@hex@kolektiva.social2025-12-20 23:22:58
So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-20 01:21:25
For everyone already sworn into this 119th Congress,
there was no excuse.
There is no excuse.
The refusal to act,
to even start to pound the drum for Trump's impeachment,
is an abdication of their own declared duty to the nation
and destructive in and of itself.
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net2025-11-20 13:32:22
Series B, Episode 12 - The Keeper
JENNA: Where?
TARA: The vapour does not tell me that.
JENNA: Lurgen left behind him a secret, what does the vapour say about that? The keeper of the secret may not even know that he, or she, is the keeper.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/212/261 B7…
@scott@carfree.city2025-11-19 23:26:18
These goofs want to use "drones that would fly up to 150 feet and eventually deliver some of the orders that today are transported by the company’s drivers."
We have a technology that efficiently delivers goods to homes in an urban neighborhood. It's called bicycles. https://
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-20 08:05:15
Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net2025-12-20 16:39:22
Series B, Episode 12 - The Keeper
BLAKE: Quiet! You'll bring the guards.
OLD MAN: Not the guards! Not the guards!
BLAKE: Then keep quiet. [Old Man drops out of sight.]
[GOLA'S TENT - He is playing chequers with Jenna, Servalan is watching.]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/212/319…
@larsfosdal@mastodon.social2025-12-19 19:01:01
@cdarwin@c.im2025-11-21 21:30:03
U.S. pushing Ukraine to sign Trump's "peace deal" by Thanksgiving or lose support
U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll presented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday with a version of the 28-point plan Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff recently drafted with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev.
That plan, leaked to the news media and confirmed by several officials, includes several red lines for Ukraine,
including a significant reduction of its army…
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net2025-09-21 18:21:12
Series D, Episode 01 - Rescue
DORIAN: Relax. Your problems are over. [Draws a hand gun. Scene - Planet Terminal. Exterior. Avon is crouched next to Tarrant. Tarrant sits drinking from a canteen.]
AVON: Pass out again and I'll leave you, Tarrant.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/401/105
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-19 06:14:24
“My oldest daughter had a lot of trauma as a child,” Andreatta said.
“Something really terrible happened to her when she was very young that I would hope never would happen to any other child.
And as a result of it, she's a lesbian.
She's gay, and she's married to a woman.
And sometimes that's a little bit of [an] internal struggle for me
because I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.”
After the speech, Andreatta opened the …
