One of the solid exercises I get from paying attention to this site is

a precise understanding of who the tech-bro class thinks is human (and thus relatable in ways that makes violence against those Others scary)

and those whom they believe to be living in base-biological forms which they themselves could surely never occupy (positions not "really" human and thus naturally the target of things like 'authorized' and 'legitimate' state-violence).

I can't really get my brain into their positions- I generally am opposed to being violent to folks for all reasons, and even if it could be justified ex pos facto, in my understanding violence is never legitimate or authorized.

But the site:

it's kind of like reading a poorly-written epic poem in some kind of horrid and post-modern style:

exegesis of the melted ideas here is work that keeps some of us in touch with what the sociopaths of the tech world think, with their out-sized influence over a world where most of us are simply subject to their fast and violent movement.

However, what is more important than teasing out the aesthetics of the violence they may either like or fear is learning what must be done to avoid being seen as legitimate and human by this class vicious wanna-be capitalists and shitters-out-of toxic technology.

That work seems like a difficult task, but this site provides so much relevant exercise and example.

I also get that in Texas they are fine "criminalizing" protesting, but that's just part of its hyper-authoritarian "charm", and a lot of us don't think that protesting in itself should be criminal.

It's an appealing view, and I get it. Probably not a bad idea to question at length.

The other spot I get exposure to this part of the US political spectrum is the comment section of a youtube guy who is pretty far to the right but who has a seemingly (at least to me) well-informed understanding of the facts- he's interesting because it's kind of wild to hear the more lumpen version of this site and what their concerns are: they are really mad that this war is happening instead of further domestic crackdowns on immigration.

In both cases, it's helpful to understand where folks who have some pretty misinformed understandings of history and politics are sitting with their opinions.

It doesn't seem surprising to me that a bunch of aspiring venture capitalists, who have probably have been or are on the cusp of having a small taste of the massive wealth that their work in building out the surveillance state has brought to their masters, have totally shitty politics.

I say that as a person who is out in the streets in the US doing what we can against the current government. But to be honest, we were out in the streets before. The difference is that you were at brunch and didn't notice.

Even better, in some place like Ruidoso, NM (where I've lived) there have been pretty massive deforestations from wildfires with the result being that it floods about any time it rains.

I've spent about 3-5hr/day for the last 4 weeks trying to get rid of stuff that burns as far out from my shacks as I can, but I would bet that when it burns, it's going to go big.

Not looking forward to that.

This is why I can't vote.

I can't give my ethical status as a human over to what the masses of folks in the US think is okay. It's kind of a disgusting proposition.

Like, you who are in the thuick of it, you who have given your voice over to empire, you expect the rest of the world to do something about the horrors done in your name just because... what?

The assholes you live around "voted" to do something evil, lesser or greater?

And now you're doing evil, too? And it is, somehow, "up to the rest of the world?"

That's bleak and you really should think if "democracy" (or it's pale ghost that haunts US politics) is doing anything useful for your status as an ethical human.

It's entirely possible that you indeed do have such a boot on your neck that you really can't resist the power of empire in its core, but for [insert your preferred diety here]'s sake, you don't have to roll your soft belly over and take the kicks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

I believe that folks in the US are, by a large margin, the most highly propagandized group of people in history. It's hard to watch stuff like this.

It's not that I don't understand that comparatively space exploration is small compared to the associated costs of the boots that might hit the ground today.

One of the weirdest things I did last week was realizing that my flipper zero could be used as a redbox... now I just need to find a payphone with a trunk...

damn, this thread is making me feel old...

I had a Commodore 64 that could use phillips tape. I'm drawing. blank, but IIRC there were musical instruments (maybe the roland juno 60?) in the 80s that were storing their data as audio, too.

Everything else is a half measure.

I do a bit of activist work still, and help with protests from time to time. This year I joined up with some folks and we have a street medic group that has been supporting some local protest efforts, fortunately it's really only been needed once this year, when some folks got pepper sprayed and needed to decontaminate.

However, even when protests might be effective, there are a couple of other relevent things:

there has been very little time to react to anything because this admin just kind of seems to operate under some chaotic principle of YOLO, so you can't plan protest a month out for an event that is planned for two months. I don't think even the admin is thinking that far ahead,

there are about 4 other things that folks have been working on, even if we don't add in the 5 other things that dropped in the last month that are worth attention. The zone is flooded as they say...

4KW of panels, 400W 48V EG4 6000XP charge controller/ inverter 3x EG4 LifePower4 48V batteries a raspberry pi running solar assistant

I feels like a bit overkill, and there is still a whole mppt unused on the 6000xp so I could still double my panel input. Also solar assistant tells me that I rarly go below 75% battery storage. If I just wanted to run my fridge and assorted convenience loads (and ran things like table saws off a generator) then I could get away with a lot less of a system.

