GraniteM @ GraniteM @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.

Why is dark humor like food?

Because not everyone gets it.

It's fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I'm not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.

He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:

The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. "We ignored Hitler," he said. "We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all."

They thought of the government as "They." The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.

He believed in rationally-considered governance:

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don't find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:

Of what use, then, are the American Communists?

They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.

Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.

Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.

All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction... you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein's fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.

Red Cross

The cholla cactus:

That's fantastic. Hope that gets forwarded to that community where a fan creation can get an official release.

Counterpoint

I was watching Labyrinth on a loop as a young boy, and I thought David Bowie was awesome, but I turned out... more or less straight. Mostly. Pretty much. I mean, of course Bowie is gorgeous, I'm not an idiot.

https://youtu.be/yGe7p98Wagg

I'm so fucking sick of people complaining about what the Democrats should have done years ago when the Republicans have been actively disassembling this country for my entire adult life, and are really getting down to the "rip out the wiring and sell it for scrap copper" phase.

And the agent is wearing clearly labeled government insignia distinguishing him from just some random intruder in the maternity ward.

Oh no!

With size adjusted to account for population! It becomes useless as a map, but significantly more illustrative of the political realities.

The US 2020 Presidential Election Cartogram:

Oh, and here's 2024

a goofy mascot that keeps doing weird things.

Sounds like exactly what a king should be.

They're working on that.

You can always track further back to earlier causes, but I think that we took a real hard turn for the worse in this country when Ford pardoned Nixon and an angry mob didn't rend Richard the Treacherous limb from limb. If the powers that be can just dispense Get Out Of Jail Free cards to their buddies and the people are unwilling or unable to fight back and force there to be consequences, then nobody in a position of power ever really needs to worry about abusing their office.

I'd seriously consider getting a crown made with THE DESTROYER emblazoned across the front.

Gotta efficiently operationalize that strategy.

I knew I should have paid more attention during Tenet.

Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

—Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935