I'm not, but I can certainly believe the surveillance industry vectoralists are salivating over a future where their AI toilet seats greet each of their data subjects every morning.

That's ego for you. It does not like frontal assaults! When someone is in the middle of realizing something for themselves, the last thing you want to do is interrupt them.

I personally saw someone in my family literally use the name "deplorable" for an online account in response to that kerfuffle. Not social media or anything like a public persona, just a web service they wanted to use. Look up sociological labeling theory. One small silver lining to their passing is that I didn't have to witness them spiral into full rabid social media dementia.

And reflexively reaching for this feel-good "no evidence whatsoever" research-assistant-with-a-deadline-quality proclamatory bullshit is one of the ways the Democratic party shares the blame for Grump. That is some "culpability for this administration" that you yourself would seem to share, and that you would say you should reflect on.

Go back and read my original comment. I most certainly would not have written my comment if you had been responding to someone still unapologetically supporting the destructionists! But no, you were taking your anger out on someone who didn't deserve it - exactly like all the maggots who continue to cheer on the performative cruelty.

Or just continue helping to throw gasoline on the corpo-manufactured divide-and-conquer "culture war" pyre! It has been working out so well so far, hasn't it?

For example if I told you that you should be ashamed of your original comment, does this make you immediately feel shame? Or perhaps does it make it feel like I am personally attacking you?

In fact, I'd say that emphasizing and playing up this difference was a pretty successful campaign tactic for the destructionists. Remember how "deplorables" ended up backfiring so hard? The characterization was entirely technically correct! But yet with the way people work, it ended up doing the exact opposite from what one would naively hope.

(in general, I honestly don't even know if feeling shame from being shamed is a thing any more with the way impersonal online communities work. You can now easily find a different community that will validate whatever you did)

This regime thrives on hate, including the hate for it.

I definitely understand being angry, there is certainly blame to be had, and perhaps there is an argument to be made that supporting RFK Jr was a poor idea even before he joined up with the destructionist grifters. But save your vitriol for the ignorant ones who actually voted for Grump, and most especially for the unrepentant ones who are still cheering as our country's institutions burn.

There are. Check out No Kings. My smallish "city" has a protest every week, and organizes a larger one every few months. I go when I can. Most people driving by are even supportive.

> general strike

There was talk of this a while back, and I analyzed it at the time - I don't see how it would help. In fact it seemed like it would make our position worse. The regime wants economic destruction, so its cronies can swoop in to pick up the pieces. That's basically the main thing they want, and it seems like a general strike would be handing them even more chaos and destruction on a platter.

> Organizing groups that bring down whatever is left of US-justicias rotten arms on anyone trying to undermine democracy

From what I see, this is indeed happening at the state-by-state level. But it's happening slowly, and the distributedness makes it hard to see. And much of it gets stymied due to a lot of rotten interference by the federal government - they tend to get things moved things to federal court, where many of the judges are regime apparatchiks. And if they aren't, then the rioter in chief goes to work threatening them with stochastic violence.

> Organizing groups that offer support and counceling for any victim of the regime

There is definitely some of this at the grassroots level, but on the other hand it's pretty hard to help someone who has been dragged away to a concentration camp far away.

> Boycotts etc

Boycott who? The problem is all the corpos are basically in on it. I've stopped buying stuff at Home Depot, and now buy that stuff at Lowe's instead. Big whoop! I expect to find out down the line that Lowe's's corpo management is also full of fascists.

> start 40 years ago and don't let the country become this way.

While the issues have been apparent all along, the problem is that the corpo propaganda has been successful at stopping any sort of reform that would have alloed us to address this ahead of time. Glaring meta issues like campaign finance and non-plurality voting are basically opposed by both professional parties, who had been offering us the shit sandwich vs turd torta dynamic for decades.

To be fair, it's the same type of self-perpetuating destruction they've been playing with education the whole time.

Spot on! The people who actually care the most about the issues the regime champions should really be their loudest critics! Instead they seem to be content just "being heard" or "owning the libs"? They'd better be enjoying it while it lasts, because what it's actually doing is burning (arbitraging) all the political capital that these issues had accumulated.

Like despite being pretty ambivalent about it, I don't want to hear a peep about "immigration enforcement" for the next decade - its proponents had their moment, they had their mandate, and they mostly just squandered it on having an anti-Constitutional tantrum.

> ... and ideology

The only ideologies I've found to line up with the regime's actions are 1. self-enrichment, 2. anarcho-capitalism, 3. malevolent foreign influence, 4. religious fundamentalism. 2/3/4 are essentially all just aimed at destroying the government/society for different reasons.

This is just tautological with the trade surplus. Yes, the two go hand in hand.

My point is that "trade surplus" is always trotted out as if it is some vulnerability of China's - that if we stop giving them dollars and they stop giving us goods, this would create an unsolvable problem for China's economy.

