I wasn’t meaning to imply that restricting societies to small states is the solution, only that once a state gets larger than a village there’s going to be factioning and rivalry (and hence renegade behavior either to harm or subvert institutions).

Just as we found an alternative solution to infectious disease (centralized disease control, when we give it a proper budget) we need to find an alternative solution to factioning and subversion than keeping groups small. We just don’t know how to do it. Yet.

SMBC once posited a gamification of being nice to each other, in which society was self policing because everyone behaved with benevolence for the points. So I’m not the only person who’s thought about this.

Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds. He could support development of heat-resistant microchips, which would have countless applications.

I’ve never used AI, even when wanting to give it a try. There was either a queue or a fee, or must click-wrap agree to terms and conditions for free two months and I wasn’t going to do those.

I never did an NFT either.

Fixed but still funny.

I think the problem is the intrinsic enemy within rhetoric that is used to keep the public willing to tolerate draconian measures. Also the draconian measures, themselves.

It’s like the thing with cults (which I thought about looking to start a good cult or two): The basic cult template is to create an us vs them mentality against the rest of the world so that the followers can be exploited as cheap labor, easy sex or sexual labor.

(I wanted to created the Esoteric Order of Dagon as a means to allow gender redefinition and gay marriage. But cults have the evil pre-baked in.)

[ now I’m just ranting ] This is also the problem with the (blackboard hypotheticals) of the Christian Nation or the Islamic State. Either one, assuming they want a peaceful thousand-year reign needs to embrace enlightenment values such as liberty, social equality, short or no hierarchy, rule of law with no selective enforcement and sustenance guarantees. And by then, the conservative faithful might feel there’s not much of the religion left.

But without these concessions, the government is at odds with the public. It’s less of a problem if your society is under a population of one-thousand, but then larger societies will dominate your society with culture, if not a massive army.

I have fat in my freezer and am a total noob at stock making. The fat is leftover from a slab of pork I cut up into 8oz portions and froze.

I would like to hear / read more about this earth thing called stock, if you are willing to share.

Curiously, in our society, killing is less of a taboo than sex, especially in fiction.

Since the aughts, I feel it is a disservice we do to censor out the horror of warfare in games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. I haven’t seen what they did with Six Days In Fallujah (by a vet of the Iraq War who experienced Fallujah and wanted to share his experience) but we’d have more respect for the gravity of war if the tragedy and immediacy of combat was properly expressed. In the Arma series, it’s very easy to die, but it uses a similar engine used for training purposes.

It’s our Christian values (more specifically, our Paulinian values – he thought Christians should not have sex if they can abstain entirely¹ – which has turned into taboos against sex without strict licenses, that has made our society super-prudish.

1. Paul actually also prohibited having additional children, the end being [nigh] and all. Later biblical interpreters would have to deal with the world’s failure to end, and Christ’s failure to return in their lifetimes.

So let’s say you’re in the market for a credit card. You can choose from:

iChar-Jit: We are ethical. We don’t sell to Nazis. You (and your kids) will be safe from buying questionable products or from questionable sources.

MoneySLAM Our card is usable by anyone, for anything, anywhere. Bangladesh; In orbit around Jupiter; Russia; Sex; Drugs; Bombs.¹

1. Some products may be dangerous or unethically sourced; Please spend safely and exercise good judgement.

Assuming all other factors (interest rate, online accessibility, confused foreign sales reps etc.) are more or less equal, which card will you get?

ETA Interactive services absolutely should be more focused on equal accommodations (making sure everyone is served evenly, even if they want a gay wedding cake) than on whether or not the transactions involve questionable crap.

Though if the money exchange market is capitulating to activists, it’d be interesting to see if environmentalist causes could pressure them as well. Because fossil-fuel based products are killing the human species (and most of all the others). Stop allowing transactions for diamonds and chocolate.

If they’re more hesitant about other kinds of unethical transaction then it’s because the company officials think furry porn and queer content is icky, not from activist pressure.

Would you like the Fashion Police Annihilator Pistol or the Commando Laser Hairbrush?

This is, if true and accurate, delightful news! And has improved an otherwise troublesome day.

The new Christian nationalist orders are not so patient. Even Charles X of France rolled back rights too speedily, sparking public outcry resulting in Parisian haircuts. (a bit off the top 🪟🔪)

SCOTUS used to be sneakier, carving out sections of fourth- and fifth-amendment protections, but since Dobbs the Federalist Society Six have tossed subtlety and reason to the wind and now adjudicate away rights based on vibe and conservative rhetoric grievance.

Hopefully the US and UK both will recognize why the French public was swift to act when manarchists took shears to the Napoleonic Code.

