Mostly because our ability to organize and unify against the wealthy is overwhelmed by the wealthy's tools to keep us factioned and distrustful of each other. Hence the necessity of the fascist enemy within rhetoric.
The problem is, we humans are simple emotional beings who are really credulous when it comes to being told stuff we want to hear, and the wealthy have crafted messaging catering to this bias and wishful thinking (hence "you are the chosen people and have to massacre all the others who are spiritual flesh-eating zombies")
That sounds way cooler to the lumpen-proletariat than "you're just another commoner, but if we work together we can topple the people who hoard all the stuff and make a fun themepark for everyone!"
I pick up dog poop left by dogs other than mine. And I do it in the name of comnunism and the end of monarchy.
Yeah, my other ride is a broom and similar stickers also imply if you cross my path you better be firm in your beliefs curses don't work, because mine will find your immortal soul and drag it, screaming and writhing into the very heart of Hell.
Also my coven depends on me for the sticky-icky and some amazing baked goods. And they don't want me sad.
I might be reading a lot into it.
This family has a LOT of activities. And is middle class, but ranking enough to have free time and money to buy stuff, possibly due to the oilfield worker.
Their neighborhood has family rivalries but is knit enough to have community barbecues. My daughter has best friends and ballet partners in the community, so at least we know our neighbors as fellow parents.
Oh and if you fuck with us, we have high-powered rifles and know how to track a bitch. We also have friends with a similar set of skills.
All of us are screwed. No one is going to get out of this intact. If you're very lucky, you'll just have friends and family who have perished or are alive, traumatized and possibly maimed or gone mad from the forthcoming era. The first step is to recognize your own future is FUBAR. Now you're living to fight so that future generations might have a chance at not having to do this.
Secondly, come to terms that you're going to be in harms way. The protests that matter will be sucking up CS gas. Paramedics will be digging less-lethal bullets out of their flesh. Riot police will beat the crap out of you, maybe permanently injure you, or kill you just as apathetically as Derek Chauvin nonchalantly murdered George Floyd. If you're lucky, it'll get captured on civilian video, there will be witnesses. You'll be dead, but that death will escalate the resistance movement. When the public sees the trauma it drives them to get involved, to take action, to realize that if they don't stand on the front line, the front line will come to them.
The protests that matter are ones that scare the MAGA movement, that scare VIPs, and they will either send the police to silence you, or get friends to send the police to silence you. So at the point you hear gunfire, or feel your eyes burn, or are facing a line behind riot shields and staring down the barrel of a sniper, it means the protest you're presently in is harshing the calm of the right people.
In proper COIN (counter insurrection) the police will want to contain protests, keep them from getting violent and let the protestors scream their heads off until they get tired. Meanwhile public officials make promises to fix the problem. Hearts and minds. Trump can't help himself but not do this. Nor can the rest of MAGA, nor the Seven Mountain Mandate or the general white Christian nationalist movement. They'll send the police in with full anti-riot ordnance, and it will suck. But this kind of behavior against peaceful protests will ultimately mobilize the public. When you have (about) 3.5% of the public active in the resistance, then it starts looking like an actual revolution.
When the police switch to real bullets (or let civilian militias do the same), it becomes a state of civil war. If you're a protest, the protest is over, and it's time to escape, rally, and look to serve the war effort. Expect everyone you know to end up either dead or not quite alive (maimed, critically wounded, traumatized, etc.) No one gets out intact.
Peaceful protests have a better chance of implementing change. The sooner we can face down the autocrats and their MAGA goons, the fewer people have to suffer trauma or die to stop them. In the worst case, Chinese bombers will hammer Washington until some official relays an unconditional surrender. Let's not let it get there.
Any two party system turns into King Log and King Heron.
I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I'll say this:
When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.
Release candidate with feedback considered. Release candidate provided no critical problems.
Use! Spread! Teach the world!
Text:
Musk's salute at Trump's Inauguration (sic) doesn't make him a Nazi
Musk's $250 Million donation to an autocratic usurper Makes (sic) him a Nazi-producing industrialist
Musk is to Nazis what the Hostess board of directors is to Twinkies
Sorry about the additional caps. I may also darken the background for legibility.
An early meme that did not pass muster when I showed it to family, but it makes me giggle.
I may just be an esoteric nerd.
Art by Erik Carnell one of the LGBT+ artists who was featured in Target during Pride and then removed thanks to white Christian nationalist pressure.
So here we are, and yeah, we need you all.
A semicolon after "youth" will help keep it clear.
Note: Most of the info here was ripped from the most recent You're Wrong About podcast ( On Buzzsprout ), Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith Go! Listen! Enjoy! Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!
Yesterday, I learned that the current American Halloween tradition of giving candy to costumed kids represents an uneasy truce between civilization and the trickster spirit.
There are a lot of traditions regarding Samhain, many of which include bonfires and naked dancing (because they all included bonfires and naked dancing. Who are we kidding?) But in the Irish farmlands, Samhain was mischief night, at least for adolescent and young adult boys (we assume they were boys.)
