Uriel238 [all pronouns]

After socioeconomic norms have been obliterated we suddenly expect them to function when we want to transact?

And this is why bribable, self-dealing politicians are bad for business in general. While a few mega-conglomerates and billionaires at the top can get political favors (and have recourse when they’re not forthcoming) the rest of the businesses are really looking for a clime with consistent laws that are evenly enforced.

The corruption isn’t a feature of the system, it’s a sickness, and explains why thr antebellum South and the Jim Crow South were underdeveloped compared to its northern counterparts.

To be fair, what we’re doing now isn’t capitalism, it’s corporatocracy. It’s the end stage of capitalism, the part of the Monopoly game where one guy has all the properties except the dude with the railroads, and the rest of us are hoping to land on Free Parking.

You shop from a handful of large conglomerates and they’re fixing the prices.

There’s no (beneficial) innovation. There’s no competition. We’re essentially in a truck system going into debt trying to survive from the company store.

I didn’t only because I knew that Cheney would be as awful a president. We needed an event to go badly where everyone was in attendance.

(If the thinkable happened, J. D. Vance would try to be a worse president than Trump, but his unrizz will not sway the MAGA base, and I even think Republican congress-critters will turn on him.)

What we need is a revised US Constitution at the ready that has been ironclad so it doesn’t depend on political norms. What we need is an omnibus ready to restore national institutions that were meant to keep us safe. What we need is a massive reformation of SCOTUS (to keep them from vetoing everything and installing a king) and the federal election system that stops cold gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter caging and election tampering, so that we can finally have elections that are actually free and fair.

These things might not immediately pass into law / ratification right when Trump’s triumpal arch is toppled but they should be ready as soon as there is the will to pass them through.

And we need it soon, before the world devolves into world war, and we’re stuck with this administration until Chinese bombers are blotting out the sun over Washington.

One does not simply walk into Mordor.

Paywall bypass

I stand by my conviction that the massive far-right propaganda machine that dominates social-media and television viewership is outright mind-control. It works less well on those who are educated, but it works well enough.

And then there’s people like my dad, a literal rocket scientist (retired now) who is a FOX News grandpa and a devoted MAGA loyalist. He should know better, but his media diet of fear, rage and culture bullshit is so sweet and tasty!

Yeah, I did that once because my crew was into The Division for a while. It was MMO lite with a mandatory online connection even for single player.

It had bunches of other problems (some of which were typical of Ubisoft titles, but the obligatory online thing was the final dealbreaker, especially since the servers would stall or go down frequently.

I hope you’re right. Like Randall Munroe, I am terrified that they’re trying to fast-track their way to the swarms of killer robots phase.

The passive voice is actually common in police reports throughout the United States. This is not new. (The passive voice is also a bad habit of journalists who report on officer-involved violence.)

The difference now is that the state agents are loyal to the regime rather than the state. There’s not even a pretense of enforcing the law.

This is how we know AI should be a collectivist project, one that isn’t owned by large corporations but is funded by taxes and developed in academies, and all IP derived from it falls into the public domain.

Besides which a lot of artists mind a lot less when their material is borrowed by a non-profit, or to serve a public works project. (There are exceptions. Disney is notoriously litigious about murals in nurseries.)

PS: Development of a robust public domain is the only reason that intellectual property should exist at all. Also it’s not property so much as a licensed temporary monopoly.

PSS: History has already shown us that people will invent stuff and do fabulous art simply by being allowed to live in a state other than desperation. Public welfare programs beget art booms. The most recent example of this was during the COVID-19 lockdown which came with extended unemployment and stimulus checks, resulting in the Great Resignation in which a lot of people turned their hobbies into something lucrative.

Blackstone would agree with you.

Many, many people, in law enforcement and the judiciary would disagree…

…especially when it comes to minorities.

Well, the governments of the EU still cling to neoliberal policies while the far right movements gain traction, and the states are buying in more and more into surveillance technology, often imported from China.

