Diesel is America’s life blood and we’re selling it off

The gas situation is volatile and highly unpredictable on a daily basis, but the overall trend will be upwards for a while, and energy is a prime driver of civil disorder in transitional societies historically.

America is entirely fueled by and supported on diesel - trucking, aviation, freight rail, all are entirely built upon the assumption that diesel is cheap and limitless, which will never be true again.

Right now, Trump is selling off the strategic reserves that we should be keeping at all costs to make a few bucks, not caring that we will be unlikely to refill these tanks ever again if they run dry, but “best” case is everything becomes too expensive for most workers to survive.

The Dollar is dying

The volatility and loss of credibility that America and the empire have caused for themselves are the death knell of the petrodollar, and I believe we may see a move to shove the dollar off the global throne by some new power, sell-offs of immense quantities of dollar instruments at the same time as squeezing domestic pricing, and inducing major dollar convertibility problems that will be like a siren screaming get out to every international capitalist (as in Warren Buffet and other billionaire or multinational corporations who will pick the bones of the republic for a buck on the way out)

This is the exorbitant privilege that has been our economy since the Marshall plan and the world bank and IMF all created dollar debt, to the point where dollars are so desirable anywhere to almost anyone that they’re a global reserve.

That means that if we buy $100 worth of French wine with a printed bill, that automatic acceptance of our petrodollar will be gone, so now that wine needs us to sell 100 euros of something America can exploit and export, we have to do work and have material wealth to trade instead of just printing wealth.

That’s a simplistic model of a complex system but works for the explanation of why oil taking a major hit on supply and juicing prices will be catastrophic for every American whose entire economic reality is built upon imperialist oil barons “interests”, almost like a vexatious trap to indebt the people to the economy without any consent or accountability.

We’re Super Fucked

There is a coming hard jump to at least 5.80 a gallon for gasoline by the end of the month, some forecasts showing no ceiling until 7 plus, so just know that you’ll look back on this time in six months from a significantly more expensive and volatile global economy and supply chain, and plan accordingly.

Diesel drives delivery so that is a good indicator of trends and pricing, and it looks like an economic slaughterhouse from my view.

The economic side looks very challenging but also wide open to some actual work we may be able to do towards permanent replacement of broken systems, because holy fucking shit this is going to be a challenge in a lot of places all at the same time.

Complexity in supply and manufacturing was already out of equilibrium post Covid, this is going to be like whiplash in some cases with shortages and overproduction happening at the same time, all these primarily economic issues are being enforced at gunpoint, which reduces our ability and capacity to make positive change for ourselves.

No idea how the political and military situation will go, wide open possibilities in every dimension, with all the menace and promise that entails.

But the economic side will be catastrophic for a majority of working Americans, globally leading to significant famine and energy shortages, with all the negative externalities of migration and war that such conditions invariably drive.

How might it play out?

This will lead to some weird tragedy in slow motion moments like ten thousand beach umbrellas piled up in a city that cannot provide potable water to the residents and other civil nightmares made real thanks to using avarice and heartlessness as a national ethos.

It could pass for us like a mild version of the 2008 crash for a year or two in some cases, and I don’t think it will be cataclysmic or anything like that, but a lot of systems are about to “fail” right when we need them to resist or avoid being stuffed into the machine.

As market conditions worsen, we consider cases like Portugal’s Estado Novo regime as the empire spun out in the late 60s, the military taking control with widespread civil support against a fascist regime which was itself borne of an officer’s coup.

That’s a good outcome, Portugal is rad as fuck and they decolonized fairly quickly, at least de jure if not economically.

I think that most people in America are fairly docile at the moment, but major shortages and price skyrocketing inflation into wheelbarrow money territory offer yet another example of capitalist exploitation being tied to wealth and profits, and to be defended by the workers most harmed by it.

Catastrophes converge in summer but will hit nadir in winter

This winter in particular is going to be insane between LNG prices, Canada Hydro delivery terms being renegotiated, the low amount of grid scale renewables and battery capacity, we are poised to make our nation into a barren hellscape of frozen grandparents being wheeled out to the sidewalks from exposure in their unheated homes (if we don’t prepare mitigation strategies for these very obvious and rapidly approaching crises).

Price alone looks prohibitively high across literally every single part of every single thing that makes up modern western civilization as a structure, and sustaining for years in energy particularly, we have to radically reduce energy use at the same time that they are stupidly bringing up coal plants so that Elon can be community note checked by grok, his own planet devouring vanity chatbot.

There isn’t any real reason we can’t just do our own thing and build sustainability into communities where we can, the economic outlook is not great but even in the most likely case it’ll be stagnant, and push more and more workers off the bottom of the ladder as they pulled it up.

Social conditioning is making us accept an avoidable disaster

I know this sounds dire and wildly negative and hyperbolic and I will admit this is a lot of inference and cross references, which have been reliable signals but not always the full story, and I cannot stress enough that we can JUST CHOOSE TO NOT DO THESE THINGS.

I think the social and cultural aspects of the two party system have continued to use those simple metrics and greed as their guide, and I think this country is about to touch the stove in a big way as to the dangers of giving a heavily armed and corrupt ruling class without a soul total control over society.

If I’m wrong, which I haven’t been on major points but probably will be on some details and times, the outcome is that we’ve built additional social infrastructure that aligns with pubic good ahead of when it’s truly needed.

I’d like to think I’ve at least partially got a handle on the situation, and I wanted to give a frank and unreserved perspective on what I’m seeing things moving towards, in particular for long term planning and strategic purchasing of things now that may get 20% more expensive every week at some point this summer, so to me the cost/benefit analysis is the critical point I want people to think about as the fundamental economics of the world break around us.

Short term mitigations and long term solution

I just bought two very efficient heat pump hvac units and we are getting adult ebikes, solar is up and I have us set up to use zero gas and a very small amount of reference power from the grid when available, but with a small and still untested battery bank I’m still finishing up.

I wish I had six more months to max out credit cards and build more of a reserve, but it looks like there is barely anything left in the hourglass until this starts making itself known through the markets.

Everyone should be shifting to the thinking that we’ll be short on food, energy, fuel, and all while the environment collapses and weather gets extreme beyond worst case analysis, and planning to build the dual power needed to survive this.

There is nobody coming to help so it’s gotta be us, so I’m starting biweekly get togethers for my group to share skills, trade what we make to encourage building up alternative local sources of knowledge, equipment, and supplies.

I don’t know how normies will react as the floor drops out beneath them, but they’ll be in desperate need with no hope for government support, and it’s on people like us to use the foreknowledge and time available to make ourselves ready to pitch in and help our communities make it through what is certain to be a year of great need.

It’s a stunning move, I think it speaks to an immense desire to be done with this debacle on both sides, but Trump made sure that America is now invested in maintaining peace in a way that has an immense dollar sign attached to violations.

Israel, our GREATEST ALLY

Israel’s attacks on Lebanon last night violate the ceasefire deal as written, so we have to watch that point to see how it’s handled by all three major parties.

If Trump does something serious to slap Netanyahu and get him to step back from his war footing to something more defensive, then the war can end in the next month, and we go down to chaos level 95% instead of 100% as we have been the last month.

If he doesn’t stop or at least signal that he is doing his best to live up to the terms, Iran gets to set the tempo, since Trump and the team signed a very very generous and comprehensive “ceasefire”, and I would wager that even as belligerent and demented as he is that he would try and salvage it since they basically gave Iran whatever they wanted in desperation.

Coverage and Optics Will Show Their Strategy

Watch how the admin and press cover the terms and conditions of the ceasefire, how there could have been “confusion” or how it gets spun, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see them ramp up tensions one more time for another big juicing of the oil and commodities markets before finally declaring “victory”, or maybe they see the timelines and decided not to roll those nuclear dice, I can’t tell who is an idiot and who is a suicide cult member in that nest of vipers.

But it looks like the regime is getting ready to sell this deal to the American people as a sort of status quo ante, but with firm agreements on formerly undefined boundaries and conditions, even though it is actually almost complete victory for Iran based on their well-documented strategic aims.

Motivations and Expectations

This is Iran’s golden ticket out of an existential nuclear-capable war that also insures their ownership of the Strait, normalization of trade, nuclear and missile technology, all backed by the promise that any violation by Israel/US of these terms is grounds for another immediate strait closure or other retaliatory actions.

Israel will try to spoil it in any way they can, expect them to attack Yemen or some other closely aligned Shia militia forces as a way to provoke Iran without technically violating the ceasefire terms, but I’d bet 3 to 1 that Trump and pals would stomp out Israel completely to save their own skins at this precise moment, so I kinda hope Bibi tries to play tough guy and Trump turns off his iron dome or some wild shit.

In some ways, this could be the best outcome for us, but everything is still so uncertain that we should keep heads up and critical eyes on everything until we see which way this is breaking.

Oil is back down around $95 at the close, we’ll have some market numbers later today to see who made big moves that benefited from this, they likely won’t prolong things if they’ve already done insider trading on this ceasefire.

We live in a world that has been carefully created by the worst people in every age, and now find ourselves in a world that has nearly perfected but also passed the utility of its main intention: creating compliant workers and preventing any revolution or class consciousness from emerging.

The Mythology of Masculinity

It’s been remarkably effective, for centuries we can look back at oppressed people being exploited and pridefully protecting the system which destroys them, we can see this in the way steel workers or coal miners cling desperately to a notion of being defined by the work which is annihilating them in real time.

“Be a man” is a common refrain after injury to young boys, encouraging an attitude of rejecting healthcare and rest after injury, while consuming as much red meat as possible to signal relative wealth and fitness.

Covid gave us another lens on this, with the alpha males all rejecting masks and science itself in favor of spreading this unknown disease as widely as possible, killing a million Americans inside nine months and continuing to clear out large numbers of the elderly even though it’s essentially ignored by the world in this moment.

Rolling coal to show how tough they are, these programmed zealots spend their time making the world less habitable for the next generation, all while screaming that we need more government violence and control to keep out the Other.

A world without a place

Instead of a world in which men act as actual protectors against natural threats, the modern industrial world has given the billionaires almost limitless power to reshape not only the economy but the very fabric of reality.

in a world where the machine provides everything then fealty to the machine is easily built with the control over culture and norms wielded by the powerful, allowing unimaginable amounts of power to be accumulated while simultaneously maintaining order and obedience from the working class.

As the social fabric and economic system have merged and reduced the places where anyone can operate independently and therefore outside the aegis of the laws and “protection” of the system, many men have lost their way so profoundly that their very existence can no longer be explained outside terms of their utility to their masters.

This lack of standing outside the constraints imposed upon us has led to generations of compliant and soft men who celebrate the wrong things, cheering as bullies and charlatans abuse the weak and filling themselves with fantasies of exercising power entirely within the confines of their allowed outlets.

Kindness and Empathy are Anathema

We are conditioned to see the poverty and injustice enacted against myriad marginalized groups as their just rewards, the outcome of a fair game that they lost and only jealousy and greed would compel a worker to bite the hands that feeds.

This all leads to a place where the greatest defenders of the status quo are not those who most benefit, but paradoxically those most exploited and abused by the system, as their hard work is twisted into a display of loyalty to capital in a pageant of bootstrap-pulling theatrics.

Instead of seeing fellow workers in pain as their brothers and sisters in need, they are filled with scorn and derision for those less fortunate, proud of their part working 80 hour weeks and filled with venom at any voices which criticize or question the system imposed upon us.

The scary part is how deep the loyalty runs, most average men will respond with fury at the idea of taxing billionaires but also at the idea of feeding the homeless on the public dime, even though the driver of that hunger is the greed and mismanagement of the ruling class.

Misdirected loyalties and false hope

For generations now, we have been seeing the effects of this inversion, as more and more groups find themselves sliced off the core and used as another threat to the majority, and we seem to be approaching the end point.

Climate change and income inequality are core to the ability to reduce population, and as automation and artificial intelligence have grown the need for labor is shrinking inversely, leaving the potential for large numbers of unemployed men with nothing to lose.

This is an existential threat to the Epstein class, so they have spent their energy conditioning us to not only ignore existential threats, but to mock those who see them, and challenge anyone attempting to mitigate harm as less masculine or otherwise less than a man.

This is another layer of armor, using the exploited to protect the exploiter physically and ideologically, while they insist that capitalism is the best system and any alternatives are dangerous and violent, ignoring the millions killed in the protection of the status quo.

War Against Humanity

Even as we speak, in real time we are watching a willful annihilation of humanity in Iran, as the petrodollar empire takes one last hurrah as it attempts to break the remaining opposition in the region, with American bodies protecting Israeli interests in an intertwined dance of death.

This war, which not a single person can actually justify, is dumping billions and billions of dollars into the sand, along with the blood of thousands of innocent Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian lives, and the best the “resistance” can come up with is complaints about the procedural issues in starting a genocidal war.

