I mean, yeah. My point was that the people who believe in fantastical boogeymen are the most likely to support the people who are the closest to being the actual Antichrist if any of that were real.

Definitely a misdirect from the corporate takeover of everything.

I grew up in a shitty small rural town, but while I was in high school I watched the shitty “mom and pop” stores slowly disappear and the local factory vote against unionization only to be closed a few years after I moved away. You know what immediately moved in to fill the void? Wal-Mart and Dollar General.

My dad was so focused on immigrants taking his job and other insane republican economic talking points that he lost that job when the company decided it wasn’t cost effective to operate in the US anymore.

The graphic design of MAGA will be studied at some point. I think it has the effect of looking like some “Everyman” did it themselves. Who’s to say whether this effect is intentional psyops or just the result of distancing themselves from people who actually practiced and studied an art, trade, or discipline, but this shit worked on a certain slice of the population pre-MAGA, too.

I mean, they already have a rootkit, a few worms, and a half-dozen viruses running in their wetware. Why not go ahead and install a few crypto miners and some assorted malware on their PC?

And then, if you do take into account the Book of Revelations, Nostradamus, various 20th-century evangelical ramblings, and the 1976 historical documentary, The Omen, the people who are most likely candidates for antichrist are Trump, Thiel, Musk, Ellison, etc.

Maybe Thiel is worried about who his father really is.

sanguis bibimus corpus edimus

He conveniently left out that Rader was former Air Force and a devout Christian. That last part is actually how he got caught (by using the church’s PC to write his letters taunting the police and sending them a floppy).

Another thing that separates Pretti and Rader: Dennis Rader is fucking still alive.

No disagreement here. I wasn’t necessarily advocating the idea, but it was interesting to explore it and “try it on” for a while when reading the book. I think there is some value in attempting to steer society in better directions, but disagree with rewriting history or purging culture to do so.

Just finished reading The Dispossessed and was going to comment similarly. It was fantastic read and surprisingly modern considering it was written in the 60s. Some of her contemporaries don’t have the same sort of timeless readability as Le Guin.

The key anarchist takeaways from The Dispossessed are the use of syndicates in lieu of corporate or government structures, no private ownership or equity, and the absence of law, elections, and criminal punishment. Committees exist for public discussion, but the outcome of that discussion is non-binding (although one may find themselves an outcast). Le Guin presents anarchy like libertarianism mixed with socialism: you are free to do as you please, but you are obligated to recognize your role in the social organism.

Le Guin also recognizes that anarchist thought is in some ways extremely foreign to all of our modes of thought, philosophy, and language. So she devises a world where the anarchists invent a new language to correct and remove “egoist” ideas. The society she develops revolted against a hyper-consumerist society, referred to as “propertarians,” and this drives much of the plot and dialogue: what does it mean to not be an egoist while still being human?; what is the limit of personal possession before becoming a propertarian?; what happens when your personal freedom and needs are trampled on by the social organism?; and how long can a non-hierarchical society last when it inevitably creates systems that begin to self-organize into hierarchies and bureaucracies?

The protagonist realizes that any revolution must remain perpetually in a state of revolution lest the people settle into inviolable customs that then calcify into law.

Your heart is in the right place, I think, but FOIA is useless here. FOIA is cool if you want to know what an agency has on file about you (which is usually nothing) or learning the “truth” about JFK, EBEs, and UAPs.

Sarcasm aside, the most important thing to note about FOIA is that agencies handle their own FOIA requests; each agency has a staff (sometimes even a staff of one) for processing FOIA requests. FOIA is also a “devil’s in the details” type of law: you won’t have much luck with vague, open-ended, or ambiguously scoped requests.

Some information and data are exempt FOIA requests, including information about law enforcement activities or investigations, the personnel files or personal details of staff, and anything considered relevant to “national security.”

Even if the information requested is cleared for release, agencies know how to stall. FOIA requests are legally required to be responded to in 20 days or less… unless “the information needs to be closely reviewed and redacted before release,” “we’ve received too many requests for the same information to answer them in a timely manner,” or “our staff are experiencing difficulty locating the specific files that would satisfy the request.” Flooding an agency with FOIA requests for the same document or topic typically makes things worse until the amount requests becomes so high that that agency just dumps them online somewhere.

The last thing I’ll say is that a lot of FOIA requests only get satisfied after a lawsuit.

I’d argue these values are not inherently conservative, even if conservatism reinforces the idea of having those values and attempts to institutionalize some perverse variation of those principles.

While many conservatives and libertarians may profess to be principled, their actions demonstrate that they are full of shit.

I mean, yeah. That’s for the character development and human flaws. Even Jean-Ralphio has some redeemable moments.

If the poop knife existed in modern times, I’m sure that there’s a communal sponge somewhere.

