no, they were the end of the worst of times. the fact that guillotines were a massive improvement is an indicator of how fucking monstrous the centuries of white terror had been.

russian revolution. nevermind.

I was riffing on the original and translated titles of foucault’s most well known work. whether it was sarcasm or not; 🤷‍♀️

semantics. you know what I was saying.

dead little girls in coal mines? there are dead little girls in coal mines instead of prices, or the normal dead people of all ages and genders on the streets I have to fucking walk past every day.

also, generally, you want your data going as few places as possible. not to beijing, not to washington, not to palo alto.

what’s the word for a thing that worms its way into your life, makes you depend on it, then uses that to exploit and damage you?

there’s a word for that.

okay but consider that you don’t have as much surveilance of your employees, and without that, how are you supposed to discipline them?

…cluttered? the fuck?

has this fucker seen a cubicle? why did she allow it?

the america that could have been.

no. when things are good there are guillotines instead of prices.

I had friends he called in the national guard on, when they were upset about their friends being murdered so much by fuckers on his payroll, to assist aforementioned fuckers on his payroll. I don’t give a shit if he’s charming. he opted out.

it WAS dealt with pretty quick, but yeah I bet it’s still pretty absurd, even if they at least ask… some questions?

no, mine is broken right now.

what the fuck is wrong with boats on principle? I’m not anti-civ. I would suggest that we should switch to sails or solar though, for slow container ships.

but for land transportation: switch to fucking trains and (e)bikes/scooters

yeah, you can whine about “MUH FREEDUMS” but a modern commercial car can’t go off road for a substantial length of time. if you’ve ever DONE off-roading, it is not the same as traveling over asphalt. you cannot go long distance like that; not as a consumer. it’s a fucking expedition, and even vehicles capable of it (most modern 4wd vehicles are not) you need to be willing to put that extreme wear+tear on your vehicle, and go through that ordeal. you fucking aren’t. no, shut the fuck up, you aren’t. not as a regular thing to get somewhere. maybe once or twice a year as a cool adventure.

so your car needs well maintained infrastructure to get there just like a train does. except the train’s infrastructure is safer, easier to build, easier to maintain, massively higher capacity, and substantially cheaper to use.

plus, you can use overhead wire/third rail, which means you don’t have to carry any power (petrol, batteries, whatever. weight is weight) on board. think of it like the speed boost things you drive over in a racing game. it’s really that good.

plus, you can just, like, sit on a train and chill. last train I was on? I took a NAP. can’t do that shit in your car. don’t talk about self driving-that’s not real without infrastructure investment, which locks you more into expensive infrastructure, and why even bother when you could have cheaper more efficient infrastructure with literal centuries of testing and iteration? other things I’ve done on a train: run a D&D game, watched a movie, written a paper, had sex without it being a safety hazard (we splurged on a sleeper car), paced, ordered lunch, gotten completely shit faced (amtrak’s coctail selection is pretty sub-par and their wines aren’t great, but nobody in california cares if you’re on edibles, and it’s not really ‘allowed’ but you can absolutely trip on acid on a train relatively safely), physical therapy, pooped (yeah not my finest hour, but the paper is better than average) read a god damn book, attended a remote conference while traveling to an in-person conference. in india, where the trains mostly work; they have trains that offer massages and five star meals.

okay, so, some nitty gritty. sorry about where I started that, I probably didn’t intend a pun. gravel rails and ties to keep them the right distance apart. pot hole? add more gravel and bang it back into shape. there are (barely) functional rail lines from before automobiles existed. meanwhile, in cold climates where they need road salt, asphalt roads don’t last a year before becoming unusable. even the basic physics of it favor trains-steel wheels on steel rails are just more efficient-you’re not bouncing around and steering side to side constantly, plus you’re carrying less weight of machine for the same amount of humans/cargo. there are places that currently have asphalt roads where you couldn’t take a heavy freight train, that is true, but those places also have weight limits for trailers going over them, for exactly the same reason. if you can take a car there, in any practical terms, you could build equivalent quality rail (or bike path) and run cars of similar weight/function over it.

we are running out of sand. we are not running out of gravel. road salt is an ecological disaster ruining our precious fresh water. tire dust is visible in the air where I live; that’s what the famous smog of los angeles is mostly made of, and if you have testicles, it is in there (that’s most of the microplastics that are in everything). trains have none of these problems. little bit of steel dust, too heavy to end up in the air, easy to clean up, even hypothetically possible to recycle it.

trains may depart on a regular schedule, but where the system actually functions and isn’t subservient to cars, which mostly make themselves look good by ruining the fuck out of everything else-don’t even get me started on induced demand, look it the fuck up- you usually get there faster with less frustration and more shit done in the meantime.

I really don’t want to hear your counter-argument. if you can’t imagine how this is better, you’re not engaging in good faith. if your excuse is that the people you let have your power are pieces of shit who would never do anything that wasn’t shitty, that sounds like it’s not really a problem with trains (or bikes or whatever), and you need a guillotine ASAP, but you probably knew that because of all the genocides or whatever they did/endorsed and the fact you don’t have healthcare.

oh, and high speed rail can go MUCH faster than 75 MPH with relative safety. look up the original shinkansen, then look up the modern ones.

yes but that’s not how they wrote it, because christians wouldn’t be christians if they were properly literate.

okay but these fucking cultists have got away with much worse pretty regularly, and I expect this one to get away with this, so im still going to argue for my constitutional right (though not necessarily ability) to shoot up a church without imposed consequences.

wouldn’t shock me

basic state logic.

they’re incapable of sucking less. their whole episteme is about centralizing, about reducing thought the farther it gets from the central authority (whether that’s one guy, a class, or a building like the pentagon), but you CAN increase violence, threaten, flatten, disable, basically wherever.

for several years in the early 00’s, the process for getting security clearance involved no background check, just knowing who to ask. they literally rubber stamped it.

getting a fed job or something still did, but just security clearance, on its own, for anyone? just ask. not even nicely.

of course.