It’s just correct, isn’t it? I don’t see how it could be interpreted as incorrect, unless you’re one of those weirdos who likes eating cow meat but can’t stand the idea of eating dog meat.

Revolutions typically only involve a small part of the population. January 6th only involved a couple thousand people and the fact they didn’t massacre congress and have a successful coup as a fait accompli was more down to the lack of dedication of the coup attempt than to the successful defensive efforts of the US government.

In a more hard-fought revolution, the people that take to the front lines are typically the ones who feel physically and strategically capable of doing so. Other people can handle the logistics, planning, and propaganda.

What tactics the rebels would use is kind of unanswerable because there isn’t a revolution happening tomorrow. The tactic current rebels use is to hide, train, recruit quietly, and propagandize. They choose this tactic because they know they aren’t in a position to win a revolution that starts tomorrow. If we imagine a world where a revolution would happen tomorrow, we have to imagine the world being different from ours in certain ways that cause the rebels to adopt different tactics that constitute “starting a revolution”.

Depending on the specific ways we imagine the world to be different, the rebels would adapt different tactics. The US military could stage a coup and arrest Trump as quickly as they kidnapped Maduro, then install an interim government to organize fair elections. There could be a surge of popular outrage resulting in swarm tactics that overwhelm key government buildings before adequate defense is raised. There could be a protracted civil war as rebels destroy military-industrial infrastructure while accepting aid from the US’ many enemies, with rebels having trained in secret militias and learning more on the go.

I don’t think it’s ludicrous on the face of it. That’s basically what happens when an uninsured person dies from something that would have taken $10k to fix and an insured person gets their organs.

Doctors only get in trouble for letting someone die when that person has a medical right to the care that would have saved them. Even then there is leeway because whether someone has a medical right to that care is often something that depends on a doctor’s estimation of the situation, which means other doctors would have to testify against them for them to get in trouble. Which of course they’ll only do if they are sympathetic to the victim or unsympathetic towards the doctor and they know it won’t affect their career prospects too poorly.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if in Austria, ethnically MENA organ donors tended to die more often than ethnically MENA non-organ donors and this gap would be bigger than with ethnically European donors/non-donors (if that gap exists). Not even as some kind of conspiracy or malice aforethought, but as just a little bit of laziness here and there. Hell, not even laziness, just setting your boundaries for once and going home after only 2 hours of overtime instead of 2 hours and 15 minutes while ordering an extra test for that one patient who probably doesn’t even need it.

There is still the question whether you want to deprive someone of your organs for that small statistical increase in risk, if you’re even the sort of demographic that risks being dehumanized. And if you’re worried about malpractice, it’s much better to buddy up with a friend and agree to supervise the doctors and nurses whenever either of you is in the hospital. Most malpractice and medical mistakes are the sort of thing a lay person can catch with some attentiveness and internet searches.

Mullvad is good, but it’s not enough to make piracy safe.

An adblocker like ublock is essential, not just for blocking ads but for blocking malware.

Streaming piracy is about as safe as sketchy websites always are, which is pretty okay these days.

If you download anything, check the file type before opening and whether the type is safe. For example, .exe is extremely unsafe, .pdf is somewhat unsafe, and .mp3 is safe. Generally audio and video file formats are pretty safe because they’re very locked down in what they can do, while interactive formats are dangerous. Someone might call audio by a misleading name to troll, but it shouldn’t put your device at risk.

If you download .exe s, do not run them unless you are very confident the source is trustworthy. This means a trusted account posting on a trusted website claiming that a trusted person made the exe. I haven’t caught this guide in a lie yet, but when it comes to exes double- and triple-check everything.

The more tech savvy solution would be to run .exes (or all pirated files if you’re being paranoid) in a virtual machine so even if the virtual machine is pwned the rest of your computer wouldn’t be.

We are witnessing the end of modern civilization, which will end just as fast as it arrived.

So it’ll take 10,000 years?

Civilizations and cultures survive the loss of >30% of their population all the time. The black death, the columbian disease exchange, the mongol empire, the collapse of the western roman empire, etc… Losing billions of people will be terrible, of course, but the billions that survive will still exist and work to survive, and they will be people worth fighting for.

Current food production is over 10 times what is necessary to feed everyone on the planet, with the vast majority of it being wasted on the meat and dairy industry that we can just stop. Food forests require more labor per calorie but are far more resilient to climate change and require far less land area, allowing the remaining agricultural land to rewild and act as a carbon sink.

The AMOC (atlantic current) is “making Europe livable” by making it warmer. Helpfully, climate change will do the same. In pessimistic scenarios, Europe returns to the current average temperature after a decade or two. Again, yes, in this scenario >90% of current human habitation would probably have to be abandoned and human population may dip below one billion, but those hundreds of millions of people still deserve the best chance we can give them.

If our best efforts mean we can only keep a billion people alive, it would be worth it.

If our best efforts mean we can only keep a million people alive, it would be worth it.

