We live in a YAF dystopia that is way less cool than most of the storybook ones.

And while every kid’s story is their chance to veer away from the usual fate of becoming a corporate cog (laborer or soldier) in a billionaire vanity project, most will just end up stuck like Winston without his nook, or will get imprisoned or will just go homeless.

We’re pretty sure it’s the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we’re speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that’s a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.

I’m a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you’re a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.

Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.

Yeah, but the police don’t hover over us in Spinners as in Bladerunner. They still have to chopper from helipad to airport and ride off in air traffic, so less in our faces.

Their superfluous greenhouse emissions fit the cyberpunk vibe though.

The second situation is a fantasy until after we have a communist revolution.

Only because it was taken from the public by Disney, since the courts ceased recognizing the public as stakeholders.

But the Constitutional function of copyright is to create a robust public domain. As that is no longer the function of copyright, we can abolish it. And the only thing that is keeping us from abolishing it is the same obstacles keeping us from abolishing autocracy.

So revolution that bridges the way to socialized art may be more necessary in the immediate future than it appears (whether or not it’s easy).

It is possible I’ve never encountered a tankie. I was accused of bring one on a subreddit for mixing non-critical thoughs in with my criticism of USSR.

Musk remains true to his Disney villain character and I stand by my previous wish for his fate to be:

…eaten by hyenas. Preferably hyenas he had recently betrayed to save his own skin.

At the rate were going were going to get the bad ending which is:

…Chinese bombers over Washington blotting out the sun.

They also invented Catholocism.

But I dont blame Italians for any of these things. I might blame the specific people who invented these things.

I’m glad some ancient Italian figured out butter, salt, minced garlic and olive oil spread on bread is delicious, and would do sexual favors for them in sheer gratitude.

It my current state of five months into a long-term psychotic break, I have the joy of feeling lonely, walking to where people are, and needing to leave immediately, and feeling lonely by the time I get home again.

What a marvel the brain can be!

I still stand by Generative AI being a useful tool. It’s just in the hands of big unilateral corporate tech rather than a public state, and artists depend on IP laws to gain profits to live, rather than being supported by a robust welfare state to provide art for a robust public domain.

Related, the post-WWII programs in England that fueled the Rock-&-Roll boom in the 1960s (with the invention and development of the electric guitar). Socialized art is a system that works well!

And yes, we’ll probably have to collapse the current civilization and rebuild it with mutant animals before we get there. < sad, disappointed existential dread face >

I’m glad we got ubiquitous smartphones instead of only rich people having flying cars.

Still, I’m promoting way, way more punk in our cyberpunk.

The point of The Terror was to burn the Révolution into the skulls of generations to come by making it so horrible the ownership class would be terrified into treating the working class nicely (this was before class consciousness, so it was the Petit Bourgeoisie that actually formed the Assemblée nationale representing the third estate. They, too, are ownership class, once Marx sorted it all out.)

This is why heads had to be piled high. We were supposed to be scared into civility. But as the early 20th century demonstrated to us, it didn’t work, and we still have people voting for far-right parties in order to vote against neoliberalism (which is happening a lot in Europe right now, and is a sound explanation of why Trump still got so many votes.)

Screaming from the far left, there are a lot of people in scarcity or precairity in our society, a society that would collapse if they all suddenly fell incapacitated from their want.

It is our fucking duty as fellow citizens to stabilize them.

Conservatism at its core is ignoring their need in the name of tradition. To the ninth charnel circle of Hell with that.

65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)

Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.

One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics). We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.

Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.

The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.

Obviously we haven’t fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.

We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.

Currently, the primary targets are said to be undocumented immigrants, but naturalized Americans and legal aliens are getting caught up in the ICE dragnet, and rendered to CECOT. The movement to restrict trans folk access to medication and life activities continues.

This rhymes a lot with the early history of the German Reich. Heydrich and the Chancellery were fully aware of the need for the enemy within rhetoric and the need to capture and contain a growing list of undesirables.

Even though it’s the Tiger Repellant Rock fallacy, when the public sees authorities at work arresting people (and making them disappear into the custody system) it shows the authorities are sincere in their effort to make society safer. The Trump Regime is doing exactly the same thing.

And as the Niemöller poem observes, the list of undesirables continues to grow, including more and more of the marginalize until it starts tapping into the mainstream. Every last one of us who is not a billionaire or a billionaire’s favored sex-puppet is on the list. Some of us are higher on that list than others.

