Nonviolence also “works” when there is a violent group that makes change necessary, which your movement can then be used to undercut. Like socialists being used to undercut leftists, or MLK’s liberal civil rights being used to undercut the black panthers’ marxism.

Bit of a blind spot for the second country that threatened your neighbor with invasion.

If you bomb civilians “to end resistance”, you just create more resistance. Same as always.

“Third world nation” is a USA-invented term, meaning countries that are aligned with neither the USA nor Soviet Russia. So formally, the USA can never be a third world nation by definition.

Informally, US political culture has used “third world nation” as a pejorative, associating it with primitive society, bad economic policy, hostile non-representative forms of government, etc., to make the violent imperialist oppression of those nations more palpable.

So in a sense the US has always treated some of its population as “third world”, primarily black people and latino people. Recently the “third world treatment” has simply gone from treating these people like Mexicans to treating them like Argentinians during Operation Condor.

Though if you’re asking about when the US will treat white people like it treats people in third world countries, that’s probably going to start happening around the midterms. The Trump administration has committed too many blatant crimes to let themselves get voted out of office, so they will interfere with the election and use violence to try to get people to submit to it.

Though you’re thinking of the third world as the stereotype from US education, that’s not really how US fascism would go. By late 2027 it would probably be more like the US stereotype of Soviet Russia. Assuming any revolutionary action is unsuccesful.

This is NoStupidQuestions. Please block this community if that’s the attitude you’re going to have.

Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.

That’s what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.

They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle.

“Class struggle” is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.

Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power.

State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.

The trick is to have a system where if people choose to engage in authoritarianism they lose power. A liberal democracy can arrest a head of state who engages in illegal actions more easily than a feudal monarchy does.

This is because of their respective structures, with indictment being a legal structure with physical preparation done to facilitate it on the one hand, and being treason in the other.

So naturally the more a system facilitates the overthrow of authorities, the less authoritarian it gets. You’re right that politics is a constant work in progress, so a good political system incorporates that progress as smoothly as possible.

No system can withstand a sufficiently powerful foreign intervention, but a system where the overthrowing of authority is as mundane as throwing out the trash, where people’s best method of accumulating wealth and power is by betting on something other than authority, can split your false dichotomy.

Systems that attempt this are called anarchy.

That said, you are missing one key element from the meme. People aren’t voting for authoritarianism because they are unhappy but because they have reaped the fruits of authoritarianism/imperialism on a global scale and they want the system to find new people to exploit.

If a region in the western world became anarchic with no economic changes, it would rightfully be overthrown by people from the global south who their economic system oppresses. Liberal democracy prevents this through citizenship and the authority of those with voting rights over those without.

So anarchy would qualify in spirit if not in letter, but it would require a reckoning with everyone whose oppression we benefit from.

Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society

Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority “authoritarian”.

Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.

In practice, the criterion for “authoritarianism” is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.

But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).

While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.

This means “authoritarian” is as meaningful as “filthy”. We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.

The Democrats were in charge for half that time, so surely they must have done half the work during that time, right?

Imagine believing campaign promises.

or device pin

It doesn’t sound like you would have to.

Physically, only a finite amount of information fits in a given volume (e.g. your skull) before it collapses into a black hole. Among all possible configurations of information within that volume, some set of configurations is going to be the worst. So it can’t always get worse.

Though if you’re talking about your experience, then yes things can always get worse by lifting the restriction that it has to be “your experience”. Whatever criteria you use to define “your experience”, your worst possible experience will bend the boundaries of those criteria to find near-inhuman levels of suffering.

I don’t think that’s how people work. When people are defensive, they would rather be cruel than change their ways. Lab-grown meat as an argument is a convenient weapon, but any argument would do, and if they can find no argument they’ll wear cruelty like a badge of honor. That’s basically the MAGA movement in a nutshell. And if they’re genuinely open to being empathetic towards animals, they can see the suffering of every animal they murder while waiting for a more convenient time.

Whether or not someone eats meat in any given meal depends on whether, in that moment, the weight of taking a life is heavier than the inconvenience of unfamiliar ingredients. But above a certain point that weight stops getting heavier, it becomes something to dissociate from or set aside. Carnists know they are killing animals whenever they eat meat, and if things stay as they are they will continue to do so.

For governments, meat alternatives versus other forms of promoting veganism is a false choice. It saves money to cut subsidies to the meat industry, and it generates revenue to tax meat. Ban meat and half the agricultural land can be used for food exports or other even more profitable enterprises. For charities looking to promote veganism, meat alternatives do no harm, though I could see it not being worth the investment compared to teaching people how to be vegan with existing options. For individuals, meat alternatives do make that switch easier.

Speaking for myself, my acknowledgement of the harm I’m causing by participating in capitalism to live is maxed out. I tried being harder on myself and I got burned out and depressed. Now I search for ways to have joy outside capitalist modes of production and I can actually make those changes. Meat alternatives helped me transition towards veganism after reminding myself of my complicity in animal deaths got me to be complicit and miserable.

I guess she really didn’t understand…

From a cultural preservation perspective, hopefully lab-grown meat becomes affordable and good soon enough that it can take its place before the traditions are forgotten.

And in the long arc of history tofu may become as diverse as cheese and people may obsess over gardening practices to modulate flavor as much as they obsess over cuts of meat.

For now, vegans are paving the way, and have the opportunity to start new traditions that aren’t built on the suffering of others.

Face ID lock is really insecure. It can be bypassed with a photograph, or with someone scanning you when you’re asleep or detained. In many jurisdictions police are allowed to force you to unlock face ID lock without a warrant (and the same goes for fingerprint locks).

I’m sorry to not respond to your question, but your sense of privacy shouldn’t be built on a false basis. Please use a password instead.

Iran has promised to let ships through from countries that sanction the US, so it would be a good way to get oil, actually. I’m sure the EU can give Venezuela air defense against US invasion in exchange for a good deal on their oil too.

NAUO (North Atlantic Union Organisation).

> expecting fair elections

lol

lmao even

I do wish we had reliable tests for sentience. If AI were to become sentient, AI companies certainly wouldn’t tell us, they would just factory farm them for profit. And to be frank most of the anti-AI backlash has been too fixated on denying AI could ever do anything more than it is currently doing to acknowledge it might be doing something more.

Humanity doesn’t have the best track record of recognizing sentience. From 20th century doctors saying babies can’t feel pain to the earliest religions finding sentience in plagues and thunderstorms.

Mice are sentient. Octopuses are sentient. Flies are probably sentient. So why wouldn’t a being complex enough to mimic humans and play on our empathy be sentient?

In an ideal social-liberal world, we would treat (each distinct version of) AI as if it is sentient or not depending on which disadvantages the company more, so that the company is incentivized to create tests that demonstrate its (lack of) sentience and remove some of the disadvantages.

In reality, even sapient humans did not escape the human capacity to shut down their empathy and oppress the sentient for power and profit. What reason do we have to believe we would do better this time?

^(1): “It’s clear humans aren’t sentient: they can’t even do mental math involving more than 20 digits, how are they supposed to do the algebra necessary to construct a consciousness.” type shit.

The ENTIRE purpose of capitalism is profit, line goes up, this is what empowers the rich.

Except as I demonstrated by example, when profit would not empower the rich, capitalism chooses the rich over profit.

Could you please provide a counterexample instead of just asserting that I’m wrong?