It is illegal, you’re right, but they want to destroy the legal definitions of many things so that they can write new ones. So suddenly, teaching kids about how their bodies work becomes “grooming”. Being anything other than a straight white Christian male makes you a “sex offender”. Reading anything other than the Bible to kids is “indoctrination”, and so on.

They’ve spent many years and billions of dollars studying the power of language and ideas. They have framing the issues from their perspective down to an art form. If you control what words mean, you control debate and democracy.

But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What’s your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.

So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:

You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.

1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.

Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.

So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?

You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.

Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.

The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he’s a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!

Same with “War on Drugs” or “War on Terror”. I would like to congratulate both Drugs and Terror for their victories. I bet if they declared a War on Housing the homeless population in the US would plummet.

They live in a huge gated neighborhood a few miles outside of DC, I believe. Personally I’d stage a protest at the place they all send their kids to school, The Sidwell Friends School, I believe it’s called.

They want their perceived enemies to make the first move. They might be calling for violence, but many of them are cowards and also love to play victim and win the sympathy Olympics.

Something about this insurer stinks. How long does it take to drop a drug from their coverage, usually? And did they know the twins would need this drug before the mother knew? If that’s the case, then her employer, who was also the insurance provider, had access to her healthcare records. They had access to all her information and likely paid her OB/GYN on the sly to tell them what was going on with the twins while in the womb.

And they think they’re protected by that profit motive. Because they vastly overestimate how much their health and lives are actually worth. If you break it down by the numbers, they actually lose money the longer they keep you alive. At the moment you become a loss center instead of a profit center, they deny coverage.

If my partner is insane, the pandemic did it to her. And how could it not, it killed her dad among several other people she loved.

One thing people are afraid of though is being “duped”. In a world where everyone is afraid of deception, they want all the products they consume to be clearly labeled. My partner thinks that they’ve been steadily replacing all meat with lab-grown and just not telling anyone and not labeling the packaging. Like, one day she stopped buying the chicken breasts she’d normally get, saying that “it doesn’t taste right. It doesn’t taste how it did pre-pandemic. They’ve done something to it.”

Most of SCOTUS is not in favor of “broad immunity”, for exactly this scenario. They want to make sure that Trump is never held responsible for his actions while in office, and that every President after Trump(if he doesn’t declare himself President for life) is criminally liable for everything. Trump has even said that he’ll have Biden prosecuted if he wins.

It’s like watching a child of abuse grow up to become an abuser. Whatever happened to “Never Again”? I guess what they meant was “Never again to us”? Hitler would be proud of what Israel has become under Netanyahu. He would sing Bibi’s praise and shake his hand and call him friend.

The Greeks created democracy, though. They were the first to think of a government where the people have a say in the managers of their affairs and resources. Would you really say the ancient Greeks were sociopaths?

Technically, we’d just need to eat one rich person. Just one. The rest will get the message. OceanGate showed us they are not immortal. Their own stupidity got them killed. After that, if I were ultra rich, I’d be very scared. Like “Let’s call up a team and come up with a strategy” scared. You see, for decades they’ve built this narrative that they are this untouchable class of beings, beyond mortals. Then OceanGate showed us that they can, in fact, bleed. You see, when a dragon is killed, we don’t mourn it’s life, we cheer the Dragonslayer. So, if I were in the 0.1%, I’d be worried about appearing very human, very quickly.

I would like to see a “tribe of tribes”, I guess. People who have all shared lived experiences, regardless of where they are from, geographically. It’s not hard to imagine that someone from another country could have a background similar to my own. Or your own. They could have better or worse experiences than you, or me. And there are some people in the world who do not want us to discover that. They want us to focus on all that makes us different, the experiences we don’t share.

I can see that. I’m willing to bet the lived experiences of individuals from different communities/tribes/nations/continents/etc. aren’t all that different from one another. Typically one of the arguments for tribalism comes from finding community with people who have the same experiences as you.

It starts with finding things that make us the same, not different.

They’re calling him Don Poorleone, and I love it.

He wants other people to pay instead.

His father bought like $3Million in chips from the Trump’s Castle Casino in Atlantic City when it started going under. Like, Fred Trump Sr. sent a chauffeur with a briefcase full of cash to buy $3M worth of chips, put them in the briefcase, and leave.