https://lemmy.world/post/16709798

It’s weirder than that, even

throwing kyle under the bus is a classic Tenacious D bit, though

The ability to selectively enforce prohibition gives you ample opportunity to profit from the gaps in the system.

It’s like 12 at night for me so this might be a little bit rambly and stupid, be prepared:

Yeah, that’s pretty true, but I also mentioned that to some extent in my OP, that selective enforcement is the case with basically every law that has ever existed. I’m not really a stranger to the institutional fuckery that happens in the illegal market either, gary webb and allat, but also the classic uncontrollable mexican government drug cartel shenaniganery. I just also think, maybe to the core of what I’m getting at, that people shouldn’t also be like, immediately snap judgement in terms of condemning illegal action on the basis of it’s illegality necessarily. The black panthers collapsed and all the other civil rights organizations that were around at the time. MLK probably got assassinated by the feds, Fred Hampton definitely did, I think Malcolm X probably also did, but those organizations, or so I am told, didn’t dissolve immediately, they just began a long process of ostracization and alienation and probably atomization as suburban poverty increases more recently, until they basically just became normal gangs, as they were engaging in illegal activity before, and selling drugs, or illegal property, is a quick way to make cash to fund ventures. I dunno I still need to find a good place to watch “the bastards of the party”, I think that documentary has something to say about that. Also never heard of boardwalk empire

I was being hyperbolic, but, a famous part of the prohibition was the organized crime which was both kind of naturally occurring at the time and was created specifically to traffic booze. Illegal material can’t be protected by legal means, obviously, and so in order to trade it, you basically have to create your own police force, your own privatized military. a gang, a mob. That’s how we got nascar and shit, the rumrunners. If you made porn illegal, I’d imagine it would just be added as kind of another form of valuable property which would be traded around by gangs which would see increased power and are kind of inherently anti-institutional. So, turning to black market cartels is a form of resisting policing, it’s a form of anti-institutional action, I’d say, as it gives more economic power to anti-institutional organizations.

I’d also say, you know, I mean, the hippies did go to wall street in 2008, so that’s something. We had the big liberal feminist pussy hat shit sometime after that, which I’m not as familiar with. More recently we had BLM which was possibly the highest level of street marching we’ve seen basically ever, and then we’ve seen like two riots to try and overturn elections, one of which was successful. We’ve seen more recent campus protests which are still constantly ongoing despite a lack of media attention. I don’t think it’s as absurd as you think, that something kind of stupid like porn getting banned might be the tipping point, especially considering the pretty steady upward trend that we’ve seen with political action concerning other somewhat disconnected issues.

If that legitimately happens and makes it into law in a broadly enforceable way rather than a “this person who I don’t like was caught checks notes watching porn! book em!”, which is definitely what it would be like basically every law that came before it, I guarantee that the government would collapse within about three weeks if less. Which I think is maybe a good rule of thumb, that if your law would collapse society if it were enforced equally, it should not be a law.

Do not underestimate the power of the gooners when they are kept from the goon.

I mean, in this case, yarrrr. but in other cases, i think, probably also yarrrr. but like, physically.

well to be fair it’s not unusual to get away scot free after murdering people with your car, that shit happens all the time

This is funnier retrospectively because apparently this fucking dumbass wasn’t even using an optic. insanity

And the prospect already got employed at a different business that had an open vacancy, congrats you’ve got NOTHING by hiring in advance and you also wasted the prospects time.

no no, you see, it’s ethical, because there’s always a revolving door of unemployed people, who somehow don’t have bad hygiene, and are always dressed appropriately, and this tactic works because they exist, and we’re just doing them a service, really. don’t ask questions as to why or how that revolving underclass of desperate unemployed people exist, that’s not allowed.

They’re putting the notion of assassinating the president out there into the weak minds of their listeners, who will take that information and do with it what they will.

I do understand they can do multiple things at once even if they can barely walk and chew gum, and I would like if they were wiped from the face of the earth, but I would much rather that they turn their attention towards the president, instead of putting their attention on trans people or whatever racial minority comes up week by week to rile up the base. The president has a large amount of protection on him at all times, the chances that any right wing nutjob can target him effectively strike me as shockingly low, and if they did target him, then probably you’d see something actually happen to prosecute them. Basically nobody else has that same level of protection.