This war also creates an enormous risk of nuclear war, Israel likely knows this is their last real chance before the empire collapses, so they have a huge motivation to use their nuclear arsenal before they are destroyed and left alone, and nobody at home or abroad is really addressing this risk in any way, let alone taking action to stop them.

This, as every other war, is framed as fighting for freedom, with bravery being to go over and face likely death at the hands of defending Iranians, and not a whiff of anti-war or pro-mutiny rhetoric is allowed in mainstream media, leaving people to see this as an inevitability that can’t be stopped.

Many Layers Shield the Core

Between the many ways that these sort of cultural loops are intertwined, from our diet that’s killing us, to the jobs that rob our lives of purpose, to the climate we destroy beneath us, all of these programmed behaviors work towards limiting our ability to enjoy life and maximizing the danger we face.

This may seem hyperbolic, and if we look at any individual part we can see there is a logical explanation that is available to wave away any deeper analysis, but if we look at the higher level it seems obvious that the bad guys are making sure that we pay the bill for their avarice and greed.

Hospitals are closing, fuel costs are rising, housing is unaffordable, education costs thousands and has no return on investment, all the pillars of the golden age of American capitalism have all degraded into chains, more and more latched to the working class to prevent any real resistance or change.

Even as we watch the devolution of all these systems back into their base condition of threatening human survival, we see an immense reluctance and even protection of the system from those who would claim to fight it, as pageantry and Twitter hot takes have taken the place of actual resistance and meaningful action to stop these things.

To see it is to know it, to know it is to fight it

There isn’t a good way to dismantle this without getting a lot more people to see the existential danger we are under right now, these bad guys are desperate and they’re going to kill us all if we don’t get them out of power and into a volcano where they belong in short order.

I don’t have any takeaway for action other than to try and get others to see this and at least stop protecting the systems that are destroying the future, because we are rapidly approaching a point from which recovery and survival will become unlikely, and by the time this becomes obvious it may be too late.

In many ways, the ignorance is the armor, to break that and get people to understand what we are facing is in and of itself a means of arming the working class against the psychological weapons of the regime, so for now we need to focus on breaking that mythology and get people to see reality for what it is before we’re too late to divert course.

Putting aside that this is yet another example of how violently and aggressively anti-democratic the “Democratic Party” actually is in this country, we should note that this is a guy who has a really shitty track record of being a scumbag to young women, minorities, homeless people, pretty much any way you can slice the electorate this guy has found a way to personally be a piece of shit to them, on the record, and proudly.

He’s platformed the right wing grifters that gave rise to MAGA, brought anti-trans language into his pitch for the new Democratic platform, aggressively fought against taxing the rich, and essentially is to the right of Nixon in every issue I can think of that matters, and does it while looking like a Duracell person who is programmed to smile in a way to trigger the uncanny valley because he’s not a real person.

Why do liberals keep picking losers?

The real issue here is that we’re more than two years out, we haven’t even had the primaries for the fucking MIDTERMS yet, and rather than hear people say we hate Newsom and respond with alternative candidates or response to the criticism with rebuttals and counter-proposals, we get what we always get from Blue MAGA: DARVO nonsense and absurd gaslighting that any sign of dissent or refusal to vote as instructed is tantamount to giving our vote directly to Trump, and that makes us Bad People.

The problem with this, for those of us who are able to engage a prefrontal cortex once in a while, is that Newsom isn’t even a nominee yet, but that hasn’t stopped the Blue MAGA anger machine from preemptively blaming leftists or even mainstream Democrats who don’t want to see a glib weirdo who dates teenagers on the ticket attacked by mobs of hyped-up crazies who insist that we HAVE to vote for him or else!

The 2024 election showed us a few really critical lessons, which leftists immediately took in (and most of us knew in advance and were forced to watch play out in real time), but liberals still have not picked up the thread that the reason they keep losing is that people see that they are losers who deserve to lose, because they stand for nothing and don’t have credibility or principles or values or integrity, and will throw anyone under the bus to get a vote, which results in them not actually getting a vote because nobody likes a fucking rat.

In march the Ubermenschen

Now, at this moment, we’re seeing something that, two years ago, would have seemed insane - the Nick Fuentes crowd, the suited-up sexless white supremacist types who are too extreme for even Steven Miller to be seen with publicly, are now throwing their support behind… the Democrats?

Yeah, and even though they might say it’s just to spit in the eye of Republicans who reneged on the anti-war pledge, I think it goes deeper than that, and I’ve been tracking this a while with a few groups and watching it grow, and now it seems to have hit the critical mass.

The Democrats, since the party swap in the 70s, have been in a sort of identity crisis, no longer the party of labor they once were, no longer the party of Southern solidarity in opposition to Republican business interests, they attempted to draft the Rainbow Coalition in the 80s but realistically have made a very poor showing of actually doing anything to help any of the minorities and women they claim to champion, at any point, while seemingly having no issues continuing to help the bipartisan machinery moving us towards imperialism abroad and surveillance fascism at home.

This lack of any real identity was in both parties, the Republicans were more identified by Reagan-like small government conservative values until that stopped being useful in 2015 and they threw the mask away like a Halloween costume on November 1, but the Democrats have clung to theirs well past the New Year and it’s getting pretty ragged at this point.

There is no real substance behind either party except the bald-faced desire for power and wealth, and the need to pretend that they care about values or voters or anything except winning seems to be melting away in this new post-reality political landscape, and Fuentes may be a monster but he is a keen observer of the political winds, and I think his intuition that the Democrats would at least tacitly allow them to draft alongside an America First platform led by Newsom is a real possibility that should not be discounted or ignored.

How the fuck would that work?

I know, at first glance you might think “there’s no way that the party that nominated Kamala is going to welcome in openly white supremacist radicals and let them have power”, and in the strictest sense you would be correct, this will not be an open alliance of equals with a public handshake.

Instead, what we’ll see is a continuation of the same post-9/11 nonsense that has been going on with both parties unabated since the towers fell: more surveillance, more police, more wars, more prisons, more secrecy, more taxes, more poverty, more violence, more inequality.

Nothing that the worst people in this country want to do is unpalatable to any run of the mill liberal, and the Blue MAGA wing are openly thirsting to get back to "Obama did 2 million deportations THE RIGHT WAY” or “We need Congress to approve our corporate punitive wars!”

The pieces for the greatest empire of white supremacist power in human history are all here, waiting to be wielded by a competent and charming narcissist who isn’t demented and distracted, but in the hands of someone competent and driven it could be forged into a weapon which could destroy the potential for human freedom to exist for generations, or forever, and it wouldn’t require a single new law or tweak to what’s already been built by the two parties over the last quarter century.

What Is To Be Done?

Honestly, at this point, we’re pretty much cooked. The worst people ever are all in power, nobody with the ability to stop them wants to do so, the “opposition” is useless and gearing up to become even worse, so electoralism seems like a dead end with a noose attached to it.

I think the best approach at this point is to dismantle the power structure around it as much as we can, continue devolving power to the states, and even consider breaking up the union entirely now before it’s too late, because once these people get the reins it will be annihilation for anyone who steps out of line.

States have recently been making moves towards holding federal agents accountable for unlawful conduct against state residents, and that needs to be aggressively scaled up, to the point we see ICE agents prosecuted and sentenced for their criminal behavior, and to curtail as much of the federal excesses as we can.

Even with all that, it’s going to be hard to constrain a machine that’s been built and primed for this exact purpose, it brings me zero joy to say “told you so” but yeah this is what all of us in the anti-war and anti-authoritarian left have been screaming about for years, especially to the sleepwalking liberals continuing to hand their votes and power to collaborationist Democrats, and now we’re about to feel the sting of what we helped create.

Given all that, it’s more important than ever to focus on the local, build dual power where we can, get states to intercept federal money and power and keep it local, catch the people being dropped out of the broken social safety net, and begin to rebuild the parts of society intentionally destroyed by fascists and demonstrate that we are the ones who build while they are the ones who destroy.

It’s gonna be an uphill battle, and it’s not going to be as easy as go out and hold a sign and magically everything gets better, but I think that when the chips are down, and we go all in on the bet, that they’re going to find out that we as people will choose to unite together to defend our communities and neighbors rather than stand back and watch the pedo squads roll in and wipe us out with a defeat in detail.

If we don’t unite and stop them together, then we’ll watch them destroy us all together.

It’s just over one year into the Trump regime, and we’re in the end stages of the installation of a durable fascist regime atop the corpse of the republic, and having just seen two murders under color of law in the last few weeks, it seems they’re preparing to speed run the last few steps.

The window on slowing or stopping this is about shut now, we’ve still got no real national coordination of labor and resources we’d need to mount an effective long term resistance, so it looks like the odds are in their favor for the moment.

Propaganda maintenance costs legitimacy

But they’re also in a very precarious spot, made evident by the new phenomenon of conservative gun nuts who spent the last two decades giving thoughts and prayers to school shooting victims as an acceptable cost to keep weapons capable of fighting the government if it went rogue, who celebrated the Bundy standoff and later occupation of a federal building, who cheered Kyle Rittenhouse, all of a sudden want you to know that a 9mm pistol with a red dot is a military grade dangerous weapon and he had TWO MAGAZINES!?

Suddenly the “dead kids are the price for me to own an AR15” crowd are real fucking serious about the risks of armed people wandering about carrying concealed, but only when “obstructing federal officers”, criminal acts such as helping an old lady who got pushed by a confederate mall cop.

This all has a cost, not in cognitive dissonance, but in exhaustion and loss of the zealous thrall that is now nearing a fever pitch, which means that the regime has to build the fear that justifies their taking of power, create threats to demonstrate the power being used, and then propaganda to make the MAGA Classic cult loudly proclaim their thoughts on NATO, Greenland, immigrants, antifa, and the gender police.

Building narrative as a replacement community

This works generally well when it’s not diametrically opposed to the old dogma, NATO was orthogonal to most of the agenda but they made that abrupt turn based on the seeds planted in the first term, but when it’s stuff like anti-gun propaganda it’s going to cause some of the MAGA base to say “wait a second” and think critically, which is the one thing they CANNOT do if they want to finish the coup.

What they need to win is to get the base so fervent and so scared and so loudly demanding the oppression become complete so that they act as an armor for the movement, preventing others from resisting and engaging in false narrative spreading and general intimidation of “paid leftist agitators” to other us as they have other undesirable minorities.

This builds both a reality outside our own in which they continue to nurture belief in the narrative over objective truth, have it reinforced and celebrated by leaders and community, and have a deep and hard to break connection between the movement and the members.

It locks them in because questioning it breaks the illusion, and the baked in response to anyone breaking the illusion is shunning, so it’s almost like asking them to break out of the matrix, only to be dumped down the tubes to the waste tank, and if there’s no Nebuchadnezzar to pick them up then there’s no chance they’d willingly break out of the illusion.

Rut ro

But even with all these hooks into the base, there’s still a finite supply of zealous fervor, it can be fueled up and turbocharged with more violence and spectacle from the state, but it has a limited shelf life, and they know this, which is why they are moving so fast and faster every day.

We’re approaching the point in the exponential acceleration of the coup is going to be a straight up line, as Lenin said “there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen”, and we’re having some fucking decades right now for sure.

But this also exposes the weakness, if they can’t get lifted over the bar and eliminate the last few ties to the old republic, they’ll falter and probably fall over, since the actual administration is packed with morons, assholes, fools, and narcissists, and they’ll implode soon if not protected by a durable fascist regime openly operating.

Delay is Defeat for fascism

In many cases of failed right wing takeovers of various countries, the speed of action and compliance of the masses are the critical measures of success or failure, and right now we’re all in on speed and completely paralyzed on compliance.

Delaying them from being able to carry out their false flag actions will make it hard to justify the extreme measures we’re about to see implemented to deal with the “emergency” created by ICE malfeasance, and if we can prevent the last phase from being completed, that makes getting them out and replaced with a legitimate government much less dangerous.

They have to make every move bring them to the goal, the latest murder is so brazen that it’s having a big impact on the narrative lock-in, if we can avoid any more ICE attacks then they can’t generate cause to shut down congress or whatever the emergency decree will be.

That would leave them unable to clear the barrier to completely seize power, but we’d still have a lot of work fixing political stagnation and a lack of viable political party, but those can be fixed if we’re smart about avoiding that last big show and final crank of the wheel.

ICE has to be seen as an illegitimate paramilitary

Because that’s what it is, and Democrats can whinge all day about how we “need ICE” and “deportations the right way were fine”, but this was always a shitty system full of shitty people doing shitty things because shitty politicians wanted to use the threat of terrorists and immigrants to let them build a paramilitary force larger than the fucking Marine Corps.

DOGE cut the legs off every other agency, Trump’s appointees are paralyzing the federal machinery, all that is really working are military and ICE and they’re being used as the regime’s stormtroopers, and they cannot be allowed to operate or even be in our communities.

