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mozz Admin

@mozz@mbin.grits.dev

Her daughter Kennedy looked confused, according to Noem, asking: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”

mozz Admin ,
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I was fascinated to see this post of a piercingly insightful breakdown of how it is on a day-to-day basis that movements "for a good cause" can become toxic and unproductive, and what specific patterns of thought to watch out for in yourself in order to make sure you're still working for good and not just becoming self-serving and congratulatory and hostile to other people working for good if they don't exactly fit in your little mold, and ultimately kill the movement... and then the guy posting it saying he doesn't know any other way to be.

Huey said it a lot better, in a positive sense, how to be the positive side, I think. I like this post quite a lot.

molly0xfff , to random
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the , what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?

No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.

mozz Admin ,
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@molly0xfff

(1) User-authored experience (2) Everyone being on the same team

Tim Berners-Lee imagined the web browser and web server running together in a single package. The same person who was observing other people's pages was also capable to do anything Facebook or Google could do, for good or for ill. And weirdly enough, little bits of the politeness that came along with that freedom -- robots.txt for example -- still survive, somehow, to the modern day, heartbreaking in their innocence next to the mutated horror that is the modern internet's grim realpolitik, yet still around.

Myspace and Geocities have nostalgia factor today because they carried over a little piece of an era now long forgotten, the ability to make your page weird and misshapen. There was no person examine the experience your page conveyed, who could decide it was horrifying and they didn't want their brand associated with it. Make music play that everyone hates every time they visit your page? Figure out a way to craft a link so everyone on earth becomes your friend? Knock yourself out, kid. It was the last little gasp of free control that many people on the modern internet have never experienced, before it was fully silenced in favor of CSS that was fully crafted by a professional, and all your stuff HTML-sanitized before it could be displayed.

Posting to alt.hackers used to be forbidden to everyone; in order to post that you had to know how to get around the permissions.

You used to put your email address into anonymous ftp as the password, not because anyone would verify what you typed, but just to help the server operator keep tabs on who was using their site for their own curiosity.

Everyone was on the same team.

The very first person who sent an internet spam message got called up and yelled at by someone in the Air Force, who told him to knock it the fuck off because the network wasn't for that.

And, he did.

mozz Admin ,
mozz avatar

API docs are at https://lemmy.readme.io/reference/get_post-list - I haven't tested this, but to me it looks like you can (for $server set to whatever server address):

  1. Open web developer tools and go to the "Network" tab
  2. Load a page of Lemmy while logged in
  3. Right-click on one of the network requests, select Copy Value -> Copy as curl
  4. Paste the resulting value to command line in a place that has curl; that'll give you a request that has the right auth tokens and etc
  5. Backspace over the actual URL so you can replace it with the API calls you need
  6. Use --request GET --url "https://$server/api/v3/post/list?liked_only=true" --header 'accept: application/json' to get liked posts as JSON
  7. Use --request GET --url "https://$server/api/v3/comment/list?GetComments=liked_only=true" --header 'accept: application/json' to get liked comments as JSON
mozz Admin ,
mozz avatar

API docs are at https://lemmy.readme.io/reference/get_post-list - I haven't tested this, but to me it looks like you can get raw results for what you've liked by doing this (for $server set to whatever server address):

  1. Open web developer tools and go to the "Network" tab
  2. Load a page of Lemmy while logged in
  3. Right-click on one of the network requests, select Copy Value -> Copy as curl
  4. Paste the resulting value to command line in a place that has curl; that'll give you a request that has the right auth tokens and etc
  5. Backspace over the actual URL so you can replace it with the API calls you need
  6. Use --request GET --url "https://$server/api/v3/post/list?liked_only=true" --header 'accept: application/json' to get liked posts as JSON
  7. Use --request GET --url "https://$server/api/v3/comment/list?GetComments=liked_only=true" --header 'accept: application/json' to get liked comments as JSON
mozz Admin ,
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Oh, true dat - yeah that is much more convenient.

mozz OP Admin ,
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Threatening the court is always what innocent people do. It's a totally normal way of standing up and being vigorous in defense of their innocence.

mozz OP Admin ,
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Yeah. The ICC and ICJ are very different.

