Expanding on this, a lot of this is very consistent in the amount by which it suppresses voters, and thus, much like gerrymandering, can be designed around or intentionally enacted. I mean, that's sort of an obvious thing, but I think it's still important to take note of and point out, much like gerrymandering and every other form of voter suppression, because it makes it all the more obvious that we do not live in a democracy, even by a little bit.
daltotron
joined 9 months ago
You’re welcome to come raise some hell outside the capital if you can afford that trip, though.
People don't talk about it, but this is what jan 6th was. Not for a good cause, obviously, but basically everyone that was participating in that was either psychotic enough to willingly throw away their entire life based on a single ineffective and uncoordinated mass mob capital occupation on a single day, or they were small business owners who were able to afford to fly across the country first class and take several days off of work, and probably most of them were both of those things. A lot of these guys are getting arrested immediately after being pardoned because the prison system sucks and does not set you up for success, obviously, even for those wealthy people. There's not an escape from the state, even for them, their lives will be irrevocably altered and made worse by their participation in a single ineffective day of high profile movement.
Obviously you could action a good amount of political change onto people by simply making them think they have nothing left to lose, as we see with that, but again, mass, uncoordinated movements are broadly ineffective. More organized and militant action is what you really only get when people start to collectively understand that the people around them, the things they actually do have left, are under immediate threat, and they need to do something to stop that. Maybe even more than that, you probably need a funding apparatus which is either gonna be foreign, or probably based on illegal domestic activities. So probably foreign.
I dunno at what point some of those criteria start to be filled. It's not looking great.
Either get scabbers, or take advantage of increased automation, or a combination of the two. The only way to prevent those scabbers is with outright illegal militant action focused on targeting them, which would earn you the ire of the state, and which most people also don't want to engage in due to moral qualms.
You can prevent a couple trucks from leaving an amazon warehouse for a couple days when you can organize a general strike where you're paying everyone a full stipend after saving maybe years of union dues, and that's the legal way to protest, which costs like, tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenditure every day, and is basically a war of wealth attrition with a huge megacorporation.
You could do that, or you could get like one or two guys to slash tires, and then set those trucks back for about the same amount of time. Or slash the tires of the individual scabber's home cars, which is maybe gonna be easier to pull off. How much of that militant action can you engage in, as an organization, though, before the feds just decide to completely crack down on you and deem you to be domestic terrorists, along the lines of what happened to the people engaged in the "stop cop city" movement? That's a good example of what's even a relatively low scale and low stakes operation, that's not very militant, and they're still getting slapped with rico charges and domestic terrorism.
A lot of those unions are politically agnostic to partisan slant because they're trying to navigate the current political climate, where they're basically unilaterally hated and unprotected, but also a lot of big unions exist functionally as an extension of the HR department of these companies because of how popular support for them has been drained, membership has dwindled, labor power has dwindled amongst their lower members because of increased automation, and because they've just straight up slowly been dismantled over time and legally gimped.
They need to have rehearsed and prepared talking points because that's the only way they'll actually come across as standing for anything other than the status quo, which is deeply unpopular. Most democrats probably don't even know what they even theoretically stand for without a corporate donor explicitly telling them what to do, and most of them can't do improv on the level of even being able to make shit up or lie in the absence of that, much less to charmingly lie by omission or tell the truth by technicality.
Realistically, the only actual solution to this problem in any long term would probably involve stationing nukes, which nobody really wants to do. A combination of not wanting to risk pissing off putin, because everyone thinks that he's an insane trump-level idiot that will engage in mutual self-destruction over ukraine, combined with the post-soviet destruction and hollowing out of the ukranian economy into private enterprise, an economy which wasn't exactly doing hot before. So it's pretty clear that most everyone doesn't actually give a fuck about ukraine or the ukranian people at all. Everyone's just gonna use this as an opportunity, as with every conflict, to pawn off old military hardware, bury the receiving country in a huge amount of IMF bank loan debt, and scale up their own domestic military production while paying off a bunch of private contractors which are, hmm, suspiciously close to the levers of power inside the real government. Weird how that happens. What a noble sacrifice.
I dunno, the wheels turn.
I mean, if you're assuming the worst, a nuclear strike could pretty much wipe israel almost entirely off the map. With a more conservative and realistic positioning, you know, one singular, small nuke, probably sourced from somewhere else, then you'd still be looking at probably 20,000 people dead or injured if it were to hit the downtown of any city. You know, ten times the amount of october 7th. That would be a huge international incident, especially seeing as how the nuke would have to be provided by some other foreign government, which means that there could be a chance of a probably unpreventable follow-up attack at almost any time. It would be a pretty big deal, even if they were credibly threatened. I mean, that's part of why Iran isn't allowed to have a nuclear program.
Destitute communities come with a lot of political instability which probably has to be channeled into something, which despite what everyone's been thinking so far, has sort of been, to mixed or poor success with basically every succeeding administration. The protests keep getting bigger, basically. You get a big or well-organized enough one of those, and then there's a chance that you get something much more serious than chaz, or you get a politically galvanizing one-sided massacre, or something else to that effect.
I think the biggest problem I can cook up is that it's sort of hard to campaign on cardinal voting, especially at the federal level, because it's sort of an apolitical and nerdy topic that people don't know about and don't give a shit about. You'd probably have to campaign on giving people healthcare, or, responding to the economy, or any number of other issues that might come up in that particular cycle. You'd have to pass it as a total footnote to something else, which, at the federal level, probably wouldn't happen, precisely because it would threaten the power monopoly that both parties have as different sides of the same cardboard cutout. You'd get no votes congressionally to get that passed. You'd probably have to do a bunch of legislation before that, leading up to that, probably you'd have to get rid of citizen's united, yadda yadda. If you were the president theoretically you could add a lot of rhetorical pressure to specific members of congress, but that's more useful if you have like, a narrow margin, if you're outweighed by most then you'd probably ironically end up doing a lot of what trump is doing right now even though he has a majority.
isn’t a slur more than that?
Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don't really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn't make a slur out of almost any word, then you're not being creative enough, or, you haven't acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.
Here, I'll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.
You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you're using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I've seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that's basically a slur, in how they're using it, and that's like, just a sequence of numbers.
Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.
This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you're exclusively calling one group "banana-eaters" based on their intrinsic traits, that's gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he's a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.
On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a "cracker", despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn't really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a "boomer", because we all age over time, where it's sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it's usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You'll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers "boomers", in that context, but you won't hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It's a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.
There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren't really slurs in how they're being used in that subculture. I'm sure you can think of examples of that.
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You know I think a lot more of their politics and general life outlook makes more sense when you understand that probably a lot of these super old guys are not computer literate enough to look up their niche fetishistic porn interests, and are probably still consuming porn the old fashioned way, which is becoming increasingly nonexistent even though it's still something that actually exists. Plus the propagation of morally puritanical values means that if they kept any of that material around at all, they'd be hypocrites, so they can't have that. Probably a lot of these dudes are walking around super pent up and sexually frustrated, I'd bet.
We need to introduce local community college and library courses to teach these elderly boomers how to goon