mad-science-guy.bsky.social
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By the way even though cops have “Protect and Serve” written on the side if the cars they are under no legal obligation to do either one.
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That's not an if. Orangeburg was two years before Kent State and you get blank looks from most folks if you say Orangeburg. Even the name Orangeburg massacre obscures that it was on SC State College.
Only difference between the two is Orangeburg's shooters were cops backed by NG, not NG proper.
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They may be sworn to protect and serve but that is meaningless and you know it; they are under literally no legal obligation to help anyone.
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This is his book on the subject. He wrote it the year before he died.
www.amazon.com/TROUBLEMAKER...
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Ya know, my dad was involved in a lot of protests, and none of them were prank like. I suspect some of that dates to the 60s when a lot of (largely white) younger people were trying to ridicule authority and it all got co-opted. Or as my dad said, politics got turned into a cultural movement.
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And millions of years from now when someone digs that up there is going to be a very confused paleontologist trying to reconcile strata. :-)
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Can't get beyond the paywall, but the fact is the aid was militarized deliberately. This wasn't some oversight, and I think everyone involved knew what the result would be.
I suspect the WaPo never brings that up, though.
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I don't know the answer to that. We have an administration that sees brute force as the only way to respond, that has zero qualms about sending people to a death camp, I am loath to depend on the culture of paramilitary organizations. Again I *hope* you are correct, but I fear the worst. /end
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And if you talk to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation you will find some very disturbing trends in at least one service branch. We have seen others - right wing militias have long made a point of getting their people into the army. Is the National Guard not a target of such efforts? /7
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Yes Kent State was a long time back. But crucially the thing that made it different was they shot *white people*. You *know* that if it had been a group of Black protesters or Native people the reaction from the NG might have been very different. /6
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I mean, after all, there are people in California who live in the counties east of LA and in the far north of the state who see cities like LA as full of subhumans. I would *hope*, Jamelle, that you are correct. I am not optimistic, though. /5
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And while I would *hope* that the culture of the NG or the military for that matter would prevent them from obeying an order from Trump to kill all the protesters, I am not at all certain there are enough people like that. You mentioned that NG people are form the state. I am not sure that helps/4
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When my uncle served in the 60s the focus was on loyalty to institutions, to the country -- now the training focuses on loyalty to your buddy to build unit cohesion. It's a slight cultural shift but an important one.
I don't think every NG member is a fascist, but the culture matters
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This is true of police in the US now; there's a whole culture we have built there that is fundamentally a fascist one, that sees local communities as occupied territory, and we have militarized them.
There has also been a doctrinal shift in the military since the end of conscription /2
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With respect, I am going to offer a historical parallel here. And yes, I have known people who served in the military and law enforcement.
Back when the Nazis occupied France, the local cops could have really gummed up the works. They did not. Because most of them were in fascist parties./1
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Granted the reason people go to AI at all is they get laser focused on the product as opposed to the process. But that strikes me as a different kind of failure than the existence of grades.
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I think there are some subjects that lend themselves better to that than others. At a certain point you have to demonstrate competence and evaluate it somehow. Written evaluations? Ok, but that’s a shit ton of work for the TA with two intro sections of 30 students.
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Maybe he finally bought the idea that whiteness is the way Jews will be “protected”. it gives the Nazis their final victory by buying into their ideas; a kind of ultimate appeasement. Thing is, that never works, really.
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3. Have we really made an effort to combat the casual racism / misogyny in techie (sub)culture? Or are we buying into the premises?
4. Have we addressed the origins of such attitudes/ worldviews?
I would say these questions are largely unaddressed
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I submit many controversies over "AI" (let's be real here, the term was applied to make it sound like the stuff of science fiction) can be addressed by asking ourselves:
1. How do computer science practitioners see "others"?
2. Have we addressed the sometimes very, very dark origins of the field?
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For automobile manufacturers the price to equity ratio usually runs around 15-20ish and Tela's is like 150, so that would ordinarily show it's overvalued anyway. This is being very "traditional" btw; a lot of finance people would likely tell me I'm being old-fashioned. But food for thought.
