7. Joker laugh HAHAHAHAHAHA

I am familiar, in part, that’s what I was kinda thinking of when I wrote that. I probably should’ve brought it up explicitly, though, you’re correct. I have seen/heard that recent numbers have been up for membership but I haven’t heard enough beyond that to know whether or not the organization itself is actually performing well or is doing anything for members, so I guess I didn’t feel comfortable explicitly talking about it.

No yeah even most people that live here can’t do shit about it. It’s basically celebrity shit, to most people, it’s just that they’re obviously going to removed about it because it maybe tenuously has an effect on their lives. We may be cooked

It keeps happening! I’m losing it!

Seems like the short version of my Intro to American Politics class at Uni.

What’s insane is that’s something you have to go to university to be taught. In this society, where it is purported that democracy is part of the fundamental fabric, most people understand absolutely nothing. If they even get taught about relatively basic things like what I’ve described, which is to say nothing of the legalese-reading abilities you might need to verify that, say, a ballot measure is what it says it is, they apparently don’t end up remembering any of it. So instead we get doomed to listen to the same conversations, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, every election cycle. They’re like cicadas, waking up every couple years, chirping, and then immediately going back to sleep as soon as it’s over.

I dunno. I find legitimate political debates to be interesting, informative, at least sometimes when I can tolerate the cringe levels at work there. I’ve been unfortunately forced to take a crash course, kick start education on every political conflict that’s been started as a result of israel, which also includes like, political context surrounding every country they fuck with, and every country that supports those countries that israel fucks with. I find that, if heartbreaking, to be a good opportunity for me to learn, because at least I get somewhere with that. But I dunno, I feel like the tendency of the average commenter is just to scroll past, or read whatever the top line I’ve posted is and then try to get me to spoonfeed them on that basis, which is obviously never going to work because they can just spin the conversation whatever direction they want, where they’ll probably end up learning less than nothing, they’ll probably just use me as another vector to reinforce their own beliefs.

So, I dunno. It all seems totally hopeless to me. I remembered forums being a much more useful vector for talking to people, but more and more often it seems like it’s less worthwhile, and I just end up retreating to my own bubble, using whatever outlet I find to post like I’m posting to a personal blog that I know nobody is going to read. It’s worthless. If I were to optimize this paragraph I’ve written, with citations, much clearer language, and make it more succinct, and then post that under all these types of posts, or, propagate that as copypasta, then despite it being more well thought out and ultimately much less spammy than the idiotic bad faith trolling that most people tend to engage in, it would probably, maybe rightly, get banned on the basis of being spam. More and more, this place, every place online, reveals itself to just be another horrible vector for the propaganda of whatever interested parties decide to manipulate the levers and pulleys controlling the tubes.

Now I classify myself as an anarchist. Not sure what went wrong.

And, see, I never even got that far. I’m still just some guy that want everyone to have healthcare and good public infrastructure, and wants wars and genocides to not be happening constantly. I don’t even know what political system is supposed to make that work, and I don’t really give a fuck which one it takes, I just want that to be the case.

Yeah, pretty much, that’s pretty much all I’ve said, yeah

Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring.

The craziest part of this to me is that this isn’t the first time this has happened since it’s started like… since the country has been founded. So the fact they’re really still willing to engage politically at all is a pretty good testament to their character, I would say.

Everyone else is basically going to give you dogshit answers, here, and I’m not gonna read through the thread to confirm that because I’ve been in enough of these threads on lemmy to know that it’s going to be the most oversimplified and horrible hand-wavy explanations you could’ve hoped for. I think maybe the collective effort people put into their posts on the internet is dwindling as a result of mass adoption and various social media incentive structures, to the point where even platforms like lemmy are gonna get filled with horrible dogshit and just the worst oldest facebook memes of all time. Don’t listen to all those fucking morons, listen to me, I’m the only one effortposting in this removed, because I have psychosis and like to write these out as a way to take notes and review my talking points.

SO, at the lowest level, you have gerrymandering. This applies to things like city council seats within cities, it applies to what gets defined as “inside” and “outside” the city and the county, it applies to districts that elect representatives at the state level, and it even, to a certain degree, applies to the states themselves. Basically, every time the electorate gets subdivided, something you would otherwise think is a good thing, as it lets people be governed more with concerns local to that subdivision, instead, those lines get drawn up most often to favor the party that is currently sitting in that seat. Being that this is instituted at pretty much every level of governance, and that people don’t tend to change addresses super often, especially homeowners, this contributes to why most states are not swing states, and why most votes are very predictably “wasted”, or, are used by the parties to cancel out other very predictable votes, or are used to further secure and entrench power with more overwhelming margins.