But this is merely fanciful fiction borne from western thinking where we don't have the political will to take sustained direct action to subsidize domestic industry. But China isn't bound by this! Rather it is merely wishful thinking as if we hold power here.

Hence my focusing on whether China actually needs more dollars (ie is reliant on exporting to get those dollars), or whether they could make do with what they've already saved up in treasuries (and other USD investments) while being unable to export as much to the US. My gut says their economy and industry is now large enough that they could weather it just fine. We're still looking at them as if they are the little kid from the 90's (who would have indeed been hurt if we had never started the arrangement), and failing to see that they are all grown up. The pump has been primed.

> the US is the only nation willing and able to absorb these capital inflows... The results have been, in my opinion, highly destabilizing

In my opinion, the destabilizing results were not inevitable. Rather they were the result of deliberate policies that were kept outside of the Overton window by the entrenched interests who were benefiting from them.

Having others say "I'm willing to accept IOUs from you rather than requiring payment in cold hard cash" (aka having the world reserve currency) is an inherently lucrative position! The downsides can only come from how you react to having that ability - a spendthrift might write IOUs without limit and spend all their cash, making the position itself look like a vulnerability. Whereas a frugal person who wants to avoid that fate but isn't very creative might keep a stack of cash that 1:1 corresponds to IOUs they've issued.

The two deliberate policies of which I speak are 1. USD must always inflate (which precludes the frugal option) 2. the legislature/executive government is prevented from spending the newly created money on (most) deliberate constructive activities (like the industrial subsidies I was talking about above).

So most of the wealth we received from having the world reserve currency (represented in-system by newly created money) was simply given away by the Federal Reserve directly to banks (as low-interest loans) to blindly "invest". This resulted in the everything bubble - unproductive assets as a safe haven, intemperate investment in new industries, but failure to maintain the industries we had (since mature industries don't achieve outsized investment returns).

In a different world the legislature would have spent some of that wealth directly subsidizing domestic industry to maintain it, backed up with laws about not being able to move production lines out of the country. But of course this was not in the interest of the corpo class as it would have meant less money going into their own pockets. Hence it remaining on the fringes of the Overton window. (the one place it did actually happen was the defense industry, of course)

Now that the deindustrialization scam has run its course, the corpo class is on to the next thing - economic consolidation to further cement their position. They're channeling echos of what would have been prudent decisions back in the 90's, which makes grassroots voters think they are finally being listened to. But it's nonsensical to talk of closing the barn door after the horse is long gone, right? So in reality they're pushing upside-down bizarro revanchist economics (like framing strong currency itself as a problem!), to destroy the economy that we actually did develop. Then they can mop up and further centralize.

My point revolves around the unlimitedness of the other right that is being used to override the first right in question. A large part of that "insane leeway" is exactly due to the corpos' rights being taken as unlimited/absolute - note how the argument in Pruneyard was trying to use property rights to override free speech rights.

But sure, rather than tweaking the conception of rights, we could instead target reform at reigning in the "rights" of corpos - they are merely whole-cloth creations of government, after all. But I suspect we'd still hit corner cases with sufficient power imbalances between individuals (say a small-time landlord and their tenant, with the landlord attempting to curtail the tenant's speech).

I'd say that these things are not opposites. Rather the rule of law is a way of tempering the power of force of arms. Look at your Nuremberg example - having won the war and enacted occupation by force of arms, the Allies were in a position where they could have simply imposed summary execution. Legalization was a stepping back from this dynamic - likely due to the amount of unilateral killing that had just gone on.

> those norms do not apply to the Russian world

The crux of the matter here is that parties on the receiving end of aggression (Ukraine, Palestine) have assented to adopting those norms. The legalistic theory is that by aggressing onto those parties, the aggressors become subject to the jurisdiction of whom they're aggressing against. I personally don't particularly like this model of international jurisdiction, but it is on solid longstanding ground. And so while I'll argue against this sort of thing at an individual level (especially where the nexus is say electronic communications), I don't feel much sympathy for leaders who end up suffering this dynamic because they decided to attack other countries.

In reality of course yes, to apply those laws requires force of arms - for there even to be something to temper in the first place. So Ukraine/Palestine assenting to those treaties is essentially asking would-be allies to defend them in some well-scoped circumstances, modulo the underlying diplomatic concerns.

For example take a core grassroots issue - immigration reform. Slowly building support for decades against the corpo imperative for cheap labor. But after it finally gets critical mass, what does this actually result in? A personal enrichment shakedown dynamic for employers of imported labor, concentration camps, and homicidal gangs of jackboots roaming the streets itching to summarily execute people for exercising their Constitutional/natural rights. All that hard earned political capital squandered on nothing more than a performative con man "for the cause". And in a few years we'll be right back to hearing their pissing and moaning about Democrats being responsible, even though they did it to themselves.

(signed, a libertarian)