conditional_soup
@conditional_soup@lemm.ee
- Comment on This Cybertruck shaped man is destroying our government 3 hours ago:
That may be, but it does kinda seem like there’s some hard, straight lines under his shirt. Maybe he swallowed a protection vest?
- Comment on This Cybertruck shaped man is destroying our government 3 hours ago:
Came here to say just this.
- Comment on When this post is 3 hours old, lemm.ee will go offline for some brief database maintenance 3 hours ago:
Stalkers, seek shelter immediately, an emission is approaching!
- Comment on I love the future. 1 week ago:
Does anyone else see a limp dicknballs as the logo on the pill?
- Comment on Sorry babe, the US never invested into public transit at the level we were supposed 1 week ago:
Get ready to ride in the bicycle gutter and get yelled at by drivers for, like, existing.
- Comment on Sorry babe, the US never invested into public transit at the level we were supposed 1 week ago:
There is, which is why the bungalow owners bitch endlessly about the skyscrapers ruining the view [of the 12 lane interstate]
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 1 week ago:
Let me speak from experience that there is no such thing as an ironic Nazi. Every single “bro, it’s just a joke lol” is followed by a silent “…unless?”
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 1 week ago:
Uncritical support for this.
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 1 week ago:
The AI image really sends the fucking campiness. It’s hard to imagine that fucking bozo even living to a third term. I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t got sniped by atherosclerosis yet.
- Comment on Is there any hope for Ukraine to survive as an independent state now that trump is desperately wishing for a peace treaty with Russia, even bypassing Ukraine? 1 week ago:
I think we are. If you can think of something awful for us to do, we’re already on our way to doing it. We’re probably a month out from shooting garbage and nuclear waste into orbit on spaceX rockets.
- Comment on Is there any hope for Ukraine to survive as an independent state now that trump is desperately wishing for a peace treaty with Russia, even bypassing Ukraine? 1 week ago:
Probably not, I’m afraid to say. Our government has been compromised, and the republic is dead, we will have no more legitimate elections and it’s likely (imo) that our legislature will soon dissolve. I wish I could say that we were ever the America you were taught about, but it was always a farce. I’m almost to middle age and I’ve never once seen my country try to be the place it tells itself it is. It’s always been a place that beats it’s chest while sitting on the couch, that steps on the weak and the poor to satisfy the rich and the powerful. I’ve always believed we could do better, that we could be the place we tell ourselves we are, but we never choose to do the hard work to be that place.
Though Ukraine will likely persist as an ulcer for the remainder of Putin’s life. The only good news is that we still haven’t cracked immortality, and one day probably quite soon, Putin’s number will be called.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
Okay, here we go
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The US is fucking YUGE. Historically speaking, it’s very, very difficult to keep countries that span huge geographic areas together. There seems to be some fundamental limit of size per population that can be tolerated before your cultural and geographic differences start becoming significant enough to start forming separate identities. The US has like 14 such subregions, and each one has a little different idea of what “America” means to them. A strong single national identity is not the default case here, you’ve got to really work at it or have some big unifying cause, which we no longer have.
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We already have pre-fabricated governments in the form of state governments. State governments tend to be pretty strong, in the sense that they tend to have a whole lot of administrative capacity, much stronger imo than what I believe of European provincial governments. The whole original idea was that the states were mostly independent states joined together under a trade federation and it’s government. Of course, it hasn’t been that for a long time, but that’s the root that we grew up from.
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We have almost no history of state on state violence, and most Americans do share some sense of national identity. Maybe not a strong one anymore, but it’s there. I think most people would be pretty shocked about the idea of going to war with another state.
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This isn’t really an ideological separation, as much as the federal government is just, like, vanishing in a puff of smoke. There’s a lot of states where they’ve depended on the federal government’s administrative capacity to handle stuff, and that’s just going away in a real haphazard, scattershot way. At some point, these states will ask themselves “if we’re handling all this shit ourselves, what the hell are we sending the Fed tax dollars for?”
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- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
Okay, I’m not trying to be shitty with you, I’m actually interested. Why don’t you make your case for when you think the US republic died?
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
X
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
Well, it depends on how you define the USA. You mean the Republic of the United States of America? Yeah, no, that’s dead. It is currently dead. It died when the SCOTUS made the president functionally beyond criminal prosecution, and everyone has just kind of been playing weekend at Bernie’s since then (though the Trump administration is dropping the pretense pretty quickly). Don’t get me wrong, it’s been dying for a long time, but that was the exact moment it was declared dead. No matter what happens, the republic as we knew it is dead and is not coming back. Nobody believes in the constitution anymore; among our leadership there are only either those who are in a hurry to destroy it, or those who are unwilling to defend it. I think a lot of the American populace haven’t believed in the constitution as an effective charter for governance for a while, too. Imo, we’re less than a year from the legislature being dissolved in some fashion of another, unless they just hang on like some ceremonial vestigial organ.
