You can blame the fascism on the literal fascists. They’re backed by the neo-monarchists who have tons of money to spend (and spent it!) converting discontents into more fascists.

Do you want to blame the discontents without a reasonable option who saw their news agencies and social media pointing towards the new Mussolini? There’s millions of them, and they can barely reason to tie their own shoes. The GOP has been banking on them since the 1970s, though the propaganda projects started when great depression living conditions weren’t sweet enough for the proletariat, and FDR created the New Deal to stop communist revolution.

It’s why in the states communism is a word of disparagement when the alternative is monarchism, and capitalism always drifts towards autocracy, then monarchism, and then collapse.

Blame who you want, but ultimately it is a machine running on natural forces. Even in the end of this campaign (when – in retrospect – it was already too late) the media was trying to inform some people (who?) that the comparisons between the Trump campaign and policies, and Hitler’s campaign and policies were very similar, enough to call both one-party autocracy propped up by fascist enemy-within rhetoric.

Nothing to do now but watch everyone get what they bought and paid for.

Because of course it did?

This was super-expected.

And match the red on the poster!

This was actually cultivated in the aughts. George W. Bush endorsed multiple secret units of Christian soldiers from the US Army and USMC to serve as Chosen do perform missions for God, which is why Spiritual Readiness was figured into the CSFF readiness assessment.

Spiritual readiness was about being a Christian Evangelical loyalist (that is the white Christian nationalist movement we’re facing today). Commanders were reassigned in the Obama era, and Spiritual Readiness was revised to become more inclusive (they’d still really rather you believe in some higher power), but the units of commandos for God are still around.

I dunno what happened during Trump or since, but since Flynn is still doing Flynn things, I assume they’re standing back and standing by.

I bet he’d have volunteers, and would feel better if he gave it an actual try.

But he appears too homophobic to kiss a pretty boy that loves him.

So inside Mr. O’Neill’s mind, he feels too femmy to be a Linux Catgirl, and while he hoped becoming a Navy SEAL and even shooting Osama Bin Laden for FBI and for the President of the United States would assure him of his manhood, he still feels his inner princess inside him growing like a kudzu and strangling out his masculinity.

And this is why he, again, a fucking Navy SEAL who has performed real operations for the United States, has to pick on civilians for who they voted for, even though defending that right IS HIS FUCKING JOB AND OATH.

O’Neill is an asshole and a bully, and I pity him for his gender dysmorphia, but there is help out there if he wants it.

The alternative to communism is drift towards monarchy.

< James Bond Opening Boilerplate Sting >

This smacks of the hyperloop, a false product offered to suppress support of other competing products.

Id est, a high-capital entity using their power to suppress competiton for smaller (more sincere) interests.

I feel better about this one, Your prvious offerings have been all complete and pretty compared to my flying spaghetti monsters. To be fair, I’ve been building more for easy dissembly rather than prettiness.

I may soon join your new religion.

Obvously Facebook- and Zuckerberg-mocking AI content must continue until morale improves.

The original thought experiment had to do with playing around with infinity, which is a whole field of mathematics with a lot of crossover. It raises questions like whether we can assume any fixed-length sequence of digits can be found somewhere in the mantissa of a given irrational number (say, π).

In a company as blue-chip as Disney, the discontinuation of access and privileges and security clearance are indicators of imminent repositioning, likely firing if you’ve engaged in mischief (such as voicing your opinion or comparing salaries).

It’s why you give sweet Christmas presents to the awkward guy in HR and invite him to all your socials. Blow him if he’s into it. He’s your intel source regarding who is in danger of discharge, and if the boss doesn’t like you.

This disgruntled guy had to be lower rank than the mailroom if HR wasn’t given notice, and his access was super low priority. No-one cared.

(Yes, I’m bitter.)

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe – not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light – just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don’t imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you’ll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you’re going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham’s Number] = ∞

It’s a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn’t super useful unless you’re dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin’s Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn’t random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

For some reason this guy pings me like Fun Land in Sandman #14 (the Serial Convention chapter). I wonder if he was an inspiration for Gaiman.