The ICJ is basically just a fact-finding body, to inform actions that nations might want to take with their police or military or just to make things plain with proof in a hard-to-argue-with way. It's a good thing, but because it's mostly toothless on its own, people leave it alone.

The ICC has a lot more bite behind it. An ICC arrest warrant means any signatory country is obligated to take the subject into custody if they set foot in the country. It's well up far enough into the "might makes right" territory of world politics that it's not real clear what would happen if they issued a warrant for Netanyahu, but it's clearly enough of a big deal that people on the pro-war-criminal side are worried about it. And there's precedent; people as big as Henry Kissinger have been grabbed and hauled in front of a judge in the past so it's not like being a US friend is a get out of jail free card.

The US was taking steps towards agreeing to the ICC until Bush 2 got into office and killed the whole thing. If you want a fascinating story about the whole thing, watch "Prosecuting Evil" (mostly about Nuremberg but deals with the ICC at the end). In it, Robert McNamara (!) calls up Ben Ferencz and says he wants to throw his support behind the ICC.

Ferencz sort of gets shocked and says, I don't think that's a good idea for you. If this thing goes through you might be on the short list of people they go after for what you did in Vietnam.

McNamara says yeah. That's why I want to do it. All those things I did, I never would have done if I knew it was illegal. I think we should have laws for these things. So if I can make it happen I want to.

And there's a little bit of silence, and Ferencz says okay then. If you're sure, then I'd be glad of the help.

mozz Admin , (edited )
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The oil industry has entered into a new economic regime. It used to be how can I maximize how many dollars can I make this quarter, whereas in the last couple years, it's turned into how can I most efficiently make the most amount of dollars from all the oil that's still left. That's why they're making record profits, ironically enough -- they used to reinvest some amount of income as refineries, new drilling operations, capital outlays that would accelerate the extraction. Now there's no point to that, so instead they just keep the cash (EE I think described it pretty aptly as "the party at the end of the world.")

I wouldn't automatically assume that a sharp drop in their willingness to spend money accelerating extraction, means a sharp collapse in the amount of oil or the difficulty getting it from the ground. They're just abruptly adjusting their incentives, without necessarily a sharp jump in the physical-oil reality (just a continuation of the steady downward slide.)

mozz Admin ,
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About what aspect? I don't really know him, but I just read some of his stuff and he sounds very accurate to me in general.

mozz Admin ,
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Just to put some context:

  • Predatory scorpions a couple feet long
  • Armored millipedes larger than a man; they were probably herbivorous but as the article notes they "would have had few, if any, predators."
  • There is a theory, possibly not real well accepted but it makes sense to me, that trilobites were the creature that way-back-when invented effective predation shortly after evolving vision. (Before which the world was a fairly benign place.) The theory further supposes that the Cambrian Explosion was caused by every other organism on the planet having to scramble not to have their soft blobby flesh munched on at leisure by a limitless army of armored, invulnerable hunters, which they couldn't see or avoid, but who could see and follow them.
mozz Admin , (edited )
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Before: All phyla differentiated but all the creatures are soft and blobby and sort of unremarkable
After: All of a sudden there's trilobites everywhere, they can see and some of them hunt, and all creatures everywhere suddenly have all this armor and mobility and a lot of them have spikes

I don't really know (even enough to talk about what might be the competing theories), but it seems like it fits and it doesn't seem all that farfetched. That said, it kind of seems like all the scientists think me and Andrew Parker are wrong though, so IDK.

(Also - I didn't know about this before as it's semi-new, but apparently Anomalocaris also had eyes and hunted, so star power of the trilobites aside maybe those guys were involved as well. I have to say though the timing of the way it's written in Wikipedia makes a little more sense if the sequencing is: Cambrian explosion -> some species turn into predators, as opposed to the other way around)

What humans are doing to the natural world right now is a global extinction event (not much different from has happened a handful of times). It's happening too fast for anything to adapt to except in the most short-term emergency ways. Mostly stuff is just dying.