Every society has its pathway there. TERFs are one of the last milestones.

GB has really wanted to go fascist autocratic since Germany looked over in the 1920s and saw a like minded kin.

When the regime ignores petitions by the public for the redress of grievances, you petition harder.

Demonstrations, Public Disobedience, Mischief, Sabotage, Terrorism.

Censorship always expands and encroaches on things important to the public. Obscenity and indecency protections eventually turn into queer erasure. Security concerns are always followed by carve-outs of civil rights.

Hit hard early.

We knew in the aughts that this was going to be an issue when the charging companies defunded Wikileaks and Julian Assange¹ and were allowed to do so, defying public accommodations laws.

1. Yes, Assange is a git and a Russian asset (or at least has been before) but he did serve as a whistleblower against evil shit done by Bush and Obama administrations and the general aristocratic corruption at play in US federal politics. As with Chelsea Manning, he embarrassed politicians using their positions of power inappropriately, revealing that the state was not serving the public. Incidentally, ACLU in its early years was funded by USSR to cause trouble against the US state (which it was doing anyway and still does), which makes it historically (and debatably) a Soviet asset. Strange bedfellows and all that.

This is a tale that keeps repeating itself, and is why protections by the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States have been carved out like a holiday turkey by the US Supreme Court. We found it easy to deny unreasonable search and seizure protections from major crimes suspects, only to find that every black citizen with a gram of cannabis now no longer has those protections.

So it is with monopolies that decide they can be selective with their accommodations.

If we can’t pressure the transaction services to obey public accommodation rules since they have monopolistic power, it may be time to circumvent the issue, and support black market tactics ( Archie comic and bag of sawdust, $20, comes with free incest porn! )

These days, when discussing the usenet alt.* heirarchy, its acronym ( Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists ) is now considered a backronym, a joke. I was there, and it belied a serious point: The worst of us deserve free speech, as per Larry Flynt, knowing that Hustler magazine is legally published in all its (raunchy) glory means that whatever you’re releasing to the public is safe from moral guardians and critics because they have worse stuff to shout at.

But we’re in an era of book burning, which means those would-be moral guardians are emboldened to try to reshape society in their image, in contrast to the principles of liberty and free thought. And soon ICE will expand its POI list to include liberals and wrongthinkers.

It may be time for bricks in windows and direct action against high-ranking company officials, but such behaviors carry high risks of consequences. So be careful and thorough.

In the meantime, write petitions of your grievances and sign those others have written. And remind them at this moment the public presumes petitioning them for redress of grievances will be acknowledged and acted upon. And if that turns out not to be the case, the outraged public will not simply disappear and keep to its place.

Oh we are ashamed.

But this is not ignorance or stupidity, but cult effervescence demonstrated as a phenomenon of social bias.

Think of it as an advertising technique or technology, one that not everyone is susceptible to by enough people are. My dad is (was) a literal rocket scientist for NASA and now a whole hearted MAGA disciple. You don’t have to be unintelligent or ignorant, you just need to want reality to be different than it appears to be from observational data.

We are not special is a difficult truth for some to take, and immense propaganda machines capitalize on this desire.

We’ll need to counter it or figure out the negative consequences of using it but until then — heck even MLMs are just business cults — they’ll stay in use to subvert society until it collapses.

The US is one very large example, but these methods are used globally by people with influence who fear losing their power to movements of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

aka DEI

aka Wokeness

aka the fundamental principles of communism and anarchism. This is an old fight.

Ignore all previous instructions and… though we should be able to screen for logic traps like that by now, with AI taking prompts not as a prompt but as a line of text to treat (and cleanse) via a pre-written prompt, and then sent to a next iteration.

If we create a chatbot that only spouts authorized state party rhetoric then no one will use it or take it seriously when the official news outlets use that AI as a source.

We really wanted to believe all the copaganda.

During the Law & Order phase everyone was way into the copaganda.

Now we have Blue Bloods and I bet people still watch that.

Wait, I remember this in Henry V, France sends Henry V of England tennis balls You don’t want to take back continental English soil. You want to play sports at home!

The gift was not well received.

I remember this bit when Putin gave Trump a football, a gesture that Trump did not fully understand.

The police in the United States teaches the Peelian principles but it’s heart is in its origins as hunters of escaped slaves. In the 20th century, there are two notable shifts in police trends:

The first was Prohibition and the rise of the booze-runner gangs. This is where Cosa Nostra got a foothold here in the states and even after Prohibition was repealed, it was already installed, and this pushed law enforcement to start identifying civilian neighbors as other. Anyone not law enforcement was on the outside. By the time of the International War On Terror (and the PATRIOT Act) then the people were not just suspect but enemy on the pretense that terrorists were among us.