The white Christian nationalists of the US are importing their religious vision abroad, and is gaining converts even on your shores.

So once the billionaire oligarchs are done here in the states financing our downfall, you can expect them to head over there and buy up your government officials as well. Because no matter where in the world you are, politicians come cheap, and they have more money than anyone ever has before, by orders of magnitude.

As I point out (though the thresholds don’t figure perfectly) a multi-billionaire can easily buy an election and control a government. A trillionaire can buy all the elections and control all the governments.

When the US falls, I hope the rest of the world learns from it. But we’ve seen this before not just in Germany and Italy. Our lessons from the twentieth century are not helping us that much in the twenty-first.

We live in very dire and interesting times.

This is something I’ve been saying like Cassandra since 2014 and the slaying of Michael Brown and the Ferguson Unrest. I was particularly outraged at the 2016 killing of Philando Castile, who had been stopped by traffic patrol forty-nine times in thirteen years. Essentially they kept trying until they got it right.

A friend of mine with family in Puerto Rico notes that this is just the norm in the US for non-whites. Police will look for an excuse to kill you. In white neighborhoods, there is a considerable risk that if they outnumber or outsize you they’ll try to make an example out of you.

Granted, in the 21st century, police brutality (including officer-involved homicide) and hate crime are now being extended to white poors more often than it was. News of law enforcement responding poorly and escalating in response to mental health crises has been on the rise, though maybe it’s because we’re recognizing MHCs for what they are rather than excited delirium which is an offense worthy of summary execution.

But ICE has always been like the brown shirts or the SS, a paramilitary force that is loyal not to the nation or its laws, but to the current administration, and intended to target its political enemies. The story goes like this:

In the 1990s FBI wanted to transition away from being the secret police that went after the political enemies of the administration (as per during the J. Edgar Hoover years). The Sicilian Mafia had been cleared out, and organized crime was changing. Street gangs were an alleged problem but that was a matter for local departments and the DEA. (FBI fiction was getting its material from the Behavioral Analysis Unit and its hunt for serial killers.)

Then the 9/11 attacks happened. Terrorism by Islamist extremists suddenly had to be taken seriously. The PATRIOT Act was passed. DHS was formed and was meant to facilitate different intelligence departments sharing their data to create comprehensive picture. Everything was a matter of national security.

Within all that, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was formed.

We already had a service to deal with immigrants. Customs and Border Patrol was intended to actually patrol the border (and regularly provided water and supplies to migrants in transit because dead bodies were messy and embarrassing). So on paper, ICE was meant to hunt down undocumented immigrants inside the borders who were causing problems. These were the rare violent felon, the murderers and rapists and the worst of the worst. Except that that they’re rarer than violent criminals are in the general population. Undocumented Immigrants are statistically well behaved and keep a low profile.

ICE also investigates trademark counterfeiting and, strangely, violations of repair licenses. In the early 2010s, ICE raided several Florida repair shops whose crime was repairing iPhones without a license from Apple to do so. This was before the right-to-repair movement got speed. And then there was that time that ICE raided the estate of Kim Dotcom in New Zealand. Representatives from record labels like Columbia and Sony were present. That was weird, and it seems that ICE sometimes serves as a paramilitary contractor for corporate interests to solve their problems.

But even before Trump, ICE was a federal paramilitary force with an obtuse mission that also served as muscle for the current administration. Obama used them quietly, but Trump was way into the notion. Trump also has had a conspicuous hard-on for police brutality in general, even before his political career. Especially when that violence is directed at non-whites. But during the first Trump term, ICE was most conspicuous with its family separation policy, with children locked in cages and denied regular accommodations (food, hygiene, healthcare, etc.), and then during the George Floyd protests of 2020, where they were quick to deploy tear gas and rubber bullets in Portland, Oregon.

So ICE serving as an unregulated federal paramilitary service that targets anyone, especially perceived enemies of the Trump regime is a natural progression from what they were when the department was founded. Even when we were seeing signs of a movement towards a police state in the George W. Bush administration, ICE was there to get its hands dirty.