If we stay around for millions of years doing this same thing then I would expect the biosphere to develop defenses and then rebound into a new equilibrium with defense measures included against what we tend to do to it. Even that outcome wouldn't really be another Cambrian explosion though, because everything before it was so universally blobby and unremarkable. That is actually exactly why I like this theory -- the clear lack of a certain type of selection pressure before the explosion happened is as much as part of the theory (there must have been something missing from the threat matrix that suddenly arrived, and what was that thing?) as what things looked like after the Cambrian.

mozz Admin , (edited )
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“So, I hear this a lot,” began Carville. “‘James, young voters are just not into this. It’s two candidates, one’s in their 80s, one is almost in their 80s, they’re concerned about things that Washington politicians, and you just can’t blame them for-‘ Oh, shit. Fuck you!”

“If Trump and [John] Roberts and Alito and [Neil] Gorsuch and [Clarence] Thomas and Leonard Leo and the Heritage Foundation, if they get a hold, there will be no government left, there will be no rights left, you will live under theocracy, you’ll end up with Christian nationalism. But that’s all right, you little fucking 26-year-old, you don’t feel like ‘the election’s important to me. They’re not addressing the issues that I care about,'” said Carville.

Carville concluded by advising the press and Democratic operatives “to tell these young people to get off your motherfucking ass and go vote because you should vote like your entire future and the entire future of this United States depends on it because quite frankly, it does — and that’s not an exaggeration.”

I never thought that in my life me and James Carville would see exactly eye-to-eye on things, but there you go. IDK if talking this way is tactically productive, but he's not wrong. They should have this guy intervene in every newscast about how Trump's ahead 3:1 among first-time Wisconsin voters with odd numbered license plates or whatever, to yell "Fuck you!" at the anchors with little bits of spittle flecked around his mouth.

mozz Admin , (edited )
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I would rather have Vinegar Man than any 100 anchors going on TV and treating this election like a normal election where neither of the candidates wants to kill his political opponents and have the military seize the voting machines, and the Supreme Court is thinking about letting him

mozz Admin , (edited )
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This is just a weird paternalistic point of view to me.

It is absolutely true that rich abusive criminals are in charge of the country, doing all kinds of horrifying stuff. You can put Biden in that category if you want; at least as far as Gaza is concerned I won't really fight you on the classification.

Sitting back and waiting like "well it's on them to fix it, and until then I won't take steps that will change the outcome to one that's better" is absolutely guaranteed to fail. If you want things to be better, work for better outcomes. That is the only way it will ever happen.

You wanna work for better outcomes in Gaza? Fuckin a man that sounds great, tell me how. You wanna give Biden a hard time about Gaza? Fuckin a man sounds great.

You wanna commit to sitting out and not taking positive steps until something changes from above to make it worth your while? If that's your choice, then buckle the fuck up, because I think there's a definite possibility that you might get a chance to firsthand experience how much worse than present-day reality it can get if enough people do that.

mozz Admin , (edited )
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Again: You're using a model that doesn't translate into politics.

Leaving an abuser is a hard road to a better outcome. Working to end the genocide in Gaza is a hard road to a better outcome (and yes, absolutely if that includes affirmatively putting pressure on Biden in whatever way.) Categorically refusing to vote for the non-democracy-ending candidate until something changes by magic from above is not a hard road to anything. It's just more genocide (by quite a lot).

It's like trying to fistfight the police when they're going to arrest you. It's like getting abused by your abusive partner and so refusing to make a decision to leave because the shelter is behind on their taxes. It's like getting a cut that's infected and refusing to get it treated because you don't like the American medical system and think it needs to change. It doesn't make any fucking sense. It's just a non sequitur.

The problems are real, but refusing to engage with the system where the outcomes can be impacted, until they get better on their own, will in this case make those real problems absolutely catastrophically worse.

IDK how long I want to go back and forth about it, but that's my feeling on it.

mozz Admin , (edited )
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Yes -- which is why people in-the-know who are training neural nets periodically get frustrated and say "You know what, this thing's not producing the results I want, it did something really wrong as a matter of fact. Fuck it, I'm going to stop applying a gradient in the direction of better results, until it gets its act together."

