I suspect we all have mental problems. Most people are not assessed and are high-functioning, yet we’re not meant to work forty hours a week and live in nuclear families, let alone struggle in precarity. Mental illness is and family dysfunction are intergenerational and have been through the twentieth century, if not through the common era.

While there are recreational uses for drugs, I suspect most drug users self medicate, which is to say the drugs they take unpresribed are used to cope with symptoms of stress and existential horror, the same way we take drugs to cope with migraines or allergies, or chronic symptoms.

Does that mean they’re uncool? Not at all. Self aware people, deep thinkers, philosophers, artists, scientists and engineers all often drink, smoke, binge on edibles or engage in street chemistries in order to cope, and the ones who are self-aware are able to recognize it’s a thing they need right now, and that others who are addicted are not to be blamed or judged by whatever gets them by, night after night.

Until we can find a better way to enforce civil liberties, the striking of illegally obtained evidence in the prosecution of terrible criminals is necessary. That they get to walk free is the point first as a penalty to the state (that now a monster remains at large) and second as a penalty to the public for allowing the state to let its agents abuse their power.

If neonazis and terrorists aren’t protected by our Bill of Rights, then you aren’t either. And it informs how the massive extrajudicial surveillance state got formed in the first place, as the US state believes national security (in all its ambiguity) is valued more than American lives.

This is part of that austerity plan isn’t it?

Not good optics for EU as a sane government when they decide to force march the Greek public for the failures of odious policy.

Sounds like EU Oligarchs are endlessly greedy and cruel as well.

Reagan was super anti-worker, and that’s when the drift started. After the PATRIOT act, the entire justice system (including the court systems) started seeing the public as the enemy (after all, we were harboring terrorists) which corresponds to the shredding of the Bill of Rights (specifically the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States). Business interests (and their plutocratic masters) were the true citizens of the US, with us lowly proletariat becoming second class citizens. Citizens United took us by surprise but we haven’t really done anything and won’t until the police are busting our own heads (or we see enough officer-involved brutality – which is, incidentally, how La Résistance got started in Paris).

Now recently

• SCOTUS neutering regulatory agencies in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo
• SCOTUS deciding in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that civil and criminal penalties for camping on public land do not constitute cruel and unusual punishment of homeless people.

If you’re too broke to have a place to live (easy to do right now), then you can have life, liberty and property stripped from you by the state. Essentially, being a human being is very much insufficient to have rights in the US. You must also be able to afford renting or owning a place to sleep. (As tempted as I am to rant about this, I’ll stop here.)

Are we absolutely sure it’s real Bill Gates and not Robot Bill Gates? I mean he’s had bad takes before but maybe it’s best to be sure?

I think you are misrepresenting the take. I’m only describing the situation, which, yes, may lead to some people giving up.

I’m skeptical of just doing something even if it’s useless, but that’s not to say there is nothing to be done.

When it comes to solving the rise of authoritarianism and movements towards autocracy, we don’t know what to do. The things we usually do (protest, escalate to violence) either don’t affect change, or can wreck society. But that means figuring out what to do, even if it means trying what hasn’t been done before.

In the case of the US, ours is a huge society that teams with the chaos of complexity, so we will have plenty of opportunities to sabotage the transnational white power movement’s takeover through local action seizing on this vulnerability. Think of the dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar breeding, migrating to the mainland and finding enough lysine to survive, despite all the efforts to keep them in control. (The infighting and brain-drain within the organizations trying to seize power may eventually drive them to collapse as well, but we have to give that time to fester).

In the case of the climate and plastic crises, we are fucked. The global food supply infrastructure will collapse and people are going to die. Few people like to look at those models (so most scientists just say this will be bad if it gets to here), so the few estimates suggest that if we act now to mitigate climate effects and drastically drop greenhouse emissions, we might be able to get the world to continue to sustain one billion people on the long term.

Do note that is seven billion people less than we have, and people who are alive today will get to experience this drop. Famine is going to become the new in thing, and it’s the sort of death we don’t wish on our worst enemies… unless we’re Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sophie From Mars has a long form discussion video The World Is Not Ending where she discusses the range of outcomes, noting that the concentration of wealth and power to people who cannot think rationally about it, except to hoard it, decides whether we figure out better how to organize and cooperate, or exist in a Mad Max future with far fewer cars and more cannibalism.

