• 1 Post
  • 159 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
Cake day: January 12th, 2025
  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Never easier to kidnap people in the USAEnglish
    1515·
    5 days ago

    People need to start kidnapping and disappearing:

    1. Conservative white Republicans.

    2. Evangelical preachers.

    3. ICE agents.

    4. Police officers.

    5. Republican politicians.

    Just dress up as ICE, bust down their doors, and haul them off. If they try to show a birth certificate or passport, grab it from them, tear it in half, and call it a fake.

    White Christian conservatives need to learn that they will not come out of this unscathed. They need to know that they are just as vulnerable as anyone else, and that they themselves are a minority group in this country. We need to put the fear of God in these bastards. That’s the only way this will ever end.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•US question: Would you approve of your state seceding from the Union, declaring independence from the United States? I think California, Oregon, and Washington would, and probably Colorado too.English
    161·
    11 days ago

    I’m at the point where I think we should peacefully dissolve the Union entirely. Just grant all 50 states full independence. Let the states come back together in whatever new nation or combination of nations they want.

    Look at the current state of our politics. Step back and really look at it. Every political system relies ultimately not on a constitution, but on the good faith of the people actually governing. Look at how the current president is wiping his ass with every check and balance built into the system. Words and laws don’t matter, there’s always a bad faith interpretation that can allow the president to seize more and more power. And the Supreme Court is openly giving broad sweeping authority to Republican presidents while severely curtailing the power of Democratic presidents. Bribery is legal, and both parties are completely captured by the wealthy. Oh, and every last scrap of freedom, privacy, and autonomy are being torn down in the path of an ever-expanding surveillance panopticon.

    I’m sorry. But by the time your political culture decays so far to allow this level of dysfunction, there’s no saving it. Our constitution is a woefully out-of-date obsolete document that should have been scrapped generations ago. And it was made difficult to amend by people who had no idea how important amending it would later be. It was built for the compromises of the 1780s, not the compromises of the 2020s. We need to go through a new process of Constitution creation, potentially multiple such processes, and come back together based on new compromises that reflect the reality of the 21st century.

    This nation cannot be saved. We need a peaceful national divorce. The alternative is likely something far worse, as we hurdle inexorably towards a second civil war.

    Note: obviously there are practical difficulties with dissolving a nation. When this comes up, people love to hand wring about the national debt or how military assets will be dissolved in this kind of scenario. These are important but obvious concerns. But national myopia blinds us here. Nations have peacefully divided countless times through history. These matters are always handled through some negotiation process. American exceptionalism blinds us to our possible futures, simply because we are unwilling to look beyond our own borders for inspiration.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•It's interesting that gun rights were sold on the basis of "resisting unlawful government." They seen to have _caused and supported_ unlawful government.English
    5·
    12 days ago

    Look at somewhere like Syria. Governments still get taken down by armed revolutionaries. Yes, there is the issue that governments are better armed. But there are a few fatal flaws in the idea that this makes them invincible:

    1. A lot of expensive weapons systems like airplanes and tanks can be taken out by much cheaper and accessible systems like MANPADS and drones.

    2. There will be people on the side of the rebels with previous military experience that will know how to use the heavier weapons.

    3. Groups of revolutionaries armed with civilian-accessible weapons can find lightly defended military bases, storm them, and seize heavier weapons.

    4. Rebel groups always receive outside assistance from foreign powers.

    If a group of revolutionaries deposes the California state government, declares the New California Republic, and tries to secede from the US, they won’t be fighting with AR-15s for long. They’ll be using the strongest available civilian weapons to raid National Guard armories and other locations that may not be so heavily defended. They may even do so with the tacit support of those working at those facilities. Then their goal will be to hold out long enough against the US government that they can petition foreign powers like China to support their rebellion against the US federal government.

    Revolts don’t happen in a vacuum. Rebels don’t need to hold out against the central government indefinitely armed only with light weaponry. At the end of the day, there’s going to be some other well armed country out there that’s going to be more than happy to see their geopolitical rival be embroiled in a war of secession. If California decided to rebel on Monday, by Friday the PRC would be loading every drone, antitank missile, and MANPAD they can find into crates, ready to smuggle them in container ships past the US Navy. Even if China didn’t support the aims of the California rebels, it wouldn’t matter. Hell, they wouldn’t even care about the final outcome of the war. They would happily fund heavy weapons to the rebels just to make sure the US federal government was too embroiled in a crisis at home to devote many resources to places like Taiwan.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What's the best way to respond to someone who says "transracial is just as valid as transgender"? (Transracial referring to people who identify as another race like Rachel Dolezal)English
    12·
    17 days ago

    Those who seek outrage will find it every time. Yes, obviously there are some trans people that don’t seek out medical transition. That’s why I said “trans people who medically transition.” But language can be overly inclusive. We don’t need to start every single writing on trans people with three paragraphs describing every exception and caveat. Obviously when you talk about a group, any group, you have to talk in generalities. If you insist on starting every comment about trans people with paragraphs of caveats and provisos, you make actually getting to the point impossible. You water down the language to the point of uselessness. At at time when trans rights are under assault on all sides, I don’t mind focusing most trans discussions on the material realities and needs of most trans folks.

    Most trans people want to medically transition. Are those that don’t somehow invalid? No. But we also don’t need to start every discussion with a thousand caveats describing every sub-category within a group. There are atheist Jews and there are gay Muslims. That doesn’t mean every discussion of those faiths is centered around these rare exceptions.

  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What's the best way to respond to someone who says "transracial is just as valid as transgender"? (Transracial referring to people who identify as another race like Rachel Dolezal)English
    2·
    17 days ago

    Do you know what an actual scientific attempt to define races would look like?

    Let’s say you wanted to scientifically define races. Instead of using subjective things like facial structure, you look at actual DNA and the groupings among populations. Let’s say we want to group humanity into a half dozen races, and to avoid bias, we do it based on some statistical analysis of DNA patterns.

    You know what you would end up with? The computer would spit out that there are five racial groups represented the population of Subsaharan Africa…and one racial group representing everyone else.

    The vast majority of human genetic diversity lies within Subsaharan Africa. If you tried to rationally define a list of ‘races,’ you would end up with a bunch of African racial groups and then one group for literally everyone else.

    This is what people mean when they say race isn’t real. Our culturally-defined racial groups are completely unrelated to the actual diversity and distribution of human DNA patterns.