Oh and also the neural net is physically in charge of all of our lives in this example

mozz Admin ,
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There was a whole crew of six-figure idiots from the DNC that all got together and decided that Debbie Wasserman-Shultz should be in charge. Carville's right up there with them; he was furious at the idea of having Obama instead of Hillary Clinton, and he wanted to skip the primaries entirely and just have Nancy Pelosi pick all the candidates. He's a full-blown loony. And a dumbass yes. I'm genuinely very surprised that he's managed to say something that I so fully agree with.

mozz Admin ,
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*on a podcast from his living room swaying unhinged-ly back and forth

mozz Admin ,
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I can give you a bunch of examples of Biden pushing domestic economics and climate change policy real real firmly back towards the center. But, on the broader point about the Democrats in general I actually agree with you. If anything I said sounded like "Let's stop working to make the Democrats better or else find a replacement," it wasn't intentional on my part. Both of those sound like great things to do. (And fixing FPTP to avoid this situation in general in the future)

In the meantime, I do think that voting for the non-apocalypse, and choosing the outcome of "needs some improvement and really should be replaced" over "will definitely try to end the world," are good things to do.

It's like if the neural net runs the life support on the spaceship, and it's clearly not doing a good job and we desperately need to find a better solution, and so one guy says hey it's been so long of this that let's just turn off the life support, what's the worst that could happen.

mozz Admin ,
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The third one looks extremely happy

mozz Admin ,
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Here's a commemorative T shirt that the Denver police union put together for the 2008 DNC.

Here's an on-duty Chicago officer wearing a similar shirt for the 2012 NATO summit.

I don't think all cops are bastards. But definitely some are, yes.

LindaCollins11 , to random
@LindaCollins11@mastodon.social avatar
mozz Admin ,
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@LindaCollins11 Lauren Boebert has been credibly accused of having worked as an escort and had two abortions. It might make it make sense why she overcompensates so hard.

I don't know whether the accusations are true, but I do know that she threatened to sue for defamation because they were false but never followed through, and the source of the allegations has sued her for trying to deny them. The suit is still going on as far as I can tell.

tusk81 , to random
@tusk81@mastodon.social avatar

Stephen Miller planning the Great Purge: Recruit ‘red state’ deportation army of law enforcement and National Guard to round up immigrants, rip them from their homes and community, and forcibly deport them.

https://americasvoice.org/blog/stephen-miller-planning-the-great-purge-recruit-red-state-deportation-army-to-round-up-immigrants-rip-them-from-their-homes-and-community-and-forcibly-deport-them/

mozz Admin ,
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@tusk81 It is not designed for immigrants. Stephen Miller may have a strong motivation to punish immigrants specifically, for whatever fucked-up reason, but the actual deeper reason for a private army like this is chiefly for domestic politics use, once they've broken the seal by extralegally going after immigrants.

mozz Admin ,
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@TheDarcBird @tusk81

Very literally, yes. A private police force like the Sturmabteilung or the Florida State Guard is one of the very last bricks to fall into place during a fascist takeover before the fireworks get started for real -- once they can challenge the state's monopoly on violence unconstrained by any oversight of court or legislature, there's very little to stop anyone who wants to from simply killing or imprisoning their opponents. We're almost there right now; the little inklings of people of the "right political persuasion" not being punished by the courts, or intermingling of people in civilian law enforcement with people in Patriot Front etc, are little sparks of it getting started for real.

I was talking with someone yesterday about tearing down the system (presumably meaning police, political parties, big corporations). My guy, I will never try to tell you not to work for change because things definitely need help, but a lot of that system is protecting you too. The things that can come in after the system falls away will make getting arrested at a protest seem like sunshine and sweet lemonade.

mozz Admin ,
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Tor's obfs4 protocol is pretty difficult to block, and it has some other transports that are options if obfs4 is unusable in a heavy censorship regime. This page is a good overview of how to start; with the right transport and bridge setup it'll be extremely difficult for your ISP to prevent you having access.

