AnIndefiniteArticle

He paid for Ukraine’s StarLink connections that he shuts off when Musk feels like it, and the incoming president who will shut off aid when Musk feels like it.

Fantastic resource, thanks for sharing

Good point, they probably focused this press release on the content of this initial dataset.

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Good catch! Thanks for checking the source.

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Yeah, I gave up reading at

it’s a shocking reminder that there are forces outside of the internet that still affect our digital lives.

Take two pieces of string with wooden knobs at the ends and hang them up together.

Put your arm between them and pull down quickly.

Repeat, and notice how a fraction of the time those wooden knobs may wrap around each other and become tied by a knot held by the downward force of your arm until you pull up which you can’t do if you’re hanging.

It’s the fourth amendment, Eric, not the first.

I don’t know if I can just accept that it’s not.

I know a lot of people who will be rightfully outraged if Trump wins. If Trump wins, it will be due to election interference and from stopping people from voting. He may win the electoral college, but is unlikely to win the popular vote. There are many reasons to see a Trump victory as illegitimate. If Trump wins there is a very strong chance of a civil war.

If Harris wins, there may be another Jan 6th-like action. Without Trump leading the MAGA movement, all that organized hate becomes a target for a more competent leader to harness. There is a chance that that might spiral into a larger conflict.

Thank you, and I plan to.

As I said, I have a handful of strong cases to vote for Harris. I also had this one dissenting voice in me that was screaming to get expressed so I could look back at what I said and analyze it. Thanks for analyzing it with me. Doing this in public and with input from others helps me vet my ideas. I don’t have a social network anymore to talk about these things with. So much social cohesion broke down during the Trump years, and it hasn’t grown back well at all.

We don’t live in a unified country, and we need to be willing to say that we are broken so we can fix ourselves.

I’m not an accelerationist, and I’m not calling for civil war.

I just see that it’s coming.

I’m not an accelerationist. I’m a realist.

America is already dead.

A civil war is coming.

2025 will be another 2020 no matter what happens in November.

I don’t want the dead weight of a dead government on the side of democracy. I want the side of democracy to be free to invent something new. I don’t want a broken down old democracy fighting against a modern authoritarian. I want the authoritarians to be saddled with the complacency and inertia of the state. I don’t want the authoritarians to be free to invent something newer and more powerful that can bring our doddering democracy to its knees. Our government is old and has been stripped by Reagan/Bush/Trump. It is a liability to be running it.

People are about to die. A lot of them. I want democracy to have its best chance of coming out on top. That means that the people have to want it.

It kind of did!

In 2017, people got mad and started taking action and taking to the streets before complacency set in. This unrest kept ramping up and took another big jump in 2020. What took the wind out of the sails of people taking action and demanding change was Biden getting elected, allowing most people to fall into complacency while Biden did nothing to fix our problems and instead got us involved in multiple overseas conflicts.

With Trump in office, the people resist. That’s what happened last time, and the people rising up and finding unity through resistance seems to me the only way to overturn America’s broken and indefensible systems. The question is who will be resisting/overthrowing, and what will they institute in their place?

If Harris wins and the Trumpers are overthrowing, the options for outcomes of the ensuing war are the mildly fascist status quo, or the super-fascist usurpers. I don’t have high hopes that many people will stand up to fight in this case.

If Trump wins then those who love democracy and liberty and equality will be the ones who rise up and resist, fighting for the best of these options.

As I said in my first post, this is the only reason that I consider Trump. I have a whole handful of reasons to consider Harris.

Social matters

Did I mention social matters? I mention foreign policy pretty exclusively, with a smattering of climate urgency.

Civil war

I’m pretty sure that’s inevitable in 2025 regardless of who wins. If Trump wins, most Americans will be upset and will resist, more strongly than last time. Even if the democratic party doesn’t want democracy or liberty, many of the people do.

If Harris and the republicans win, the people who want democracy will be on the side of the broken state, fighting a lost cause. If Trump wins, those people will be fighting against the state to build something new.

I’d rather fight for a better system over defending a broken one. I see war and unrest as inevitable.

I don’t think that the system will allow us to change the democratic party, not because the people don’t want it, but because the democratic party won’t allow it while they are in power. The people are NOT represented by any party or any part of our government.

The whole world is already fucked. Trump taking over will only fuck America faster and give the rest of the world a chance to not get fucked by America.

For your optimistic scenario, do we have the time for all of that? Does the middle east? Does the world? Is that even a possible outcome of all this? Or will it all just blow over and we’ll pretend like nothing happened (see four years of Biden) while Harris just doubles down on world annihilation? She’s promising to be a republican, I’m just taking her at her word.

Have you considered that you might end up on the losing side?

If Harris wins, I’m on the losing side, as is anyone who cares about civil liberties or democracy. Voting for Harris is voting to lose with complacency and voting for a position of despair that lasts four more years.