Shortly after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploded in 2004, more news showed that this was the first appearance of a larger CIA extrajudicial detention and torture program. Rumsfeld suggested that torture was necessary and waterboarding isn’t really torture anyway, and a conspicuous lot of Republicans fell right in line, saying torture of terrorists (without due process) was acceptable, and waterboarding wasn’t even torture. My dad was among those toeing the Republican line, about which I was aghast.

So I went on deep dives into moral philosophy and dared to stare into the maw of Holocaust history. ::: Of note, the marks inside the genocide chambers at Auschwitz were victims were clawing at the walls as they died. :::

So when news of CECOT emerged only last week, I lost my mind, and to this hour I can’t think of a proper appropriate, rational response to such news. Alexei Yurchak, survivor of USSR and teacher at Berkeley talks of hypernormalization in which we humans tend to try to just conduct our normal everyday lives as civilization falls apart around us. Is that what people around me are doing? It’s hard to believe I’m overreacting.

I’m still beside myself about these events, and for now I’m distracting and avoiding thinking about them, which is really not a great response.

(feedback appreciated)

Is this new? I’m pretty sure responder services (such as 911 operators and suicide hotline operators) have immunity so long as they’re acting in good faith. Also, there used to be good Samaritan laws that allowed independent civilians to offer help, so long as they act in good faith.

Yes, a dead victim’s family might want to try to sue the hotline service, but the entire dialog is recorded and proving bad faith would be difficult to do.

Granted, our courts are corrupt like a Seagate HD, but even a click-wrap ToS won’t affect those judges who have something to prove.

I find it comparable to the old Rodney Dangerfield joke I called suicide prevention and they put me on hold. I’ve actually had that happen, since rushes can overwhelm the operator pool.

I’m more okay than my recent questions have let on. I’ve sometimes been too spicy for my (few) friends, and was looking for the old recovery network (pre-internet) where I might get a support group and a sponsor.

After exhausting a list of contacts in Sacramento (either they cost money I can’t afford, or they require interest in a specific brand of Jesus), I called 988 to see if they had leads. The good news is they have a robust search engine at www.findhelp.org so I have more phone calls to make.

Coincidentally, I was quite spicy at the time, as the mere existence of CECOT hit me hard, let alone that ICE is collecting innocent folks and sending them there. My country is for-realsies doing the concentration camp / gulag thing. It’s difficult since I’ve been screaming like Cassandra about it since 2004, and here we are.

But while I’m not a suicide risk (I have dependents), living in a society that is being burned, and is purging undesirables appears to be a valid concern, and I can’t tell if those around me are confident we’re safe for the foreseeable future or are engaging in hypernormal behavior (🐶☕🔥)

But if the White House instructs ICE to collect and evacuate the crazies and then ICE starts sweeping California, then I’m really not sure there’s a sane response. The other concern is if my benefits discontinue and all the resources are impacted or disabled.

and, I’m trying new meds since my previous regimen isn’t cutting it any longer so I’m playing that roulette game as well.

Thank you for asking.

Betcha some US citizens are going to get caught up in this sweep.

I wonder if we could get ten percent of taxpayers to not.

From its inception ICE has taken the role of the German SS, which is to say a paramilitary force loyal to the administration rather than to the Constitution (what FBI was during the J. Edgar Hoover era) It was that way though George W. Bush’s admin as well as the Obama admin.

ICE also lent itself out to corporations and trade organizatiobs. They raided the Dotcom estate in New Zealand, and they raided Florida repair shops that did unauthorized (but effective) repairs on Apple products (an event that fueled the right-to-repair movement).

To not talk to ICE. Do not associate with anyone who associates with ICE. Do not cooperate with Law Enforcement that cooperates with ICE.

Eventually when agents and collaborators of the Trump regime are tracked by Nazi-hunters (whatever they call the new iteration of hunters) ICE agents and their collaborators will be the highest priority.

Remember ICE is the agency raiding houses and taking people without due process to CECOT in El Salvador where they suffer tortuous, inhumane conditions comparable to gulags and WWII concentration camps.

The new holocaust is here.

Depends on what they expected. Savoir faire? Je ne sais quoi? Bling? A hunger for the flesh of mortals?

Vampires come in the range of most demographics. I am a goblin-mode reclusive vampire, allergic to the sun, and I appreciate clearly defined thresholds and social boundaries.

I also do math.