Did I miss something and they dismantled the mass surveillance state, reigned in the police, and stopped funding endless imperialist military ventures while I wasn’t looking?

Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.

Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.

Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.

Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

• In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

• In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

• In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

• Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.

I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

Maybe my brain just saw it was about Kennedy and something about space and filled in the rest. It’s weird.

At first I ready the title as “Kennedy Space Center” for some reason and I was really confused.

*when was the last time they did it in America?

There is no punishment horrible enough that we could inflict on oil execs, especially the ones that have known about this since the 70s and chose to fight for the status quo, that would make up for what they’ve done to us.

Removing humans from your side of the war lowers the cost of going to war and allows for even more centralized power. It’s a lot easier to do morally bankrupt acts if you don’t need to convinced a group of human soldiers to do it. Clearly you can anyway a lot of the time, but going for the robots is a lot cheaper/less risky.

It’s pretty obvious why powerful people would want this and why it would be terrible for the rest of us even without worrying about a hypothetical sky net future.

Where do they get the money from?

Biden, and any US president, is pro-military industrial complex. Anything that lets them sell more weapons and increase US hegemony is what their ideology is.

Oppressive systems passively inflict violence on the oppressed. Artificial lack of access to basic necessities like food, shelter, healthcare hurts or even kills people. Getting over policed gets people hurt or killed.

The absence of war isn’t the same thing as the absence of conflict. The conflict is built into the structure of a hierarchical society. It’s just only felt by some. A war brings the conflict to the surface to make those who the system supports feel the pain of those who it does not.

The government could give in and create a more just society for everyone and the conflict would be resolved. The oppressed giving in only benefits those in power. They go back to passively experiencing systemic violence.

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Submitting to an oppressive government is not peace.

One of these “sides” could unilaterally peacefully end the conflict. For the other side choosing “peace” just means submitting to living under an occupying force as eternal second class citizens. insert mlk quote here.

The prisoner’s dilemma assumes an inability to collude and strong incentives for defecting from any potential collusion arrangements.

Moderators are free to talk to and work with each other and there’s no particular incentives to compete over. Everyone is here for good discussion. There aren’t any ads or anything at the moment right? So why not just agree on cooperation? I don’t see the problem here.

In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.

In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.

Eh, the way it was written I wouldn’t have read it as sarcasm. Text and tone yada yada. That said, I’ve definitely seen people who seriously think like this.