Quit trying to divide the left. At this point, I’m going to have to assume you’re a Republican if you’re still doing this shit a year after the election.

I can’t build a guitar. I can build a guitar-shaped object. But I cannot build a guitar.

The word “police” is not synonymous with “law enforcement.” Police have only existed for the most recent 2% of civilization. All the grand historical empires you’ve heard of through history? They didn’t have police. There weren’t any cops in ancient Rome. There are ways of enforcing laws that do not involve having a clique of people that make it their entire career and develop an in-group culture hostile to everyone else.

For example, a common method of enforcing laws was through universal service. In many Medieval towns and cities, every male of a certain age and wealth had to spend a certain number of nights per year on town guard duty. It wasn’t your profession; it was a duty you took on like jury duty.

Maybe you’ll always need some career professionals for certain specialized tasks. I don’t think we can assign crime scene investigation duties to a random person. But in terms of the people that actually show up when a crime is being committed? I would trust a randomly selected person from the population rather than your typical police officer. If drafted individuals can handle fighting literal wars, they can handle the duties of a beat cop.

The problem is that policing, as an institution, attracts really bad people. It’s a relatively accessible path for people to gain a great deal of power over others; thus it attracts the worst our society has to offer. The police profession attracts people who want to hurt and violate others. Grade school bullies grow up to be cops. If instead of policing being a full time job, it’s a gig that anyone can be assigned at random for a period of time, then you don’t end up with law enforcement that selects for sociopathy.

Remember, police beat their spouses at twice the rate of the population as a whole. The police profession attracts society’s worst people.

Have you not seen the literature showing the effects regular LLM use has on people? You can’t see the obvious demonic connotations of a machine that coaches people into committing suicide? That’s like literal Satan, Prince of Darkness, Father of All Lies shit

Is it actually the spawn of a literal personal devil? Of course not. But the damn things act a hell of a lot like the devils of myth and legend. They tempt you in with the promise of easy effortless success and riches. And in the end they take everything from you.

Tactical urbanism ftw!

I mean, it will literally steal your soul. Using LLMs changes you. It degrades your skills. Its sycophancy harms your ability to interact with actual human beings with opinions of their own. It makes you feel like you are never wrong. And use it enough, and it can literally drive you mad.

LLMs are the closest real thing to a malevolent demon that will steal your soul.

Are you a hallucinating llm?

Why can’t the school shooters just switch to ICE? Smite someone who deserves it for once!

Hitler declared formal war upon the US.

Exactly. The US has a history of making inconvenient Latin American leaders disappear. The means vary, but the impact is the same.

When was the last time we violently deposed a Western European head of state?

TBF, attacking Venezuela like we did has a lot of historical precedent. The US has a long history of deposing inconvenient Latin American leaders.

But engaging in an unprovoked war of conquest against one of our oldest allies? Collapsing our most important defensive alliance? This is an entirely different animal. There’s no precedent for an invasion of Greenland.

Who says it has to be evil or cruel? I make a mean dish. It’s about average.

We need more than that. We need potential 2028 candidates to announce that a future Democratic president should just refuse to fund ICE. If Trump can shut down entire departments by fiat, so can a future Democratic president. If SCOTUS commits the most transparent act of judicial partiality in history and wish to somehow rule that a Democratic president can’t do the exact same thing they okayed for Trump? Well tell them to pound sand.

I mean, honestly, like, if you’re going to try and buy someone’s country out from under them, at least make the offer remotely fair. You know what Greenlanders don’t have to pay for? Health insurance. You’ll burn through $100k easily in ten years in health insurance premiums, copays, etc. Realistically you should be talking millions per person, or some ongoing inflation-adjusted six-figure annuity payment. The US is only a nice place to be in if you’re wealthy. If you actually wanted to convince Greenlanders to sell their country, even if we completely ignore the desire for self-determination and independence, you should be talking about making every Greenlander wealthy by US standards.

See that’s the kind of thing we should be making mass AI propaganda for. You simply must invade a country of brown people to appease the bloodlust of your base? Use AI to create an entirely fake country and fake an entire invasion and brutal occupation of that country. Blame a nonexistent ethnic group for all of society’s problems. Get all the propaganda benefits of imperialist wars without all the expense and blood shed.

This is the kind of innovation we could be having right now!

Eh. You need actually useful forms of direct action. Too vague and indirect and it completely loses its usefulness. You are not going to meaningfully combat fascism by just buying less consumer crap. Find ways to directly help people instead.

There are so many forms of non-violent direct action. They may involve violating the law, but they need not be violent.

Want to help undocumented immigrants? Offer them covert shelter. Rent or lend them a room in your home and don’t disclose that fact publicly anywhere. Undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable when driving to work. You can help by offering them rides. They can sit in the back seat with a hoodie or mask obscuring their face, making them unidentifiable from outside the vehicle. These actions might meet a stretched definition of illegality, but they’re certainly not violent.

Want to help the homeless? Help people regardless of the law. Offer meals to folks regardless of local ordinances. Find vacant properties owned by corporate landlords, change the locks, write fake leases, and help homeless folks become squatters.

Want to help trans people? Put away the pride pin; we’ve raised enough awareness. focus on direct material needs. Help them find jobs to counteract discrimination. Deliberately go out of your way to hire a trans person. Is this legally discrimination? Actually it is. Technically it would be discrimination based on gender identity. But fuck it. Are you aware of a kid in need of HRT because they live in a state where it’s banned or because they live with bigoted parents? Buy hormones from grey market websites and ship them the medicine they need. Coach them through the process of taking it and hiding it from their bigot gene donors. You know what you call someone who risks their freedom to provide life-saving medical care for another person? You call them a saint.

There are many ways to help people targeted by the administration and their ilk. When evil laws are written by wicked men, it becomes the moral obligation of all people of good conscience to disobey those evil laws. And really, as long as you keep the scale small, your chances of getting caught and prosecuted for doing things like this is quite low. It’s nonzero, but still quite low. And even if you do get caught, at least you earned those charges actually helping real people in need. Certainly a lot better than throwing your life away trying to kill a few random ICE officers.

There are many ways to help people. Often those means are restricted by the same people looking to hurt those targeted people. Don’t violate the law for the sake of violating the law. But if you come across a way to truly help people, do not let the law get in your way. That’s the true meaning of direct action.

Some exploitation is necessary, in the same way a bison exploits the grass.

But different economic systems can generate vastly different levels of environmental destruction. For example, our system encourages planned obsolescence, fast fashion, and overall disposable goods. There are countless materials we don’t recycle simply because it’s not profitable to do so. You can build a system on a more circular economy, where new raw materials are only harvested if recycling can’t provide.

It is not human nature to consume and reproduce more than a ecological niche can support us and many peoples across the world live in balance with their ecosystems before Europeans invaded them.

https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-3-540-33761-4_62

Tell that to the mammoths.