• 39 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Fair enough, but, like, 100 archers against 1000 people ends poorly for the archers if the people are willing to take some casualties, and a keep wall is only good so long as nobody inside decides to unlock a door or people outside can’t get a ladder set up somewhere for a few minutes

    Yes, there have been successful revolutions since the 1850s, but they’re definitely a lot harder than they used to be, and I think they now really do require some sort of defection from the ruling classes or military over to the opposition in a way that you didn’t really need for, say, the French revolution, where an angry mob of peasant women could just force their way into the kings castle and tell him how things were gonna be going forward

    I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m definitely not saying people should give up protesting all the bullshit going on right now, but I do think meta social contract between the rulers and the ruled has changed a lot since the 18th century because of technological progress



  • why people aren’t gathering in mobs

    Well, it happened about a hundred years after your time, but there’s this thing called the Gatling gun that got invented that really became a hard counter to angry mobs trying to storm things, and once that stopped being an option they just kinda stopped listening to us


  • Actually, I think NPR gets money from Amazon because they pay NPR for ad free versions of their shows for Prime subscribers, and Amazon just chooses to advertise that on their own

    Of course, the fact that NPR is being paid by Amazon and Amazon customers get a premium version of public media is a total fucking disgrace, but NPR rightly or wrongly felt they had to do this because they’ve been expecting the federal government to try to cut them for years and they needed new revenue streams






  • Imagine how Garcia feels

    SIMON SANDOVAL-MOSHENBERG: His head is spinning. I mean, he’s really surprised. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. He understood that his case was over and won in 2019, when the immigration judge issued him an order of protection and allowed him to be released from ICE custody. He got a work permit. He was renewing it year after year. He understood that his problems were behind him.

    And then, all of a sudden, one day out of nowhere, he gets pulled over in his car, taken into custody, finds himself in El Salvador, the one country where the judge had ordered he could not be sent. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he’s meeting with a U.S. senator. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he’s being flown back to United States on a private jet and, you know, is being told that his name and his face are known around the world. You know, it’s almost like one of those movies where someone wakes up out of a coma.

    MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: I was going to ask to what extent he is aware that he has become something of a household name in the U.S.

    SANDOVAL-MOSHENBERG: Yeah, he didn’t have an understanding because he was held completely incommunicado in both of the prisons that he was in, in El Salvador. That is one of the principal human rights violations, is that there’s no access to legal counsel, not even a phone call. We sent a lawyer down three times to try to visit with him, and that lawyer was not allowed to visit with him. So he had no idea…

    https://www.npr.org/2025/06/12/nx-s1-5428138/what-happens-next-for-a-man-at-the-center-of-trumps-immigration-crackdown (arc)










  • Hundreds of years ago they were a mixed bag, but with the advent of germ theory (and fire codes) cities rock and like 95% of humans should live in one

    But that doesn’t mean CAFOs are a good idea, because their number one economy of scale trick is a) ignore all the environmental regulations to create more profit per unit b) have enough units makes the cost of fines/litigation/lobbying a manageable business expense