If our best efforts mean we can only keep ten thousand people alive, it would be worth it.

Every kiloton of CO2 we stop the emission of is a life saved, and the vast majority are emitted in the US, Europe, and China. If you live in any of these regions, there is so much you can do.

So you don’t tell them to calm down, you just stay away. Hm.

Skill issue, legitimately. If you don’t understand how you can discount that kind of slaughter, you’re probably already doing it.

That said, disregarding the obvious evil of massacring over a hundred children, for civilian deaths from bombardment to be a war crime, it has to be the deliberate targeting of civilians. Mistaking a civilian building for a military one and bombing it is not a war crime. Killing civilians while using the most accurate means available to aim at military targets is not a war crime.

War crimes were codified by western nations using western standards for what sort of behavior is sportsmanlike in warfare, with those standards informed by the sort of horrors those nations tend to commit.

Like with regular crime, we should get used to not using “crime” as a word to denote moral judgument. It’s just a word for doing something the state doesn’t like. All good people are criminals.

Well, one of them is currently invading Iran.

I was going to complain that clearly “spreadsheet” derives from paper-based tabular data editors. But apparently that term was only used consistently after 1906, while digital spreadsheets that aided calculation were conceived of in 1961. Meaning that it has meant a digital calculation aid for longer (65 years) than it only meant a tabular data editor (55 years).

Broadly speaking, the US is okay with invading Iran because Iran isn’t a US tributary and the Iranian state is unwilling to become a tributary because theocracy is incompatible with US tributary status (A king might swear fealty to an emperor, but god’s emissary can hardly submit to a heathen).

The primary objective of the US administration is to win the midterm elections. War has historically boosted Republican support under low-informations voters and centrists, and going by the standing ovation in Congress, Democrats are happy to go along with the narrative that this is a just war because they too support enforcing tributary status.

That takes care of the motive. The means is the US military-industrial complex. The opportunity comes in the form of the US breaking a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Iran and then being outraged that Iran isn’t complying.

They could count on Iran not complying because Israel keeps attacking Iran (and its other neighbors), ensuring Iran will defend itself in a way that can be treated as offensive. Israel keeps attacking its neighbors because that is what the US pays them for and because their history of doing that means that if the US cut funding for unrendered services, many Israelis would have to flee to escape facing justice for their participation in genocide.

So that’s means, motive, and opportunity for the US attacking Iran. Now how will it go?

Firstly, the motive being elections means the US will keep the war going until at least after the midterms. Economic consequences of this can be spun as justifying Republican autarky. The biggest consequence would be oil shortages in most of the world. Countries with large domestic production and/or strategic reserves, including the US, Canada, China, Russia, and Venezuela, would be less affected or have their position strengthened (with Venezuela going along with the US because they now know what happens if they don’t).

In Iran, the US will keep bombing targets until it is satisfied ground resistance is sufficiently mollified, then move troops in to occupy. Given Iran’s geography and the theocratic nature of the current regime, it will likely be a phase of shattering state power followed by a phase of occupation and guerilla warfare.

The US will attempt to create safe zones from which the tributary government and military loyal to the US operate and grow in power, likely centered around urban areas, key infrastructure, and strategic resources. Given there is more support for regime change in Iran than in Afghanistan, the tributary government might attract enough loyal troops to slowly take over the fight against the loyalist guerillas and not collapse immediately when US support drops.

This invasion has bipartisan support so even the Trump administration being replaced would not stop it. I don’t know how long the Iranian state can resist, but as long as it does the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz will remain in place, and even after that guerillas will make that route unsafe. After that, getting the tributary government shipshape could take years or decades, on the long end probably getting cut off like Afghanistan.

Iran or its supporters may attempt asymmetric warfare. If the US government wants to, it could replicate 9/11 and its massive boost for Republican popularity by having a similar lack of curiosity about suspected upcoming attacks. There have been articles about a possible Iranian drone attack from a ship off the coast of California which could fail to be stopped. Similar attacks may occur on the rest of NATO, and slowly ebb as Iranian loyalist power diminishes.

The economic consequences of an oil shortage would naturally hit vulnerable targets hardest. Food delivery vehicles might not be able to afford a trip into remote rural areas during a famine, while Europe can rely on electrified modes of transport for day-to-day stuff and reserve oil for essential services.

Countries with more oil, such as Russia and the US, may take advantage of this situation. Ukraine is not looking so good.

At any time, the US could move on to the next crisis and either stretch itself thin or leave the Iranian tributary state without support in what would then be a civil war. Israel will continue its aggression until its funding gets cut and it collapses.

So it goes.

People are exhausted because they are already worrying but they’re avoiding the issue. Politics affects their lives every day, their inaction makes their lives worse every day, but they’ve been taught to only think about it in ways that cost a lot of effort without helping, while demonizing all the ways that do help.

Because you can benefit from engaging with politics immediately. Organize with your neighbors to share the tools you only use incidentally, like heavy-duty work trucks and power saws, through a library system. Estimate how often y’all are going to need them and keep that many in stock, then sell the rest and distribute the money.

