Uriel-238 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: The Shell Game Of Fascist Gaslighting

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2025 @ 02:20pm

    In a better timeline we could give them the benefit of the doubt.

    If the world was not facing a plague of crises (including some actual infectious outbreaks) we might want to investigate why people choose fascism over cooperation, turn to state endorsed violence over civil discourse. We could regard disregard of neighbors as a behavioral problem that might be treated with psychiatric care. But we're now in a state in which people are dying due to government failure. Law enforcement with the legal authority to use force has been captured by interests that seek to engage in containment and genocide. We have to triage, to put out fires and render hazards save again. So far, the resistance is still trying to stay within the confines of legality and nonviolence (or at least limited violence), but the social contract has been broken at the federal level. The whole point of a state in the first place is to provide a non-violent alternative for resulting grievances and injustice, and the state has failed in this regard, and is engaging in unjust violence on its own. ICE -- allegedly a branch of law enforcement and the US DHS, is boxing its victims in a corner where they choose between fighting back or permanent detention, possibly forced servitude. No animal, domesticated or otherwise wouldn't fight for their very lives in those circumstances.

  • On the post: Supreme Court Blesses Human Trafficking With No Explanation In Stunning Abandonment Of Rule Of Law

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 24 Jun, 2025 @ 01:56pm

    They WILL come

    The face-eating leopards will come for everyone. Some of us are just higher on the list than the common Lutheran pastor.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 23 Jun, 2025 @ 02:05pm

    Kindness to the stranger is OT

    The essential crime of Sodom and Gomorrah was failure to uplift the stranger, the widow, the impoverished, while hoarding excess.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 23 Jun, 2025 @ 01:57pm

    COBOL works fine

    Mr. Musk just likes to break things for sake of breaking things, sans ideas on making it better. Also if he can exploit the process for more swimming lucre.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2025 @ 10:01pm

    Blue state witchcraft

    I've heard that there have been incidents of heavy glitter-bombing of ICE agents in the field, glitter is notorious for being difficult to clean off. It makes the ICE agents identifiable when they're out of uniform. When I was in San Francisco, and was expected to be armed, I got an anti-riot pepper spray gun (less the enormous canister), and the spray was laced with dayglo red dye developed to be difficult to wash off (so that persons involved in an incident could be identified). It wouldn't be that difficult to customize paint projectiles with something more like India ink than the easy-wash extreme-sports paints.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2025 @ 09:54pm

    SCOTUS lifetime appointments...

    The more vicious part of me wants to see the lifetime appointments of US Supreme Court judges become a liability, but at this point they've made plenty of rulings, each of which have resulted in a preventable body count.

  • On the post: The Shell Game Of Fascist Gaslighting

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2025 @ 02:00pm

    There was always going to be a Trump

    In 2012 there were no viable contenders for the Republican primary. As Steven Colbert noted in The Colbert Report, the GOP got prepared to be resigned to accept Romney as their candidate He was chosen not because he was exciting himself, but he was the least unexciting compared to all the corporatist, family-values Rand fanboys (and -girls) that were offered during the primary. And it was going to stay that way until some Hitler / Mussolini-wannabe cult-of-personality figure popped in to take it all away. Trump just happened to be the right one going down the escalator. This isn't what the GOP wanted. We understand this once they saw their own party transforming into a fascist autocratic movement right before their very eyes, but with Reagan's policies, the conservative intelligentsia knew that is where it was headed, and by George W. Bush, the symptoms were there. In fact, when Trump ran against Hillary, it was noteworthy Obama in his neoliberal wisdom allowed the intelligence state and the surveillance state and the disposition matrix to continue to exist right up to the moment he handed it off to Trump. As frightening as watching the GOP gripe but do nothing to stop it, it was a greater terror to me that the Democrats, the opposition party, continued to build the mechanisms of public oppression for Trump even as they recognize what he was. I doubt it was pure collaboration so much as the same need to cling to power that kept Feinstein and Ginsberg (and keeps Pelosi and McConnell) in office and in power until it is pride from their cold, dead hands. This may be a limit of the species, and is definitely a limit of democracy as it is defined by the Constitution of the United States. Those in power were going to let it fail sooner than they were going to fix it.