I’m going to start going to all my governor’s reeelection events to ask her to use the guard and state police to evict ICE entirely from the state, and arrest/prosecute any who have committed crimes under color of law.

If we can get one governor or sheriff to take the initiative to say “these dangerous goons can’t come here”, then a domino effect can be induced, and we can seriously undercut the legitimacy and operational range of these Proud Boys with armored cars.

They’ve set the tone, we’ve got to adjust

This phase will end with bloodshed, I wish there was a way to avert it but we are locked in and the bad guys have a plan that’s going to crush workers while they finish looting the country and economy out from under us, and we’ve got to be ready for that.

Avoiding conflict is the best strategy, but it’s going to be harder now that summary execution in the street is allowed and celebrated, so make sure you’re aware of the risk that going out now carries, and be safe by moving in groups.

I think we should remain as peaceful and nonviolent as they are to us, and hope that we can get them in a few more cases of bad optics clearly showing them as who they are, to build up more popular political support to push them out of our government.

This is the moment when we’re going to find out if America really is what it has always claimed to be, or if that was just another piece of false narrative impressed in us since birth, and more importantly for each of us to find out if we are what we’ve always claimed to be.

ICE is just another one of a long list of federal and civil organizations created to protect white supremacy at the cost of all else, and now that these methods and agencies are being turned inward onto white people, all of a sudden the crisis has become real and people are panicking.

There isn’t much time left to derail the fascism express before it reached the terminal, we’ve already passed the last stop and Blue MAGA has ensured that none of us could get off or throw the switch towards another station, but there is still opportunity to stop them, and if we move quickly and do it the right way, it can be done with almost no further violence or cost.

Change and Reform are Diametrically Opposed

For decades, the democratic and liberal wing of this country have lived under a myth that politeness and decorum are all that is necessary to produce a just and equitable society, to the point that most of them think changing a profile pic or putting up a yard sign are materially significant to changing reality.

Remember Kony 2012, where everyone was mad about child soldiers for a week, and then it just vanished? Same with many other things, once a social or economic movement like Occupy, BLM, or Antifa have become an actual threat to the status quo, we’ve seen Democratic leadership and allies embrace these movements and extinguish them.

They do this by giving “support”, which mostly means that establishment NGO types create corporate structure and turn them into fundraising arms of the elites, telling us that we’re helping when we donate to these hollowed out and neutered entities.

These are the same people who sat on their hands all year as this got worse and worse, as we asked more and more for them to do something, anything to at least set the tone and attitude of resistance, but instead we’ve watched Schumer and Jeffries cry and fundraise while doing less than nothing to stop the MAGA tsunami which is now towering above us.

To reform this system is to naively pray that it won’t happen to us if we don’t provoke them, and is clearly not going to help, and anyone who insists we must remain within the rules and norms of a system built by white supremacists for white supremacists will have diminishing returns and only delay the inevitable implosion of this Ouroboros.

Blue MAGA are currently more dangerous than MAGA Classic

At this moment, we need to be very clear, the “wait till midterms” nonsense and all other electoral political stuff is irrelevant. The lawsuits are irrelevant, the mayor saying “fuck” is irrelevant, none of these things are going to help because they all depend upon all parties respecting the democratic process, which is no longer the case.

Pretending that this can be resolved within the system is what brought us here, minor concessions and tiny wins presented as triumphs, while the far right run roughshod over constitutional law and precedent and decency itself, and Democrats have proven that they are either unable or unwilling to resist.

This means we need a new bottom-up structure, made of local groups and federated as a national party, to challenge and destroy the two private corporations masquerading as political parties, and this cannot happen with Blue MAGA people trying desperately to prevent any actual resistance with their smug nonsense narrative pushing.

They have to be excluded and if necessary pushed out entirely for this, because at the end of the day MLK was correct about moderate liberals’ love of peace over their dislike of injustice, and the liberals will call the cops on the revolution if we don’t make sure to clear out the establishment stooges.

A national fundraising and resource distribution network is essential

We have a few options left to us, from protest to disruption to economic leverage, and we need to be pulling every lever and hitting every button as hard as we can. Part of this is going to be organizing locally but pooling resources nationally.

Between the mother gunned down by ICE in the streets of Minneapolis to the Ford employee who called Trump a pedo protector, we are going to have people doing the real work of resistance who are going to suffer. They will lose their jobs, their cars, their houses, their ability to be in public, and we MUST put a program in place to be able to catch these people and help them survive this fight.

Some of us are wealthy and can contribute money, some of us are not but can contribute time and skills, but I’m trying to connect a lot of smaller groups into a kernel of a national movement to help make this happen, and I think it is a critical prerequisite to the kind of activism and action which will be needed very soon.

Putting ourselves between bad guys and the innocent

I enlisted in the military because I wanted to defend the people and stop bad guys, which was naive but very common among people when we get down to what they really believe. I think this country is awash in potential heroes of this moment, which will demand not only physical effort and strength but also community healing and building to counteract the destruction of the regime.

But for myself, even as physically broken as my body is at this age and history, I think the time is now to be armed and armored and put our bodies in between the bad guys and the people they are trying to harm.

This will demand a high degree of professionalism and calm, as we must ensure that we’re out in numbers large enough to deter attacks from ICE thugs, but also to not engage in bait or arguments with agents and reactionaries who would want to provoke us into impulsive and destructive actions.

Unlike the cops, we must be perfect in our actions and responses, engage in militant community mutual defense but to rein in and redirect those who would engage in adventurism or counterproductive violence, and make sure that our side is not causing problems while demonstrating that we can prevent them.

This is going to require a lot of training and coordination, and should not be done by people angry about what’s happening who are looking for a fight, because the first time that actual fighting breaks out, that helps the regime and reduces our public support.

Stop paying taxes

Assuming you’ve already bought the rifle, if you have a job, immediately change your W4 withholding to “exempt”. This government is no longer legitimate or legal, paying taxes to them only means more ICE agents on our streets. They’ll continue to rack up the deficit because money isn’t real and they care more about power than anything else, but we should take the money we’d have spent on taxes and donate it to the national resistance fund.

This needs to be something we push on states as well, find every way we can to confound money going into the hands of fascists, and slap the hands that move those dollars from us to them. The feds will soon be shutting off major parts of the social safety net as a weapon to intimidate and deprive anyone not in line with the party, we’re well past the point when we should have stopped paying these sociopaths.

Remove the space for them to cause harm

Right now, ICE is on the streets, protected by cops and soldiers, attacking our communities with impunity. I think it’s important that we continue to go out and demonstrate, and when ICE arrives, wait until they’re fully committed and ready to move. Then, we dissipate to other demonstrations in the area, continuing to create hotspots of protest and driving a cycle of fascists deploying only to have the field empty of potential targets.

Every fight that happens, even one we “win”, works in favor of the fascists. The state has a monopoly on violence, they own all the news and media networks, everything is arrayed against us, so for the bad guys violence is always fuel for their narrative and agenda. We need to starve them of that fuel just as we need to starve them of money.

Legitimacy is the currency of the regime

They are a coup who have killed the republic and are using its corpse as a disguise, but they are still treated as federal agents who have legal power and authority to do what they are doing. We need to make them look stupid, to harass and prevent them doing their jobs, and to make people who aren’t in the MAGA cult realize that this is illegitimate and immoral.

The holocaust was legal, slavery was legal, hiding Anne Frank was a felony, so the “law” has never been a guide to how one must conduct oneself in a civilized society. In fact, the veneer of legality has been a key component of every fascist putsch from 1921 through today, with history awash in examples of “nice people” prioritizing the law over what is truly right.

That is a hard spell to break, but we can continue to press on our side to remind people that it’s us versus them, and letting them write the rules which bind us but do not protect us, while protecting them without binding them, is a path to doom.

We should not exclude any agents of the state or politicians until they can show they are on the side of the people, words are useless in this fight so if the police and troops and leaders take a stand to protect the people from the threat, then they should be welcomed and marshalled towards our common good.

But if they’re going to cry and make speeches and file lawsuits, then they’re not willing to do what is needed to protect the people, and should be fired or recalled or pushed aside to make space for people with integrity and honor to take those positions and use the power to prevent harm and protect our communities from those who would annihilate us to hold on to their ill gotten power.

I’ve been trying to socialize and promote the idea of parallel systems, for resiliency and tolerance for systemic collapse, for years with little to show for it, but still at this point, the resistance is almost entirely people who just outright refuse to consider more significant changes to the political landscape.

So maybe the best way to organize and direct the mass of people who want to help is to create a religion, but run it as a sort of general welfare insurance social movement to make sure we can move resources and funds to areas in need quickly and effectively.

I have an ancestor who helped found the Unitarian Universalist church, and another who built a Christian socialist commune in Hopedale, MA which I think is a good model of the sort of community shepherding towards mutually beneficial outcomes that I want to promote on a wider scale.

The republic is dead, the constitution is no longer in effect, and the systems which millions of our fellow people depend upon to survive are going to collapse, and we have to build a safety net before it all falls down around us.

I think something like that might work, because if we try to do it politically people will never listen and will actively fight against us, and we’ll never even get off the ground before we are ground into paste for the gears of the machine.

Jesus’s word was real heavy on generosity, forgiveness, compassion, and shared shepherding of our communities, and I think there is a lot of value in just saying “our religion commands us to respect and protect those around us” and to live that example.

Either that or we found a PMC, hire a bunch of veterans, and then we do PSD for at risk people under threat of state violence, to compel local and state law enforcement to mediate and fairly manage the process while protecting civil rights.

Just fifty armed buddies, saying “perhaps not today” to ICE, with the conviction to make it stick, and making it clear that we would be wiling to take it to the logical conclusion if pressed on the matter.

With thousands more nationwide ready to back up the first line, repeating and spreading a message of hope, charity, civic duty, and integrity as core principles, it would allow us to push back against the bad guys and be prepared.

Perhaps a blend of the two, so that we may walk the path without being easily dissuaded, I think that the Sikh faith’s focus on community defense and shared meals is a particularly interesting example.

I don’t think there is a future at all in the political pageantry we’ve been seeing this year, people think they are “resistance” but are deluded into thinking that protesting our way through this crisis will work, and we have precious little time to start building life rafts and safety nets for our communities before the bad dudes start pushing vulnerable people off a cliff.

We need a way to reach people quickly, to mobilize them towards finding and solving problems in our communities, and I think this is both earnest as a way to use the church as an engine of positive change, and would be a much more faithful interpretation of the word of the late great JC.

He kicked tables over in the temple so that we could winch locked cell doors off their hinges, in both cases he is protecting innocent people from those who would exploit and destroy them.

I think the urgency of the moment and the moral clarity of the guiding principles compel us to act and resist what we see as wrong, and I think that when it comes to truly protecting one another from undue harm, that we must be active and accountable to one another and to our own interpretation of a moral code.

And I don’t think this should be controversial or shocking, on the contrary it’s a very worrying state where we are seemingly so close to the triumph of evil but still politically deadlocked on if we even want to discuss more meaningful ways to stop evil, and that we should promote kindness backed by willingness to use force to protect others.

That’s why I joined my church as a kid, why I joined the army, why I volunteered three times to go overseas, and why I think the right way to navigate the next two years plus is to build a deeply functional system of mutual aid and community assistance that can catch the falling ones, and move us towards a more modern and just world.

I was a Republican my whole life until 2015, more libertarian I’d been on my way to independent, and then Trump swept the nomination.

He looked like the final boss of a Wolfenstein game, comically evil and immoral, but against him was one of the least cool people to have ever existed, which really felt to me like the Dems were trying to lose.

Now, I’m probably a mutualist or socialist, think we should invest heavily in the people of this country and provide a reasonable level of social services for everyone across the board, and am now criticizing Democrats from their left often.

The Problem Now

We’ve gone fairly deep into the fascist plan without any seeming ability to stop them, and many times when I suggest we at least try to stop or delay them, I am met by “allies” who treat me disrespectfully and dismiss the idea of demonstrating resistance.

At this stage we have the doors closed on a lot of potential solutions, and as they get closer to the day they take the mask off and throw the corpse of the constitutional republic aside, options will become more dire.

A lot of what’s been put into motion will happen just based on inertia in various forms, but it seems bonkers that we’re not even reaching the “Taiwanese Legislature Brawl” level of response to at least show that we’re not all meekly going along without at least trying to stop bad things from happening.

Whose Fault Is It Anyways?

I blame Democrats in particular for a lion’s share of responsibility in giving us Trump, twice, and I think their continued cooperation with the regime helps the bad guys gain legitimacy and durability.

I know they are bound by law and rules in a way that makes actually *stopping* MAGA impractical via the legislature, but just showing us that they aren’t going to be quiet obedient collaborators would do so much to energize the people who cannot stand for what is being done here in this moment.

I know Republicans are way worse in so many ways, but that’s irrelevant to me when the Democrats can’t mount an effective or sustained action, because the Democrats’ actual job is supposed to be stopping the bad guys as much as possible.