You could make your home server a securely-accessed onion site and connect to a remote-access-via-web service you're running there. That part might be a little challenging (and this process overall may be overkill) but it'd be very challenging for them to block it, I think, so if you've tried some things and had no luck, that might be the way to do it.

Be careful obviously

jenniferplusplus , to random
@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io avatar

I don't know who needs to hear this, but I'm getting tired just thinking about the testing path you would need to follow in order to fork mastodon and keep it as an in-place upgrade from baseline.

  1. stand up a baseline mastodon instance
  2. federate with some peers
  3. fill it with realistic data
  4. migrate to the fork
  5. test the fork
  6. test federation
  7. repeat across several combinations of mastodon base versions and other fedi servers
  8. rapidly, during development
mozz Admin ,
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@jenniferplusplus FediTest might be of interest to you

mozz Admin ,
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I was curious about where exactly Navarro is doing his time. I learned he's in Mt. Pleasant Correctional Facility in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. I wasn't able to find out too much about whether it's a good prison or bad prison or whatever. From the satellite photo, it doesn't look all that terrible, although I'm sure it's not fun.

While searching for that though, I did find out some things about FCI Miami where I think he originally reported and FDC Miami. Respectively:

In 1986, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) thwarted a daring escape planned by two inmates at MCC Miami. Gary Wayne Betzner and Terry Jackson Briceno planned to be in the recreation area of their housing unit when a helicopter would fly overhead, drop a rope ladder, and help them escape. Instead, once the helicopter flew over them they spotted three FBI agents in the helicopter and several others on the grounds.

Why you gotta mess with the prisoners like that (although that honestly is pretty funny)

In June 2010, the facility's security procedures prevented attorney Brittney Horstman from meeting a client when her underwire bra set off a metal detector. After returning from a bathroom without the item, she was turned away because of the detention center's dress code.

What the fuck

mozz Admin ,
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I was all set to say well, I don't think it's necessarily wrong, if the FBI and the prison officials are keeping two criminals in the prison; that is their job even if it clearly seemed that they were having a little fun with this one. But... that was before I looked up what they were in for:

Betzner, serving a 15-year sentence on a cocaine conviction, and Briceno, serving 18 months for importing and possessing marijuana, added attempted escape and conspiracy charges to their arrest records.

If convicted on all charges, Briceno and Betzner each face a maximum additional penalty of 10 years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

15 years for cocaine

That's most of your adult life

And now it's up to 25

☹️

mozz Admin , (edited )
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Just gonna leave this here -- the recent fatality rate in humans is about 30%. There are a tiny number of data points but the point is, it looks to be more deadly than Covid was by quite a lot. And clickbaity news about the 2022 dolphin case aside, it's clearly everywhere, and able to jump to new mammal species readily.

Since it first arose, H5N1 has been identified in a range of species including mink, dolphins, grizzly bears, foxes, and a polar bear.

It’s been especially devastating for marine mammals; in Argentina, bird flu killed 17,400 southern elephant seal pups, roughly 96 percent of all young born in 2023, researchers estimated.

Maybe I am missing something but assertion that the current public health risk is low seems to be based on more or less nothing. Why is the risk low? People are still working among animals some of whom are definitely infected, every day, in messy conditions. The consequences once it figures out how to spread person-to-person will be somewhere from moderate to apocalyptic, and what we're doing right now is clearly just half-measures to delay that happening by a little bit. Why is that low risk?

mozz Admin ,
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virility

Do you mean transmissibility? I get what you mean, but I've never heard this word used this way. (Virulence is, more or less, the non-fatal version of mortality -- how much damage the disease does -- so not that.)

Be that as it may, once the disease is established in a new species it tends to get less harmful because of exactly what you're talking about -- but plenty of diseases through history have been in the short run both fast-spreading and deadly, especially right after they jump into a new population. Which is exactly what H5N1 is doing right now (on all three counts).

mozz Admin ,
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"It is okay! The fire is only in the building next door along with the 10-15 others it spread to. Once we've detected it in our building, the risk won't be low anymore, of course."