You also have first-past-the-post voting in the vast majority of places, abbreviated as fptp voting, in which you have a single, non-transferable vote. Proponents of this system can basically only defend it on its braindead simplicity, because there’s not really any reality in which it accurately represents the interests of the voters. If you think of a voting system as being a way for voters to clearly communicate their preferences, and have those preferences followed, then fptp voting only provides one bit of information: “I want this guy”. It doesn’t rate candidates in relation to each other, it doesn’t tell anyone whether or not you would prefer one candidate over another. So, people get locked in to voting for one candidate which has proved to be consistently popular, and has a good chance of winning so they don’t “waste” their vote, which as previously described, is probably already wasted, and so we get locked into a two-party system pretty much everywhere.

Both these systems combine to severely limit the weight of anyone’s vote. It effectively means that, outside a couple gerrymandered suburbs, in particular swing states, which can be figured out well in advance of elections, the rest of the votes don’t matter. Most votes are just locked in a system where they are effectively being used by the sitting parties to cancel each other out.

Most local races are funded at the local level, meaning they tend to favor older, much more well-off candidates which don’t necessarily represent the majority of people’s interests. This outsized power can be increased with gerrymandering. Americans also tend to favor sitting candidates over new candidates, both because of FPTP, and also because culturally FPTP has become ingrained, meaning incumbent candidates tend to be able to sit around for as long as they want. Primaries are pretty much unilaterally controlled by the parties that run them, as we have seen in this election, and they are able to pretty effectively select who it is that they want to be elected through the funding and backing of the party, within their territories, which is something that’s happening at every level, and not just at the presidential level. So, economics and economic disparity has a great role to play in who is able to run for local positions, on top of obviously having a very clear role at higher levels. Less money can also have a very outsized impact in local, smaller elections, where candidates can court corporate interests and party interests and then bankroll their way into a position pretty much guaranteed. This is why you can pretty much dismiss anyone who’s going to suggest that you go and run for local office, as though that’s some gotcha. They wouldn’t know, because they probably also haven’t run for their local offices, but especially at the higher levels, those local offices tend to be controlled by elderly small business owners and a bunch of lawyers. Canvassing and commercials are pretty effective, especially when you can concentrate these on the gerrymandered fraction of the population with values already favorable to institutional powers, which is having an outsized impact.

So, given that your vote is pretty much guaranteed to not matter, is especially guaranteed to not matter at the federal level, and is very especially not going to matter if you live anywhere with any significant population density, lots of people take that as an opportunity to piss their vote away on jill stein or whatever other scammer that’s running. Of course, third parties would probably be more effective at the smaller local levels, building up larger and larger bases of support until they are more adequately able to challenge the major parties at the federal level, and even try for federal funding, but we’ve seen such a level of institutional capture at pretty much every level that it’s sort of a fucked game to begin with.

It’s so fucked up at every level that I’m not sure I would really fault the parties that are running with like, 2% of the votes, in polling, compared to the fucking massive country-wide institutions that are actually controlling elections and messaging. Those that can even get 2% of the votes are likely to get those votes because they’ve been donated to by one side, the other, or, much more commonly, both, on top of business interests and foreign powers, who all believe that adding in another spoiler candidate will help their candidate get elected.

To hopefully dissuade some idiotic criticisms before they happen:

Q: Well, then what am I to do!?! If I can’t vote on a candidate, and have my vote be effective for that candidate, then what have I done politically? What’s the alternative?

A: None of that really contradicts any of what I’m currently saying, it’s not a valid counterargument. I’ve told you the reality of the system, if you have a problem with how your current strategy is not effective in that reality, then take it up with reality, not me. I would probably say that organizations outside of the system, organizations owned by a majority of the people within them, organizations that can wield political power, those would probably be useful. Organizations that can punch above their weight class economically would be most useful. We’ve seen a recent, very minor rise in unionization and union activity, after decades of downturn as a result of government policies, which has been good, but I am concerned again about many of these unions, and especially the older ones, being subject to institutional capture at the highest levels as a result of ill-thought out internal structures and a desire to “keep out the raffle”, from elitism, classism, or racism. If I had thoughts of reformism, then I would aim there, and I would probably also aim to create a lot more interconnections between these smaller unions which are more individually vulnerable. One big union, would be a good idea suited to the moment, and I haven’t seen it taken up a lot.

