want is for people to stop waiting around for the system to present them with the right option on a ballot (as if that's ever going to happen) and start engaging in direct action to alleviate the suffering around them and frustrate the machinery that drives that suffering. I don't want people to give up on hope, I want them to understand their hope is misplaced if it is in the existing political system at all.

ETA: It's worth reiterating here that angry and dissatisfied leftists who weren't happy with the DNC in 2016 were not a significant contributing factor in Donald Trump's win that year. And this isn't directed at anyone here specifically, but telling people to stop demanding a truly equitable system and democratic representation is a curious way to stave off fascism.
#40
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 07, 2020, 06:14:00 PM
Quote from: Doktor Howl on May 07, 2020, 05:21:34 PM
Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on May 07, 2020, 04:31:45 PM
If the long game was the way it works, we wouldn't be scrambling for mediocre damage control after 40 years of incremental change in the wrong direction and 4 years of precipitous falling into a fascist abyss. Why does the GOP get to go full tilt Nazi but the DNC has to settle for this baby step bullshit? Either it's because the DNC doesn't actually want all that much progress anyway, or it's because the USA in general just isn't the sort of place where progress happens. In neither case does "incremental change" feel very likely. I am tired of hearing about this "slow march of progress" and "long arc or history" horseshit when a Republican like Eisenhower would be jeered off the Democrats' stage these days for being more radical than Bernie Sanders. It's all hogwash. History has no direction, and the notion that progress must be slow is a myth that only serves to reinforce the status quo.

So now you can choose between "things not getting much better" or "things continuing to roll downhill on fire."

Doesn't matter what you're tired of hearing, doesn't matter that you'd prefer candidate that would prefer more rapid change.  There are loads of things that I want, things that make sense, that I'm not going to get.

It's like that.  And that's the way it is.

It's like that when everyone has agreed among themselves that the way we do things now is the way things must be done because it's the way we have always done them. And "things not getting much better" isn't on the ballot, you're talking about the "things stop getting worse at their present breakneck speed and go back to getting worse at a more manageable pace" option. People keep telling me that we have to do progress slowly so the Luddites and rednecks can sort of keep up, but weirdly the Other Guys don't hear that argument about their concentration camps and racist cops and they are quite free to hop into the deep end as quickly as they please, and we are asked to just bide our time and accommodate them. Because god forbid things get worse before they get better, that's a bridge too far. No, it's preferable that things just get worse, period, albeit more slowly.
#41
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 07, 2020, 04:31:45 PM
If the long game was the way it works, we wouldn't be scrambling for mediocre damage control after 40 years of incremental change in the wrong direction and 4 years of precipitous falling into a fascist abyss. Why does the GOP get to go full tilt Nazi but the DNC has to settle for this baby step bullshit? Either it's because the DNC doesn't actually want all that much progress anyway, or it's because the USA in general just isn't the sort of place where progress happens. In neither case does "incremental change" feel very likely. I am tired of hearing about this "slow march of progress" and "long arc or history" horseshit when a Republican like Eisenhower would be jeered off the Democrats' stage these days for being more radical than Bernie Sanders. It's all hogwash. History has no direction, and the notion that progress must be slow is a myth that only serves to reinforce the status quo.
#42
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
May 06, 2020, 03:45:53 PM
there's a lot of misinformation going around, not the least of which is that "berniebros" somehow cost Hillary the election, and not the fact that she took her election for granted and neglected key battleground states. Sanders supporters turned out for Hillary to the tune of about 85%, and the rest of them were never going to vote for a Democrat in any event. The number of protest voters (both those who refused to vote and those who voted for a third party candidate) was not large enough to make a significant difference in the result.

It was not the loud minority of hard-left poopy-pants [non]voters who got Trump the White House. The idea that it was their fault is just lazy thinking. Trump was elected because a wave of racist populism and economic disenfranchisement pushed the electorate toward a strongman. It was the same dynamic that got Hitler elected in Germany. The same thing happened throughout Europe at the same time. It was not because a relatively small number of holdouts refused to compromise their values, and it wasn't because all Sanders supporters are cantankerous misogynists. Thinking those people are to blame (or even exist in statistically relevant numbers) just gives a person someone to hate, which feels good but doesn't really accomplish anything. I mean, unless shitting hate is the whole goal, in which case it achieves its objective quite effectively.

As for 2020, everyone who is going to vote for Biden is already set on doing so. You can demand the act of voting for Biden if you want, but demanding that people's inner voices be intentionally and genuinely happy about it is just dumb.
#43
I can't wait for the conspiracy people to seize this article as proof this was an evil plot by China to use biological weapons on the entire world
#44
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
April 11, 2020, 03:13:08 PM
yeah it's a lot of horrible shit out there. I am mostly just disappointed in the fact that we can't even imagine the wholesale rebuilding of society because the foundational assumption underlying everything we could possibly do is that we can't trust the people around us. we must preserve the civility and structure of government, even as it descends into fascism, even though millions are harmed even by harm reduction. this sense that everything is fucked and the best we can hope for is slowing that descent because people are shit and can only be nominally restrained by normality and habit. it's oppressive and depressing and uninteresting.

#45
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
April 10, 2020, 05:55:58 PM
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2020, 05:50:22 PM
Quote from: tyrannosaurus vex on April 10, 2020, 05:31:31 PM
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2020, 05:20:58 PM
let me try a linguistic cleave:


-Bad accelerationism is making potholes so that the city (which typically ignores potholes) will finally notice & send out a team to fill em in.

-Good accelerationism is intensifying the existing potholes by spraypainting dicks around them.


https://www.ladbible.com/news/uk-potholes-gets-fixed-after-protestor-spray-paints-penises-around-them-20190427

okay but why this underlying assumption that only the city is capable of filling potholes?

if we pay taxes so that the city takes care of the roads,
but people begin filling potholes themselves,
what is the systemic outcome?


well, in the short term, the potholes get fixed. in the long term i guess one or the other becomes redundant, or the tax money that was supposed to go for potholes goes for smartbombs instead. but that's already happening anyway.