I mean, do I have to say what you could just do to any senators which oppose you? It might be getting into coup territory, but eventually you’d probably reach a point where things just proceed as normal. Or you, as biden, could just take the L on it, make sure the newly stacked supreme court shuts it down, eat the, what, next 10 years of your life, if that, in federal prison or whatever it is, and blammo. Could probably even use the opportunity to step down but I imagine if he did some shit like that his approval rating might go through the glass dome protecting the flat earth aaaand post

the dems would never go for that, though, because then they’d actually be doing something. even if you took away oh no the two senators that somehow always conveniently oppose any action they take, you can be sure that they’d pull some other poor sap up out of the bowels in order to play the villain.

So, what happens if the president is charged? Is he automatically ousted? I mean, apparently a felon can run for president, so does them being a state criminal actually impede them at all, or no?

Well yeah, but that’s only one part of fascism. You could say pretty much the same of any war, lots of non-fascist goverments, and hell, you could say we already do that, just look at how the campus protests were treated, the BLM protests, the civil rights protests, the sufferagettes, a personal favorite of mine would be the horrid history of our oppression of labor by siding with companies and enabling the use of pinkertons to gun down crowds, yadda yadda.

No, if america was to be fascist, it would be fascist for historical reasons which already existed, which have been around for a while already. I don’t know whether or not america suddenly having a dictator, would really have too much of an effect on it suddenly becoming fascist, despite the popular consensus that fascism just requires a really racist guy to suddenly be a dictator. I actually don’t think that would factor too much into the definition at all, I think you could pretty easily have a fascist democracy, and you could definitely have a fascist oligarchy.

I’m pretty sure imperial japan was mostly run by a military cabinet which internally needed a certain number of votes, and the emperor was more like a figurehead and religious figure that had a certain amount of sway over the cabinet’s decisions as he was like, a big deal, more than him being a figure of political power. From what I remember, anyways. Me personally, I’d be pretty comfortable calling imperial japan a fascist state, even if it maybe conforms to that definition less well than, say, italy or germany.

Not so much, it would more be along the lines of a standard military coup, which doesn’t necessarily have to originate from a fascist. Those can and do come from all sides of the political spectrum.

I don’t think biden would ever do that, and probably if he did, he’d be the worst president dictator of all time with only the mild upside that he could maybe only do so for the rest of his probably not long lifespan, or for the next couple months as they run another election, which he would probably do since he seems like kind of a sap.

But, if he were replaced by a person I actually liked, or there was someone who’s policy I agreed with in that position, I’d pretty much be fine with it, and I get the feeling that most people would be fine with it too, as in, a majority of the population. The levers of power might freak out though, and that might put a damper on things.

So, obviously he could just [redacted] the supreme court justices he doesn’t like, appoint new ones, and then the only thing congress could do would be to expand the court or whatever, right? but then why couldn’t he also just keep killing people in official acts until he gets a bunch of people that are like “yup, that was official and you don’t need to do anything about it”? I know that’s probably a slippery slope, right and would probably get him a shit ton of public pushback, especially after a certain point, from both conservatives, who predominantly make up the military, and economic power structures, to liberals who would prize decorum and “fair play” above all else (but I repeat myself), and so maybe that leads to a dissolution of society, which maybe leads to an even worse society as the people who control the levers of power are already the most horrible people, but, yadda yadda.

But, I dunno, how many congress people does he have to make go away, before the rest of them start to get the picture and then start to behave in their own self-interest, as they’ve always behaved? How many people do you really have to threaten in a system where the people who climb to the top are only going to be there out of their own extreme self-interest?

you know, I at least appreciate on here that, even if you’re going to be massively downvoted for basically no reason, at least there’s someone here making this post and then backing it up in their comments, rather than me just having to look at the headline and be like “yeah that sounds like fishy north korea style clickbait xenophobia to me” without wanting to actually look into it.

So, good job.

buh-buh-buh but what about when I refer to mechanical engineering! what about when I need to adjust my cam timing! oh no!