The idea was to haze the local grownups, particularly the crabby ones who yelled at clouds or didn't like young'uns much. There were plenty of old standby pranks: carving faces into produce or shepherding livestock to the rooftops to dressing up like ghosts and monsters and ambushing them at night to send them running.
It was a mostly accepted tradition. Teenagers got to go bananas for one day a year, and were (more or less) on ~~good~~ better behavior for the rest of the time. Skittish folk did the Purge thing of holing up in safety.
And then the Irish and their wily teenagers came to the United States.
Our Halloween pumpkin-smashers were called guisers from those in disguise. Note that there were other guising traditions that exchanged DNA with our dark cabal of malicious tricksters. (One fond one was of drunkards who'd sing at your house until you gave them food, beer or money to leave), but for our antagonists, it was the black bloc of the time, a means to ensure that you weren't identified at the scene of a fresh crime.
Do an image search of "vintage halloween costumes" and you won't see people trying to look like Mario or Misty or Mickey or Megatron, but just people in spooky clothes and spookier masks clearly up to no good. You didn't buy your costume, rather you made it with whatever was on hand, and hence there were a lot of sheet ghosts.
In the early 20th century pranking in the States achieved an apogee (a nadir?). The great depression drove everyone to despair, and wanton destruction that once was meager and required a morning of repair might be the fire that broke the farm. Also some pranks went wrong, leading to a resonance cascade failure, starting a wildfire or other unnatural disaster.
And then WWII happened and we were not only trying to salvage what we can, but had real (alleged) monsters that might even be infiltrating the homefront as we speak. Pranksters then were losing the war for the Allies and serving the Axis, even if inadvertently.
Something had to be done, and even President Truman got involved regarding The Halloween Problem.
A couple of early attempts to trade Halloween for a nicer holiday failed drastically, and the pranking continued.
Eventually an armistice came when the neighborhood spooky pageant emerged. Creative neighbors would turn a part of their house into a spooky diorama and light the path with candles and jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween kitsch. Rather than hopping onto a war-wagon (that's a mischief team stuffed into a motor vehicle) they'd go visit the local spooktaculars. (This would in turn fuel the haunted house craze, assisted by Disney's Haunted Mansion opening in 1953)
Feeding the roaming guests kept the rotten eggs away. While there was candy, there were also cookies, apples, (toothbrushes, Chick tracts) and other treats. Sometimes there were activities, though I never could figure out bobbing for apples.
The transition from free-form snacks to packaged candy came due to The Candyman who was much less exciting than the movie version. Ronald Clark O'Bryan made custom Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide, one of which he fed to his son, Timothy on Halloween, 1974. He was far removed from a master criminal, and inconsistencies in his story kept the police interested until it all fell apart. He was also deep in debt and took out a beefy life-insurance policy on his son. The police didn't have to investigate too deeply.
O'Bryan was executed in 1984, but by then the damage he had done to Halloween had been done, and moral panics would persist about tampered Halloween treats. By then it was common for everyone to just give packaged candy.
Related was also the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. They had nothing to do with Halloween, but secured into the public conscience that people could tamper with products in order to cause mayhem to the general public. And at least by my recollection, this not only ended all Halloween offerings of home-made cookies by kitchen-minded families but also made sure safety seals were added to every food and hygiene product in the US.
By the aughts, everyone was familiar with the "fun-sized" candy which was totally not that fun.
(It's noted by some that Tylenol doesn't really need all that much assistance to poison you. As painkillers go, it's hard on the system, easy to overdose, and Tylenol poisoning incurs a yearly body count in the US. There's been an ongoing effort to convince the FDA to rethink its approval of Tylenol, for convincing cause. But big pharma really wants to keep selling you stuff. Anyway I digress.)
These days, we hear a lot of calls from the religious right for the end of celebrations of Halloween, a holiday too macabre for families who purport to have family values. Many churches tell their parishioners to skip the holiday for Jesus, while more clever churches simply hold a party there as an alternative to trick-or-treating. Some churches forbid witches, or even only allow approved costumes from the approved costume list. There's a lot of, as Dan McClellan would put it, costly identity signaling between members of right-wing religious ministries to show they're on team-purity.
But this is not a holiday we celebrate to honor benign gods and favored spirits. This is not an Apollonian holiday we keep up for the morale of the people, rather it's a Dionysian holiday, one we celebrate in respect for spirits who would wrong us if we don't acknowledge their presence and the unsteady peace they offer in exchange for our tribute.
Hallowe'en as it is celebrated in the US is a rite we engage in every year to keep away malevolent trickster monsters, who will return (and will start fires) if we don't placate them with yearly treats.
In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren't undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle's exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
Once the Miserables found themselves outvoted in the Estates General of 1789 by about 3% of the population (the ones with money), it became very uncomfortable in France for aristocrats.
Just saying,
Isn't this action (removal of the git repo) essentially an admission that:
My (unpopular?) solution is to make sure the rest of society isn't so desperate for food that they're willing to rob a robot.
In an unrelated suggestion, if youre in a grocery store and see someone stealing food, no you didn't.
The last I checked, the stats are like this:
Range: ~70 miles
Accuracy: Likely to hit Paris
Effect: About a city block or too (1/10 mile radius)
So its a terror weapon.