Criticism is good

Recently, a lot of well meaning people hear me do that and think “this guy is a secret Trump lover” and insist that Democrats are fighting real hard, but cannot give any actual examples that are anywhere near as common as the collaborationist behavior that I am talking about.

It’s a reasonable assumption, and could be clarified with a question or two, but they’ll insist that any suggestions of possible tactics Democrats could attempt aren’t viable and that we just can’t do anything except vote blue no matter who.

And I would vote blue if they were somewhat decent, but they never are, they’re either some weird rich lawyer or other status quo rent seeker, so I think we should identify what can be done in what realms to push blue to be better, and then high five each other when we fix it and win.

For some reason, the continued decline of even an illusion of citizen power makes a lot of people complacent and cranky, and even to this day will defend candidates who just absolutely fail to even try and stop MAGA.

I will burn this fucking tent down before I let Blue MAGA step inside

A frustrating repeated claim is that Democrats are progressive and leftist or socialist in some way, and that we should all pull together to stop orange man, and that we need to stop “purity testing” stuff like support for genocide, and we can solve that after we beat Trump.

A lot of us vote blue for “unity” and then watch Democrats who win immediately slam the door in our faces and engage in some bipartisan nonsense, and yet our votes are taken for granted, we’re treated as naive and silly and foolish if we insist on having a system which lets us fix these problems.

Then Democrats will embrace “Abolish ICE” to pluck it away from the people organizing it and suffocate the movement in the cradle, vote to fund and expand them, and allow now-normalized levels of oppression to keep getting bigger and more dangerous.

If Democrats in office are going to fight me harder than they’ll fight the fascists, then they need to be recalled and replaced by representatives who aren’t cowards.

What might solve it?

So, all that said, what I would suggest Democrats start to do is mostly focused on demonstrating actual integrity and courage, there are plenty of good people in the party who would probably love the chance to actually *fix* something, if the leadership could help them we’d at least go down swinging.

In general, the coup where the fascists installed their own parallel government is already complete, and in large part that’s because Democrats have done practically nothing to slow down or jam congressional processes.

Biden handed off a well oiled machine, the levers of power with a cup of tea and a fun little note, and Trump pushed EO and bullied courts and congress with basically zero pushback hard out the gate, and steamrolled whatever remaining constitutional control remained.

They’ve been building their machine for months, Israel and Epstein seem to have altered the timelines and goals a bit, but it will probably be up and running in the near future for some sort of demonstration.

Why bother fighting if they’re sooooo strong and scary?

Because these things the regime will do are going to be aimed at people who cannot defend themselves, so I think that anything to reduce their ability and availability to do bad stuff is helpful.

It’s important that we find ways to frustrate, delay, annoy, or pester the people who make the bad decisions, as well as those who implement and enforce the decisions, and to make it clear that we are intentionally doing it to prevent the speed run across the Rubicon.

Every step they take brings them closer to their end game, so even if they eventually win this phase, if we make everything cost more for them to do the wrong thing, then we can put pressure towards positive action, and know that it’s taking away their bandwidth to do hate crimes.

Embarrassing show of Quisling sensibilities

Democrats as a whole are completely unready and unwilling to try and resist in any meaningful way, no matter how many speeches and tours they do it never moves into concrete strategic vision or demands to be met.

When one of their ranks takes even the most tenuous and tender toed motion towards showing real resistance and fighting, their colleagues step aside and let it fall flat, as leadership makes it clear that we shouldn’t be IMPOLITE while we’re negotiating the annihilation of the New Deal system.

Al Green said a few words at the SOTU and got censured, but they should have gone one after the next, disrupting and making a huge scene while Trump has to stand there and not look like a psychopath on international tv.

Treating the Institutions with Respect Directly Benefits Bad Guys

Legitimacy is EVERYTHING for this to work in their favor, if we reject their regime and don’t see it as legitimate, it loses power and reach.

But the Democrats vote YEA time and time and time again, and by acting as if Al Green was in the wrong, while they politely listen to a dangerous maniac explain in detail the crimes against humanity they’ll do just for fun, in between the crimes they already have going?

They have to show that whole place is a sham, Corey Booker was real talkative when literally nothing was on the line but has mostly sided with the majority, but I want to see them making so much noise and being so disruptive that the facists have to make us leave.

Make Them Make Us Leave

And it’s important that we make them make us leave, by being so disruptive and annoying that the bad guys give up on pretending to do the republic act and just use violence, it creates a moment for everyone involved to see the true core of what the regime is, and what they will do without a care to what it costs us all.

The fact that one congressperson was assaulted by a paramilitary thug, and then CHARGED FOR BEING THE AGGRESSOR after repeated violations of her congressional and constitutional rights, and the Democrats are like “lol the courts will make this right” is fucking embarrassing.

I want the history books to note that we all did what was correct and necessary in the moment, but I’m afraid we’re on course to be a cautionary tale in line with the Weimar Republic, where comfortable liberals laughed at the far right and treated them as trivial until they realized too late how dangerous things actually were.

We have obviously crossed the Rubicon and are no longer able to operate as a cohesive nation that takes care of its citizens, and after decades of Democrats play acting as a resistance while serving the elites, and the backlash that empowered the new regime of unelected billionaires and fascist lackeys to end the rule of law, we find ourselves in a situation in which remaining in this country is an unacceptable risk to protecting ourselves.

To be clear, there are only two possible outcomes: a peaceful exit from this sinking ship in which the states that don't want to become serfs to Elon Musk go our own way and try to at least serve and protect our residents, or continue to naively believe that the laws or system will save us until the inevitable civil war in which everyone loses except the billionaires who pushed us into it.

So if you still believe this can be sorted out in Congress or in the courts, you're wrong and need to catch up with reality, because the liberals wasted all the times we could have done that to virtue signal and absolutely failed while insisting we have to support them, and now it is plain to see that they were never really interested in stopping Trump or protecting us, but were only play acting as resistance while smothering any actual movement to the left.

Tom Hohman, one of the top contenders for Nuremberg Trials II, is making statements with the full backing of the Musk/Trump/Thiel regime that he's coming to Boston with a phalanx of highly armed federal agents intent on violating our laws, attacking our neighbors, and assaulting the foundations of our laws and liberties, so that they can continue being complete monsters and deporting people for no good reason.

The rhetoric clearly shows that, as they always have, the fascists will tell us who they are and what they will do, and that we can either believe them when they tell us, or pretend that can happen here, until the inevitable Pikachu face as you realize that they did it again and you did nothing.

My belief is that Massachusetts is up again to be the birthplace of a second rejection of unjust rule and barbarous treatment my those holding power, and should activate the national guard to be at the ready to deny these paramilitary attackers the ability to enter our state, and to physically remove them under arms or detain them until we can reach an agreement that they can't be here.

The state should also suspend all federal tax submissions, redirect the income tax withholding entirely into the state treasury, and be prepared to use that money to replace the few things the federal government was still doing to benefit people, since it's clear that our money is being stolen for billionaires in DC and that they have already made it clear that those who speak up about their criminal and dangerous acts will "not get funding", so let's just say fuck them and do it ourselves.

Everything is full throttle towards collapse, so instead of waiting while the whole thing imploded as it absolutely is going to, we should be proactive and set up state and regional replacements of these dying agencies and services to minimize the harm our residents will suffer from the death of civil service at the federal level, and stop giving our money to monsters who will blow it on yachts and genocide and indefinite detention of innocent people.

We can decide to make a good decision, reject the illegal regime that has taken over the USA, and address this crisis head on in a way that reduces harm and protects our most vulnerable neighbors, or we can put our heads in the sand and pretend that the Democrats will save us by glib tweets and asking us for donations, or even more insane, that the courts will magically find a way to restrain a president who already has the unwavering support of the Congress to assume dictatorial powers.

The game is lost, the Republic is dead, the constitution isn't real, and every day that we refuse to accept that is one step closer to a very avoidable collapse which would have generational trauma inflicted on people who have done nothing wrong.

To fail to act to stop this is to be complicit in everything which is happening, and if we don't take a stand on the side of justice, fairness, and compassion, then we might as well just lay down in the street and let the deputized MAGA cultist run us over with their new legal authority to kill people who are in the road.

The course of action which has been locked by these psychopaths in power will kill us all, and destroy any chance at a future worth living for all the generations that are counting on us to stop this before it's truly too late.

Problem is, as usual it's not the actual bad guys, but leftists/progressives/"protest voters" who are now in the Blue MAGA narrative crosshairs, with the recent announcement by Trump that he's going to finish what Biden started and extirpate the remaining Palestinians from their homeland and turn it into a theme park, the thin veil of shitlibbery is slipping as they fall over themselves to post smug attacks on the actual resistance to blae us for their failure.

I've already seen like six posts of people making some version of "oh, look at what Trump is going to do, hope you leftists and protest voters are happy", which is a great thing to do because (a) Democrats can't do anything to actually oppose Trump and his agenda in this post-law post-norm landscape and are still not letting the narrative adjust to that, (b) it underlines the ideological and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic party and its complete lack of use in any situation we will find ourselves in as a country, and (c) throws the people they already victimized under the bus, again, all to avoid any sort of reflection on why these fucking do-nothing brunch addicts lost TWICE to the least qualified and most terrible person to ever run for office.

So, rather than examine the effects of gaslighting us that Biden was SHARP AND FOCUSED, and insisting that if he wanted to run we had to respect his feelings and let him, or how Kamala failed to differentiate herself from the Obama/Hillary/Biden form of soft-dealing enablement of fascism and band-aid policies which fail to interest voters or solve their problems, or ruminate on how their tone deaf half-measures and ardent service of special interests gave Trump a weapon in being able to attack their out of touch and unhelpful policies, or asking why 90 million voters stayed home rather than pick either of those shit options, they decide to go with the tried and true "attack the people who aren't ideologically pure" option.

It infuriates me that these vote-and-do-nothing wastes of space are the direct enablers of Trump, that they stood on norms and assumptions that the system would protect us from the system instead of actually stopping Trump when they had power, that they actively and enthusiastically assisted Israel in its campaign to extirpate Palestinians from their homes while telling us "we can't not do this", and after all those failures and tea parties and Wakanda dances and ripping up paper, that when faced with the reality of a Trump regime unrestrained by law or convention, that their plan is "do nothing, make noise, attack the voters who we need, and blame minorities for daring to have a voice".

It's probably the last time that we'll be voting for a while, at least in the system/country as we have known it, so now we see the emperor without their clothes, namely that their only tools are voting, fundraising, and tweeting glib New Yorker cartoons while doing nothing to materially degrade or oppose the bad guys.

So here we find ourselves, in the maws of a regime poised to circle the wagons and eliminate the last vestiges of checks and balances or accountability to the citizens, with a long-dead corpse of a Democratic party still filling up all the space that a resistance would need, giving lip service to "resistance" without any real leadership or message or strategy, clinging to the insistence that calling out Trump's illegal actions or lies will somehow help tilt the scale back towards the 1950s style political landscape that liberals have deluded themselves into thinking we inhabit, and rather than take any real stand on the side of justice, they once again choose to attack the people who tried to call out and oppose the Quisling party and its seeming fascination with appealing to Liz Cheney and attacking anyone left of Bernie as if we're the cause of all this.

This is just the beginning, and things are going to get a LOT worse, and a lot more chaotic, and a lot more unhinged, and I think it's time we all get together behind the idea that the Democratic party is an active impediment to fixing what's wrong in our nation and our world, that the people inside it will do less than nothing to help us and our communities, and that if we don't send them out to pasture that they will continue to pose and posture as if they're fighting the rising tide of fascism, all while nipping at the heels of anyone who actually WOULD resist and fight back, and at the end of the day they'd send our names into Elon to prevent us "doing something dangerous", because they will never ever admit that the system is irreparably broken and will only be a tool of oppression and injustice until it is finally destroyed.

The time is now to start... well, buying a rifle and stopping paying taxes, but critically we need to immediately start organizing outside the fake resistance and creating organizations and resources to help catch all the people who are going to have their lives turned upside down by this fucking clown show.

Mutual aid and education are going to be key components of making it through the next four years, millions of our fellow citizens and residents are going to lose access to benefits and services they need to survive, and even in the states which aren't controlled by death cult morons it's going to be a tall order for the local and state governments to make up the shortfall.

We need to prepare ourselves to catch those who are being pushed off the tightrope by the same ghouls who are cutting the safety nets, and from that core of mutual aid and support structure, hopefully we can coalesce into a national movement of people who refuse to give their money, power, consent, or name to a wildly illegal regime that is going to do its best to annihilate all of us in the service of ushering in a white nationalist Christian theocracy.

If we don't do it, nobody will, so talk amongst your friends and neighbors and start figuring out what people in your community need, what's most at risk, and what we can do to help each other weather the dumbest and most avoidable catastrophe, which will be the only future we'll see if we continue to let these leeches masquerading as a government to play their parts while the plane crashes into the mountainside.