I dunno, I would broadly agree and I think that it’s probably not a good thing to be calling people, but I do have two complaints I would like to file with the official board that governs this sort of thing. Neither of them relate to the word’s banned usage, however. Of course, it’s still gonna be a little weird.

One is that I like -tard as a suffix, I think it has a kind of satisfying mouthfeel in pronunciation, I think potentially we need some more words that use it, and I don’t think that as a kind of, like, workaround, or way to say the slur more. I kind of wish the suffix was dissociated from the slur, so this was more possible. The only other word I can think of that does this is mustard, which apparently arrived at a similar pronunciation through a different etymological route. I dunno, I find it to be a kind of like, inherently hilarious word, or satisfying word to say. Unusual, maybe, maybe like an unusual morpheme pairing. Maybe I have some level of just like unprocessed shitheadery though, that’s very possible. I also kind of wish there was a way that actually worked to de-escalate the weight of a slur, to rob it of it’s weight. Obviously, taking it back doesn’t do much, because it’s just going to be subject to the same in-ground out-ground dynamic, a la the n-word, right. It’s okay if gay people call each other or themselves the f-slur, it’s not okay if some straight guy walks in and does it. More positive associations might work but then, you know, doubtful that would work in the first place, and also you’d probably not see a lot of people wanting to take the L and push it on that one because everyone would hate them for it, both the people insulted and those who would use it as a insult.

Also, I don’t like this kind of mentality more broadly of “oh you gotta be more creative when you insult people.”. Some people are so boring and uninterestingly fucked, that they aren’t worth the creativity you expend upon insulting them. I think it just kind of shadows the problem here. No, you don’t want to say the word because it denigrates an entire group of people when you use it in an insulting manner. There’s not really anything there about creativity, or lack thereof, that makes it a moral problem. Sometimes you do need a low-rent insult, it should just be one that isn’t a slur. Call someone a shitheel, or something, it’s easier than this, there are plenty to choose from.

Okay, thirdly, I think there’s also a broader, and interesting question here, of, how an insult being based on like, unchangeable characteristics makes it more mean or more of a slur, right. But then that sort of, leaves out things we might consider as being changeable, like, say, body weight, which I would also say is a dick move, to insult someone on the basis of their weight, or to constantly bring it up, or anything like that. On the other hand, insulting someone on the basis of their eye color is maybe like, very antiquated, still potentially mean, and potentially very mean in like, maybe india? But I dunno so much if it would be considered a slur, really, as much as just kind of a very weird thing to bring up. Insulting someone on the curliness of their hair, maybe, but then that could be seen as a proxy for other things, just like most traits. It’s hard to do this with something too obvious because most of them have been historically associated with like, eugenics and shit like that. Maybe if you were to insult someone based on how big their feet are or something, that might be a more socially acceptable or lighthearted insult, even if it’s still mean.

We also have, like, technically all characteristics are unchangeable, if we live in a deterministic universe, right? Insulting someone’s intelligence, even if they don’t have autism or down syndrome or what have you, is still insulting a deterministic aspect of their character, which was sort of unavoidable for them to stumble into. If you insult someone for even, their choice of boots, right, you are just insulting a characteristic about them which was ultimately inevitable, the result of many dominoes falling into place. I think perhaps when we attempt to understand the purpose of insulting someone, we give it this guise of free will and agency which I think ultimately makes it more mean than it would otherwise be. It robs it of its whimsy.

We view insults as some sort of like, vehicle for tough love, vehicle for change, perhaps, or we view it as maybe righteous, because you’re insulting someone on something they can change and by implication I think, should change. I think we have to be honest, though. Insults are not for the people who are being insulted. They are for the people saying them, they have always been. If that’s the case, it doesn’t even need to be really related to the person you’re insulting at all, or even necessarily directed at them. It doesn’t need to be such a mean thing, if it’s just for you. And if it is just for you, then I think it’s more valuable to do that assessment and figure out why you’re actually doing it, instead of just like, giving into mindless frustration and calling someone a mean name, like a child.

Dunno, you might wanna just watch UFC 1. If you’re really high level you might wanna watch nog vs sapp, though. Best one I’ve seen that’s actually at that level, even though the weight disparity might not be so extreme as you desire outside of like, basically carnie shitfights like eddie hall fighting twins.