That’s not really being rich, though. The guys on that list could theoretically buy whatever countries they wanted, hell, they could buy multiple, hell, they could just buy owning stock in every country by way of bribery. If you’re the leader of a single country, it’s as though your money is all invested for you already in that single country. You’re mostly locked down to wherever you are. But the Walton family, owning Walmart, last time I checked the third largest economy in the world, they can extract that money and pivot wherever they want, with basically no borders or limits.

Well yeah, but that’s only one part of fascism. You could say pretty much the same of any war, lots of non-fascist goverments, and hell, you could say we already do that, just look at how the campus protests were treated, the BLM protests, the civil rights protests, the sufferagettes, a personal favorite of mine would be the horrid history of our oppression of labor by siding with companies and enabling the use of pinkertons to gun down crowds, yadda yadda.

No, if america was to be fascist, it would be fascist for historical reasons which already existed, which have been around for a while already. I don’t know whether or not america suddenly having a dictator, would really have too much of an effect on it suddenly becoming fascist, despite the popular consensus that fascism just requires a really racist guy to suddenly be a dictator. I actually don’t think that would factor too much into the definition at all, I think you could pretty easily have a fascist democracy, and you could definitely have a fascist oligarchy.

I’m pretty sure imperial japan was mostly run by a military cabinet which internally needed a certain number of votes, and the emperor was more like a figurehead and religious figure that had a certain amount of sway over the cabinet’s decisions as he was like, a big deal, more than him being a figure of political power. From what I remember, anyways. Me personally, I’d be pretty comfortable calling imperial japan a fascist state, even if it maybe conforms to that definition less well than, say, italy or germany.

So, we have an imperialism which has both historically been in place around the globe and constantly been effecting an in-group, which exists internal to borders, and an out-group, outside them. We also have a couple different in and out groups within the US. Black people, Native americans, you name a racial minority, we’ve done fucked up shit to them. So, pretty textbook so far. Violent military expansionism, imperialism, and high levels of domestic racism is what most people would probably tally up fascism to be as, colloquially. They might not even pick up on a dictator being a central component. We also have corporate capture, which is pretty solidly the case in america. We have an erosion of public utilities and infrastucture. We have a police state. Fervent nationalism, controlled mass media, blatant theocratic intervention, you know, we have all the classic markers of pretty much all the definitions.

The only qualification I can cook up is that we’re presumably a “democracy”, right, which I didn’t really even think of as being a requirement. You can have a fascist democracy, it’s just a democracy where not everyone can vote, which has always been a kind of tenuous characteristic of democracy at best. We went from wealthy, white male land owners being the ones to vote, to rapidly most everyone being able to vote, actually fairly recently, in the grand history of the US. Especially horrible once you factor in gerrymandering, segregation, white flight, and redlining, which means that the average black voter had much less say (and still does have much less say) than your average white voter. We also elect people, who elect people, with more or less vote weight on both a local basis through gerrymandering and more or less weight on a per state basis through the electoral college, in a fptp system, where a kind of nash equilibrium ensures that there’s only gonna ever be two viable parties or candidates in local, state, or federal elections, for pretty much the majority of america.

So, we’re a “democracy”, but I would say that we’re only a democracy insofar as a 5 month old fetus could be considered a human. We might consider athens to have been a “democracy”, too, right, according to the formal definition, but if only white male landowners can vote, then that’s already such a subset of the population that you might legitimately be closer to an oligarchy at that point. And both an oligarchy and a democracy can be plenty fascist. Hell, the germans arrived at their fascism through mostly totally legitimate democratic processes.

So, I mean, yeah, america’s pretty much always been a fascist country, sorry to break it to ya.

so does that mean England was fascist?

The biggest imperial and colonial power of perhaps all of history? yeah probably

Not so much, it would more be along the lines of a standard military coup, which doesn’t necessarily have to originate from a fascist. Those can and do come from all sides of the political spectrum.

I don’t think biden would ever do that, and probably if he did, he’d be the worst president dictator of all time with only the mild upside that he could maybe only do so for the rest of his probably not long lifespan, or for the next couple months as they run another election, which he would probably do since he seems like kind of a sap.

But, if he were replaced by a person I actually liked, or there was someone who’s policy I agreed with in that position, I’d pretty much be fine with it, and I get the feeling that most people would be fine with it too, as in, a majority of the population. The levers of power might freak out though, and that might put a damper on things.