(Edit: Actually, once it's spreading inside our building the risk won't be low -- we've already detected it in our building a couple of times, but it didn't spread so it's fine.)

mozz Admin ,
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And then collect the bedding (an indescribably foul mixture of sodden straw, chicken shit, and feathers) and feed it to your cows.

Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight ( www.righto.com )

"Different Globus units needed to be built for different orbits. Moreover, this design only handles circular orbits, making it useless during orbit changes such as rendezvous and docking. These were such significant limitations that some cosmonauts wanted the Globus removed from the control panel, but it remained until it was...

mozz Admin , (edited )
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She looks like something that shambles out to protect the temple when one of the adventurers makes a loud noise and awakens it. Like her mouth can unhinge and open wide without limit like a snake, and her shriveled fingers do cold damage when they touch you, all while her eyes have that exact same unchanging lack of emotion like in the photo.

mozz Admin ,
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I'm not trying to tell you right or wrong about your opinion, just to me, totally independent of her political views her face has the look of insanity and death about it. IDK, maybe I am letting the story color my view but that is my assessment

mozz Admin ,
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Yeah that'll happen. I still get my heart thumping sometimes looking at some girl that just looks vaguely similar to some person that I knew

mozz Admin ,
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Get outta here with your simple reasonable explanation and excitement and interest in the topic

(Do you have full text for the thing you linked to? I read the abstract and I thought it was pretty interesting yes yes)

mozz Admin ,
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Yeah. As with many things, "Can this make money?" is not the same as "Is this a nice thing to have around?" and the disconnect between the two when capitalism tends to assume they'll be the same thing, is a source of unhappiness in many ways.

mozz Admin , (edited )
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Okay, I read a little.

They say the same thing in the USA, where some 85 percent of the population are apparently 'apolitical' since they don't bother registering a vote.

Nor that it's the point, but Kelman was born in 1946, when it was about 65 percent that didn't vote, and it's been going down since then throughout his lifetime. In the modern day (i.e. long after this was written), about 60% of people vote.

If there was any possibility that the apparatus could effect a change in the system then they would dismantle it immediately.

They are dismantling it in many places in the US, I think specifically because there's starting to be a possibility again that it can effect a real change in the system.

Countries that have no elections, or only rigged elections, are regarded as failures.

You don't have to get into any kind of back-and-forth with me about this if you don't want to, but I am curious -- do you honestly believe that countries that don't use voting are not markedly less successful at giving the freedoms to their citizens that the writers here clearly believe are important?

That's one of my key points about the overthrow of "the system" in general -- a lot of times, the structures of power that replace voting if voting gets done away with are much, much worse. The type of injustice that exists in the modern American system is significant but what are you wanting to replace it with that you're asserting would have more justice? I mean, maybe. I would want to hear the details. But I think asserting that there's no reason why people would not want to be in a place that operates without voting is weird.

elections in practice have served well to maintain dominant power structures such as private property, the military, male domination, and economic inequality. None of these has been seriously threatened through voting

This part, I agree with. Just voting for the candidates presented and nothing else is guaranteed to perpetuate systems of inequality. Fully agree there for exactly the reasons that Ehrlich states. I think where we differ is:

  • ... and so we have to work for change outside the electoral system (absolutely true IMO)
  • ... and so it doesn't matter if we vote or not, no matter how stark the difference between any two particular candidates (absolutely false IMO)
  • ... and so voting is irrelevant and the whole thing is a fake which we don't need (fuckin what, have you ever studied a society with big concentrations of power that doesn't use voting, and what a fuckin nightmare it turns into?)

That is my take on it. IDK, I skipped around to read up on more but my reaction was much the same to any selected sections I found. I think the problems they're describing are very real and difficult bordering on intractable. I think the solutions they're prescribing for them are likely to make the exact same problems very much badly worse.

mozz Admin ,
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Oh, they're hugely important. I'm just saying that the likely apocalypse that's coming is going to destroy many many hugely important things which are more directly visible (crops we eat, places we live which are currently safe from deadly extreme weather, etc). But yes it's a big deal; I wasn't trying to make it sound like it's not.

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