And sure, go out and vote, right, but, don’t harbor any illusions about what you’re doing when you go out and vote. Focus more on your local candidates and your obscure, idiotic local laws and regulations which are probably going to be explained poorly in some half-baked blogpost or news article, if you’re even afforded that dignity rather than just having to read shit straight from the charters and laws themselves. Don’t just get invested every 4 years when you get threatened with a new form of fascism by corporate media. If you’re falling for that shit, then you’re probably running around like a chicken with their head cut off, doing worse than nothing. If you’re not willing to put in an hour or two of concentrated reading and research in the right places, then you would be better off, at that point, just ignoring all those anxieties, not voting, and eating jalapeno poppers at chili’s or whatever else.

Q: This shit is too long, I can’t read it all!

A: Tl;dr GOTO 10

federated platform splits userbase into a million little fiefdoms, only somewhat interconnected, all differently starved for interaction

Yup, checks out

I dunno if that would be being allergic to strawberries so much, since most of these services have options for only seeing women if you’re also a women. The gay dating market in general seems much healthier, ime. It’s more as though you were drowning in strawberries, and then maybe one out of a twenty or twenty-five wasn’t rotten at the face, or, maybe one in twenty wasn’t a clone of the same five or six kinds of strawberries that you keep seeing. It’s ultimately the same problem for both sexes, though. An overabundance, and a lack of real ability to distinguish between everything because of both a glut and a drought of overly flattened data leads to a kind of processed apathy out of sheer volume. Then, neglect leads to desperation, and then for some, to resentment, and so on and so forth. What I really don’t understand is that for mostly purely cultural reasons there’s such a massive and self-reinforcing disparity, it’s kind of insane. There has to be a further underlying cause there than just like, 20 or 25% of men are desperate freaks and that sort of plunges everything into a downward spiral where everyone is sort of putting on this elaborate game of lying to each other because of a couple bad actors. Makes it kind of impossible to deal with any of this if you’re autistic, to be honest.

I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of “geopolitical security” since we’re going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.

More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won’t do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it’s not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we’ve all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.

Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.

Because I’m sure that LA, in california, is under threat of swinging right if people protest vote too much. I’m sure of it, it just makes sense.

I mean I dunno, even if you switch to some sort of li-on AAs (something which I think would also be good for other reasons, like making recycling potentially easier, being able to swap batteries between devices, making batteries slightly cheaper), I dunno how many people are gonna want to slice open their own batteries and run tests on what comprises them. Since the half-life on any given set of batteries is probably in the range of multiple years, or at least several months, you’d probably be able to set up an attack before any government agency or private battery replacement or analysis would start getting off the ground to sus out what you’re doing.

I think the only reason this might be harder with replaceable batteries, would be that the potential for batteries to get swapped out of devices means that you’re less certain to see any kind of explosion from a given device that you’ve modified, and you’re less certain to hit the particular targets that you want, but it doesn’t seem like either of those would really be a big problem for whoever would want to do this sort of terrorism in the first place, so I’m not sure that’s a major deterrent.

You didn’t bury the pipes

Seems like a bad idea in colder climates, and also, in other non-cold climates. If the pipes aren’t below the frost line, then they’d freeze and bust open, or, if they drained, you’d be without water for the whole of the winter. You might be able to get away with it in a hotter climate, but then you run into other problems. What do you make these pipes out of? A single conduit of inflexible pipe would be best, since this would deliver water along the fastest route, would be easiest to service, and might also require less chopping of local ecology than if the network was more decentralized or if the pipe was flexible. Because you’re going to have to chop up the local ecology to some degree. Tree branches will grow into or around the pipe, which is a bad thing. A flexible pipe might avoid that but you’d gain a lot of other problems in return. If you go with steel, especially galvanized, that’s kind of ideal, as plastic is gonna have a pretty sorry half-life in the sun and heat and elements. So, you could do it, but, it would take some amount of effort. If you had a stable singular conduit, you could also maybe pump the hot water through more constantly, or, pump it back and forth in times of low demand and otherwise store it in some sort of tank more local to the houses, which might help prevent freezing.

I think probably the best solution, in this case, is just to dig deeper than the, say, 7 feet that the tree roots are gonna be, and then bury your pipe about that deep. Only problem is that you’re gonna have a much harder time servicing anything if you have any sort of problem along the way, since now you’d have to trek through the forest and try to get at it through there. You might want to make a whole fucking very deep custom underground service corridor for all of your utilities, at this point, and that’s going to be incredibly expensive. Especially if your soil conditions are garbage, which they probably are, and you’re still going to have to dig and chop through the roots of the trees where you decide to have outlets for your utilities. I can see some sort of combination of an overhead pipe and an underground service tunnel here, that seems more reasonable while still also being insane, very stupid, and inefficient.