I don’t indulge in opinions, except to say I’m afraid of the cannibal famine future, and I’m afraid we might well kill ourselves, and not in a cool way like AI takeover or robot apocalypse. But I also recognize that we naked apes are not rational and have to be clever even to choose to govern ourselves by logic rather than feelings. We do tragedize any commons we come across, and that’s a habit we will have to break. I don’t yet know how.

It’s not to say we’re doomed. Rather it’s to say the odds of us coming out of this are really bad, considering the path of least resistance. We better start figuring out how we’re going to cleverly emerge from this fine mess.

We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.

We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.

If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.

A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.

And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

Okay.

The answer is it’s all up in the air.

I expect there’s a massive GOP movement to suppress votes and gerrymander other votes. I suspect there are efforts to defraud the election in some counties or even in some whole states. But I don’t know how successful they will be.

I expect there will be an attempted coup d’etat if Biden wins the election, but I don’t presume it’s going to overthrow the US. We may break out into civil war, but then if the Republican party takes power, the US is going to be really hazardous anyway. I’m no expert, but by my understanding civil war is going to be inevitable so long as we can’t get relief from the mass precarity and enough election reform to empower the public. And since the Democratic party still treats its progressive wing as red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table, we can expect only table scraps.

Biden staying in the White House means I probably have longer before I’m collected to be processed as an undesirable. It could make a difference of months or decades.

That said, I’m pissed off, too, the degree to which the US is responsible for the Palestinian genocide, though the way I’ve been following it, Biden has been doing a lot more than the neo-liberal norm to quietly slow down Netanyahu’s offensive into Gaza. Not as much as I’d like, by far, but more than I’d expect from an establishment Democrat. Biden’s been slow-walking aid to Israel, whereas we expect the Republican party is glad to facilitate massacring Palestinians while simultaneously cutting off support to Ukraine so Russia can take over.

Assuming you are a voter, it’s up to you, and maybe it’s more important to you to symbolically support Palestine by not voting against the Republican party. But doing so might have material effects that make things worse in Gaza, hence I’m going to vote tactically.

Okay, if you don’t care which of the two guys gets elected (Democrat or Republican) then sure, vote for the third party of your choice. That said, we don’t know if Perot was a successful spoiler. If Perot pulled (approximately) two GOP voters for every one Democrat, then yes, he was a successful spoiler (the math is even more sophisticates, since this would have to be calculated for each swing state and then summed up) but we don’t know.

But in 2024, every Republican voted into office advances the effort towards turning the US into a one party autocracy. This means you have to vote tactically based on if you want that process sped up, slowed down or don’t care. Unless you’re close enough to a billionaire to get the fuck out of dodge (e.g. leave the US for extended leave) then a Trump presidency is going to lead to a lot of Trumpgrets, and a risky venture through the gravity well of a purge and holocaust.

I can’t speak for you guys, but I don’t want to risk dying in a concentration camp, and I can’t emphasize enough how much that is totally not hyperbole.

Infringement of IP is a crime according to specific states, but if you make art, and I replicate it, it doesn’t affect you.

If you write a story and I read it without paying you, it doesn’t affect you.

The only reason IP is a thing is because short-term monopolies on media (or inventions or methods) were enshrined by specific states as law, and then spread through trade agreements, and they were expanded on without concern for their original purpose or for the good of the public. In fact, we’re seeing fair use rights fade since states aren’t willing to enforce them, and platforms like YouTube over censor.

So at this point, in the US, the EU and the eastern market, no IP law would be better than what we have.

So no, you have not demonstrated any reason I should have respect for your IP.

However, if you’re going to insist, and be an IP maximalist, there is one thing I can do for you /to you (or Sony, or Time Warner, or Disney) that is worse than pirating your product.

And that, of course, is not pirating your product.