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(I covered finance for a long time, btw, and so I nerd out a bit)
Basically if you get down to the $175 level that's worrisome, but that hasn't happened yet; there's every possibility it stabilizes before too much longer.
(That new price may reflect the company's actual value better too)
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And the stock is still above its level of Dec. 2023, and it hit previous peaks in late 2022. So it's not like it has been a bad investment, even now (obvsly depending on when you bought, but if you picked it up at an average price, around $200, you'd still be ok)
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I've no idea. But I suspect that given Tesla's price point and that alternatives are out there, it's possible the the factors mentioned coincided with analysts taking a closer look and accelerated something that was in the cards anyway(?) - Tesla topped out in December.
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Worth noting: stocks are owned by and large by institutional investors and they tend to move slowly if they see the company itself as a decent prospect, even if the CEO is frothing at the mouth (sometimes the CEO matters less). Are Tesla's top line revenues were sustainable, given competition?/1
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At what point tho, does it become too much?
My grandfather dropped ordinance on Germans. He was never sorry about it, given that the country was explicitly dedicated to eliminating people like him from existence. I'm not sorry either. At some point, you have to cut your losses, no?
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Tomorrow is one for Muslims :-)
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(dang it I don't mean to be so dark about it, but hanging on to anything that resembles hope, or joy, is a tough sell lately).
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It's just deeply saddening to me. I just cannot see the people who voted for this as human anymore. They *know* what they were doing. They *enjoy* it.
And I do not know how to live in a world where the only way to be happy is to be evil.
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How long before the cops have a a shoot on site order, you think next week? The next? And every single, one of them will happily obey.
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And apropos of your writing about movies, the old trope of somebody who fails the dictator and is executed immediately is so far from the reality and how these things happen its almost comical.
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Yes this and I would point to the work of @davidneiwert.bsky.social as well, he wrote about this stuff all the way back in 2003 dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_01_19_d...
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It’s where you get the whole “Stalinist and Nazi dictatorships are the same” stuff, and mental images of totalitarian states that there are no relation to reality
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Some of this comes from the very bad way students in the US learn about how dictatorships and authoritarians actually function. The guys running around in uniform, the death camps- that’s the endgame, and it’s not imposed like magic from above.
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(And I will say it right here I probably did do the latter a few times in my career; I am not proud of that and it was a mistake, I f-ed up. But I am going to own that, and try to do better. )
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I was such a journalist myself not long ago, and I won’t say I was all that great at it but I damned well wouldn’t want to be on the side of fascists and I would not want to (and will not) write stories that ignore the people affected
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When people get asked "has your life changed" a lot of the time they are responding to a different question than the one you or I might be answering. /end
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I teach, I am not unconnected with this stuff, but in terms of what I do Monday through Friday lots of things are the same for me; I am *conscious* about stuff because I choose to be and that's my politics. As long as day to day stuff looks sort of OK for some people, dictators can operate/2
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You said yourself people don't know well why they vote, I think this is similar. I get up, I go to work, I still buy groceries weekly, Lots of stuff still has to get done. At very basic levels things look sort of the same. It's the stuff that's *less* visible that's altered & that's the point./1
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yes, if you think and have a conscience it feels very different now.
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Hm. I would offer that at one level that's true -- even the most brutal fascist dictators of the 20th century *didn't* change people's day to day lives at first. You still go to work, pay rent, all that stuff. That's kind of the point, to make sure the horror stays abstract. That said...
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But more to your point, I think it's really important to *not* let people off the hook, and to mobilize people at the same time, and the unfortunate thing is we don't have the equivalent of the old Communist Party or Socialists or Labor (as in many other countries) which could do this very thing.
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I don't think "economic anxiety makes you fascist" I do think a major failure on the part of the Democratic party was to *mobilize people* on an alternative message. So the people who might have helped stop it were given no good options and just stayed home (in one sense, rationally so)
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And my sense is that people didn't think the bad things would apply to *them*.
But at the same time, would any of these folks really bat an eye if we had actual death camps? We already have one in El Salvador.
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There was a whole culture there that previously existed of anti Semitism, similar to the racism that is already present in the US. That made it easy to rationalize all kinds of horrors.