This is not great, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we've lost any ability to forecast and predict what's going to happen in the near term.

Sure, Harris probably wouldn't have done much, another caretaker president who won't rock the boat and will do just enough minor adjustments to keep up the illusion of a functional government, but at least it would have followed its own rules and logic, and we could plan accordingly.

With Trump, all bets are off, maybe he'll start a paramilitary militia to be deputized to deport anyone they dislike on the spot, maybe he'll select a horse to be the secretary of agriculture, maybe he'll sell Florida to Putin as a tax avoidance scheme, there is literally no act too extreme or absurd for him to try it.

The only thing we know for certain is that he will never leave the White House alive, he'll either live out his term until he croaks and My Chemical Brovance takes over, or he'll just continue to delay and defer any electoral process to maintain power.

He'd be at risk as a civilian, and has already said he'd do it, and there frankly isn't anyone in government who would stop him, so I guess we just gotta be OK with that for now.

On the plus side, I assume a lot more people will be receptive to the message of the page/group: namely, decentralizing power and knowledge to local communities, fostering responsible self-defense and resilience, and working to reduce and deny our tax revenue to what is certain to be a wildly illegitimate and dangerous administration.

It's too soon to make any sort of guess as to how this will shake out, but the probabilities are not looking very good for a lot of our fellow humans, so I'd just ask that everyone review their own readiness to keep your family safe through a 4-6 week period of unrest.

Between China having the keys to the power/fuel grid, Trump looking to slip through some heinous actions and policies, and the white-hot political unrest that's seemingly going to boil over any minute, there is likely going to be a need to remain in place and take care of ourselves at one point in the next year.

Other than that, I'm going to try and get some more articles and resources posted whenever I get to it, so that we can start sharing information and building in safety nets to a society which is about to go through some major upheaval.

I don't know for certain that he can't win, but I know that if we give Trump four more months of Biden's seemingly accelerating decline, that we are going to be at greater risk to his attacks and media, worse off as a country, and will be creating other massive problems for no real benefit.

The Blue MAGA dogma at the moment is to run out the clock procedurally so that Biden actually gets to the point where he can't be replaced without creating a constitutional crisis, which is actually not for a couple months but is the finish line for Biden truly having the nomination and throwing the dice on Trump.

The narrative is basically to pretend that we can't do anything, because Biden wants to stay in, and delay any meaningful discussion or action, until it's actually too late to gain a major bump in voter appeal which would offset whatever risks doing a change that late.

This kind of self-fulfilling prophecy is the inverse of the "just vote blue and then push them left" lies that they told us with zero intention of honoring the last two elections, because there is much less risk with changing candidates at this time, while the danger to the whole world if we let Biden keep shitting up the place (and the value as propaganda and perceived weakness he gives our enemies) is enormous.

As far as delegates, Biden would cede them to whoever he wants (as has happened in other situations with pledged delegates), and there's literally nobody harmed in the process, and it can help us be much more confident in Pennsylvania and Michigan especially, so that we don't give Trump a free second term without putting up significant resistance.

Very few states have laws that would treat a Biden endorsement/swap as a faithless elector, and fewer still even have penalties, and honestly even if it resulted in the electors getting life in prison, it could quite literally be the inflection point at which the republic is saved or condemned to disintegration and dishonor, so do a solid for your country and make the tough call to protect our country and especially our people.

Up until about two days ago, my position was "We need to at least have the discussion, and if Biden can show us he is ready we will accept it and move on", but between the debate and the press conference, I am not seeing a man with the public interest at heart, and he is visibly unable to do the most basic requirements of his oath of office.

Well, maybe he's letting his pride and honest belief that he's the best guy for the job get in the way of admitting that in the best case he's got huge weaknesses and is vulnerable to Trump's particular brand of attack, but either way I give zero fucks about him and only care about beating Trump with a comfortable and solid margin.

I am now certain that he should step aside, in a way that passes the torch and keeps him involved in the handover, as a gesture of continuity and personal sacrifice to make sure that the Democrats beat Trump, because *that* is the most important thing.

Since y'all refused to even allow discussion of topics like Biden's electability, mental state, record, Palestine, and now his ability to pass the torch (AS HE FUCKING SAID HE WANTED TO DO IN 2020), now it's gotten much worse, and he's done a ton of damage to his credibility and America's already tarnished image, so you just need to shut the fuck up and do what we ask for once because it's the right thing to do.

I think it would even be reasonable (although hopefully not necessary) that he be removed under the 25th Amendment, I'm genuinely worried that the last four years Biden's been making agreements he didn't intend to or how the progression here impacted his duties, but if we have a smooth switch to a solid ticket, we can sidestep that risk as well.

Can you imagine if Biden did another debate like the last one, in October? If it gets worse, if he can't get back off the ropes? Nothing I have seen over the past four years has aligned with the Blue MAGA narrative, and if he loses in November, we are going to be at risk of a wide range of existential threats that we're not equipped as a society or country to address.

I don't have time for a guy who gets sick or has a stutter or has surrogates gaslighting us that the guy who can't remember how to say numbers is "sharp and focused", or whatever the fuck is going on with him, because I need a person in that position who is going to fucking crush Trump and then step on his cronies until they are out of the halls of power.

And you'll note that the Blue MAGA narrative has always been to eliminate *space for discussion* by automatically labeling critical or controversial subjects with fixed dogmatic responses which eliminate consideration, hence why many of these Biden leibstandarten keep "asking for evidence" of Biden's weakness or other potential candidates' strengths, but there is no real way to prove it to a level at which they would concede the point, so all it does is give their bad faith gaslighting a veneer of fairness.

Y'all seem to have a broken idea of democracy in your minds, because Democrats are consistently insulting and ignoring our views and beliefs, and dismissing polls and voter sentiment as less important than "the facts", all while gaslighting us that this mediocre grampa with an unremarkable record is actually amazing and we're too blinded by media to see him accurately.

News flash jack, "the facts" which the whole Biden protection dogma is working off are tautologies built upon the foundational belief of Biden as some sort of master statesman who is doing great work, when in reality he's basically been "take your grandpa to work day" and doing about as much as any average president would do (mostly on autopilot, might I add).

Even if you're right, that this is all a manufactured outrage, myself and millions of other people are having panic attacks at how badly the Democrats are slamming their own dicks in a car door over and over again, for no discernible benefit we can see, we are still voters who you need with a reasonable belief that's open to changing, if you can actually show us that.

There has been zero effort of any value from Democrats and shitlibs for the past decade or so to meet progressives/leftists/youth on our concerns and demands after we "voted together to stop fascism", and before that it was not much better.

It's always "we need to vote the lesser evil to keep Trump out!" when liberals want our help to get into power, and then after the "most important election ever", we end up with some huge missed opportunities from how Bidens handled his term.

Yet again, Blue MAGA Lucy is holding out the football of "protect Democracy!" telling us that this time, Charlie Brown is going to be the one to get what he wants.

I also need you to actually give a shit about winning and crushing the bad guys, because this weak-willed "oh we can't upset anyone, America's not like that, we need to heal" nonsense is weak and it means we have to compromise with liberals, and watch liberals compromise to help out the people we're supposed to be allied against, and shut us out entirely.

So even if we're all useful idiots of some conspiracy to endanger the election by making Biden look weak, then why does he keep doing stuff that makes him look like an escaped grampa from the care home, and not even be able to give me five solid minutes of competence and no weird aphasia or category errors?

I have been concerned about Biden from policy and personal fitness pretty much all along, there was another whole narrative about Biden being the most electable in 2020, which was a tailored media/DNC effort to snow out Bernie and other upstarts who threaten the status quo that really started this Blue MAGA cult of... not personality, but brunch.

But the fact that these simple concerns we have are not being allayed by Biden exuding leadership and competence as we would hope, but in fact I am at a panic level right now, and if the shitlibs go full Blue MAGA and blow this election because they were too busy protecting Biden and the narrative to make rational and informed decisions about maximizing our winnings in November I am going to lose my fucking mind.

If Biden stays in the race, the next four months will likely be peppered with humiliations and damage to our country to the point that I wouldn't be surprised to see it disintegrate, or even worse handed over whole, with all its powers and privileges intact, to Donald Trump, who is going to use it to do crimes because he is literally a professional criminal and probably also a narcissist or maybe even psychopath, but definitely would not be great.

All so that Biden, some guy that literally nobody really is excited or hopeful to see in the race, can stay in, and not inconvenience some Democratic party administrative staff doing the paperwork, and that is an increasingly likely and extremely dangerous potential outcome that seems to have no effect on the core actions and beliefs of the Blue MAGA pushing Biden as essential to victory.

Look, I get shit wrong all the time, and while I think I'm making good analysis based on reality and truth I can't see the future, but all of this from Blue MAGA to protect Biden over party and country is bad faith and is based on a delusion, and we have to snap y'all out of it before you drag us into the pits of hell as you smugly repeat the same mistakes that cost us so dearly in 2016.

It can be done, it must be done, and if none of the democrats have the energy and sense of civic duty to get Biden to help position the Democrats for major victory, then we should probably look at abandoning the festering carcass of the Democratic party and just fucking have Jon Stewart or another non-partisan celebrity to come in and sweep the board.

I guess we'll see in November if their foolish wager pays off, especially if some third party appears, with a candidate who is both not Trump and also not Biden, to siphon significant margins of independents and shift elections.

So this goes out to any dudes who saw the bear meme, and instead of saying "wow that's crazy we need to help fix this", decided to argue that women are wrong/stupid/evil/sexist/whatever, which led you to talk over women and try to tell them about their experience.

I think the problem here is that your view of power dynamics is fundamentally broken, and is letting you get wrapped around an imagined discriminatory act being more important than the real discriminatory act, which you are also actively protecting with your response.

Being afraid of a group based on stereotypes and propaganda is bad in the abstract, but with 1 in 4 women being victimized in their lives, a vast majority of them attacked by men, there's going to be a natural psychological response to that to be more discriminatory and self-protective when meeting unknown men.

I think you've read the wrong way into the whole issue though, for this whole bear meme moment, in no way am I feeling guilty, attacked, discriminated against, harmed, or affected in any way by what other men do.

I naturally assumed when women choose the bear it's because a lot of men are legitimately fucking dangerous, and that made me sad to think that literally half the world's population is having that response.

When I hear someone say something as jarring as "I'd rather meet a wild animal than you", I consider if I'm the kind of person that warrants that, and if I'm helping those people create trauma and distress.

I'm secure enough in who I am and the moral decisions I make to understand that what I am seeing is a fellow group of people who have endured some major fucking trauma, and they've expressed it in a way that is shocking and embarrassing to me for the behavior of those toxic men.

I don't know about you, but when I hear someone say "I was hurt", I ask how to help them stop hurting, rather than split hairs about how that person has expressed their distress.

Same thing with the flag kneeling backlash, like I did three combat tours overseas to "protect freedom", but people are getting hopping mad about protests during a fucking song that CONTAINS REFERENCES TO SLAVES being played at a giant sporting event, to the point that they refuse to listen to the people protesting and express support to silence and punish those who dare to speak out.

Sometimes, especially as a white hetero dude in America, one has to just pipe the fuck down, listen, and at the very least not be a part of the problem, nor play devil's advocate about trivial equivalences and other rhetorical masturbation that is 100% not helping anyone.

This exact behavior is even a core part of what caused the trauma in the first place, meaning that sealioning about "poor men" mirrors the systemic ignorance and downplaying of marginalized people being abused, which is not a great look.

That behavior is literally protecting the systems and social norms that allow these injustices to happen, so you have in fact lashed yourself to the mast of a ship on course to asshole town and are actively choosing to be part of the problem.

Literally just don't, stop clutching your pearls about your imagined petty injustices, and if you're not gonna help solve the problem, at least stay the fuck out of the way and keep your nonsense to yourself.

At a visceral level that seems like it might be true, since if we focus on consumer goods and entertainment it seems like capitalist economies create more tech, innovation, culture, and happiness.

The thing is though, this is in many ways an outcome in *spite* of capitalism, rather than being fostered by it, but the ways in which ideas and inventors are exploited are invisible beneath the "free market".

I work in tech, have contributed to a few patented processes and devices, and know about a dozen people who have been primary on a range of patents which have generated tens of millions of dollars for corporations, while every single one of the real inventors have tales of their work being taken under employment agreement, a trivial bonus at best, and in many cases having their companies and ideas outright stolen via manipulative business practices.

The idea that the iPhone can only exist because capitalism created the conditions for it to happen is a wildly wrong assumption, because the fifty some odd innovations which had to be developed and synthesized to create Steve Jobs' "vision" are all brought about by people passionate about creation and innovation, and the fact that many essentially did it "for free" compared to the value created by their ideas underscores the inborn human quality that is invention and creativity.

