To be honest, this forum is where I come to take th temperature of the US "centrists" who brought us to this point. I've quit other social media, so this is one of the few places where I can hear what folks (who are often quite clever in quite a few dimensions) spout rather vicious thoughts.
The other spot I get exposure to this part of the US political spectrum is the comment section of a youtube guy who is pretty far to the right but who has a seemingly (at least to me) well-informed understanding of the facts- he's interesting because it's kind of wild to hear the more lumpen version of this site and what their concerns are: they are really mad that this war is happening instead of further domestic crackdowns on immigration.
In both cases, it's helpful to understand where folks who have some pretty misinformed understandings of history and politics are sitting with their opinions.
It doesn't seem surprising to me that a bunch of aspiring venture capitalists, who have probably have been or are on the cusp of having a small taste of the massive wealth that their work in building out the surveillance state has brought to their masters, have totally shitty politics.
I think you are right, I've also stopped social media myself recently and left with nothing but YouTube and the occasional visit on HN for tech.
With that said, and I'm aware that HN audience are mostly in tech but I always thought we in tech are better trained to think critically and look at things from various perspectives. But to see the exact same response patterns one would see in FB makes one surely question how many people are truly capable of independent critical thinking. I'm also starting to think that given the complexity of modern life and the amount of information we are flooded with people are simply choosing the most repeated narrative within their circle without much reflection or any critical thinking. At the end of the day most folks here are busy with other things and it is easier to believe they are evil and we are liberating then dive deep into one of the most complicated areas when it comes to history and geopolitics.
Well, a lot of the folks here also share the view that because they understand how pointers work in C or can orchestrate stuff in docker (or whatever the kids do these days) they must be smarter than all us dumb losers who can't figure out how to make our brains okay with this world.
It's an appealing view, and I get it. Probably not a bad idea to question at length.
Naw, sorry, reading through this thread you're burying your head in the sand; sorry, just calling balls and strikes.
I say that as a person who is out in the streets in the US doing what we can against the current government. But to be honest, we were out in the streets before. The difference is that you were at brunch and didn't notice.
> But to be honest, we were out in the streets before.
Who is "we"? Do you remember your past lives? If you are fighting against every government when you will realize you should maybe just move to another country?
I'm not american or from US but this reads like mental illness
That is what taking a loan is, you are able to do it, its how you afford your homes etc. The bank is the essential guarantor in that transaction, without the bank the person you buy the home from doesn't trust you enough but the bank has that trust.
So essentially governments build trust with banks so those banks can issue fiat currency. Then those banks build trust with people like you so you can use the bank to issue fiat currency. Its the same system, bank pay interest to central bank for doing that and you pay interest to the bank.
If you mean why you can't get money from the central bank? Its just that you haven't built trust with them. But you can do so indirectly by taking a loan from your local bank, and that trusted middleman takes a fee for it.
I'm on Colorado's Western Slope. Last summer we got about no precipitation for 2 months and then 6" in one day. Wooo... very fun.
Even better, in some place like Ruidoso, NM (where I've lived) there have been pretty massive deforestations from wildfires with the result being that it floods about any time it rains.
I've spent about 3-5hr/day for the last 4 weeks trying to get rid of stuff that burns as far out from my shacks as I can, but I would bet that when it burns, it's going to go big.
I can't give my ethical status as a human over to what the masses of folks in the US think is okay. It's kind of a disgusting proposition.
Like, you who are in the thuick of it, you who have given your voice over to empire, you expect the rest of the world to do something about the horrors done in your name just because... what?
The assholes you live around "voted" to do something evil, lesser or greater?
And now you're doing evil, too? And it is, somehow, "up to the rest of the world?"
That's bleak and you really should think if "democracy" (or it's pale ghost that haunts US politics) is doing anything useful for your status as an ethical human.
It's entirely possible that you indeed do have such a boot on your neck that you really can't resist the power of empire in its core, but for [insert your preferred diety here]'s sake, you don't have to roll your soft belly over and take the kicks.
Yeah. I vote for the lesser evil. My ethical status is less important to me than trying to make the world a better place, even if imperfectly.
I believe that my ethical status would be in more jeopardy right now if I could have prevented a clearly criminal war, and chose not to. My actions, not the actions of others, determine my ethical state.
It does mean I face an ethical quandary now. Thus far I have upheld the social contract of democracy. I have not broken it in an attempt to end this war. That is an ethical stain on me, which I live with as best I can. It is my inaction, not the actions of the country, which stain me.
I will vote again when I can, and right now I'm going to hope that ends the war. That will not be sufficient, but one of my moral principles is "It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it".
If it suffices... then it suffices, and I will do my best with what happens after that. If it does not suffice, then I will be faced with an even worse moral quandary, and I hope I find the strength to do whatever seems right in that dire circumstance.
I recommend Jon Stewart's podcast with Heather Cox Richardson from this week. They talk about the ceding and concentration of power, and how we the people can take ours back. Not something that can happen in a midterm or maybe even the next ten years. But at least we are talking about it more and their words will help us articulate things better to our neighbors.
I believe that folks in the US are, by a large margin, the most highly propagandized group of people in history. It's hard to watch stuff like this.
It's not that I don't understand that comparatively space exploration is small compared to the associated costs of the boots that might hit the ground today.
As I understand it, transferring data as audio goes back quite ways, right?
I had a Commodore 64 that could use phillips tape. I'm drawing. blank, but IIRC there were musical instruments (maybe the roland juno 60?) in the 80s that were storing their data as audio, too.
Heck, my computer used to get on the land line telephone and ask its friends for software.
One of the weirdest things I did last week was realizing that my flipper zero could be used as a redbox... now I just need to find a payphone with a trunk...
Yep, that's correct about the Juno 60. There are people still sharing WAV files of the original factory patches which is cool to be able to re-load now and again.
The usual thing that most of us do is not do things that make other folks want to blow our vehicles up. That's how I've avoided getting my stuff blown up, at least.
That's a lot of it. I helped facilitate protests during Iraq2, and it feels like it did very little compared to efforts, I dunno, volunteering at the local homeless shelter?
I do a bit of activist work still, and help with protests from time to time. This year I joined up with some folks and we have a street medic group that has been supporting some local protest efforts, fortunately it's really only been needed once this year, when some folks got pepper sprayed and needed to decontaminate.
However, even when protests might be effective, there are a couple of other relevent things:
there has been very little time to react to anything because this admin just kind of seems to operate under some chaotic principle of YOLO, so you can't plan protest a month out for an event that is planned for two months. I don't think even the admin is thinking that far ahead,
there are about 4 other things that folks have been working on, even if we don't add in the 5 other things that dropped in the last month that are worth attention. The zone is flooded as they say...
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