Uriel238 [all pronouns]

KOSA has been heavily criticized by members of the “Don’t Delete Art” (DDA) movement, including American Civil Liberties Union, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, libertarian magazine Reason, and anti-abortion group Students for Life.

That presents a good websearch lists, if you want to know how this will negatively affect the internet and the lives of children.

There’s a petition you can sign here.

Tribalism makes people really stupid.

The US is also suffering from a low fertility rate, at 1.79 (population replacement rate is 2.1), which we made up for in the 20th century by lots of immigration.

(This is one of the factors that informs the great replacement myth, as non-whites approach outnumbering whites in the US. A vocal minority sees this as a bad thing, especially since whites tend to vote Republican and Blacks tend to vote Democrat).

I find it odd and fascinating that the ownership class is terrified by the notion of a lowering population – babies allegedly grow up to be workers after all – but are not willing to pass policy to support child rearing, and depend entirely on tradwife propaganda and restricting contraception access and abortion access.

It’s especially a problem since our economy is based entirely on growth, with lots of young people providing support for elders.

The US is not unique with this problem. South Korea, Japan and Italy (actually the whole EU) also have low rates and are trying to implement changes to improve fertility, and so far to little effect.

This is a problem I struggle with philosophically. I have lived in the US with a degree of privilege and I feel the price for that should include knowing how the proverbial sausage is made, that is, knowing all the crap that is being done to allow me to live in (meager) comfort.

It’s Poor Things cranked up to eleven. The British empire is holding the beer of the American one. It’s just too much.

The continual rush of news, propelled by the addictive properties of the YouTube algo, have driven me quite mad, albeit, I suffer from behavioral health problems already. I haven’t found a balance to this.

We are learning as a species that public relations (messaging, propaganda, whatever) is effective, and when the ownership class can put trillions into controlling the masses, it works.

I’d like to think there’s a counter for it, but the worker class seems to be willing to suffer a lot of misery so long as someone else is suffering more than they are.

To be fair, I’m not sure human beings are self aware / conscious beyond the pedestrian meaning of these terms in psychology.

The question is whether the far-right propaganda machine is effective, and can mask the affordability crisis, the disastrous elective war, the blatant corruption with hatred and male grievance. The machine has really drilled home that you’re a communist and effeminate if you dare vote against the godhead, even if doing so is in your own best interest or in the interest of accountability.

A lot more people are going to have to suffer and die before the revolution turns violent. And yet, if a non-violent revolution gains any ground, the ownership class will be happy to resort to violence to defend their wealth and power.

There is definitely a difference between the one that wants to see a neoliberal state continue and the one that wants to dismantle the system for a oligarch-run autocracy.

When it comes to the neoliberals, at least their opinions can evolve under pressure.

ETA: I came across this take from Jamelle Bouie, It’s Not Both Sides. It Never Was.

I think that if Trump were personally responsible for dooming humanity, he’d see that as a win.

Yeah, the birth rate is tanking mostly because Zoomers are not bothering to date at all, let alone having sex and risking pregnancy. They are the generation of abstinence that purity culture always wanted.

It doesn’t help that it costs $200 for a traditional date (dinner and a show), and that they have no hope for an actual future, such as home ownership, retirement or continuing to survive in a stable society.

The ongoing spectre is the black maternal mortality rate, at 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births (2023 figures from CDC) compared to white (14.5), Asian (10.7) and Hispanic (12.4).

I don’t have numbers for 2024-2026 but can only imagine it’s gotten worse and more disproportional as access to maternity healthcare deteriorates further in the US.

Compared to the rest of the industrialized world, the US sucks when it comes to maternity mortality and infant mortality.

Verifying you have a phone doesn’t verify that you’re human.

December 7, 1941.

How to tell the techs you’re lying without telling the client

So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.

This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.

I posted more lenthy comments on the other communities. Here I’ll say this:

When it comes to backdoors to security, there are no good guys. Zero.

Governments have long wanted backdoors on secure private communication, and so long as we have an ownership class, they always will.

And backdoors will always be more useful to hackers, industrial spies and terrorists than they are these departments of state looking to ensure national security (or watch for proletariat unrest. We’re already pissed.)

And the private sector will always route around these backdoors, possibly by modding the client or offering new services that are still secure.

States should get used to disappointment. Investigation bureaus should prepare for going dark. Once upon a time they had to rely on detective work rather than asking Google whose phones were near the incident or what web-surfers were asking questions about the circumstances pre-hoc.

No, I’m saying the species as a whole is failing because 77 million people could be simultaneously fooled into voting against their own better interests. It shows that democracy can always be subverted. People, brilliant rocket scientists, in the case of my own father, can be tricked by demagogy into backing malicious despots and kleptocrats, and the plutocrats and oligarchs can afford to find and hire them.

Careening towards more than one imminent great filter, it’s going to take some miracles of innovation to successfully navigate them, and more divine providence in sociopolitical theory to reorganize people into some sort of community-focused government system that resists subversion by those who seek power. So while we’re not completely fucked, we’re absolutely playing long odds.

Granted, not all is completely lost. Homo Erectus went through phases where their species was reduced to less than ten thousand, and they had to suffer through a harsh epoch of millennia before recovering and populating the world until they were weeded out by competing cousin species. We may still survive in small, meager tribes, but all this culture is going to be lost, ground into the geological record.

We may get lucky, but that is not to say we can evade catastrophe at this time (not without extra-terrestrial intervention or other deus-ex-machina techological development that its inventor doesn’t try to restrict and license), but a tenth of our population might survive, and every day we do nothing, or stay subjugated to far-right efforts to cling to power, is a day that more of us are doomed to perish, or rather fewer that our world will be able to sustain, while we figure out how to migrate offworld.

77 million people voting for an autocrat is a symptom of a greater problem, one that has plenty of other symptoms, and has shown us we are just not foresighted enough to act early; we can only be rational with effort, and are otherwise prone to emotion and fixed action patterns. It’s easier to blame the weirdos and marginalized in a society, than to recognize class conflicts, or acknowledge the wealthy fuck the rest of us over to retain their wealth and power.

Feel free to provide evidence that I’m wrong. I often present harsh reality as I understand it with hopes that someone knows a development I don’t. And sometimes that even works! But for now, we have to face the dildo of consequences unlubed.

You think political illiteracy is an epidemic only of white European descendants?

When 77 million people do the thing, you can’t really blame it on character. At that point it’s a failure of the species. Don’t worry, we won’t be plaguing the world for too much longer.