The idea that one system or another can create better conditions for creators does stand up, although I'd argue that socialism/communism as it has been practiced at the state level has not been much better for creators or societies as a whole, but I think it's clear that "socialism done right" would absolutely be better for all parties.

The sad state of things is that most businesses start off innovative, get mired down with MBAs and regulations, push out the best and brightest, and exploit those who stay out of a sense of misguided loyalty as the formerly bright star goes through enshittification and becomes a big shitty corporation just like every other big shitty corporation.

Eventually all these formerly innovative and promising organizations find that they're sustaining themselves not with innovation and efficiency and new value, but by inertia and the laziness of enterprise customers who will buy Oracle databases or Cisco network gear, not out of excitement for the product but because that's what everyone always does and nobody who actually cares has any real input into the process.

Our human drive to create and share is suppressed and perverted by the forces of capital and greed, and it really makes me sad to think of how many brilliant and productive people I've seen crushed and spit out by the system that takes their creations and uses them to smash out bricks of shit to trade with all the other shit brick vendors which maintain a death grip on the means of production.

By that I mean, I’ll do whatever I can to take things off my plate so that I’m not forced into doing things which don’t interest me, so I’ve naturally been pretty effective in automating toil and drudgery at work for the past 20 years.

The constructive part is important, because it implies two qualities; namely that it is reliable and that it does not waste my time, and both of those qualities are best realized together.

The Problem

So, after living for 40 years as a complete slob who has never had a clear desk at any point in his life, I’m finally going to do what the popular kids are doing these days - pitching an AI application that will personally benefit me enormously.

My biggest issues right now are the living room and the desk, which will give us rough archetypes for “room/space” and “surface/container”, and I think those are flexible enough for a POC which can accommodate scaling.

If we look at “organization” as a function built on top of “inventory”, then we really need to be able to two two relatively simple things, namely processing a photo and other data inputs into a representation of the “objects” within the view, and being able to recognize what objects are via modeling and a curated database of comparative objects to aid recognition and classification.

The classification is important, because there are going to be a billion ways people will want to have things - some would go for a continually immaculate and static space, some would simply want to know where to clean or repair something, varying based on situation, so all of that demands a strong language processing function to make useful inferences.

This won’t be a perfect “Marie Kondo, but on a computer” analogue, but the future use cases and workflows which are most useful can’t be predicted accurately, so I think it’s going to be a lot easier to build a POC and see if it has value or if more functionality is needed.

Maybe This Could Work

The general cameras and/or other sensors with AI/ML processing to be able to take a picture of a room or surface, and then over time refine which items are where, and where they belong.

For example, if it gets a picture of a living room, either organized to standard or in a state of varying entropy, with no information except what is directly sensed and gathered, start from that point and identify what objects/spaces/surfaces are where.

Things like where the floors are, what’s on the walls, being able to discern cubbies/shelves, and other structural data will be gathered to construct a representation of objects in space.

Once it can tell what the Lego box looks like, it can identify where it goes, and as a starting capability it’s a quick way to take a picture of something with your phone, and get back a response with all items of interest labeled, so I can check and see where something should go.

Conversely, I can search for an item, and get a real-time status on both where it is now and where it should be.

Granularity should be user selected, so I can see that a pile of things have “legos” and “action figures” in there at a broad categorization, or I may drill down to know what action figures are there so I can find the one my son needs to take to bed.

It could be used to identify very small parts, like individual legos, but likely only in surface mode or requiring multiple cameras/sensors to discern “very small” items.

What About Data Security?

Great question, I wish everyone asked it about more things, and the answer is “we’re going to find out”.

I don’t mean the usual Internet of Shit philosophy of “security is for nerds, hardcode a root password” non-decision that plagues the current tech landscape, I mean that we’re going to need to see where the problem points lie.

The tech security is not easy but at least it is quantifiable right now, I’d have the entire stack run on its own low power local mesh network which is entirely cut off from the house network, and only accessible via gateways which exchange the stack to the LAN/WAN through reasonably engineered APIs, and all of this is routine currently.

The big issue is that this would be taking multiple pictures of things in your living space, many times with you and your family in the spaces, and keeping track of what is where and when, and that would make this an absolute jackpot for a wide range of very unsavory actors.

Aside from the usual tech vectors of securing access to the data against the usual battery of vulnerability exploits, there would be risks to unauthorized access within the LAN, social engineering, data leaking via the call outs to the wider network, and probably a lot of other dangers that I’ve not even considered.

This is the sticky question that needs to be answered if something like this would ever be of general use, but I believe that it can’t be properly answered until we’ve got a tool which can be the sui generis test case.

Why Not Make A Tidying Robot?

Well mostly because it’s super fucking hard, but the last flurry of caveats and obstacles wasn’t enough for you?

This still requires me to move things with my human hands, but I don’t know how well the initial idea and user experience would turn out, nor how much utility it may have to people who aren’t me, so a smaller scope to validate the core idea seems reasonable.

This is scoped as a room inventory system, also because I don’t know anything about robots, but it could be able to feed instructions to a number of external entities.

There’s already a fairly well defined space of robot and home automation products, and

Most CEOs are a net negative on their organizations

It’s my turn to make a sweeping and seemingly hasty generalization, but I stand by this statement both anecdotally and from what I see happening in the economy. I have rarely worked at a place where the CEO even set an appropriate strategy and cadence for meeting goals, let alone had any meaningful impact on the actual operation of the business.

In many places, CEOs and other high level “leadership” would make absolutely insane and stupid decisions, as nearly everyone with a brain was waving their arms and showing the error of the decision, and then when it blows up the employees who tried to prevent disaster are tossed under the bus with layoffs and missed opportunity.

Absolutely zero CEOs will ever have a truly clear picture of conditions on the ground once an organization gets over a couple hundred people, because it’s just too much for one brain to handle, so it’s delegated and filtered back to the CEO.

Money is Speech in Elections - Now in Journalism Too!

I get that business rags have to publish a lot of stuff, so fluff and repetition are unavoidable, but it’s a very limited viewpoint at best, and an actively wrong person driving towards the guardrails in many cases, but I guess getting a CEO piece is a big deal.

This always gives me a giggle, because the person least qualified to tell you a goddamn thing about a company is the CEO, who spends his time doing spreadsheets completely segregated from the rank and file labor, and is fed a curated stream of data from functionaries and petty tyrants.

Where is Fortune with their smash piece “Fred from the loading dock gives concrete examples of corporate leadership dropping the ball and blaming workers”. If they’re gonna give uncritical passive voice airing of whatever some rich dude said in an interview (or are these “sponsored content”?), then the converse should at least merit consideration.

Definitely Blame Shifting and Gaslighting

So then they’ll roll out cool “facts” to support the immediate end of employee quality of life, to scare the workers into the mentality of “the remote ones are not like us”, in the sense of organizational merit.

They’ll say when layoffs happen, your boss won’t fight for you if you’re remote, because he’s not seeing you around the office to toot your own horn, which is really beautiful.

Not only are these goofballs overlooking their managers of remote workers are unable to have a clear picture of their employees unless told by them in person, they’re preemptively blaming the workers who seemingly deserve it, even though their “mistake” was to do the same work, but without driving hours to have some useless twat micromanage them.

Hybrid Seems Wise, Why Do CEOs Always Alter The Deal?

Every accusation seems to be an admission, as this house of cards built to maintain the “iron horse is the best because the stupid jet keeps derailing” thinking, are just the paroxysms of a dying ideology, as some of those sprawling shambling organizations, “too big to fail” sized businesses, finally meet a slayer of giants threatening the fundamentals of what it is to be a company.

The whole debate is absurd, because I feel confident that these two statements will bear out:
1. Remote work will always be part of the labor market.
2. If it will always exist, then any successful organization must be able to operate remote and in person interchangably in unison as much as possible.

So what these CEOs are telling us with their big brain analysis is “the people I pay to stand between me and the workers say the workers have to be here for me to do my job”, even though the real risk I see here is a fully remote workforce showing self-organization at least sufficient to start winnowing down middle management, so MBAs are in a frenzied quest to gate the workers behind themselves and not let efficiency slice away their positions.

Maybe It Really is Worse?

Yeah, that could absolutely be the case, and absolutely will be in some major areas. But hybrid brings managable risks with flexibility for compromise, and still dozens of examples of a slow or accelerated return to office full time were enacted as a direct result of the company being able to dictate the terms, with zero leverage available to labor.

But as with most things, culture and working practices in large organizations must by definition move slower than smaller and more nimble groups, and here we are less than four years from the harried and poorly planned lockdown period which began the remote experiment (catching many of these CEOs off guard), and the titans of industry think that is enough time to test, evaluate, and make an informed decision on strategy on the whole idea.

Any sane person would think “well, I bet it would be bad for dental hygeinists, but it probably fine for an executive assistant or computer programmer”, which is an obvious place where remote will never completely take over, yet we have here “experts” making sweeping and unbounded statements about the abject failure of work from home and how they’re gonna send you packing with nothing in a terrible market if you don’t comply, like some sort of mafioso who receives protection payment in the form of employee frustration.

History Shows Major Changes Happen To Work

The point is, we’ve never really had a coherent social norm about work from home as we do the office, and that shows that we’ve barely gotten through the initial experimental phase and there are almost certainly new tools and methods to bring greater benefits we’ll see later if we don’t give up and go back to the panopticon.

When we were farmers, our day was 0500 to 2000 most days, with a lot of downtime in small chunks during the day, and a farmer’s day in North Carolina was mutually intelligible with a farmer in Germany, with bursts of excess activity at sowing and harvest with lulls in the winter in which they maintained property or did other tasks.

Mines were dawn to dusk, factories were 13 hour days seven days a week, but offices came in with the much more reasonable 40 hour week which organized labor had recently won.

Women entered the workforce in WWII, cities sprang up around factories to supercharge the economy, guys did eight balls to maintain 80 hour weeks in the 80s, all these changes happened with evidence for benefit and harm as a result in mixed measure, until an equilibrium was found.

Is Remote Even Optional Now?

Remote work is the next phase, and likely will become the default within ten years, mostly because there will be so few jobs for actual humans that the computers will zoom themselves for much of the process.

That may sound foolhardy to state, but it’s got the opportunity to begin our transition to a post scarcity society, because the amount of required labor shrinks even as population goes up, and the trend seems to be exponential with no end in sight.

If there were a compelling reason to be in the office, besides “you literally cannot brush teeth of someone in Sandusky Ohio from Detroit”, then it would have been raised already as a counterpoint to the insanely obvious flexibility, freedom, and satisfaction this policy earns from employees.

The criticism is almost always “If we do things the old way without question, that new way sucks!”, as if the failure to adapt is the fault of an idea (one which dozens of companies execute near-flawlessly) and not a missed requirement to adapt to the times.

Wait, So Why Do We Have CEOs When We Have Excel and a Chatbot?

You know, that is actually a very interesting and intriguing line of questioning, I wonder if any of the major business publications will see fit to give that an honest analysis.

I’d be glib to just state that this is possible now, or that CEOs don’t make any difference, but almost none can deliver 400 times the value as an average employee does.

I think it is obvious that it’s coming up fast and there should be a lot of investors looking to automate the employee who costs 400 times what any other does, especially when the belt has to be tightened because the new EMEA expansion went horribly wrong and the CEO insisted that they market to Austria with shrimp on the barbie and kangaroos.

Compared to the effects of a human queen bee paid 400 hives’ worth of honey for being there, I would bet that many businesses would see improvements across multiple core domains by eliminating the CEO and having a council of smaller sub-orgs work together organically, letting decisions be made closer to where core competency is strongest.

Where is their support within Gaza?

Were Israel the egalitarian and just state which it claims to be, at least some Palestinians would be working as part of a large network of intelligence and direct action operatives inside Gaza, due to their shared ideological goal of protecting Israel because it protects all its people, which is an essential foundation upon which to build a secure and safe region while it’s under threat from insurgents.

But that's not what we're seeing, because had they done what would really crush Hamas, there would be little if any international outcry beyond any issue in the region has traditionally garnered, due to the low civilian casualties and effectiveness of the campaign to eliminate the risk and destroy the ability for Hamas to engage in military action.

We're not seeing an upwelling of Palestinian support for the Israeli invasion that is heralded as the saviors from evil Hamas, because the people who live in Gaza know that they live under an apartheid regime which views the lives of Palestinians as not even worth a tenth that of a "real" Israeli citizen.

The math doesn’t add up on their justifications

The numbers speak for themselves, terrible Hamas snuck into Israel and killed 1200 innocent people - which is absolutely a reason to hunt down and eliminate every single person involved in the massacre - yet Israel has killed 11,000 people in its campaign and shows no sign of changing course or making any concession whatsoever to the people they are murdering, all while claiming proximity to fighters is justification to just fucking level entire city blocks and kill hundreds of people each time.

