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darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

@ darkcalling @hexbear.net

Posts
2
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586
Joined
6 yr. ago

  • Nobody is doing that until Episodes IV-VI. In Andor's time it's simply a rebellion to end the empire. It's the opportunists who who turn it into restoration of the republic and no radicals survive to oppose them.

    To be fair Saw specifically says to Wilmon (who Luthen sends) in S2E05 during his rhydo speech thing about revolution not being for the sane, how "we'll all be dead before the Republic is back", now maybe he was just talking in broad terms of the goals of the others or has certain better ideas about what a new Republic should look like but it certainly sounded like the show writers were making it his goal too. He is one of the most revolutionary coded characters though.

    Much as we might want to cast our wishes onto Andor there were never any strong mentions of left revolutionary thought (nothing that would be out of place in liberals talking about bringing down the USSR or Nazi Germany from the liberal perspective) and only vague baiting towards communism without so much as a solid two spoken lines of dialogue that suggests more than some aesthetics being adopted in the way liberalism tends to recuperate revolutionaries.

    It was all about tearing down bad thing (Empire) and replacing it with either hand-wavy thing that isn't "authoritarian/dictatorial" or just straight up restoration of the Republic. Nemik in particular doesn't come off to me as spouting anything but liberal platitudes for the most part. None of them talk about broad, just about how the empire is bad and hurts people and walks around like a bully carrying out abuses. Nothing about economic systems, nothing about say promoting gender equality, racial/species equality, addressing any kind of structural issues in the Galaxy they live in. So we have little idea who they really are or what they'd do if they took power. You mention subordination to the goal of the revolution and fair enough but it's just a way to leave it open to paint it whatever color you want depending on your ideology unless you're a raving fascist freak who loves the empire of course.

    It's all very liberal and VAGUE in that way, there's this big bad government (thankfully very fascist coded not communist coded) and it uses authority badly and abusively and does arbitrary executions and all kinds of just vicious repression and occupying power abuse stuff and they're against that and they get together with friends, do a little adventurism but a lot of it is idealistic speeches by the lib Mon Mothma and such that we're to presume opens a gas line to the revolutionary flame that gets the new recruits, welds the various factions together and sets things off for the events of the films.

    In this way of keeping things vague people can see what they want. The can see the American revolution in it, they can see the French revolution, they can see the fall of the USSR to US backed protests and color revolutions as cast as "organic uprisings" by western media and history books, they can if they're leftists see the rise of the USSR against feudal Russia. They can see the empire as a "what if Nazi Germany succeeded" type thing.

    I do agree about the killing off of radicals at least being potentially a kind of statement. As is the fact they try to rein them in but only because they fail does the rebellion succeed (if Luthen had thrown in the towel when they wanted they wouldn't have learned of the death star until too late, if Andor had been less of a rogue guy and obediently followed all his orders they would have been destroyed by not properly following through). Though ultimately it's not shown that this is anything other than luck and dedication, nothing ideological that sets Luthen, Andor, etc apart from the lib rebellion leaders cowering on Yavin.

    It's definitely one of the most leftist, revolutionary shows from the west, in the English speaking world made in probably at least a quarter century (post 9/11), maybe longer because it can be interpreted that way and does critique fascism and have a lot of revolutionary spirit but by the last 4 episodes it does as you and others note cram itself back into Disney's timeline.

  • It's important to remember reddit's own rise to stardom was off of bad changes made to Digg which the community hated as well as off centralizing and killing off individual niche forums and also it's free speech absolutism. So it's not that surprising some amount of people would as reddit calcifies and enshittifies further try and make the jump to yet another alternative. We've seen it with kids moving from Myspace to Facebook to Instagram and Tiktok as those platforms become mainstream, become full of adults, clueless and strange boomers, and enshittify in the chase for profits, to say nothing of the web culture impulse of jumping to something different, new and exciting.

