That's assuming I actually look like a threat, rather than someone infatuated with the weird robot dog.
It's a golf park full of rich old people. I bet the dog-hecklers will come dozens per hour.
The ones at Mar-A-Lago are unarmed.
My approach to the armed ones, particularly the TASER-equipped ones used by some US law enforcement departments, would be very different.
I don't see downvotes here on Blåhaj, but I'll respond to rumors of them with LGBT+ memes.
Here it comes.
Dang it. He's not the master vampire.
So in 2016 when Trump got elected the first time (by EC, still leaving everyone scratching their heads), a history teacher friend of mine started an activist group on Facebook based on The White Rose ( on Wikipedia ). Here in the States, we still have a considerable respect for the right to free speech, even though people speaking in defiance of the current tyrannical state may get attacked by nazis (id est MAGAs, alt-right militants, the usual run of official and unofficial Trump-enthusiasts).
Now the White Rose itself is not a great example, since they were all hunted down by the Gestapo and executed, but true to the mechanics of revolution, they made resistance sympathists of onlookers, and activists of sympathists (and militants of activists. No fewer than 42 plots to assassinate Adolph Hitler^†^ are known to have occurred, and it's likely we've missed some including the time-travelers who could retroactively cover their tracks.)
In fact modern resistance tactics (which includes those used by BLM during the 2020 George Floyd protests) highlight the same methods, by not being aggressive and letting the authoritarian forces initiate violence. It helps in an age where that stuff gets captured on phone camera and disseminated online, and the next thing you know, ICE is contending with a line of moms and another line of dads using leaf-blowers to disperse CS gas.
It's still a long journey between frustrating Trump to silliness and actually getting some relief to the public, but I'm willing to wear out my shoes trying.
† All the assassination attempts were from within. The Allies saw Hitler as a ~~weakness,~~ [vulnerability,] since he often would override his generals strategies and ignore technological developments that disinterested him. Hitler was also fond of attacking when it was astrologically auspicious, which the Allies used to effectively predict them.
Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake. -- often attributed to Napoleon.
Only one German official was specifically targeted by the Allies, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík were trained specially by the British SOE to get close to and kill Reinhard Heydrich, and ambushed him 1942-May-27. Heydrich died eight days later from sepsis.
Bonded servitude (the superset of slavery) has been a universal thing throughout civilization, even though we have been dreaming of non-stratified societies at least since the enlightenment, and the occasional heretic / blasphemer / impious philosopher since the classical age.
So when we talk about peonage (bonded servants) in civilizations, we compare like to like, say slaves as they were regarded under Roman law vs. serfs during the middle ages. It's messy. We don't have slaves officially in the modern United States, but we do have forced prison labor (which we treat worse than Roman slaves) and we have child labor and immigrant labor, but these are thanks to blind spots in law and enforcement... but that means we have blind spots in law and enforcement were atrocity can (and often does) hide.
So slaves were better off in the Roman age than they were, say, during the Sugar plantation age here in the Americas. Peasants in the middle age had more rights but were just as bonded, and modern court systems emerged because letting the local lord adjudicate based on his gut feeling (oft while he was inebriated) resulted often in miscarriage of justice.
In the meantime, yes, we still fantasize about creating a system in which the lowest laborers can actually enjoy their work, and don't have to worry about precarity of food, housing, health, etc. We're totally not there yet and should be further along than we are.
Coo at them. Pet them. Call them a good doggie. Drop a treat on them, all in defiance.
The Republicans who spread that rumor didn't care whether it was true, and was looking for choice rumors to spread.
It's blood libel for the 21st century.
I think the state in this case needs to be divided into adversarial and non-adversarial departments (or subdepartments). It's better to tell (for example) the water department you don't know whether the pipes are lead if that's the case, rather than forcing them to unearth copper pipes or letting them leave lead pipes.
But it is absolutely appropriate (assuming you believe in strong rights to privacy) to insert NSA keywords into benign communications, so that NSA wastes time on your false positives, but that's because NSA isn't supposed to be doing mass surveillance of the public, rather is supposed to be helping develop communication security that is impervious to surveillance.
If your local precinct actually works with the community, doesn't harass minorities and doesn't rob civilians via asset forfeiture, it might be worth giving them sound information (including saying you don't know what you don't know.) On the other hand if it behaves typically for law enforcement in the US, leading them to chase geese will save everyone else trouble.
To be fair, if we look close, we see ecosystems within ecosystems, including a buttload of predation and two buttloads of parasitism. Parasites capitalizing on other lifeforms to utilize their energy and resources for their own growth and reproduction, as far as the eye can see.
And that's what human society is. It's much less prone to top-down parasitism in tiny societies (less than 500 members) but when we have communities of millions and states of tens of millions, it's pretty easy for religious ministries and ideological politicians to take over the system to make giant militaries that hammer other, less-captured societies.
Every once in a while some of us get the idea, what if we make a system that doesn't involve parasitism. I bet we can make everyone pretty happy. And this is true, except that the parasites really like having ridiculous amounts of wealth and power, and would rather render the entire species extinct than be confined to being a (well-to-do, comfortable) commoner.
This is why, even though there have been successful anarcho-communist organizations, they are often attacked by state law enforcement acting not in enforcing law, but in preserving political power.
No war but class war.
Death to monarchists.
I'm really pissed off right now, at both US political parties, at human nature, at a lot of things, so this may not be the best time for me to sound off on a question like this. This may go long. I get into some grizzly topics like Suicide, the Holocaust and how laziness is a fake thing invented by capitalists and Calvinists.