I'm sure there were IDF soldiers and veterans as well as other Israeli state agents included in the killing and kidnapping, which is not a reason to condone hateful slaughter, and yet the presence of "Hamas" in Palestine has created a situation in which the IDF regards every square inch of territory a free fire zone to obliterate to "get Hamas" with zero regard for the human carnage they are creating.

What should they be doing?

What Israel would need to do if they wanted to achieve the stated strategic goal of eliminating Hamas is a targeted operation to find rocket sites and logistics routes/caches, recon the entire tunnel network, place supplies and munitions at strategic locations for guerilla operations, and conduct constant low-intensity operations with high chances of hitting legitimate targets and minimizing collateral damage.

It would not be quick, but it would be successful, but only if coupled with a civil policy which shielded Palestinians from collective punishment and allows them rights in parity with any other Israeli citizen from an unoccupied part of the country, because without that it is clear to any rational observer that this is about revenge and not a reasonable act of self defense as Israel claims.

There would not be carpet bombing of towns, but strategic strikes by smaller and more capable aircraft and munitions which reduce the chance of collateral damage as much as can be expected in war.

There would not be tanks and a massive influx of ground troops, because that greatly increases the risk to friendly troops and plays right into the hands of Hamas and Iran's narratives, and instead we'd see IDF special operations teams kicking in doors and additional civil support to ensure that water and power was working in secured and friendly sectors.

So why are they invading like it’s a conventional war?

But what we're seeing is not a targeted operation to remove Hamas from the region, it is a piece of lethal theater played out for the benefit of international optics, creating a situation where any rational person would fight back in self defense and then pointing at that as some how justifiably causal of the invasion and reign of terror Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people.

It’s gotten so much momentum that one of the most universally bipartisan and agreed-upon principle in the United States government is that Israel is universally good, must be supported to the hilt, and will not be held accountable in any meaningful way, to the point that even the idea of a cease-fire or “humanitarian pause” is looked at in the same light as the Final Solution.

Why is Palestinian autonomy such a caustic subject in America?

We’re all about completely evicting Russia from every scrap of Ukranian territory, but Joe Biden is gonna smile and wave while sending billions of dollars and American made munitions to Israel to perpetuate the mindless and pointless killing of Palestinians, and an echo of America’s legacy of extirpating natives from a region by crook or hook or rifle, then sending the survivors into reservations on the least desirable land in a cycle of murder and taking.

Yet Palestine, a very real place with millions of very real people living there in an effective ghetto enforced by the Israeli state, is not seen in the same way, and in this case the American political machine is full steam ahead on Israel finally neatening up those little mistakes and claiming all territory to the exclusion of the current owners.

Haven’t we heard this one before?

I feel like this is reminiscent of American treatment of Vietnam and other colonial possessions lost in WWII in the post-war era, when we chose political expediency and financial concerns over the self-determination and very lives of millions of people around the world who wanted freedom from the foreign occupier who had already failed to protect them once, and we did nothing to help entire nations of people so that we could keep the support of their occupiers and exploiters.

If America really is home of the brave, the melting pot, beacon of freedom, whatever idealistic view we seem to share of our country being free and good, then we can’t turn our backs on people being abused and killed by an unjust invader, and at absolute minimum demand an immediate ceasefire, and force Israel to the table with an international group to help negotiate an end to hostility and return of services and rights of the Palestinian people.

Why is this MY problem?

A lot of people who I’ve shared these thoughts with are resistant for a range of reasons, but one of the more common is a belief that Israel are the good guys, that they’re taking care of a domestic issue, and they should be trusted to act in good faith.

If after consideration it’s realized that this is not the case, the default fallback seems to be “well, it’s still not our problem, we have enough going on at home!”, as if to denote the lack of options for individuals or even the country to interfere in their affairs.

The problem with this is that is still looks at the issue as Israel, the whole region, has a renegade enclave that is full of bad guys who should be stopped, rather than a situation where an occupying force has taken most of the place by conquest and is now using its position of power to bring a war of attrition and conquest onto the remaining reservations on which the Palestinians have been packed.

What’s happening in Palestine is worse than what’s happening in Ukraine on several key points, and it’s disappointing and horrifying that America’s government is actively supporting and helping to camouflage this operation as some sort of crusade against a dangerous bunch of hardline militants, which is in the form of letting a dangerous bunch of hardline militants invade a densely packed ghetto and kill indiscriminately.

What can we do?

Well, I wouldn’t suggest asking Liz Warren what we can do, especially not if you’re disturbing her at dinner. I wouldn’t ask Joe Biden, who is probably the least useful president ever, because you’ll just get double goodspeak about how Israel needs our help and that we can’t even consider asking Israel to tone down the carpet bombing.

I wouldn’t ask anyone in Washington, because a confluence of corrupt influences like big oil and the military-industrial complex all want to see more large scale military actions with little chance for success and high chance for continued expenditure of blood and treasure.

They are either blinded by the pro-Israel media and cultural propaganda, bought and paid by special interests, or simply taking the path of least resistance in making no more than passing lip service to any sort of drawdown or accountability for what is being done with our tax dollars in our name.

They need to be told what to do by the people, but money is speech and speech is too cheap to even reach their desks these days, so what we need to do is raise awareness and demand accountability from the people who are making this happen, because there is no reason to delay an end to such a destructive, shortsighted, counter-productive invasion of the last vestige of home which these people have.

"It seems obvious, why are we not doing anything!?"

There are many social problems which can be at least partly addressed with some very good ideas that have worked in many other places, but there is a learned refusal to rationally examine anything which would alter the status quo, which is conditioned into us by school/church/media as a reflexive rejection of anything which challenges the status quo.

Many great ideas seem obvious and have been thought of many times, but the issue is that our system is intentionally designed to protect the powerful and their interests, and only act in the public good when necessary to maintain the illusion of a just government and fair economy.

We're powerless to bend Congress to actually do anything bold, even when there is a clear need and obvious benefit, and we continue to watch in disgust as they continue to make things worse, patting themselves on the back for the rare instance when they make things a little better, all while they insist that slow compromise is the only way to run a country, even though both parties hate each other and act more to thumb the eye of the other party than to improve the country.

Why are we letting these idiots exclude us from the discussion?

Democrat or Republican, even the most daring of these watered-down proposals from either major ideology wouldn’t even begin to fix the fundamental dangers built into our society, yet these ideas are still too far beyond the pale of "acceptable ideas" for actually being enacted, trapping us in a cycle of watching the world burn while a bunch of goofy 75 year olds bully one another on Twitter instead of actually doing anything to make things better.

When presented with novel options to address major social problems, the bar is set impossibly high, to the point that even when an overwhelmingly good option is achievable, the goalposts will be moved ever further into absurdity in the name of "perfect".

If one suggests “radical” proposals in America which have been working for decades elsewhere or are aimed at tackling the global catastrophes which have been wrought by the system, it’s laughed off as idealistic and foolish, destined to fail, and the reason for discarding the notion out of hand is usually some flaw which is presented as insurmountable and immeasurably worse than doing nothing.

Meanwhile we have social and institutional ideologies like capitalism, policing, imperialism, social justice, and class, all constantly degrading and causing damage to the vast majority of humans worldwide, but the negative externalities of the status quo is hand waved away as the cost of doing business (or brunch, if one is a liberal).

“We are capitalists” said Nancy Pelosi, with more money invested in ice cream than most Americans spent on their cars, while Trump threw paper towels to hurricane victims as he tried to get back to the important work of fossil fuel extraction and maximizing the amount of people who died of COVID, and these are the people who decide what is debatable and achievable by our society.

Poisoned wells and hyper-distortion of material conditions

Any good idea will likely butt up against one of the sacred cows protecting the wealthy, but the utility and possibility would seem so obvious and compelling to a rational citizen that there is an enormous campaign to inculturate certain assumptions and ideas as horrible and terrifying, lest the subjects take the time to consider their own self-interest above those of the powerful.

Anarchy in general is looked at as a lawless hellscape in which Darwinism on steroids plays out and the world descends into a massive Lord of the Flies scenario, so dangerous and violent that it’s become a social shorthand to mean “terrorism and moral depravity”, for this brain worm the first principles are that people are dangerous and want to go on murderous rampages and that the only thing standing between us and a future of misery are the brave cops and politicians.

“How will you stop criminals and thieves”, “What if someone attacks you?”, “What if I decide I want your food”, these seemingly major flaws with a new system are played up as a complete game over for consideration or compromise, meanwhile the status quo enables widespread looting of the environment and working class people, and the system is accepted thoughtlessly by a majority of first world subjects.

Socialism is even worse, acting as a third rail which prevents discussion to such a degree that even people who are objectively toeing the line of socialism reject the label and shun it to avoid all the negative connotations, as dozens of more developed and free countries watch in puzzlement as we vote to do more harm to ourselves and give more money and power to the billionaires.

The definition of socialism in America is “when the government does something that doesn’t benefit me more than others”, becoming a cloud of ideas ranging from free school lunch to taxing billionaires to composting the rich, and anything with the label are seen as morally and materially equivalent to gulags and guillotines.

America is the best, but we have to make it great again, also racism isn’t America.

There is a dogmatic assumption that America is great, we're the most free nation on earth, our boys in blue are brave, our troops are supported, and capitalism is the fairest and best way to make an economy where hard work is rewarded.

The mountains of evidence which disproves these myths is ignored, even by many who see the problems and insist that minor tweaks to the system will effect positive long-term change, because the norms and history itself show that only sanctioned ideas from within the system are acceptable.

The mythology that “America isn’t like that” when a white nationalist march happens, or that it’s just a few bad cops, or that we are the greatest/freest/richest country, are a set of fairy tales to deflect from the fact that the institutions and organs of power are entirely corrupt at every level, legally and morally, that they are working as designed, and that everything will continue to get worse if we maintain course.

The futility of voting to change an immutable system

There will never be a way to “fix” a system doing exactly what it has been molded to do by capital and corruption, because any meaningful change in any area is regressed to the mean by the byzantine structures which mutually support one another, a self-healing complex system created to shield the powerful from accountability or moral responsibility for what they are doing to us.

Voting has gotten to be even more farcical than it was even 30 years ago, with the "choice" being between a party which continues to endanger and oppose progress to the point that it's a literal death cult of pridefully and willfully stupid mean people, and the other party which wants the cultists to be nicer online, hire more minority cops, while embracing any viable progressive issue and immediately watering it down, acting as a ratchet pawl to avoid any hint of leftward progressive change.

There's not even the veneer of cooperative management of society for the good of the people, it's just assholes calling each other names and getting elected even when they haven't done any legislation of value since 1964, and they stay in power for decades because once the private corporations we call "parties" have blessed a new candidate, they gain an enormous advantage over any challengers to the point where they don't even have to pretend to serve the people to win.

We can’t fix the problem if we’re forced to constrain the debate to trivial issues

The craziest part is that so many millions are so hyped up about what the other sides politicians are doing that they cannot see the bipartisan support for ass fucking the planet while shitting on the entire human race, and it’s being done by and for the benefit of the most evil and useless people to have ever lived.

Even some conservative worst case strawmen like “kill all billionaires or millionaires” wouldn’t really make much of an impact, because money isn’t real and too many people are personally invested in maintaining the stability of the status quo, with millions of working class people deluded into thinking their hard work will pay off and that they’re just doing their jobs.

Banks will continue to loan money to people who need to go into debt to survive, shoplifters and register skimmers will be jailed while corporations get away with wage theft, landlords will collect money from people who need shelter, the system has been designed so that everyone is both subject to its worst tendencies while being entirely employed in maintaining it to hold on to what little we have.

Poor people heaving themselves onto their swords for capitalists who hate them

The truly insidious part of this is that the more the system squeezes the masses, the more outrageous government intrudes on personal lives, the more the economy funnels wealth away from workers and towards sociopaths at the top, the more unfair it gets the more that working class people double down on the myths, the more determined and unwavering the support for the system grows within the masses.

This gives rise to the American phenomenon of a guy working 80 hours a week for 35k a year who insists that this is a good way to live and that any changes to the system are bad, because he knows that since the 70s the two things which happened are that immigrants arrived and his wages decreased, and the bombardment with a direct correlation there is effective.

By dividing the working class along multiple lines (ethnicity, class, gender, religion, political, etc), the placing a large portion of the working class on the bottom and a similar sized group second to bottom creates an effect where the second to last will do anything in their power to not slide further down, all while the media rails at the scapegoats who are blamed for the declining fortunes and opportunities for all.

Social progress on issues is met with a growth in inequality elsewhere in larger portion, giving the ammunition to the propaganda factory we call “news” to reinforce the narrative that making things better for exploited people has a direct personal cost to everyone else, and presents a way for working class people to be ardent supporters of unjust systems out of fearful self preservation.

How can we fix a system like this?

You can’t.

Seriously, this isn’t some sort of hyperbole or nihilistic acceptance, but the fundamental truth I want you to take away from this is that we cannot fix something which is working exactly as intended, and adjustments or amelioration will at best provide temporary relief for some, while ignoring the costs being borne by others.