  • On the post: The Shell Game Of Fascist Gaslighting

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2025 @ 12:04am

    Stupidity as an energy-saving shortcut

    This correlates with some of my own fringe theories. Exempli gratia the 40 hour work week exhausting all the adults to the point they cannot effectively parent, leaving kids neglected Or the correlation of the public's capacity to engage in politics with rest, rest, recreation and the time to deliberate, otherwise people resent their civic duties. The eight-hour workday and forty-hour workweek (including paid lunch and time off, which got taken away later) by the family breadwinner, was the concession by industrialists to union pressure, and we're noticing now that it's not enough. That people are driven crazy, kids grow up neglected. Heck, Millennials and later don't dare to have aspirations or ambition, and expect to go bankrupt and homeless before they have a chance to retire. Maybe it's because voting King Log is as bad as voting King Heron, if not worse, because you starve to death rather than quickly getting eaten.

  • On the post: The Shell Game Of Fascist Gaslighting

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 20 Jun, 2025 @ 05:03pm

    I'm pointing at the sign again.

    It's time, yet again to point at the sign with Sartre's antisemite quote. TLDR: The fascist, the monarchist, the cultist do not argue in good faith, and readily engage in deception and ridicule when facts turn against them. They start the conversation with no respect or regard for anyone outside their own ranks. Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. -- Jean Paul Sartre Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946

  • On the post: Feds Arrest Yet Another Democrat For The Crime Of Helping Others Under Attack From ICE

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2025 @ 02:34pm

    thug_1; thug_2; thug_3; thug_4

    This picture recently dropped on my images feed. Hoe did a bunch of goons clearly up to no good (and about to get their day ruined by Spider Man) become a normal, expected phenomenon in the US?

  • On the post: Feds Arrest Yet Another Democrat For The Crime Of Helping Others Under Attack From ICE

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2025 @ 02:24pm

    "Crime"

    Americans really need to engage in some introspection as to their moral priorities. Ever since DHS started abducting terrorist suspects and rendering them to black sites in the Aughts, we could no longer count on what is legal to serve to match what is ethically or morally right. (there are also drastic differences in enforcement, often based on race, color, sex, age, religion, etc. and especially wealth or status. That's a whole 'nother topic, and books have been written about it.) Right now the administration regime is treating documentation infractions as major, violent crimes, and treating their abductees worse than we treat our most heinous offenders on death row, so there's also a matter of proportionality of retributive justice. Law has become meaningless in the US. Crime is a buzzword not to speak of those who have committed wrongdoing but those who are in disfavor to the regime, much the way Catholicism or Protestantism could be capital crimes in England, depending on who was king at the time (a phenomenon that informed the US establishment of the wall of separation between church and state, BTW). Police kill people who are not resisting and not armed, and yet that is somehow not a crime In some states, going into a bathroom designated for another sex is a crime. Not long ago, some common sexual activities were crimes (adultery way more than sodomy) Heck, Kim Dotcom committed crimes in the US even though he never was on US soil, and they haven't really been able to establish a specific wrongdoing other than capitalism that other capitalists don't like. And curiously his estate -- in New Zealand -- was raided by US ICE. So our justice system is not merely broken, but failed. Every convict is a political prisoner, an enemy of the state, regardless of what they've done that was immoral or unjust or ethically wrong. And it's about time the people of the US recognize the monumental task of setting it right again.

  • On the post: Feds Arrest Yet Another Democrat For The Crime Of Helping Others Under Attack From ICE

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2025 @ 02:05pm

    If we had the numbers

    ...we could arrest the ICE group (who are not showing identification marks or law enforcement indications) for assault and battery and attempted abduction. Citizens in the US have that power, and we know what ICE is doing is contrary to the Constitution of the United States. ICE agents are not operating by consent but because they have more guns than the rest of us. If twenty-plus citizens stopped a squad of five, it might require some policy changes, even if shots are fired and lives lost on the way.

  • On the post: Feds Arrest Yet Another Democrat For The Crime Of Helping Others Under Attack From ICE

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2025 @ 02:15pm

    Is this how civil war begins

    ICE is acting illegally (or at least immorally) to effect violence (abduction and rendition) on innocent people. Knowing that's what they're doing some people fight back especially since they really don't want to spend the rest of their entire lives in a South American gulag. Violence escalates. Eventually enough officers get deaded to activate the DHS and police state, or enough civilians get deaded to turn armed civilians against the police state. I can't opine what we should do; ICE agents seem super determined to attack people and ruin lives, and for now they have more guns then the community around them is willing to bring to bear.