Third parties really don’t matter. You have one vote which is against the guy who will do his part for Project 2025 (end democracy – and Democrats – and install a one-party autocratic state, who doesn’t even have to pretend to care what you think). And you do that by voting for the other popular guy, the Democrat.

If you vote for a third party or you don’t vote, then you do nothing to stop the rise of autocracy. Obviously, a vote for the Republican is a vote to accelerate the one-party autocracy process. So those are your options.

Third parties only act as spoilers in FPTP elections, and the campaign machines for both major parties regard and will regard them as such.

Ross Perot ran for President as an independent as a third party candidate getting 18% of the vote and none of the EC, and is the record holder for the largest share by a third-party presidential candidate.

King Log (does nothing) and King Heron (eats all the frogs, id est, the constituency).

This is an old problem.

We Americans commit (more or less) three felonies a day. It used to be at least three felonies a day when violation of a website’s TOS was a violation of the CFAA (which can land you 25 years). If you’re a little girl, the DA is probably not going to prosecute, even if you were naughty and downloaded a song illegally.

But here’s the thing: Officials (especially sheriffs lately, and their deputies) are big in coveting your land and your wife and your other liquidatable assets. Heck, if you have some loose cash lying around, all of US law enforcement is already looking to find it, locate it and confiscate it via asset forfeiture and if you get in the way of their prize, well they’re sheepdogs, and you’re now a designated wolf.

And so anything you do that might be even slightly illegal is useful to make a case before a judge why you should spend the next 10 / 25 / 75 years locked up in Rikers or Sing Sing. Even if it’s a petty violation of the CFAA, or is so vague they have to invoke conspiracy or espionage laws, which are so intentionally broad and vague that everyone is already guilty of them.

Typically, these kinds of laws are used when a company or industry wants to disappear someone into the justice system. The go to example is the Kim Dotcom raid, which happened January 18, 2012, conspicuously on the same day as the Wikipedia Blackout protesting against SOPA / PIPA (PS: They’re still wanting to lock down the internet, which is why they want to kill Section 230).

Kim Dotcom was hanging in his stately manor in New Zealand when US ICE agents raided his home with representatives of the MPAA and RIAA standing by. He was accused of a shotgun of US law violations, including conspiracy and CFAA violations. The gist of the volley of accusations was that he was enabling mass piracy of assets by big media companies, hence the dudes in suits from the trade orgs. His company MEGAupload hosted a lot of copyrighted content.

Curiously – and this informs why Dotcom is still in New Zealand – MEGAupload had been cooperating with US law enforcement in their own efforts to stop pirates, and piracy rates actually climbed after the shutdown. Similarly, when Backpage was shut down for human trafficking charges (resulting in acquittal, later), human trafficking rates would climb as the victims were forced back to the streets.

(But Then – and this does get into speculation because we don’t have docs, just a lot of evidence – Dotcom had just secured a bunch of deals with hip hop artists and was going to use MEGAupload as a music distribution service that would get singles out for free and promote tours, and the RIAA really did not like this one bit which may be the actual cause of the Dotcom raid, but we can’t absolutely say. The media industry really hates pirates even though they know they’re not that much of a threat, but legitimate competition might be actual cause to send mercenaries in the color of US law enforcement to a foreign nation to raid the home of a rich dude.)

What we can say is US law enforcement will make shit up to lock you away if someone with power thinks you have something it wants, and you might object to them taking it, and they have a long history of just searching people’s histories (online and off) to find something for which to disappear them into the federal and state penal systems. After all, the US has more people (per capita or total) in prison than any other nation in the world, and so it’s easy to get lost in there.

So yeah, you absolutely have secrets to hide.

Is it your intention to appeal to law? Here in the states, extrajudicial detention and torture by state actors is legal. Does that make it right?

Do you think the copyright term of life + 70 years is fair to the public? Do you know how we got here?

That’s an extremely vague question, and presumes that any art is de facto intellectual property.

It also presumes that anyone has access to the institution that defines and enforces intellectual property.

Also, intellectual property isn’t a real thing, but you don’t want to read too many words, so you’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

The notion of the latter informs the former. The public domain is intellectual property rights of the people. Restricting the public domain takes that away.