    To be fair the lemmy devs were trying to grow lemmy as a replacement for reddit and did heavily advertise it not as a Marxist or leftist space but as an alternative ecosystem so we could say it's suffering from success which is likely necessary. The lemmy devs were not going to keep their nlnet funding by remaining a niche place full of only Marxists forever and if they want to continue getting paid to develop lemmy full time and we want them to get paid a broader base of support was inevitable. At the very least they won't hardcode in anti-left stuff which cannot be said for the owners of just about every capitalist centralized social media in existence, at best on those they're just too cheap and lazy to censor the left or anyone else and are chasing growth so much they'll tolerate anyone who isn't pushing literal CSAM or ISIS propaganda.

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  • You may be thinking of power disable (pin3) which can cause drives in non-enterprise older PSU systems to get disabled due to power being supplied on that pin because it used to be part of an older standard. Kapton tape over the first three pins will take care of that.

  • Said it at the time. Don't ever imprison these people as a solution. They'll get broken out, pardoned whatever and sparing their life doesn't mean they'll go easy on you, they'll still have you killed without a second thought.

  • Much in the same way Jordan Peterson has some okay basic advice about life. It's how they get the underclass on their side. They offer them a hand up, some tips to pull them out of a rut but pair it with a propaganda and indoctrination regiment into reactionary ideology so that as people get better off they become more selfish, more reactionary and have less class solidarity because they associate the reactionary thinking with the success of more stability in their life and double down on that. Truly saddening.

  • I feel they were there to reinforce the morale of Ukrainian troops and to not so subtlety ensure they didn't surrender (because they'd kill them if they tried).

  • Horrendous. But also telling that they're not in the least afraid of going this far.

    Either:

    1. they're deluded enough to think that people on SNAP are going to turn their ire on Democrats
    2. they think Americans are so propagandized and beaten down with atomization, individualism, the protestant work ethic and other myths and bullshit that nothing will come of this so why not kill off some poors
    3. they believe this will lead to riots and such and desperately want that and believe they can control it and use it to their own ends

    or I suppose there could be 4) which they think is this will force the traditionally spineless Democrats into capitulating by putting more pain on people which I guess fair enough, not a bad bet even if it is an awful angle to have to stand behind with your brand flag waving.

    Also bad on the supposed opposition (Democrats) for not noticing how this was written and could be interpreted to do just this and not just rewriting it in some sort of rider bill 10 years ago when they had huge majorities. "treating them more favorably than other customers by offering them specialized sales or incentives" What is the point of this even? Oh I know. They wanted it in there because the frothing mass of poor hating people in this country which includes many who vote Democratic would be scandalized and enraged to see the "moochers" on food stamps getting special deals and great pricing and being "rewarded" for being poor so in a pure optics move that makes sense only in the diseased context of the American civil religion and the Protestant work ethic they did this to avoid the Republicans hammering on about it.

  • I'll just point out things were a lot different then compared to now.

    Cops back then didn't have body armor of any kind usually (kevlar was brand new and not widely available nor was it guaranteed to stop bullets from rifles as commonly carried by the panthers). They also usually had at best a pistol, maybe a shotgun in the car or trunk in some cases. They often patrolled alone or maybe two cops and might have encountered two panthers armed, not good odds for the cops that at least one if not both gets a funeral if they start shit.

    Cops back then weren't as organized, as militarized. They couldn't call out a helicopter gunship, they didn't have surveillance drones doing overwatch. They couldn't scream on the horn and get 10 armed agents from several agencies there in 20 minutes as emergency back-up.

    The US was openly trying to appear good compared to the USSR and was very determined not to do many if any massacres if they could help it because it made them look bad in their attempts to woo the non-aligned states.

    Compare to now. These ICE types wear heavy modern body armor with plates that can stop rifle rounds. They receive military training, they operate in tactical squads. They carry automatic weapons. They have overwatch. They can call for and get SWAT multi-agency heavily armed back-up with even more automatic weapons and armored vehicles within 15 minutes in many cases.