If Trump wins, I have high confidence that I won’t survive the next four years, but at least I’ll be going down fighting, and at least there will be some hope that civil liberties and democracy can be restored in the process. Some hope of rebooting America and to create a nation that values democracy. This is a position of hope. I believe in the American people. We are strong. I would rather see those interested in democracy and human rights unite against the tyrannical government instead of acquiescing to tyranny with a rainbow flag on it.

I want to live in a democracy that promotes liberty. Voting one way has no chance of delivering this, but will be comfortable for me as I watch the destruction the planet. Voting the other way opens up a possibility for democracy to win, even if it’s slim. This position of hope is what I am interested in. I see no path to democracy or liberty through the democratic party. Harris is only promising to double down on W’s policies of American destruction.

Russia, China

I also strongly detest these authoritarian regimes. America’s military spending is orders of magnitude larger than theirs, and America is driving the arms race. Reducing the American military will reduce the need for arms for these countries.

Ukraine has only ever been part of the West when the Ashkenazi Jewish glue acting as transliterators were present in the country. Post nazism and post zionism, the people who could keep Ukraine in the west were removed. As long as the Jews are distracted by their genocidal aspirations instead of going home to defend against Russia, Ukraine is a lost cause.

China and Russia both have disastrous policies in central Asia. Ukraine and Taiwan are small fish. Central Asia is the most sensitive ecological and cultural target of Chinese and Russian interference. The US does not care to protect this region because there is no oil. If America were actually providing a challenge to China and Russia where it matters, I might view things differently. I’d love to see a plan to save the Aral sea and central-asian ethnic populations such as the Uyghurs.

That poll is about opinions on the US’s role, and says nothing about Israel.

It’s an absolutely bonkers result considering the US’s decades of destabilizing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in other countries like Yemen and Syria, alliance/support of terrorist states like Saudi Arabia and Israel, and imperial/extractive attitude that has been the primary force destabilizing the region in my lifetime.

The idea that ANYONE can look at the middle east and have a positive view of America’s role is disgusting. America’s disastrous 21st century foreign policy is the primary reason that the entire world has become so destabilized. America is a terrorist state and the US military machine is the single biggest threat to human survival. Stopping the US at all costs is the most important thing that we can do to protect the biological experiment of the current ecosystem upon which we depend.

The only reason I am considering voting for Trump in the fall (compared to the handful of reasons why I am considering Harris) is that four more years of chaos may finally destroy the American War Machine and the disaster that is American foreign policy.

Four more years of Trump directly puts my life in danger, but if it leads to this country self-destructing I’m personally willing to make that sacrifice. Anything to cripple our criminal war machine. What good are our rights and liberties if the depend on a war machine that is willing to risk the habitability of our planet? If America collapses, with it will fall the major fuel of the arms race. If the leopards have to eat my face for my country to finally get put in its place, I’ll proudly try to pet the kitty.

Ideally, I want America to be a functional democracy that respects and promotes civil rights and liberties around the globe. I have never had the option to vote for such an America. In my lifetime I have never seen America take actions that imply that these are the values of our government. The options are to vote for the competent criminal who will directly and purposefully undermine the habitability of our planet, or the incompetent one who may cause more damage in the short-term due to his bumbling but may be better in the long run by removing America’s destructive influence on the world’s stage as we turn inwards to fight a civil war. Maybe a civil war will cause us to reassert what we claim are our values, and I’ll finally live in a country I can respect,

I’m pretty genuinely torn in this election, because I’m willing to sacrifice my personal safety for what I see as a net positive in the world in the long run. I’d rather be hopeful that we have a path to fix America. I’d rather be hopeful that America could be a country that promotes democracy and civil liberties. America as it stands is not a democracy, and we have no liberty. America is dead. Do we keep voting for the parasites, or do we vote for the incinerator to protect others?

While this is true, we should also remember that old growth forest, not tree plantations, are the most efficient at sequestering carbon and filtering/storing water.

Just because the timber industry is has been adopting renewable aspects, doesn’t justify expanding it recklessly. Reducing demand and recycling as much paper as possible is still a key part of keeping our usage sustainable. Even if the trees grow back, there is still energy being lost to harvesting and processing. Tree falls are a major source of carbon sequestration in forests, which enrich the soil. If the trees are being harvested, that piece of the local cycle stops. I try to vary the locations that I collect kindling wood in my back woods so as not to deplete any area.

Trees are the most visible and obvious carbon sink. You can watch a tree grow over a few years by literally sucking carbon out of thin air. I live in a bog where the trees all fall down after a few years. Quite a few come down every windy season. You can see how they shape the landscape, dam waterflow, and turn into soil mounds. The dammed water helps to trap more plant matter and sequester more carbon. Removing the trees from this ecosystem by harvesting would interrupt this process. This process maintains the soil fertility. The trees still grow back for now, but our lack of consideration for soil health and for soil as a carbon sink reminds me of our attitude towards conventional industrial agriculture. If we keep treating the soil like this, will the trees keep growing back in 50 years without requiring artificial fertilizers and water filtration to replace the trees we extract?

Never have I ever seen Rocky Horror Picture Show, and multiple people have told me that I should in the past few weeks.