In the United States, there is a constant push to increase the power of the federal, state, and governments for our safety. Purported safety in exchange for no privacy, which really means no power especially as the government increasingly denies access to any information about its activities.
Funny thing is that it does not matter which party is in charge, but that they always insist on increasing the police’s power and the security state’s ability to remove privacy while increasing the penalties for which only the little people face. Since there seems to be a growing use of the state’s power against people who speak ideas unpopular with the elites or is of the opposition’s party, one would think that adding more power to the government especially by stripping away the Constitutional protections would be a bad idea.
But the people in both national governments seem to think that the power of the state will never be used on them. After all it is only for getting the Bad Guys and anyways you will be in your quiet sinecure. Or so they believe.
]]>The real problem is that most people, whatever their ideology is, mainly want to have a home, food, some luxuries, and have their kids do better than they do. Yes, there are other things that are important, but if you don't have that, then what does it matter?
The Democratic Party is now the Conservative Party and the Republicans are the Insane Party; really, they are two wings of the American Uniparty, which has essentially the same neoliberal economic platform of less taxes, less regulations, all-war-all-the-time, austerity for everyone except the wealthy, and global warming? What's that?
The social issues are used to differentiate the two wings. While the Insane Wing is more poisonous both wings are conservative and corrupt with policies that will kill the majority. They also, like the major British parties have a lock on power. So, the pressure is building and people are growing both desperate and insane.
Americans, everyday Americans, are getting increasingly radicalized and desperate as the government and the society it is supposed to govern increasingly fails. At everything.
This one of the reasons for the growing police state and the change of the media into a gigantic propaganda operation of the state. Social issues like abortion, trans rights, guns, etc. are important, but they are used by what passes as government to distract, divide, and control the increasingly desperate nation.
Just how can a socialist, like myself, get attention without being smeared as some transphobic, bigoted, anti-American, Stalinist, Putinite, class reductionist, epithet-of-the-moment, when I want to talk about the growing number of tent cities or the one million homeless, massive corruption, and lack of medical care?
No home, no food, means no government, which means no country, but lets talk about the latest social issue/distraction of the moment, instead. And it is the same with anyone on the right or the left, really across the entire political, economic, and social spectrum. Try to talk about what is really important for our survival and you get smeared and dumped. Good times.
Honestly, I am hoping for some American version of the Australian teal party. However, considering how effective the government propaganda, the co-opting of various movements are, and how popular assassination is in American politics historically, from both the right and left, I am not optimistic.
]]>From the little I understand of British politics, the UK has the same problem of corruption, incompetence, and fake policies that always, somehow, impoverish even more the already poor or suffering, and give barrels of money and sympathy to the already wealthy.
The details between the British and American political systems are real enough, but the gist is the same; both major American parties need to be staked, beheaded, burned to ashes, doused with Holy Water with the cremains dumped into the nearest ocean;I assume the same for the top 2-4 British parties.
]]>Really, both parties are really grifts pretending to be political parties and where the job is getting as much bribes as possible while pretending to run the country. The goal is to loot as much as they can for as long as they can and the social issues is smokescreen. The only real difference is that one party will kill you more quickly than the other.
When it comes to abortion, guns, or trans rights it’s all a smoke screen.
Mention the collapsing healthcare system? Abortion! Baby killers! Women haters!
The collapsing school system and the unaffordability of college? Police brutality? Extensive hunger and homelessness? Guns! Trans rights! Child molesters! Crime! Racism!!
It does not matter what anyone’s views are. It only matters to distract from the increasing government dysfunction and corruption, hunger, homelessness, lack of healthcare, real jobs, Covid, etc.
]]>So just like the Democrats’ screaming about Russia is used to obfuscate their and system’s failings, the current massive corruption/concentration makes it harder to understand what our world could or should be like. Even the current automation craze seems more of a fad and effort to accumulate wealth by getting rid of paid workers with poorly performing, or at least more vulnerable, but unpaid machines. Poor quality that does just well enough.
Hopefully I made some sense. :-)
]]>Where l live over thirty bookstores with in fifteen miles just disappeared and not because that individual store was not making a profit. Too often the chain either died or pull the individual store because it was not making enough profit. And a lot of stores lost their lease because of insane rent increases.
The invisible hand of the free market seems not to work sometimes. Too often it seems just an excuse to clear cut the market.
]]>I like the bit about Chlorine trifluoride and fluoride metal fires in Wikipedia.
What I like to know is how anyone lived long enough to find, make, and do research on the stuff.
]]>I have not yet had the pleasure of trying to get funds; I am hoping I never have too. No one (I hope!) goes into any type of science expecting to rich. That said, at least in theory, if not often in practice, in the engineering mentioned here there is the possibility however small to recreate, rebuild, or go around something.
Getting melodramatic here, but when it is trying to record a dying language, finding that one skull, or doing history with some palimpsest, there is often no replacement, no way to recreate, or find it again. Once lost, it's lost.
Which explains why some are a touch fanatical about record keeping.
]]>The idea of documenting the how, what, and why of any research has been around for some time. In the "soft" science of anthropology, they are suppose to document everything so that any future anthropologist, or anyone really, we be able to use it. It could be language, religions, anatomy, or just anything. This is not impossible, it just has to be habit, albeit very tedious habit sometimes.
Of course, anthropology was started to preserve something of the societies being destroyed, quite often deliberately, so there was only a limited time to save anything, and even if the destruction was not happening, well anything with humans in it changes. Also just excavating something is destructive. So document everything, all the time, or lose it, probably permanently.
]]>I have noticed that there is a large number of people, usually but not always, are well educated and well paid, who hold people having a strong sense of place, or religion, or patriotism as primative or even dangerous. It's not even a liberal or conservative issue although liberals are more likely to be so. It is sometimes returned as contempt for higher education or for thinking of the welfare or others outside the local community especially outside the United States.
I have to be careful not believing too many people are. I do think too many use such beliefs and feelings as a reason not to think deeply.
As in oh the Christians/Muslims can't really believe what they say. It cannot be because on faith or their honest interpretation of the Bible or Koran. They must be hateful monsters. Or the poor voted Trump or Brexit because they are bigots not because they have been screwed by every one in power for the last forty years.
Too many also use their dislike of the elites as an excuse not to listen to facts and statistics. If those people, who are educated like those liberals, spout some nonsense like global warming why should we believe them? Who needs to study philosophy or politics it's all crap.
]]>Also civil wars are not always massed armies, or ,if they are, they often start small then go worse. The American Revolution, the American Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, or the mass street fights of the Wiemar Republic Admittedly we are not up to armored cars, machine guns, howitzers, or Molotov Cocktails yet. :-)
Wait a bit. I might wonderfully wrong and there will be no war, but I would be shocked if violence near the levels of the late 1960s to 1970s doesn't occur.
]]>One the most important reasons that we still have an effectivish government with legitimate authority is because the military. Is. Always. Subordinate. To. The. Civil. Authority. And the has also always been the belief, mostly true, that if someone lost this time, next time they might win. If the military takes over, not so much.
Despite the massive military and nearly paramilitary flavor of too much of our police, it is the belief of our nation in the legitimacy of its authority, not how powerful it is.
Oh yeah, we might get an instant Great Depression II also.
]]>I half expect that after Miami and everything south of the Everglades goes under, New Orleans and half of Louisiana will follow.
]]>Yes sir, I'm sure we don't need such nonsense as product safety laws. (Insert stupendous eye roll)
Actually I'm more surprised any of our parents lived to have us.
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