    They do not operate within a state that has a USSR it cares to try and compete against, it has no interest in trying to pretend it isn't somewhat racist nor does it care about shouting about maximalist liberal freedoms.

    So there's less restraint, the opponents are more heavily armed, have body armor, have better military training, travel in numbers at all times, and are itching for an escalation that lets them use even more force and/or declare martial law.

    The US of the 1960s and 1970s had a more serious risk of serious prolonged insurgency due to the social and economic upheaval of the era than now which they also had an interest on tamping down on and not feeding. The propaganda wasn't as good, we hadn't seen end of history yet with the USSR being illegally dissolved.

  • Concerning. Wouldn't be surprised to see this occurring more in future if pihole stuff gets any more popular than it already is. You may think you're being kind to your tech illiterate relatives setting it up for them and you are but after enough technical people do that for non-technical people and inevitably preconfigured versions start getting boosted around mainstream social media the ad and data companies will take notice and take viciously punitive steps to clamp down on and dissuade such behavior. Unfortunately trying to evade capitalism's abusive practices on an individual and technical level is not feasible at any scale as it notices and adapts. The only solution is socialism and policy solutions at a broad level.

  • If it's worrisome do you perhaps have funds to purchase them a new battery? They sound very cheap and careless to be eating moldy food so maybe if presented as a free thing for them maybe they'd go for it? Helps if you can do this around an actual holiday so it seems less like you're trying to exercise control over their stuff. Of course if they're just a careless control freak (and being cheap has no actual part in it) even this could be received with hostility I suppose. Even if you have no experience you can often find battery replacement videos on youtube if it's an internal one by searching the model and "battery replacement" though be wary some may require tools like special screw-driver bits which may drive the cost up (though some seller MAY include things like that with the battery).

    Otherwise a fire extinguisher and working smoke alarm sound good to me as alternative purchases.

  • Are we at least not doing above-ground testing and burying it to minimize the contamination of various elements which taint scientific study for no good reason? Or are we back to big spectacular above-ground, air-burst or at sea-level type testing because it looks cooler. Oh who am I kidding, Trump will want it above-ground and probably in the Pacific or something to saber rattle at China with and will say it was the biggest and bestest nukulur explosion ever.

  • they should do it only for precedent,

    The precedent exists. The federal government has sovereign immunity from most claims. Though I'm not a lawyer and it seems a little confusing it seems they've only waived immunity for patent suits (for example the government starts churning out iPhones, Apple could sue them but the remedies are limited to Apple being given damages equal to the lost revenue of those products and they must go through a special court).

    ice is not sovereign in itself, it's a branch of government, they could sue individual posting it or chain of command

    No, not so far as I know. Government is not a magical entity kept locked up in the basement of the capital with writhing tentacles. Government is made of people. Those people are acting as part of the government not as individuals unless you can prove otherwise (in this case it's an official government account, if they posted on their person account not for government business you might have an argument though they'd argue back they were using it for government business that time and likely get the benefit of the doubt, best you could hope for). While acting for the government they are not legally a human being named say J D Vance, they are the US government legally speaking as an entity under the law. You could try and challenge that but in this case you'd lose very quickly as this is obviously a government act. We can disagree the government should be doing anything in the realm of this type of thing but they are.

    Sovereign immunity would be worthless if you could just go after whoever carried out things and terrorized them all into not doing a thing by directly hitting them with lawsuits and stress. In fact this goes as far as the government at the federal level extending immunity to contractors carrying out government contracts where the government under the law steps in the way of potential suits as concerning their government contracts and work done for that and you must sue them not the contractor, they get in the way.

    They could probably try and abuse the DMCA take-down system, especially automated ones to try and knock these offline though the government might appeal and threaten them into getting it back online in this case and DMCA technically has a penalty for filing false claims, not something your average person could ever hope to use in retribution but the US government certainly could though one might argue they'd lose because the take-down was good faith, it was infringing.