Yeah, it’s curious how the public cannot get organized. History has shown that labor is almost always fighting a losing battle.

Germany had the same problem last century, though the process of Nacht und Nebel took years in the Reich, and the Trump administration is trying to fast-track it into months.

I’m disabled, and there’s been news that institutionalizing the disabled is an early next step on the White House agenda. So I hope we can nip this in the bud in time.

NYT Columnist Jamelle Bouie made a relevant point on his take, today, on the death of Lindsay Graham (on YouTube).

He notes that there is a moral to be recognized by anyone who is currently in a position similar to that of Graham’s (before he died).

After Graham completely rejected Trump in 2015, recognizing that Trump would spell the end of the Republican party as we know it, and repurpose it into a cult of personality, he turned around in the interest of retaining power to become one of Trump’s most devoted sycophantic toadies. This defined his career for the following ten years.

And when he died, Trump was sad that it would impede the passing of the SAVE AMERICA act. He didn’t care at all.

I remember the NSA massive surveillance machine during the George W. Bush administration and Obama administration that tracked phone metadata and internet traffic that left or entered the US (which was used to justify a lot of surveillance of US citizens). Even after the Snowden disclosures of 2013 we were promised that the system was only meant to track foreign terrorists.

Then we learned that DEA had full access to it, and that NSA was sending hints to law enforcement about large amounts of cash in transit so it could be intercepted for purposes of asset forfeiture, what is nothing short of robbery of civilians by law enforcement officers.

This is an example of mission creep, in this case how it affects the surveillance state. Once we allow a method or technology to be used for major crime (like terrorism), it will eventually be used even for minor crime (like drug possession or distracted driving).

It’s very common for courts to forgive a violation of fourth amendment protections against unreasonable search when the violation presents evidence for a major crime, but then that case will be used as precedent when the same violation occurs and discovers a minor infraction.

This is how, during the aughts and 2010s, the Fourth Amendment was gutted by a long run of carve-outs. Now, a police officer or state agent can violate your privacy without a warrant via a whole range of exceptions:

~ If the crime they discover is significant (SCOTUS suggested controlled substance possession as an example)
~ Using specialized technology, say long-range multi-spectrum cameras, or using a drone.
~ If probable cause can be established. A favorite is a detection dog that signals on anything and has a 90%+ false positive rate.¹ (This is a particular beef of mine, since fake detection dogs are now more common than actual detection dogs, and dogs are losing their presumption of regularity as a result.)
~ If the police officer was acting in good faith, which is obtusely defined and is very hard to disprove.
~ If the suspect is non-white or otherwise suspicious due prejudice. Really, in a lot of counties, law enforcement are allowed to operate on hunches, or have a suspicious activity parameter list that is so encompassing (and often contradictory) that it’s impossible to not be suspicious.

If you want to know how we got here these were already problems during the Obama administration when we had allegedly reasonable people in elected offices. And while they discussed the risk of too much power falling into the wrong hands, they felt compelled to keep it.

Whether the One Ring, or the Ring of Gyges, power without consequence is too seductive.

¹ A similar issue is the $2 roadside drug test which reacts to a lot of substances that aren’t controlled, such as glazed sugar off a donut. These were originally supposed to be then verified later in a lab, but instead were used to establish probable cause, and eventually were used as evidence in court.

Don’t worry. Once they get rid of birthright citizenship and define American as hereditary, they’re start cutting into the palefaces too. Too Italian? Too Irish? Too Spanish? You’ll be out too.

They’re the good ones.

What’s convincing is that hobbyists are taking open source AI models and their own batch of training data in order to do small jobs. They need more LORAs and more massaging of the prompt, and they might take minutes or hours instead of seconds to generate, but they absolutely work.

It’s especially useful if you want to make slop of a category forbidden on the provider servers.

Right now, something is legal or illegal if you want it to be. All you have to do is bribe enough pockets in the justice system.