Congratulations, you just did an anarchocommunism and made your community a million dollars with a couple dozen hours of labor. All that’s stopping this from happening is people’s willingness to engage with politics, meaning they are stuck thinking of themselves as incidentally indebted independent individuals. That and their willingness to turn down thousands of dollars in cold hard cash rather than consider the possibility communism is better than capitalism.

Trump is trying to steal the elections. As laid out in Project 2025. As he tried in the 2020 putsch. If seeing that makes you a leftie, then every centrist is blind.

every centrist is blind.

If advertisers loved a good news channel, all corporate news would be good news channels. But scared and tired people make far less informed decisions, making advertising far more effective.

The countless horror movies you can watch online are far more upsetting than a streamer saying “fuck”. Censorship isn’t about avoiding people getting upset but about having infrastructure for silencing speech that they and their corporate partners don’t like.

Imagine if cops couldn’t give out fines, then they would miss out on being able to choose to let white people off with a warning while fining black people for the smallest infractions. This means cops would be less effective at maintaining white supremacy. And so cops have to be tough on crime despite all evidence showing that it makes crime worse. Because cops exist to maintain and expand white supremacy, and more specifically the supremacy of rich white Christian men.

Likewise, an advertiser who has a well-established policy of punishing “advertiser-unfriendly” phrases like swear words can then use that policy to suppress certain voices while letting other voices gain fame by boldly defying the rules with only a slap on the wrist. This infrastructure has allowed them to very quickly start censoring Palestine, Minnesota, and discussion of productive forms of activism and resistance in general. Whether this is a service they sell to rich white men or if it’s them choosing to do this because of their rich white owners, the buck stops with them.

Look, you can keep pointing out obvious loopholes and people can keep answer with increasingly obscure examples of laws or of people getting convicted trying just that until the cows come home, but that’s missing the bigger picture.

The rich don’t want people to get rich easily. For legal loopholes to go unpatched, they have to be complicated enough that politicians can plausibly deny blame and they have to require enough wealth to begin with that rich people see it as a tool rather than as a threat. Or they have to be something that has genuinely escaped notice so far despite millions of people searching for it. A lay person free-associating from nothing is very unlikely to come across something that hasn’t been tried yet.

“[tinny distorted noise]”

Glad we live in the 21st century then, where the rest of my comment applies.

1776. Saying that it is self-evident that all men are created equal but enslaving blacks and genociding natives and denying voting rights to 90% of the population.

Please actually read my comment, thank you.

What happens when the US gets accidentally bombed by Israel and 34 people are killed? They talk it out and remain good friends.

The US government and the elite they represent do not care about the American people beyond them being the tools by which they can force the world into as steep a hierarchy as possible with the US elite on top. If the US gets bombed, the US government will do what serves the interests of the US elite.

So it really depends on what’s convenient. It’s hard to speak generally about an alternate universe in which Canada and Mexico are at war, but if I squint my eyes I can say that if Mexico hit the US, the US would invade Mexico and install new leadership while conveniently using it as a reason to suspend the midterms and ramp up to a full-blown genocide of Latinos in the US; while if Canada hit the US, they would be made to pay a trillion dollars in reparations or something.

The late 19th century USAmerican colonization of Native American land shows that you don’t need cars to make an industrial rural society. Trains will work just fine. This means you build towns to be walkable and centered around a train station, with agriculture surrounding each town. Modern heavily mechanized agriculture might make population densities so low that even this is not viable, but the products still need to be transported, so you can have trains that stop at each megafarm which can also carry passengers if necessary. When I was in Queensland a few years ago, I saw mechanized agriculture use a bespoke railway network to supply a factory, so clearly even now despite all the fossil fuel and car subsidies it’s economically viable.

Though as you may know, industrial agriculture is dumb and unsustainable. Desertification due to requiring too much water, climate change due to fertilizer consumption, industrial pollution that kills millions of people per year and destroys ecosystems, lack of genetic diversity causing crop blights that risk famines or global shortages, insecticides that cause cancer and destroy ecosystems, most of it being wasted on the meat industry and on maintaining massive surpluses and exports to ensure western global domination, etc.

If we want to do agriculture right, we want to do food forests. It’s more labor per calorie, but it’s resilient, local, and it doesn’t make the planet uninhabitable by the next century. Food forests are more compact too, which means that a rural population tending food forests can have a much higher population density, or can consist of large villages separated by rewilded natural landscape (and/or low density food forests for migratory communties). This makes trains even more convenient to get around because they can run more frequently.

Meanwhile if you want to live in the wilderness away from these towns, then an absence of car roads means you can live far away while only being a couple kilometers away. So you still don’t need a car because you can just hike along a trail to get to town in under an hour. Need to carry a lot of stuff? Use a Chinese wheelbarrow. Maybe a battery-powered one with stability and steering assistance if you don’t feel like getting exercise. They carry more than a modern American SUV and they don’t murder children either.