  • There are a shocking amount of reactionary types who love animals and see them as precious, pure, untainted by human "degeneration" and so on (Hitler was probably like this given his vegetarianism) but will happily voice smiling support for tossing the untermensch "sub-human" types into lava pits. Because the animals bring them joy while the brown people they don't see as people just stir up programmed rage and insecurity.

    I have known several types like this, would be in near tears just seeing an animal get hurt in a film yet shrugged at the suffering of brown people, poor people, etc as it was their fault. They had no fucks to give.

  • I don't think you can really sue the government for copyright infringement can you? I'm pretty sure sovereign immunity means they'd have to consent to being sued.

    So basically they can use all this stuff for promoting their little reactionary militia stuff all they want. In fact there was never anything stopping them from plastering Mickey Mouse over like government ads for how great social services and SNAP are (except the fact they'd never cross precious property rights for the sake of the poor workers).

    So at most these companies could sue and then complain when the government declines to hear it which would get fash frothing mad and declare the brand/IP/universe "woke" but little else. That and probably get the government to try and investigate them for any badly filed paperwork.

  • At this stage, the Israeli army does not know whether this was an attack plan approved by Hamas leadership in Gaza or an operation carried out by a besieged armed group that realized the army was closing in on them inside the tunnel."

    Or, or, an intentional false flag attack done by one of their controlled militias they've been arming to the teeth in order to give them a justification to do some more murdering and maybe even break the ceasefire intentionally. This is really why Hamas needs to disarm and/or liquidate those militias because they're perfect for this use.

  • focus on 'improving lives'

    Oh cool so he's throwing all in behind China and socialism with Chinese characteristics since they're proven experts at that. Right? Right??

  • Brave of you to think they won't train it on the bible AND THEN centuries of theology and apologetics done in the context of systems of feudal monarchy (king is good, monarchy is right) and then capitalism (market is right and actually hand of god in action) plus probably a few Evangelical school courses.

    I mean these are the people who have turned indoctrinating kids into a science. James Dobson (hell isn't real but if it was he'd deserve to burn in it for a few billion years) was a psychologist who applied the scientific methods of late 20th century to figuring out how to best break and successfully indoctrinate kids into Evangelical Christianity and published a number of books filled with homophobia, patriarchy, misogyny, and general twisted insinuations for how men and women should be. And he was hardly the first. There are others who came before him who applied psychology to teaching pastors how to whip up and control a congregation, teaching missionaries how to put vulnerable people in the right headspace to fill their heads with their lies, etc, etc, etc. No, no. Christianity has an incredibly rich amount of written text that dwarfs the textual length of the bible itself on things like this to turn such an AI into a gas-lighting, manipulative, twisted chatbot. If given the chance they'll make such a chat-bot and put it up as a suicide help-line or mental health type thing to try and convert people.

  • On a realistic note, is there an official redline from China about Japan's offensive military capabilities?

    No. And the US wouldn't take such a line seriously as it's unlikely China would either.

    In the past crossing China's red lines meant being snubbed for diplomatic visits, some not picking up phone calls, reduced counter-narcotics coordination, and angry military drills around Taiwan and absolutely nothing else of serious consequence. The trade war has China tit for tatting the US with export restrictions but that's not as a result of crossing red lines on geopolitical issues that displease China but as a direct response to economic attacks. The US has a history of crossing China's red lines on Taiwan in particular. China draws one, US steps over it, China gets angry, acts coldly towards the US and eventually after a few years goes back to normal after some gesture move from the US on unrelated matters or some formal statement with no teeth.

    Fact is Japan is a US vassal, a directly occupied vassal and has been since WW2 and a key part of US power projection in Asia. If it's in the US interests to have Japan re-arm and say "we are doing this to mass murder Chinese people soon" then that's what will happen. China may express displeasure by slapping on trade sanctions on Japan and allow and encourage protests in China against Japan and so on but they're not going to strike Japan first because militarily striking Japan would be tantamount to militarily striking the US as they have a joint defense agreement. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_and_Security_between_the_United_States_and_Japan )

    At this time in China's long-game plans they have no interest in engaging in warfare with the US.