Random Dent

Back when the Queen was still alive, Stephen Fry described her role as being “as if Uncle Sam was a real person.” Meaning, being a sort of personification of the country without actually holding any real power over it. I’m not a huge fan of the British monarchy, but if we have to have one I’m at least glad it’s limited to being essentially a powerless tourist attraction.

It sucks that we all have to live through it, but I feel like the current times in the US are a really interesting test of the sort of limits of democracy. By that I mean, what happens if the majority of the population just willingly elects the worst person they can find, and at the same time every check, balance, rule and tradition that everyone assumed would keep things on the rails just… turn out to be kind of bullshit because nobody is willing to enforce them?

It raises all sorts of weird questions, like at a certain point is it okay to overrule democracy in some way to protect the country and the people, even if the majority seem to want to just run the bus off a cliff? And what about the people who didn’t vote for this? Are they expected to just go down with ship or have to leave their home country altogether? An informed and engaged populace is vital to a healthy democracy, but what if enough people are uninformed/propagandized enough that they just willing take down the whole country? Does the rest of the world just let it implode?

I have no real answers to these questions, but I’d love to be studying this whole situation from like 100 years after it’s all over.

Also even “Today” is not a happy song lol. From Wikipedia:

After the release and minor success of the band’s debut album, Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins were being hyped as “the next Nirvana”. However, the band was experiencing several difficulties at the time. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was undergoing an increasingly severe addiction to heroin; James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky had recently broken up their romantic relationship; and Billy Corgan had become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide and plagued by writer’s block. Corgan recalled that “after the first album, I became completely suicidal. It was an eight-month depression, give or take a month, and I was pretty suicidal for about two or three months.”

…

The dark, ironic lyrics of “Today”, describing a day when Corgan was feeling depressed and suicidal, contrast with the instrumentation. Michael Snyder of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the song is “downright pretty as rock ballads go” but that “Corgan manages to convey the exhilaration and tragic release he seeks.” Corgan told Rolling Stone that “I was really suicidal … I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can’t get any worse.” Corgan later compared writing the lyrics of “Today” and “Disarm” to “ripping [his] guts out”.

Yeah that’s honestly the main thing for me too. It’s $120 Canadian for the Deluxe version. My price point is like… $30, especially since by all accounts it’s not even finished.

I wonder if some sort of “Dead Man’s Switch” might be an appropriate solution for something like this? IIRC there are services that will send out messages to certain people if you don’t log in for a set amount of time, so maybe something like that could be set up to email friends/family/a lawyer/the consulate of your home country or whoever in case you get snatched?

It probably won’t be able to tell them where you are or what exactly happened obviously, but it could at least let people know something’s up.

I feel like the “getting into privacy” journey for a lot of people tends to look like a bell curve - you start off with a few apps and minor tweaks to protect you from the worst online privacy invasions, and then it gradually builds and builds until you become the sort of person that has all their cat pictures on an air-gapped encrypted server hidden in a cupboard somewhere while you use SearX to find the best mask that will confuse facial recognition cameras, and then after a while you break through and just go back to using a few apps and tweaks to protect from the worst of it again.

• Does nazi salute multiple times at presidential inauguration and instead of apologising…
• Makes a series of nazi-related jokes
• Makes a speech at a far-right rally in Germany
• Retweets that “Hitler didn’t murder millions of people”
• Is apparently shocked that people are angry at him now.

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Someone will install Doom on you and post it on the internet

I suppose it’s just like most drug addicts, you don’t really choose what you get addicted to or when, something just sort of gets its hooks into you at some point and that’s it.

Plus if you factor in having essentially no boundaries on your life (ie infinite money and nobody to tell you no or stop you doing anything, being more-or-less above the law, access to high-quality drugs and world-class healthcare) you can probably go on doing stuff like that pretty much indefinitely. IIRC that’s how Keith Richards said he was able to go on doing drugs for so long - he was loaded so he could always get the good stuff that wasn’t mixed with anything.

Yeah I mean, water and oxygen can both kill you in high enough amounts.

Thinking about it, whoever Elon’s dealer is probably has a pretty sweet gig as far as drug dealing goes. They’ve got someone on the hook who is the magical combination of being an addict, has infinite wealth, doesn’t know the value of anything, and is a huge asshole so they probably don’t even feel bad about exploiting them lol.

I’m not American. but it always seems to me like the Democrats immediately tie themselves in knots trying to meet the Republicans halfway, when everyone knows they have no intention of budging an inch.

It’s like if two people share a meal, one person goes “Should we split this bill 50/50” and the other one just says “No fuck you, you pay 100%.” Then the first person, instead of telling them to fuck off, says “Okay I’ll pay 75%, how’s that?” and the other one just refuses until they eventually pay about 5%, then complain about it for the next year and tell they first person that they still owe them for the 5% they paid.

Then the first person invites them for dinner again.

It’s like a regular nuclear reactor, except it’s run by people who don’t know anything about nuclear reactors, the waste is dumped wherever without consequence, and the power output is only used to run an AI and mine cryptos.

Imagine if the future of your country and the lives of millions of people who live there all hinged on you having to fly half way around the world and be filmed trying to be polite to two gibbering morons, and not even in your first language.

Mad respect to Zelenskyy for keeping it together as well as he did TBH.

As a person from Europe living in Canada, I’d say it’s not that we hate Americans, we know there are lots of nice people there and a good chunk of you hate Trump as much as we do. But unfortunately we just kind of have to treat America the country as a hostile nation right now. Given that the US government is directly threatening Canada and actively betraying Europe, there’s not much choice. It just is what it is.

Disclaimer: I don’t speak for all Canadians and Europeans obviously, there are some Trumpy people in Canada and Europe too for some fucking reason. But amongst the people I’ve spoken to about it, that seems to be the general vibe.

Brit here. It’s always been like this, at least for my whole lifetime. I remember in the 90s they were trying to get biometric ID cards going with people’s fingerprints and retina scans on them, and the government has been pretty consistent with trying to undermine encryption, harvest everyone’s metadata etc. Best I can tell, we seem to be the testing ground for any Orwellian nonsense that gets dreamed up, before it gets shipped out to the States and other places.

Presumably his companies must just run themselves, because we seem to be expected to believe that he’s running a rocket ship company, an electric car company, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, moon-lighting as the de facto President of the United States, while also dicking around on Twitter all day long and being one of the world’s #1 gamers and parenting like 15 children or whatever it’s supposed to be now. (Or at least, the ones that are still talking to him I guess.)

Yeah even if they did actually repeal it, which they won’t, it’s really closing the stable door after the horse has bolted at this point IMO.

Because with the current administration, you can say it’s illegal to accept money from so-and-so, and they’ll just go “fuck you” and do it anyway and nobody will will stop them or bring consequences, so … yeah. This is kind of doing time, not talking time.

As someone currently living in Canada, the US is badly fucking up a lot of it’s international relations too. I’ve heard several people here say that even if if the US unfucks itself right away (which it won’t), it’s still going to be a long time before things will be right again.

You don’t go around threatening neighbours and allies like this and then expect to be able to just walk it back overnight.