So, obviously he could just [redacted] the supreme court justices he doesn’t like, appoint new ones, and then the only thing congress could do would be to expand the court or whatever, right? but then why couldn’t he also just keep killing people in official acts until he gets a bunch of people that are like “yup, that was official and you don’t need to do anything about it”? I know that’s probably a slippery slope, right and would probably get him a shit ton of public pushback, especially after a certain point, from both conservatives, who predominantly make up the military, and economic power structures, to liberals who would prize decorum and “fair play” above all else (but I repeat myself), and so maybe that leads to a dissolution of society, which maybe leads to an even worse society as the people who control the levers of power are already the most horrible people, but, yadda yadda.

But, I dunno, how many congress people does he have to make go away, before the rest of them start to get the picture and then start to behave in their own self-interest, as they’ve always behaved? How many people do you really have to threaten in a system where the people who climb to the top are only going to be there out of their own extreme self-interest?

Their link shows some infographic in french, for me. I have reposted it.

too dumb to read

checks out

Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.

I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.

trains run on time

I am here to regretfully inform you about the state of american rail infrastructure…

then you’re just a bot.

I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you’re just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that’s the same thing again.

Maybe I’m a victim of Poe’s law, but I’ve seen “launch nuclear waste into space” get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It’s a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone’s had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It’s like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I’m probably not going to really think they’re a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they’re saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.

I’m also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it’s inevitable that more plants collapse and it’s inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I’m trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn’t want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there’s not really a point, there’s no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The reason people aren’t going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.

You’re not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it’s flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.

And I say just launch the waste into space

This immediately discards like, everything you’ve said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It’s way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn’t crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.

How are you hurt by alarms? Noise, high voltage, the fear of the things they indicate, or something else? legitimately curious, never heard of this phobia before

you know, I at least appreciate on here that, even if you’re going to be massively downvoted for basically no reason, at least there’s someone here making this post and then backing it up in their comments, rather than me just having to look at the headline and be like “yeah that sounds like fishy north korea style clickbait xenophobia to me” without wanting to actually look into it.

So, good job.

Excellent and much needed context, compared to just seeing images of contextually devoid book vandalism, and being trusted to assume a kind of naive, perhaps bad faith idiocy.

I legitimately wonder if there’s really any level of protest that people will tolerate. If you throw soup on the protective glass that covers a painting, prepare to get slammed with a 20 minute protracted conversation about whether or not soup can leak between the gaps in the fixtures that secure a painting to the wall, and whether or not that amount of soup can do damage, and how much money we’re all paying for it to be cleaned up, and how seeing a painting is a once in a lifetime thing which is now ruined for the people who went and so on and so on. If you block traffic, well, now I’ve had to spend 2 or 3 hours in delays, and there’s no cause that’s really worth a minor inconvenience. The protesting crowd should all get gunned down for that. At the very least, they all deserve to know that nothing they’re doing can every really matter or change anything ever.

Then of course, none of that’s actually related to the issue we really want to discuss, there, that’s all just tangential, complicated political issues, that we’re primed to bellyache and whine about. We can only show how much we care by donating to some nonprofit, while we go about our lives ideally uninterrupted an uninconvinienced by the protesters. I feel like I must’ve stumbled on this thread dozens of times already, and it never really gets any better.

I think what drives the root cause of this is some kind of nihilism, some sense that nothing can ever get any better, and if you think otherwise, you’re naive. That we really just exist to keep everything in a permanent deadlock. If you were to take more extreme action than this, well, no, that’s morally abhorrent, whomever will just get replaced by the institutional successor, and oh, you’re causing X amount of property destruction, which is X amount of economic value, thus, X amount of time, and thus, X amount of lifespan for someone. Then you’ve basically committed murder, if not mass murder, by wasting so many lifetimes. The many, sometimes literal, murders of the status quo otherwise need not apply, or else are assumed to be inevitable. Even if your actions here were somehow directly materially related to the conflict, right, it would be all too easy to just dismiss it out of hand as being not really effective, or as being adventurism or a waste of everyone’s time. Can’t I just get back to the perennial Big Game? I just wanna grill for God’s sake!

I mean I feel like I’ve seen him get smeared since way way before covid was happening, like, since the 2010’s at least he’s been getting heat for no reason, I feel like

No yeah for real. I’ve never seen him doing anything I would really consider to be annoying, or at least, more annoying than any other science communicator, and he constantly gets shit on for being like, too cocky, but then when you push back I never get any examples of things he’s actually fucked up on, just that he has bad vibes.

buh-buh-buh but what about when I refer to mechanical engineering! what about when I need to adjust my cam timing! oh no!