Sorry to read that about your brother. I have similar people in my life and it’s infuriating and depressing to observe.

If you want a positive read to just reframe it in your head, hear me out. People use quotes aspirationally, right? They are summaries of our values or insights into our personalities. Maybe your brother uses that quote because he’s aware that he wants change but is unable to summon the courage. Maybe the conflict between his values and his social circle is wearing him down. Maybe he regrets a bunch of stuff and wants the chance to start over but feels trapped.

You could view your brother’s use of the quote as him being a superficial emotionally stunted dude who misunderstood the premise of the film, or you could view it as something that is meaningful to him, that hints a deeper truth. “I am Jack’s wasted life.”

It’s an issue with being able to identify and assimilate positive traits, I think. Ron is a stoic and self-disciplined which is often read as emotionally repressed unnecessarily strict dad energy. Instead, it should be read as introspection, strong personal accountability, and authenticity and intentionality of thought and action. Ron also isn’t a reactive persona; when something challenges his beliefs, he chops down a tree while he mulls over the idea and decides how he wants to move on from the experience. Without the nuance, it just looks like a dude gets mad and does man stuff with an axe until he cools off.

Their racism is ancillary and it’s not that simple. MAGA exploits several rotten elements in rural American society; racism is just one of them

I think the simplest explanation is that they have been conditioned to hate and fear first and do not consider any person innately equal until that person has proven themselves to be worthy of value. To enter the American south, you walk into a minefield of social faux pas and a mire of shibboleths. You fucked up just by driving in with “Yankee” license plates. Hell, you can fuck up by having the wrong county on your plates (which is a thing in the south). For a group of people who hate anything “woke” or involving critical theory, they are a textbook example of intersectionality; their identity is complex and why they don’t like you is even more complicated.

They have been conditioned to distrust anything they don’t immediately understand, dwell peacefully in contradiction, be selectively empathic, and ignore their own self-interests whenever it does not exclusively benefit them. This is the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” and “my true reward awaits in heaven” crowd. You can’t reason with them because they answer to a higher power and it’s all part of god’s plan. And if you make the mistake of quoting scripture at them, they write you off as a know-it-all who has read the Bible but hasn’t read it with your heart.

They are generationally impoverished, both financially and intellectually. The south suffers from massive brain drain and financially successful people are just those that God has blessed. There’s no charity for those outside of their immediate social circle. There’s no such thing as southern hospitality, just public manners. Bless your heart, they’re talking shit before you walk out the door.

Southern society craves authoritarianism and aristocracy because blind respect for authority and power are deeply rooted in their culture and religion (and that’s exactly what the antebellum south was; that’s their “heritage”). Trump promises to make it all great and lift them back into their rightful place because they all think they will be the plantation master.

Poe’s Law, meet Kafkatrap.

Thanks for the insight and perspective! Motorsports are admittedly not my thing, but I’m pretty sure older dudes buying motorcycles in middle age or retirement is far from a recent trend; it’s a pretty well known stereotype. Hell, Wild Hogs is almost 20 years old at this point. Not that that invalidates what you said about the dangers they pose learning to ride so late.

I’ve seen a lot of younger people in my region riding e-scooters with a seat attachment or electric mopeds.

I have a neighbor that might be entering a mid-life and/or identity crisis phase. A few months back he shows up with a hog and starts tinkering with it in the yard. Pretty soon he has a bunch of motorcycle friends who start showing up to ride and off they go, loudly farting down the street on their bikes.

I’m mostly ambivalent about the entire thing except that he tends to work a late shift, so he doesn’t get started with his hobby riding until 7 or 8 at night. Not late enough to really complain about but also late enough that it can be disruptive. He’s a okay dude and we’ve civilly chatted about the noise before, but I don’t think he thinks his motorcycle counts as noise. I hope he finds what he’s looking for out on the open road.

Good lord, the funniest thing I remember from college German was how easy it was to distract Frau Professorin from her lecture by just mentioning bread.

I’ll take “solutions to non-existent problems” for $500.

I don’t have a snarky term at the ready, but nightmare shades is what comes to mind.

I distrust these companies and the entire ethos surrounding wearable tech so much that I can’t help but imagine that products like AI (or XR) glasses are just the precursor to something even more awful like implantable tech or other cyberpunk-styled body-mods. I wore a smart watch for a while and all it did was teach me to read my texts twice and spam me with notifications. Once I disabled the move/hydrate prompts and the text and email notifications, it became quite useless on its own. With glasses, it will just become another distraction and data harvester.

More than one Silicon Valley tech dude has been outed as a techno-feudalist singularity-obsessed trans-humanist who read speculative sci-fi and came away with the worst possible interpretation. I can’t imagine any way to positively frame these things.