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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2024

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  • It actually makes a ton of sense and has oodles and gobs of historical precedent. Fascism is what happens during capitalist crisis. When you weaken education, revoke social safety nets, delay retirement age, encourage unaffordable housing, withhold wages, withold healthcare, and promote wealth inequality, you’re going to get fascists. The emerging fascist wing is anything but irrational. They are reacting to real issues, and so they flock to the only people who appear to actually get anything done: the right.

    At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat – all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm




  • the thing you should never let them take away is hope

    “We have to let go of our relentless positivism, our absurd mania for hope, our naive belief that with grit and determination we can solve all problems. We have to face the bleakness before us. We live in a world already heavily damaged by global warming, which will inevitably get worse. Refusal to participate in the further destruction of the planet means a rupture with traditional politics. It means noncooperation with authority. It means defying in every nonviolent way possible consumer capitalism, militarism and imperialism. It means adjusting our lifestyle, including becoming vegans, to thwart the forces bent upon our annihilation. And it means waves of sustained civil disobedience until the machine is broken.”

    Chris Hedges

    The hope to reclaim American “democracy” via electoral means plays into the hands of the fascists. At this point, it should be crystal clear that neither the democrats, nor electoralism, nor a blind faith in some abstract concept of “hope” will save us. Nothing will meaningfully change until the rich and powerful fear for their lives. This includes the democrat pundits who many incorrectly see as our only means of escaping the fascist backside. Everyone should be getting armed and organized.


  • should start preparing now

    The time to prepare was when the Democrats were in power. It’s now too late. MAGA in 2019 could not have telegraphed their moves harder. The plan was always to massively bolster ICE and commence rapid, racist deportations and death camps. And not only did Biden and democrats fail to prepare for this (dismantling ICE, jailing MAGA, chickenshit prodecutor Garland, etc…), but they carried out the biggest federal law enforcement blunders in US history.

    On top of this, Biden expanded ICE during his time in office, and literally built the camps that Tump is now utilizing.

    It’s just downright pitiful to see a headline saying that “now is the time to act”, as if the people we’re begging to act didnt just spend the last 4 years collaborating with fascists.



  • They would have way more parts, fail more catastrophically

    This remains to be seen. In fact, the opposite is proving true.

    https://maritime-executive.com/article/report-carrier-uss-ford-s-electromagnetic-systems-still-need-work

    USS Ford’s launch and recovery gear are electromagnetically actuated, a departure from the steam-operated Nimitz-class carriers. The new designs were developed and installed because they promised longer intervals between maintenance and higher sortie generation rates. Though the Navy remains upbeat about Ford’s capabilities, these gains have proven elusive. “The reliability of CVN 78 catapults, arresting gear, and jet blast deflectors (JBDs) continues to have an adverse effect on sortie generation and flight operations efficiency,” noted DOT&E in an annual report released in mid-January. “The ongoing reliability problems with these critical subsystems remains the primary risk to the successful completion of CVN 78 [initial operational testing and evaluation].”

    The carrier’s Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG) has similar challenges. The AAG is supposed to cycle 16,500 times between failures, but in recent testing it has broken down after roughly 450 cycles.

    Belowdecks, the Ford’s Advanced Weapons Elevator (AWE) elevator system remains a source of trouble. During a weapons onload in September, the lower stage elevators performed more quickly than those on a Nimitz-class carrier, DOT&E said; however, 109 elevator failures were reported out of about 20,000 elevator dispatches. “AWE system reliability will be critical as the Navy develops standard procedures for moving ordnance from magazines to the flight deck,” noted DOT&E.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2022/10/14/in-a-first-deployment-test-uss-ford-fails-to-beat-nimitz-class-benchmarks/

    In a first ordnance-handling test, the advanced weapons elevators on the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), America’s new, $13.3 billion supercarrier, offered little to no meaningful improvement over the legacy elevator systems aboard America’s venerable $5 billion Nimitz class carriers.

    Crew claimed they “were able to run ammo downstairs in the magazines much quicker because we were able to put extra weight on the elevator, able to run it down quicker, which means you have to run those cycles a lot less.” That sounds great, but unbiased analysis of the Ford’s performance during the carrier’s initial two-and-a-half day ammunition onload cycle suggests the Navy has yet to take full advantage of Ford’s eleven faster and stronger elevators. Put bluntly, all the high-tech electromagnetic elevators aboard the USS Ford failed to translate into a faster ordnance onload cycle. It calls a primary pillar of the Ford’s business case—that new ammunition handling techniques would yield vast performance benefits and make the ship less vulnerable—into question.



  • It actually does matter when you have an entire thread of people decrying Trump’s supposed lack of understanding of magnets - while simultaneously pushing completely incorrect ideas about magents and laying bare their own lack of understanding of magnets.

    Especially annoying when you can do one single Google search and read a plethora of sources that explain in great scientific detail just how susceptible magnets are to water - especially in seawater applications.