The norm that revolution, radical change, or militant self-defense by marginalized people are all scary bad things is core to this, because the system has indoctrinated us to see our safety as intrinsically linked to the systems of imperialism and capitalism, so a threat to those systems is perceived as a threat to us.

Physical violence and refusal to honor debts is seen as the domain of the crazy and irresponsible, while economic violence is carried out on a grand scale by the system against us, and they continue to slash and invalidate the promises and debts made to the people by the system.

At the end of the day, the only real solution is to eliminate many of the institutions that have been propped up to be the bedrock of modern civilized society, and to do so will require two very radical things of all of us.

Smaller communities are always better than larger ones

The first thing which must be done is to decouple the necessary functions and services of a human-focused society from the capital-focused machinations of state and capitalism, to cherry pick the few things which are currently done by the system and must be maintained and expanded to foster better communities.

The entire concept of a nation as a viable unit of culture, governance, and ideology is absurd, as the impossibility of agreement on issues like abortion or gun rights shows us, with wildly incompatible views between counties, let alone across the vast nation.

I don’t know what people in Iowa want to do, so it makes no sense that people in Iowa would send their money and power to Washington and have my elected representative decide how Iowans live - they should keep the money and power there and exercise it in the way they see fit.

Cooperation and federalization are great, and should be fostered with services and groups which help spread out costs and improve quality of life for all, but this requires that the governed have agency and ability to join or leave these associations at will, rather than having the government in charge of vast swaths of decisions enforced at gunpoint.

Economically it’s the same thing, 75 years ago you’d run errands at stores owned by people who lived in your town, your local bank lent to townspeople and provided a safe place to save their money, there was a larger set of corporations in certain fields like automobiles but in many ways the money one spent moved around close to where you spent it, and the boss was someone the workers saw in person regularly.

Today, those stores are long dead, killed off by deregulation, globalization, and aggregation of mega corporations which undercut prices to eliminate all competition, and which now act as a pipeline of wealth out of your community and into some corporate account which will net insane profits for those who hold power, while treating workers as replaceable objects who do not deserve a say or a stake in the business that could not exist without them.

Buy a rifle and stop paying taxes

The next thing is where I’m going to lose about 75% of you, and that is that we as individuals should strive to eliminate our contributions to the system, do commerce outside corporate-controlled markets, and be prepared to defend ourselves and our communities when the hired muscle of capitalism comes to beat and shoot us into submission.

I’m not saying anything so crazy as “go out and pick a fight”, because the government has the monopoly on violence, and anyone crazy enough to think that starting a fight is a good idea will find themselves in a box while the TV reminds us how crazy and stupid they were.

But every law has an effective death penalty, even a parking ticket ignored will lead to registration being revoked, continued driving would result in police trying to arrest the driver and impound the car, and continuing to resist will lead to armed and aggressive response from those sworn to protect us, simply because we said “no thanks” to one of their rules about where we could be on the road we paid for.

I doubt that we’d see anything like Handmaid’s Tale carried out at scale, but we can look at groups that help marginalized people right now in America and how they are treated to see what happens when people take care of each other in a way that doesn’t reinforce and enrich the system.

Volunteers feeding homeless and hungry people see cops arrive by the APC load, hands on their tasers as they pour bleach into the food and harass the clients and staff, all under the guise that they’re just making sure that local laws aren’t violated and that unsafe food isn’t consumed.

Supplies and water around the Mexican border left for the migrants making the journey are destroyed and poured into the sand by border patrol, whose sole job is to make the trip to America so dangerous that the huddled masses yearning to breathe free go somewhere else, under the insane assumption that we can build a wall tall enough or a journey hopeless enough that a parent won’t try to make it so that their kids can be safe and free,

At some point, government employees with guns will show up and try to stop you from doing objectively good and necessary work for your community, claiming that the government does that exclusively and so well that they don’t want the help, and in some cases that’s going to escalate.

The power of the rifle is in the owning, not the shooting, as demonstrated best by the Bundy standoff where the presence of an armed and determined group exponentially increased the risk and cost of using law enforcement to stop them, compounded by the optics and media coverage.

It worked for a bunch of yahoos protesting a misinterpretation of a law, it can work for you when you’re telling some functionary why they can’t come on your property and inspect your community takeaway meal kitchen or your commune’s electrical grid.

Wait, society would fail without taxes, right?

Society would absolutely fail if we all tried to keep our money and avoid spending on public good or social services, but that’s a case to be made to prioritize those services rather than an argument to support taxation as it exists.

As far as taxes go, putting aside the fact that money isn’t real, it’s a signal to the system that we’re paying the vig, and that they have our submission to a system that will waste most of the money on things we hate that are going to hurt innocent people, while the schools and services we’re promised continue to degrade as funding is cut to benefit special interests.

Workers, already stinging from the theft of the majority of the value of their labor by their boss, see a third of what’s left taken by various governments, and in return see increasingly smaller benefits for the price.

Wars, policing, even our public works have degraded to the point of ridicule, “what about the roads?” is a common response to my advocacy of refusal to pay taxes, yet our roads are minimally maintained to the levels needed to provide an efficient and publicly funded way for corporations to transport goods from across the globe and into your local big box store.

It’s essential that we look at social services and public works as priorities which receive the funding and support they need to attend to the needs of all, but I can’t think of a less effective way to do that than taking money from workers before they even see it, and sending it off to Washington so that politicians can spend it on terrible things while they actively work to cut the benefits and services that people truly need.

We live in an age of alienation and distrust, I personally don’t even know the names of my next-door neighbors and feel disconnected from my community, which is a side effect of the way society is structured currently to focus on work and transactional interactions instead of fostering supportive local communities, and the unyielding quest to commodify everything from our food to our entertainment to our personal relationships.

This makes it trivial to convince people that the suffering of people they see every day is acceptable, which is why many people in the most poverty-wracked parts of the country are the loudest critics of welfare or any form of investment into the people and communities, especially when every “benefit” has a direct cost to individuals that media can hammer on to solidify this resistance.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

As of today, I’m still paying my taxes and waiting to see what comes next, since I don’t want to suffer the consequences of state reprisal before there’s even a chance for meaningful progress, but that’s not the point I’m making here.

This system is going to fall, and all signs seem to point to it happening soon, which means that we need to be ready to step in and help each other rebuild a fairer and more sustainable society on the ashes of the old, and be ready to do so quickly since the window will be short, with all the players in the current system vying to restore their fiefdoms and get people back under control as quickly as they can.

These are ahistoric times, and the collapse could be slow with small failures being covered by the system for a while, or falling like dominoes as banks fail bringing down financial houses bringing down corporations, it’s hard to predict and impossible to truly prepare for.

But I think that the best approach to make the world safer for us and future generations is to understand this system is temporary, the need for order and community is unbreakable, and that preparing ourselves to maximize our ability to benefit others is imperative.

The other part is to organize locally, so that if things start to turn we have a framework in which we can coordinate and act to maximize our effectiveness, and to provide a kernel of a strong community that can serve as an example of people engaging in mutual aid.

By all means, we should continue to agitate from within the system, using the weak tools we have to make gains where we can, but to truly fix anything meaningful we need to be prepared to starve the system of power and money, while creating organizations to address the increasing gaps in society that many of our fellow humans are falling through.

OK, but seriously, what do we do now?

Find what you can do to benefit your community, and hone your skills and networking. This isn’t going to pop into existence fully formed, we’re facing global catastrophes at never-before-seen scale, permeating our world down to the lowest levels, so the solution cannot be prescribed when we’ve yet to see how this is all going to play out.

But we do know that all people have a common set of needs like food, water, shelter, healthcare, safety, entertainment, education, organization, culture, art, and friendship, and you can probably think of some skills and interests you have which could be a good way to contribute.

I’m disorganized and impulsive, so I’m definitely not the kind of person to create a local committee to connect all the people who’d want to be a part of this, but there’s someone out there who would be ideal for it.

The next 15 years are going to be the most important times in human history, as we make the choice between a post-scarcity future of limitless potential, or perpetual subservience to an ever shrinking group of wealthy villains and their entourage of hired thugs, so I’d like to close with a request that you think about how you’d improve your community, and talk about it with your family and neighbors.

The seeds of mutual aid, respect, and true freedom are being planted right now, for what might be the last growing season if we’re not careful, and I hope that I’ve at least gotten you to consider the demands and possibilities that are facing us.

Views on the subject can be broadly aggregated to two groups, and while there is a lively debate in one group about what to do, in the other we have an ideology which is committed to rolling coal till we all die.

Climate Realists

What I think would be the largest group, which I’ll call Climate Realists, are those like your run of the mill liberal, who wants to reduce and recycle and meet climate pledges reached in global cooperative organization, because they see the effects of our delays to this point and wish to avert disaster.

Climate Realists see the problem, but cannot craft a solution, since most continue to seek a “compromise”, by watering down their half-measure solutions, continuing to make longer and larger allowances for emissions and other dangerous activities which we cannot afford.

Even after decades of compromises with bad faith actors controlled by carbon capital which gained us nothing yet cost us dearly, there is still an outmoded commitment to “bipartisan action” that leads to the worst possible outcomes to be within the realm of negotiable terms.

Climate Realists all know that we’re already behind the curve on preventing some very bad future conditions, but there’s a reluctance to propose anything truly radical, as even the most minor flaw or side effect of a “perfect” plan seems to be enough to garner sufficient opposition to prevent any progress.

Climate Delayers

The opposition are the vanguards of climate genocide, whose views and positions continue to shift as objective reality disproved their entire worldview, within the last 30 years going from “climate change isn’t real” into “climate change can’t be caused by humans, we’re so widdle” to “we can’t be sure it’s us causing these insane record breaking extreme weather happening right now” to “maybe hotter is better”, into a new ideology I’ll call Climate Delayers.

Climate Delayers no longer deny that it’s real, or that it’s a problem, but they continue to carve out space in the discourse and solutions we need and insert useless tests or bad faith arguments which only create controversy and dilution, allowing “the process” to proceed, but pushing discourse and public awareness towards the dumbest and most unbelievable ideas that will kill a lot of future humans.

One Man, One Vote, Zero Safeguards

A real problem, for us today and every human who may ever live, is that we live in a society which holds sacred the right to voting, and there is no real barrier in our current society to people with outlandish and absurd internal realities to manipulate voters to support stupid ideas that cause immeasurable harm.

This is because we’re still stuck in a system designed to let two groups of mostly friendly people, who have some major philosophical quarrels, reach a reasonable compromise.

The Paradox of Compromise

No matter how little we “compromise” with an ideology which is fanatically committed to preventing any progress on the issue, the net result will always be less than the full measure of a solution which we urgently need.

After decades of having these “disagreements” be the barrier to even starting implementation of a solution - which, had we implemented in the previous decades when they were proposed, would have been significantly easier and less disruptive to current humans - many are still committed to letting the Climate Delayers have a major role in running our society, in the vain hope that by sticking to protocol and tradition we can gain a workable agreement where all sides can walk away content.

Worst case predictions of the past are better than best case predictions today, and getting worse with every moment with which we delay the needed work to save the future, and the risks to future humans grow in variety and probability in real time as we’re seeing it happen.

In a perfect world, we’d all agree that we need to pitch in and do what is needed to stop the problem and mitigate as much of the harm caused as we can, but in a situation where the core belief of one side is to fanatically oppose the other, a compromise is less of an agreement and more of a loss of integrity.

What Can Be Done?

What I find funny - in a terrifying way - is that our social boundaries allow for discussion of some monstrous things done to fellow humans, immigrants are treated like criminals for literally doing what America was created to do by coming here to have a better life, women are treated like incubators and still facing reducing but persistent misogyny, and all this is allowed to be said openly by people who we allow to have an equal say in the government of this society.

I think that democracy cannot work when the “choices” of the governed are distorted, misrepresented, and coerced into self-destructive actions by the powerful, and that we should open the discussion of removing those people from having any say over what we do to tackle the problem.

Ideally, we’d tackle the problem at the root and do rational but “radical” things like nationalizing or breaking up multinationals, make major investments in mitigation and alternative energy, and be willing to endure some moderately uncomfortable times to change course towards a sustainable future.

In the most probable case, our solution would be some sort of organization with global authority to set rules and arbitrate disagreements, so that we could have a rational and fair system which relies on cooperation and mutual self interest, to allow humans to make these harsh and disruptive changes together.

This Might Make You Mad

But I also think we need to widen the space of ideas we’d consider, because I’m past the point where I thought we could resolve this by dividing the country geographically to allow more advanced communities to forge the way, and I’m fast approaching the point where I’d say that disenfranchisement and other radical remedies should be considered.

I think that future generations will look back at all of us from this critical moment in human history with shame and disgust, at the Climate Delayers who continued to support the suicidal cult of carbon capitalism, and also at those of us who basically stood by and offered token resistance to an open assault on the survivability of our planet.