So I learned early on the fucked up nature of capitalism and the laziness rhetoric accompanied with the Protestant work ethic. My parents were glad to criticize my avolition (that's the medical term for the symptom of not wanting to do anything), but then I was suffering from neglect on account that they both worked full work weeks and were too exhausted to parent.
This is to say, mental illness and family dysfunction often are intergenerational. They were also driven by their parents to work themselves to exhaustion, and they did, and I became a stereotypical gen-x latchkey kid. Anyway, Mom tried an experiment, of paying me by the chore rather than a weekly allowance while I'd have regular house-chore duties. She'd then not pay me if my work was not up to snuff, and I learned quickly that all my efforts couldn't get it to snuff (I really tried, but I was a kid, and she wasn't good at telling me what she wanted). Resigned to have no allowance, I stopped working, entirely, and that just wouldn't do.
I wouldn't be diagnosed with Major Depression until my adulthood, and I'd discover that at my most symptomatic, I could lay down in bed for months, barely able to get up to eat or poop and having the libido of a lump of granite and the inertia of a neutron star.
Contrast the people who lucked out in The Great Resignation of 2021. During the COVID-19 Lockdown, people defied their industrialist bosses and Calvinist ministers and found they could not couch potato out for more than a week or two without getting a severe case of cabin fever. (People who winter in high-snow areas already know this phenomenon, and Steven King's The Shining is inspired by centuries of worst case scenarios.) Most people took up hobbies, turned their houses into lego parks, took up wood carving or cooking or something, and a lot of those things became marketable skills, hence a lot of Take this job and shove it and a sudden dearth of people willing to suffer abuse, toxic workspaces and a less-than-sustenance wage.
Laziness isn't a thing. If someone is healthy and happy, they'll do all the chores. Granted some chores are tedious or arduous or hazardous. In my pinko communist fantasies, I imagine we take some queues hfrom Power Wash Simulator until we figure out how to automate the process, and then automate the maintenance and repair of the machines that do that job, then automate maintenance of the bots that do the maintenance and repair until one guy keeps an eye on the one dial while writing poetry.
Speaking of communism, Marx predicted enshiffication of products and jobs in Das Kapital and our industrialist masters made it clear they liked it when the working class was living in Hoover towns (of cardboard boxes and paint cans) and eating flour paste (and dying of malnutrition). And they don't mind at all that their employees need food stamps and are living in their car (and sleeping roughly).
There's a cute bit in the John Scalzi short story Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth where the announcer (not the principal) is talking about the graduating class, and his well wishes and high hopes for them. And then he notes one species_who will, after graduation, be bussed to the downtown stadium to begin mating challenges that will leave nine out of ten of you dead..._
That's us. Human beings, in capitalism. There's never enough work. Allegations of meritocracy imply that the least of us will be unfit and will be disposed of like Spartans tossing their imperfect infants into the Kaiadas cave chasm to perish on the rocks. The beggars, widows and orphans we're supposed to watch out for (and is why Sodom was firebombed in myth) we leave to languish in homelessness, or in prison for failing to fit in and work hard enough.
And here in the states that class of undesirables continues to expand.
Granted more than 10% of us persevere, but somewhere between 66% and 88% of US households live in precarity, which means they worry every night about whether the next week is their last. Most of us are not within the hunky-dory threshold, by far.
In my case, staring blankly at the recent US general election results, I know I don't want to end up homeless, or arrested and in a detention center (whether stuck in a crowded cell, compelled to forced labor or awaiting my turn in the genocide machine). I'm far away from these outcomes for the moment, but the coming administration makes my fate a lot more unpredictable. So I'm looking for an L-pill or other functional exit strategy, in case I need to evade arrest once I am unpersoned.
And this has led me to an interesting discovery. Society doesn't want to think about its casualties. I deal with suicidality every day. Usually it's just considering it. But even professional therapists tend to freak out when I talk about it. Also, in the aughts, I went on a deep dive into the Holocaust, what steps were taken from the concentration camps started by Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst to the Pogroms along the eastern front to the massive extermination machine of Auschwitz. So I'm familiar that societies don't mind deaths when they happen quietly in the cold, or in the systems. They mind them when they're out front and messy and require a lot of cleanup. This is why self-immolation protests are terrifying, and even though there's not enough of them to change hearts and minds, they are a wake up call that our autocratic masters fear.
In reality, the US is suffering from a suicide epidemic. Our rate (about 40K a year in the 2010s and climbing) is worse than Japan (who is much more okay with suicide, though they're trying to change that) and worse than Russia (Russia's having a no-good very bad...Putin). For every one dead body from suicide, another three or four end up in the emergency room for trying, but survive, or are stopped by a friend. Also we're pretty sure some families will obfuscate the cause of death and attribute it to accident (or in David Carradine's case, literal ninjas) so they don't have to deal with the public questions about suicide.
But curiously life does suck for most of us, and we're waiting our turn in the showers, or out in the cold, or ultimately for the water to run out so we can't make enough food.
I'm not going to advocate harming yourself or others, but I will say playing by the rules is silly, and there's no way they'll let you into the cool kids club. Ever. You were never meant to win. Go arty. Go renegade. Go crazy. Go unpredictable.
I'm tired. I'll give this a grammar pass later.
That is the way that the police work in the United States yes.
We're not talking about the police, we're talking about the Secret Service protecting the President-Elect of the United States... at a golf park Not only that, but a park where people have to be super rich since access to Trump (leader of the GOP and now President-elect) is figured into the membership fee.
And while the police are happy to gun down the rest of us shlubs, they treat rich people like they treated OJ Simpson after he hacked up Nicole Brown. When they don't and they actually shoot a rich person, then high-powered (blue-haired) lawyers come and sue the precinct and county for enough money to collapse the GDP.
But I do hear you. Police in the US are bastards to the last.