But I'm operating a recording studio, and there were a couple days this winter where I had a full-band session and a couple days of storms and got down to below 50%.

I end up converting stuff anyhow, because all my loads run at different voltages- even though I had my lights, vent fan, and heater fans running on 12V I still ended up having to change voltages for most of the loads I wanted to run, or generate a AC to to charge my computer and run a rice cooker.

Not to mention that running anything that draws any real power quickly needs a much thicker wire at 12V. So you're either needing to run higher voltage DC than all your loads for distribution and then lowering the voltage when it gets to the device, or you simply can't draw much power.

Not that you can't have higher voltage DC; with my newer system the line from my solar panels to my charger controller is around 350VDC and I can use 10awg for that... but none of the loads I own that draw much power (saws, instapot, rice cooker, hammond organ, tube guitar amp) take DC :D

I'm almost 50 and mostly retired except for work I like doing (producing musical events or performing).

About the time my kiddo graduated high school, I moved to a rural area far from cities, and about 18 months ago I bought some land that had primitive shacks on it.

I spend a lot of time reading history. I assume that the US fails eventually;

not because I have any illusions about surviving that house fire, have a lack of awareness of the mass death that would cause, or fantasies about how I'd be able to function in some post-US world.

That assumption comes out of watching the capitalists strip the wiring from the walls of US soft power along side watching the fact that it's 85 degrees in March at 6500 feet here... "climate isn't weather" is true, but I'm not an idiot and we didn't have a real winter this year.

The failure of the US is terrifying, not because I and my community would mourn the loss of some glorious and benevolent order, but in the way that the death of my estranged parents was terrifying:

we are no longer doing things because we're forced by the fantasy of belonging to some larger political order, but now have to choose what to do.

Having read a lot about what the US has done in the world, I believe that a) it's unethical/racist/genocidal / exploitative in almost all its actions and b) I think the only actual hope for climate change is the end of the US as a world order. I don't know if the end of that order is sufficient to fix the ecosystem, which I feel is on the verge of some calamitous changes, but it certainly seems necessary.

Not having control over that failing system, and not having a lot of fantasies about belonging to the polis associated with that system, it's perhaps easier for me to look at its failure modes more clinically than I might have when I was 25 and saw it as an impenetrable solid face; I've moved downstream from Fisher's statement, and now it's much easier to see a possibility for the end of capitalism (or at least the uni-polar US world order) than the end of the world itself.

Not that it's the actions of a bunch of angry and over-educated leftists who would bring it about, but as has always been understood by Marxists (among whom I do not count myself), the failure leading to its dissolution are the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself.

Which makes me feel amazingly hopeful, actually. I don't have any real political power (beyond my affinity group), so it's nice to know (like Duncan instead of MacBeth) that these things could maybe take care of themselves without me doing anything I don't find ethical.

Because I believe that there is a future for humans, I spend a lot of time organizing with folks even when I think the short-term goals aren't super useful: for instance, doing ICE Watch support with local folks, shooting a lot of guns with folks who understood the wisdom of John Brown, or just being available to help out folks who have politics oriented around direct action.

I have been spending most of my time clearing the scrub oak from various parts of the land where I live to make the wildland fire interface a little less terrifying. I build a pretty sturdy solar power system here. I've spent the last couple of months getting my head into programming the esp32 and its peripherals. I got a ham license and have been working on building radio systems. Hopefully I will figure out how to get an underground cistern next month, and then act on the septic permit I got last year.

Other than that, I assume that things aren't going to change much in my life time... I just sit here in my shack playing banjo and hoping for the best.

Prognostication should be illegal and all, but I suspect that Trump will probably kick off in 6 months from a stroke, the Dems will elect Newsom, and then they won't do a damn thing to change anything, and we will be fighting the facists under worse conditions when they finally find a pretty face to solidify them.

So I look forward to dying of Super Ebola-fluenza at age 65 in the middle of a mid-June snow-hurricane near Bluff, UT while supporting a bunch of anarchist 30 year-olds in a drone-powered trench line while they fight the "Western Slope Fascist Front". But I bet I'll still be driving my Tacoma to that battle...

Combined with seeing how the extractive energy industry has treated old wells, where they do everything in their power to abandon them and put the burden of cleanup and mainteance of that remediation onto the public, I simply have no faith that nuclear power is "safe" as long as it's private industry doing the work.

I think that covers a lot of western media in all the wars the US has waged in my lifetime:

it's always "a regrettable (but worthwhile) mistake" until it's a "horrific but unique war crime"... it's never "who the fuck said these vicious idiots could kill whoever they want and never face just and material consequences for their crimes".

This shit certainly seems intentional. Maybe the folks who are attributing things to "incompetence" are just projecting their own incompetencies in interpreting the world, but at this point I suspect that they to are complicit in this malice.