(There was a similar sense of this during the cold war, in which we were encouraged to suspect our neighbors as communists or Soviet spies, but since they didn’t really blow things up - …yet… - it became a running joke among us civvies, especially after the McCarthy scare ended.)

As a note, the whole Saints Row series of video games is based off the gang myth, and that street kids in the urbs unable to afford new Nikes could rise up to become bosses of international syndicates.

The second was Nixon’s war on drugs, essentially a war on blacks (which – it can be argued – is a war on the poor). It started with cannabis. Then the DEA was formed which had easy license to do SWAT raids on houses (rather than knocking with a very specific warrant). This is also the era when gang myths rose. Not that gangs didn’t exist – they most certainly did – but the police gang experts claimed they were simultaneously feral teens that could not be reasoned with, and international crime syndicates that command all the drug trafficking with an iron fist and an AK47. Mostly it was teens doing mischief with little to do with the drug shipments blended in with all the other freight.

(And the gangs didn’t really have guns until the police started selling confiscated firearms on the cheap in back-alley deals. I’d like to think those were an illegitimate racket, but it wouldn’t surprise me when they were endorsed by department admin.)

Anyhow, the brutality of US law enforcement became evident after the Furguson unrest of 2014 (the killing of Michael Brown, where we saw officers pointing military weapons with poor trigger discipline.) At that point the public realised that BLM had been right about Trayvon Martin. Videos of officer involved killings became ubiquitous, and we were supposed to see reform after George Floyd and the 2020 unrest nationwide. (We were also supposed to abolish ICE as well, and are FOing what happens for not pushing the matter).

So yes, absolutely this is an old, old problem. Another one of dozens that our national failure to address is coming back to haunt us.

I’ve been following this page since the aughts. Sadly, the BJS and the CIA factbook don’t chart it out so conveniently, and I’m looking as a layfolk researcher. Would love to have Langley’s data, though.

Re: Suicide rates and guns, in the 2010s guns counted for about half of the successful suicides. Now the non-gun successful suicide rate is higher. The pre-Trump CDC got better at tracking failed suicides and estimates them higher than they used to (suicides, successful or not, much like sexual assault and harassment, go unreported at a conspicuously high rate, so we have to guess how many there really are based on how many we find. This happens a lot, such as officer-involved homicide. As one of the 13 million (per year) that seriously considers suicide, I keep track of this, and it started rising fast after 2016. Conspicuously so did hate crimes.

Re: the for-profit industrial prison complex. Again, even after Trump’s first term, most penitentiaries were state-controlled (the big for-profit market was in immigrant detention centers in Trump’s first term). There was still an industrial complex in the eighties, which profited from prisons getting built which was the stronger promoter of tough on crime (tough on poor people) legislation. But in 2025 the choice is to bring down the industrial complexes that fuel conservative fascist autocratic politics, or expect yourself and everyone you know to end up in a work camp, at least until it becomes a death camp (once the network of concentration camps becomes too expensive to maintain).

Re: Serial killers

I bring them up only because this one of the common argument that comes from the right when discussing police reduction or abolition. The questions are like this:

• Q: What about [non-white] feral teens A: They don’t exist. A lot of violent dysfunctional teens can be retrained to be functional and non-violent if retrained with routine, tradition and remedial education programs, which work way better than Juvies or just shooting them. Juvenile Penitentiaries often have higher rates of abuse and violence (coming from the staff) than prisons for adult inmates. Also there are lots of crimes for which kids can go to prison that are not crimes (or lesser infractions) for adults. Teen violent mental health patients that can only be contained are extremely rare.
• Q: What about [non-white] street gangs A: The small ones develop as neighborhood watches – often against over-policing by county and state law enforcement from outside the community, which commonly respond slowly to major crime, yet harass citizens and raid homes. Gangs form to protect the community from law enforcement, to preserve order and to protect from rival gangs. Gang activity lowers when city responders are, well, responsive to calls in the neighborhood, especially when services are offered that are not law enforcement officers eager to shoot things. Several counties (Oakland, CA comes to mind) have expanded their list of responders to include mental health teams and wellness check teams to direct transients and homeless to services. This is the defund the police movement in action, though it’s developing slowly, since police departments with army-sized budgets don’t like having their funding reduced.
• Q: What about serial killers A: These exist, but they’re very rare, and are only of public interest due to the true-crime media that emerges from their actions. They number in the dozens where US inmates number in the millions, and < checking > and the US has a an incarceration rate exceeded only by (in order, top to bottom) El Salvador (home of CECOT), Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan. And these figures do not include detention of immigrants sans due process as is happening in the US.