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Messages - tyrannosaurus vex

#61
Donald Trump is not the problem.

He is an inevitable result of a society that overvalues profit and undervalues human lives. If Trump had never been born, we would have some other equally vile sack of excrement sitting in the Oval Office. He is symptomatic of our collective terror and ignorance around the pace of social change. Like God, if Trump did not exist, we would have to invent him.

In terms of the election this year, a vote against Trump is absolutely meaningless if it is also a vote *for* a return to the political and social status quo in which he arose. Any vote that is not essentially revolutionary will only serve to strengthen Trump's position -- specifically because it is the popular longing for a return to normalcy that created his presidency in the first place.

Voting for Biden is not a protest against Trump, it is a fear-based reactionary scramble for safety. As such, it is doomed from the start because all such scrambling only reinforces the political trajectory that has already culminated in Trump's election. Why would the country elect Biden, when we already have a president who embodies everything he stands for but without the cheap and frankly insulting veneer of faux civility?

Joe Biden opposes universal healthcare (he says everyone deserves "affordable" care, which is code for "healthcare should only exist as a side effect of making some asshole a billionaire"); he opposes network neutrality; he supports imperial wars; he supports propping up banana republics to secure resources; he opposes economic security for the working class (again, unless it makes a profit for someone). Personally he is a sex creep and he can barely string a sentence together better than Mango Mussolini can.

If you want to vote for Biden, please do it for the same reason I am doing it: so you can tell the useless liberals and centrists that you did play the game by their rules and we all still lost. Don't do it because you think there's any fundamental difference between Trump's outright fascism and the DNC's fascism-with-a-wink.
#62
Aneristic Illusions / Re: UNLIMITED 2020 THREAD
April 08, 2020, 07:38:36 PM
Just checking in to say I'm holding my nose and voting for Biden in 2020 but I will steadfastly refuse to implore anyone else to do that and will shout down anyone I see engaging in condescending high-horse-ism about "swallow your pride" and "take one for the team" because after 2 years of hearing how awful Bernie is for failing to control the low number of radical chauvinists in his base, to turn around and yell at people for not strategically voting for an actual first-hand rapist is beyond unpalatable and stretches into laughably two-faced territory.
#63
when you live long enough to see history repeat itself
#64
going down to the town well to draw water and finding out they replaced it with a starbucks
#67
I am dreading the peak of infections in NYC and across the country this week and next week because this country is full of Americans, who are dumb. They will see the peak and decide, despite the warnings from experts, that the danger has passed, and they will go back to business as usual and set off an explosion in contagion.
#68
Quote from: Juana on March 12, 2020, 11:10:54 PM
Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn't be allowed to securely encrypt them, or they'd lose legal protections that allow them to operate.The EARN IT Bill Is the Government's Plan to Scan Every Message Online
QuoteImagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn't be allowed to securely encrypt them, or they'd lose legal protections that allow them to operate.

That's what the Senate Judiciary Committee has proposed and hopes to pass into law. The so-called EARN IT bill, sponsored by Senators Lindsay Graham (R-GA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), will strip Section 230 protections away from any website that doesn't follow a list of "best practices," meaning those sites can be sued into bankruptcy. The "best practices" list will be created by a government commission, headed by Attorney General Barr, who has made it very clear he would like to ban encryption, and guarantee law enforcement "legal access" to any digital message.

This is fun. :horrormirth:

This is bad, but the nice thing about internet communication is that there is a thriving community of people who will compensate for it with decentralized ad-hoc communications services that don't depend on the existence of any company to whom a lawsuit could be addressed. It's really only going to apply to enormous sites where you really should already assume your correspondence is monitored anyway.
#69
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / a petition
April 06, 2020, 04:21:49 PM
the world is awful and nothing makes any sense anymore including questions of life and death, so i am requesting ideas for discordian chaos magic rituals that could resurrect TGRR because we need his guidance in this trying time.
#70
apparently my employer failed to predict the impact of laying me off so they rehired me
#71
Quote from: Cramulus on April 04, 2020, 04:26:51 PM
got it -- I like it.

really, any organized structure representing labor seems like it would have its work cut out for them in this day and age. Especially for folks that don't traditionally have union representation, like most office workers.

you really need a trustworthy leadership though - if the org is not trusted by its members, or if the org gets effectively smeared, the whole thing will fall apart like cotton candy in a rainstorm

That's true, and why if I ever embarked on such a journey, I'd have to make sure it had solid legal representation and a PR approach that put miles and miles of distance between it and "unions". It would probably need to hob-nob with traditional insurance companies for a while to build a rep as one of the guys (except nerdy because non-profit). Nonthreatening, like "hey we'll try to tackle this thing where your system leaves millions of people writhing in the gutters so you can get on with your yacht parties and cocaine". And when approaching workers it would be framed in a "do this because you are a Responsible Bootstrapper, protect yourself and your family from unemployment" way, and definitely not a "fuck them capitalists let's take 'em down" way.
#72
Quote from: Cramulus on April 04, 2020, 02:41:23 PM
I'm not clear - what's the difference between this idea and a labor union? (other than the size - what you're describing sounds like a very large labor union)



The difference is in tactics. A labor union only works if everyone at a particular employer organizes and starts bargaining with their employer, and in a lot of areas that's more or less impossible because of union-busting legislation ("right to work", etc). In contrast, this is a fund that individual employees could pay into that provides a safety net outside or in addition to the pitiful one provided by state-run benefits. Fairly early in its existence, it would be able to offer some of the same protections to workers that unions provide, but without needing to organize entire companies. It also would have a few features that unions typically don't - paying unemployment and paying wages during a strike, primarily. Because it wouldn't be limited in contributor base to a specific employer or industry, it could build the resources to dictate terms to employers, not just "bargain". And because it would be centrally planned, it could (in the long term) engineer strikes and other actions across the entire economy in a methodical way rather than hoping for some association of independent unions to cooperate.
#73
Aneristic Illusions / Re: Fighting mental illness.
April 04, 2020, 12:38:22 AM
as the days go on I'm having a hard time mainly with the opposite of all these problems. Idk what sort of thing is responsible, but i have always had a strong need to be able to retreat somewhere and he completely alone, and you'd think I could get that these days but no. I live with my girlfriend in a very small space and neither of us ever leaves for work and it's irresponsible to leave for socializing reasons so it's all day, every day, and all night sharing this tiny space and it's driving me fucking crazy.
#75
to be perfectly honest, i have no problem with this. humans are dumb and need to be ruled with an iron fist. we cannot be trusted to do literally anything responsible on our own.