  • On the post: Yes, The FTC Wants You To Think The Internet Is The Enemy To The Great American Family

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2025 @ 09:25pm

    There are a lot of threats to children and families

    The first ones that come to mind our car-dominated transit system (which allows for high rates of accidents) and poverty / precarity, and our curious disinterest in making sure children are fed and get healthcare. Once every child has a home, a consistent (and non-dysfunctional) family, three squares a day plus snacks and an actual education based on facts and data, then we can start looking at what other things may be corrupting our wee ones. Until then, our society is so severe that I forgive everyone, kids included, of their copes, whether social media or video games or three spliffs a day or heavy narcotics. The world is that terrible that touching grass is not enough. Heck, we may soon be running out of grass to touch.

  • On the post: How The Republican Party Became A Party That Believes The Constitution Only Applies To Its Enemies

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2025 @ 05:32pm

    Um, yeah.

    If you look far enough back in the archives of this blog site, you will find dozens of instances in which forth and fifth amendment protections have been carved out in favor of law enforcement illegally (or unethically) obtaining evidence. Law protects the privilege and makes the unprivileged easy to prosecute. The same can be said of the Constitution of the United States, not because our judges and lawyers are sharp like Cardinal Richelieu, but because they openly opine in favor of the folks they like and against the folks they don't like, often based on skin color, and our means to check them are toothless. In 2025 we are seeing the unlubed natural consequences of letting years of selective enforcement go by. The leopards are out in battalions, and it's face-eating season.

  • On the post: Trump, ICE Have Earned Every Bit Of The Hatred They’re Now Facing

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2025 @ 03:17pm

    "Why isn’t the media talking about..."

    Here: Part 1 and Part 2 of Behind the Bastards: How The Liberal Media Helped Fascism Win which provides an excellent deep dive on the phenomenon. TLDR: MEDIA AGENCIES ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS even liberal or left wing agencies will not report on anything that jeopardizes their own power, and that of the ownership class that, well, owns the newspapers / radio stations / studio buildings, etc. They want your ears, but don't want you to take action.

  • On the post: Trump, ICE Have Earned Every Bit Of The Hatred They’re Now Facing

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2025 @ 02:55pm

    "The best of only two bad options"

    Two party systems are known for turning into a race to the bottom (King Log vs. King Heron). It's a product of First-Past-The-Post election systems (one person = one vote), but in the case of the US, it was intentional to keep the power in the hands of the (slave-owning, plantation) bourgeoisie. It's revealed in other parts of the Constitution of the United States, such as the (defunct) 3/5th rule, the disproportionate power distribution of the Senate and the Electoral College. Because, as Feinstein, McConnell and Pelosi show us as examples, people don't give up power until you pry it from their cold, dead hands. Even the Magna Carta was signed at sword point (several times). We on the left have been holding our nose and voting tactically since Hillary Clinton (if not Bill Clinton), because the DNC is specifically rigged to only allow establishment neoliberals, and force progressives to dine at the kids' table. However we get through the MAGA mess, if we let the neoliberals take power again, we'll end up right back here again, fighting Fascist Autocracy's next (not necessarily final) form while Pete Townshend screams to a guitar sting: Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!

  • On the post: Trump, ICE Have Earned Every Bit Of The Hatred They’re Now Facing

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2025 @ 02:42pm

    A New Argentina!

    It's annoying that we have to Fight elections for our cause The inconvenience—having to get a majority If normal methods of persuasion Fail to win us applause There are other ways of establishing authority -- Evita (1976), ALW & Tim Rice, A New Argentina

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2025 @ 12:34pm

    "Biographical leverage"...

    ...is a cold-war tradecraft term for material usable to coerce a subject to do what you want, e.g. blackmail or extortion.

  • On the post: Palantir Continues To Burnish Its Evil Tech Overlord Reputation By Kicking Journalists Out Of A Tech Conference

    Uriel-238 ( profile ), 12 Jun, 2025 @ 02:23pm

    The hope is that they're acting too fast.

    When the German Sicherheitsdienst detected dissenters (the old fashioned way, using blackmail to recruit informants and spies) they'd wait a while before sabotaging their career, (or just sabotaging their car) and this took enough time so as to draw less attention to the opposition party's run of bad luck. By the time dissenters and people with untoward opinions were being arrested, the water was way too hot for frogs, and the public was used to arrests of alleged enemies of the public. (And they did not speak for they were not one of those people.) In the US, today, our coup d'etat participants are so eager to get on with political arrests and targeting those who might obstruct the president's agenda (Obstructing a political agenda is not illegal in any state) that it's caused alarm even from officials and media agencies that would otherwise be glad to see the regime change, but not like this. It appears a lot of folks who are way into doing the fascism are sickened when they see it up close. Heck even Eichmann and Heydrich got queasy.

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