I dunno, I would broadly agree and I think that it’s probably not a good thing to be calling people, but I do have two complaints I would like to file with the official board that governs this sort of thing. Neither of them relate to the word’s banned usage, however. Of course, it’s still gonna be a little weird.

One is that I like -tard as a suffix, I think it has a kind of satisfying mouthfeel in pronunciation, I think potentially we need some more words that use it, and I don’t think that as a kind of, like, workaround, or way to say the slur more. I kind of wish the suffix was dissociated from the slur, so this was more possible. The only other word I can think of that does this is mustard, which apparently arrived at a similar pronunciation through a different etymological route. I dunno, I find it to be a kind of like, inherently hilarious word, or satisfying word to say. Unusual, maybe, maybe like an unusual morpheme pairing. Maybe I have some level of just like unprocessed shitheadery though, that’s very possible. I also kind of wish there was a way that actually worked to de-escalate the weight of a slur, to rob it of it’s weight. Obviously, taking it back doesn’t do much, because it’s just going to be subject to the same in-ground out-ground dynamic, a la the n-word, right. It’s okay if gay people call each other or themselves the f-slur, it’s not okay if some straight guy walks in and does it. More positive associations might work but then, you know, doubtful that would work in the first place, and also you’d probably not see a lot of people wanting to take the L and push it on that one because everyone would hate them for it, both the people insulted and those who would use it as a insult.

Also, I don’t like this kind of mentality more broadly of “oh you gotta be more creative when you insult people.”. Some people are so boring and uninterestingly fucked, that they aren’t worth the creativity you expend upon insulting them. I think it just kind of shadows the problem here. No, you don’t want to say the word because it denigrates an entire group of people when you use it in an insulting manner. There’s not really anything there about creativity, or lack thereof, that makes it a moral problem. Sometimes you do need a low-rent insult, it should just be one that isn’t a slur. Call someone a shitheel, or something, it’s easier than this, there are plenty to choose from.

Okay, thirdly, I think there’s also a broader, and interesting question here, of, how an insult being based on like, unchangeable characteristics makes it more mean or more of a slur, right. But then that sort of, leaves out things we might consider as being changeable, like, say, body weight, which I would also say is a dick move, to insult someone on the basis of their weight, or to constantly bring it up, or anything like that. On the other hand, insulting someone on the basis of their eye color is maybe like, very antiquated, still potentially mean, and potentially very mean in like, maybe india? But I dunno so much if it would be considered a slur, really, as much as just kind of a very weird thing to bring up. Insulting someone on the curliness of their hair, maybe, but then that could be seen as a proxy for other things, just like most traits. It’s hard to do this with something too obvious because most of them have been historically associated with like, eugenics and shit like that. Maybe if you were to insult someone based on how big their feet are or something, that might be a more socially acceptable or lighthearted insult, even if it’s still mean.

We also have, like, technically all characteristics are unchangeable, if we live in a deterministic universe, right? Insulting someone’s intelligence, even if they don’t have autism or down syndrome or what have you, is still insulting a deterministic aspect of their character, which was sort of unavoidable for them to stumble into. If you insult someone for even, their choice of boots, right, you are just insulting a characteristic about them which was ultimately inevitable, the result of many dominoes falling into place. I think perhaps when we attempt to understand the purpose of insulting someone, we give it this guise of free will and agency which I think ultimately makes it more mean than it would otherwise be. It robs it of its whimsy.

We view insults as some sort of like, vehicle for tough love, vehicle for change, perhaps, or we view it as maybe righteous, because you’re insulting someone on something they can change and by implication I think, should change. I think we have to be honest, though. Insults are not for the people who are being insulted. They are for the people saying them, they have always been. If that’s the case, it doesn’t even need to be really related to the person you’re insulting at all, or even necessarily directed at them. It doesn’t need to be such a mean thing, if it’s just for you. And if it is just for you, then I think it’s more valuable to do that assessment and figure out why you’re actually doing it, instead of just like, giving into mindless frustration and calling someone a mean name, like a child.

You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.

Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

Not to sound like a ancap idiot or whatever, but I’d imagine that has to do with the fact that streaming services don’t actually compete with one another. Exclusivity deals mean they don’t actually compete in terms of user experience, features, ease of use, higher video or audio quality than their competition, improved bitrate, whatever. Instead, they just compete based on who can snap up what IPs for the cheapest, which is just a game of whoever has the most money, whoever can outbid their competitors. Then, you’re not going to netflix or hulu or disney+ because of the features of the platform, you’re going to them because they have some IP that the other platforms just straight up don’t, and if you want to watch both IPs you gotta pay for both. So, it’s not really competition, in the conventional sense.