Voting for Trump (or for any Republican candidate for elected office) is voting for one-party autocracy. Even if the individual is ethical, they will be pressured into serving the party (or removed for a more loyalist alternative). Not voting for a Democrat when there’s a Republican candidate is not voting against one party autocracy.

Trump is not Hitler. He’s the Secret Hitler of this election. Even if he’s less bright than Hitler and less charismatic than Hitler, he’s fulfilling the same role, and the outcome will be the same, a one-party autocracy propped up by fascist enemy-within rhetoric and a massive deportation effort that will ultimately turn into a massive evacuation effort. (That is, evacuation into mass graves, or even an ash pit).

We are on the precipice. Do not fuck around. Do not think otherwise. Do not let anyone else think otherwise. If Trump wins, the world is going to hold America’s beer while it works to enact a holocaust that dwarfs the Holocaust… unless the resistance is really good (it’s probably not) or the Allies overrun Washington (not in time).

The short tl;dr answer is, we don’t. For me, it’s something I contended with around 2003-2004 when my father stood with most staunch Republicans in advocating for extrajudicial torture of POWs and eventually of civilians including Americans who were mistaken for terrorist agents.

On the other hand, the same event drove me to study moral philosophy so I could explain at length why torture was wrong; he didn’t care, which was the gaze into the abyss moment. I saw who my dad was in the dark.

Cut to 2024, and even if Harris wins (and any coup d’etat attempts are put down) we are a long, long way from the scare being over. This has been reviewed at length by CIA and we’ve heard from experts on civil wars, how they erupt and historically what must happen to prevent social unrest from turning violent to the degree that it overwhelms responders.

The universal panacea is the restoration of power to the people. So that’s not to say we can merely preserve elections in the US. Our election system is corrupt and relies on FPTP voting models (one person, one vote) which means third parties cannot be competitive. It also means the two principal parties don’t have to be very public-serving to stay in power.

This means Harris not only needs a cooperative Congress (and cooperative state populations) but also the impetus to operate against the interests of her party for the good of the public, and we all struggle to discard the One Ring. She’ll also have pressure from establishment politicians, as well as progressives who are not progressive enough to go the distance and let power be diffused to a wider body of persons and interests.

What we can expect are some shorter-term measures, maybe some social safety nets, some relief for people caught in the debt crisis or homeless crisis, even some labor reform so that most of us aren’t one crisis away from homelessness and a ruined life. But this will kick the can down the line, and allow the Republican party (whose only trick now is election subversion and procedural coup d’etat when not violent coup d’etat) to persist as it is (and has been at least since Reagan).

Election reform would force the Republican party to reconsider its far-right-wing position and actually offer a platform worth voting for. But so long as we don’t get that, they still have viable pathways to seizing power.

All this said, some people will come to their senses as the precarity lets up. Some people will realize they can afford to be less afraid, and that a public-serving society is something worth fighting for. But that is a long, and personal process for each of them, and usually they’re pretty repentant when they realize what they had become.

Feds are wrong, or would be if copyright continued to serve its original purpose (according to the Constitution of the United States) to create a robust public domain.

All media should be accessible through public libraries, and arguments by federal courts presumes that the public does not have vested interest in content. It presumes the government isn’t there to serve the public, which raises questions as to why we have government in the first place.

Ubisoft is not a serious game publisher, rather is a racketeering company that uses gaming software as a vehicle for its monetization schemes.

It’s also a sex harassment and assault den for its upper management to prey on its clerical staff, and its HR notoriously covers for them.

I no longer play the Ubisoft games for which I have licenses, and I say this as an old fan of the Far Cry series. No longer.

Ubisoft needs to fail enough to get liquidated and bought out, I expect, by another AAA publisher gone amuck or a private equity management company. In either case, may Ubisoft assets load them down like a neutron star.

In c/196 we had the conversation about the devil being a patron of the arts.