What we get to decide now is what comes next. That’s what nobody’s sure about. Are we going to have a middle-east style theocratic government? Italian fascism? Maybe the military defends the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic and we re-form the republic? German fascism? Neofeudalism? Peaceful balkanization? Hot balkanization? COULD IT BE?! BY GOD, it’s the ghost of Lenin with a steel chair! Or maybe we’ll get something entirely new? It’s frankly impossible to guess while we’re living in it. I think cold balkanization is both the most likely and most optimistic scenario. IN THE MEANWHILE, yeah, you’re still going to see all the window trimmings of the USA; the maps will still say USA, we’ll at least nominally still have the things that make America America (like the constitution still sitting in its fancy protective case, as though the GOP didn’t just wipe Trump’s ass with it), it’ll all look weirdly normal while they make the republic’s corpse do a funny little jig.
- Comment on hexbear.net comically loses its domain name 2 weeks ago:
Isn’t hilarious chaos a Nazi instance?
- Comment on Private Prison CEO on Trump Deportation Surge: “One of the Most Exciting Periods in My Career” 2 weeks ago:
Wow, thanks, I hate this.
- Comment on Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything 2 weeks ago:
Well, yeah, but those costs are for tomorrow’s executive to figure out, we need those profits NOW
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 3 weeks ago:
You know, I’ve got to give their marketing team props for managing to sell a vehicle with the engineering quality of a Saturn to people with more money than sense for a whole ass order of magnitude more than it’s worth.
- Comment on Jeep Introduces Pop-Up Ads That Appear Every Time You Stop 3 weeks ago:
Drivers don:t need to be watching the road, they need to be watching this ad.
- Comment on NASA instructs employees to remove pronouns from all work communications 3 weeks ago:
I’m on the progressive left. At best, it’s treated as a social nicety that we ought to offer each other, because it’s perfectly reasonable to expect functioning adults in a society to be polite. It’s hardly a meat and bone issue for me, and I think you’ll also find that to be true for actual progressive left politicians like Bernie and AOC. Much of the progressive left, despite what Fox or OAN is telling you, is focused on actually fixing economic issues that impact everyone, like the outrageous cost of healthcare.
- Comment on Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
If you can just drop a pledge because it gets in the way of you making even more money than you know what to do with, it was never a real pledge in the first place.
- Comment on Is there any non-zero possibility Musk was not doing a Hitler Salute? 5 weeks ago:
I don’t think so. My case:
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Just at the level of fuckin eyeballing it, the comparisons to how Hitler did it to how Musk did it are pretty damning.
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I asked Germans on Lemmy if Musk would’ve gotten fined if he was anyone else and had done this at an event in Germany, the answer was a confident yes. I expect Germans know it when they see it, and know how not to fall foul of the law, so that’s another good test that says Musk knew what he was doing.
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Last and most damning is when you consider the context of the man himself. Musk has been directly sponsoring and promoting not just right wing but reactionary parties like AfD, MAGA, and whatever Nigel Farage’s fucking circus is called for years. You can also see this in how Twitter’s content is managed. The dude has been putting in lots of very visible work boosting Nazi messaging and actual Nazi politicians/parties. Is it REALLY such a shock that he would, ahem, stop hiding his power level in such a public way after a win like the 2024 election? I don’t think so, and especially not if you accept that Musk believes there’s not going to be another meaningful election. I don’t think the other oligarchs think so either, that’s why they’ve been so quick to fall in line and pay their tribute.
It’s time to face the music. Chat, we might be cooked.
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- Comment on It is what it is 6 months ago:
Yeah, I’ve learned some discretion over the years. I once told a story that dead ass got me sent to therapy.
- Comment on It is what it is 6 months ago:
Me telling an EMS war story that brings the vibe to a crashing halt.
- Comment on Texas judge who bought Tesla stock won’t recuse himself from X v. Media Matters 6 months ago:
I fuck with this energy, let’s get it done!
- Comment on Texas judge who bought Tesla stock won’t recuse himself from X v. Media Matters 6 months ago:
I don’t know if I can; it’s not, well, in my lane as a bicycle/pedestrian committee member. I still show up and advocate for lane narrowing and traffic calming at the city council meetings.
- Comment on Texas judge who bought Tesla stock won’t recuse himself from X v. Media Matters 6 months ago:
I don’t know. Me and class II bike lanes are not in a good place right now. I’m not saying they don’t have their place, but we’ve got them as narrow ass lanes barely big enough to stand in directly next to arterial traffic doing ~40 mph, no buffer, no rumble strips, no flexible bollards, just paint. This is obviously dangerous infrastructure to anyone who isn’t lying to themselves, and it shows in our injury/fatality rates for cyclists.
- Comment on Texas judge who bought Tesla stock won’t recuse himself from X v. Media Matters 6 months ago:
I’m trying to secure wholly separate bike lanes, or at least flexi-posts, anything but a sharrow or a line of paint. Tbh, I dunno how that’ll work with a street sweeper.
- Comment on Texas judge who bought Tesla stock won’t recuse himself from X v. Media Matters 6 months ago:
Day 30 of being fucking bewildered that I, a non-voting member of my city’s bicycle commission, have stricter ethical laws binding me than those for judges and politicians.