Just uproot the trees and replant them later, EZ.

Old growth forests have interconnected root systems, so you’d have to cut up all the trees at the root, raise them up, and then hopefully you can put them all back in the same configuration you got them out in. Not really a great way around that. This is probably going to kill all your trees. The local nursery is actually a better idea, and it’s better just to move away from an industrial scale of tree production that only produces a couple different kinds of trees, which I think is kind of psychotic at its face.

Yeah, well, we’re gonna have to learn how to do it eventually.

I dunno if our population will keep growing, to be honest. I’m not entirely sold on the idea that just education and birth control will curtail population growth to a maintainable degree, or at least, to the degree where our level of growth won’t outstrip our level of innovation to be able to compress said growth.

Also, probably no chance that we return earth to a pre-change state. Well, maybe. You have promising ideas like spraying sulfur dioxide or some other type of aerosolized chemical high in the atmosphere, like in snowpiercer, and that might be able to curtail a lot of the major effects of climate change if only someone was really willing to do it or co-ordinate an effort.

But seed banks, banks of genomic information to re-sequence species from close neighbors. You can’t really bring back those plants or those species if the conditions which surrounded them no longer exist. I’m not even talking, say, the rainforest as a whole, right. That would be incredibly difficult, but you could line up a process of succession, take the hardier species, plant those, propagate them, then slowly start to propagate other plants that can take over and develop other niches as they arise, same with animals, and probably you’d wanna pair both of these with a good degree of population control so you don’t get any runaway problems like with kudzu in the south.

No, the bigger problem there is that, I don’t really know how you would decrease carbon levels, or global temperatures, or decrease soil acidity, or other chemical traces in the soil, or the level of sand in the soil, or whatever other problems you might have. The reasons why those plants and ecosystems destabilized and went extinct will still be around, and would still have to be combated. You could maybe cook up some different schemes to try and solve those, more geoengineering, more terraforming, but we’ve already been straining credulity with this whole thought experiment, here. At some point, you really have to start asking why a shit ton of people would start to undergo this sort of a process if they couldn’t even see the value in the ecosystem enough to prevent themselves from destroying it in the first place.

You’re also kind of looking at it in terms of, what level of natural change should be allowed to happen. The dinosaurs went extinct from natural causes present in their ecosystem, whether that be an asteroid or a big volcano or whatever. The massive fungus forests that died because of the proliferation of cyanobacteria, that was also a natural process. These things were also massive extinction events. So we really gotta figure out what we’re trying to do here. Are we trying to preserve human suffering? Are we trying to lock nature in some kind of stasis because we think that to be advantageous? Are we maintaining nature and trying to minimize human involvement out of a kind of ethical obligation to do so? I don’t really know.

I dunno, in any case, better to just have everyone live in an apartment complex, I think.

That’s kind of assuming they can’t just find any other freak to take command while doing everything the foundations and conservative PACs and corporate donors want. I don’t actually think trump really has all that much charisma beyond his slightly flamboyant mannerisms and his weird accent that I’ve never heard anywhere else. They could pretty easily replace him with some other brainworm candidate, probably get someone way younger and slightly more well-spoken, lose maybe like, 10% of the diehard trump supporters, and then gain back those numbers and more after running their candidate for like five months and trying to ride with slightly more centrist appeal.

Trump isn’t like, the end of this, he’s just a kind of canary in the coal mine for what’s to come, because the conditions which created him still exist and are actively worsening pretty much all the time. It’s not gonna end with him.

He’s also one of the only democrats that’s refused to sign the PRO act iirc, so I don’t think he’s, uhhh, pro labor either, which is a somewhat large issue I would say

Yeah, unfortunately people don’t understand that, of the IT guys and linux users and sysadmins that are gonna be most likely to want to migrate over here as a result of reddit going to shit, a lot of those are going to be furries and trans people, sure. But the other half of that demographic is gonna be the most incredible middle class financial anxiety liberal grifter white dudes you’ve ever seen, no question.

I mean I’m generally skeptical of like “this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems” schtick, right, and I’m also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.

If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it’s a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn’t tend to be broad enough.

It’s basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.

yeah georgism is crap though

but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off

I dunno if that’s a super necessary element, really. I think they could probably get off better, actually, if they had a more lenient prison system, and, say, didn’t execute people for minor weed possession or like, being gay. But then I also think their economy relies on a large portion of oppressed migrant labor, if I remember right? I dunno, somebody fact check me on that