Im holdin out on 1G. Im reaching my phone out the window to catch a gust of signal. Internet so slow all my pictures look like the Super Nintendo. All my packets got no time to live. Games give me wins for disconnecting out of pity. Ping times in the hours and I still got no pong
Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp), page 3
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Emma (ipg@wetdry.world)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Apr-2024 16:42:33 JST 
Emma
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Emma (ipg@wetdry.world)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Apr-2024 16:42:34 JST
Emma
We need more people with bad internet. Im talking bird shit on the satellite dish type networking. We dialing in on a chewed up phone line. Call it espionage the way im dropping these packets. Baud rate tied to my hearts BPM. Im starting a small business on McDonalds Free Wi-Fi. I dont send JSON, I give my buddy Jason a call and he gets it where its going. Im moving different. Lag so bad the opps think Im teleporting. My downloads arrive on a UPS delivery schedule. Got a router running off three triple-A batteries. We rigged up wifi with walkie talkies.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 11-Nov-2024 13:29:09 JST 
simsa03
Two reasons why T may in fact continue to support #Ukraine by weakening Russia:
– His intent to have U.S. produce more crude oil will lower its world maket price, cutting even more into Russia's main source of revenues.
– The largest share of U.S. financial support to Ukraine goes to the arms manufactoring industry, many of whose factories are in the swing states T just won. Cutting these finance expenses increases local unemployment.
Perhaps it's no exaggeration to say that T needs the Russian-Ukraine war to continue as much as Putin does, although for different reasons. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 11-Nov-2024 12:43:24 JST
simsa03
What an interesting approach to entice Trump to arm Ukraine to the teeth. What were they thinking in Russia? Now I am cautiously optimistic that Ukraine will get further military and financial support from the US under T.
https://x.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1854698475008499811 . -
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In conversation from activity permalinksimsa03 started following John Carlos Baez.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 11-Nov-2024 03:46:34 JST
simsa03
Well, I'm not so sure. Better not vote than vote awful. To me the talk about "exercise their right, privilege, and responsibility as citizens to vote" is a faint echo of the strange sentimental self-image of the U.S. consisting of "shining city on the hill", "beacon", and "last hope for the world". The Myth of Exceptionalism is always at work when the U.S. sees reasons to engage as well as when she sheds responsibility when collateral damages accrue.
I have been a staunch non-voter for the past 40 years, for various reasons. And when pressed with the remark to consider all those people who died for "our privilege to vote" I usually replied that it was democracy that brought Hitler to power not a coup. (In fact it was some kind of coup as the backroom deals between Schleicher, Brüning, Papen, and Hindenburg to make Hitler Reich Chancellor to tame him inside a broad coaltion of conservatives pretty quickly backfied.) I had only one rule: Should voter turnout sink below 51% I'd vote, not for the programs of the parties but to keep the democratic system alive. (I always accepted that I could afford my stance of not-voting only because there was a majority of people actually voting.) Only lately did my assessment change when I began to view democratic systems (!) in terms of political infrastructure. (That is: Liberal democracies as a means to provide enough time for disagreements in opinion to be resolved or decdied without society breaking apart, quite contrary to what quthoritarian structures provide.)
Thus I am less into a "sentimental and moralizing approach" towards democracy but into more mundane aspects of cost-benefit considerations. (I wonder how Thomas Hardy would have seen these two approaches.) -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 11-Nov-2024 02:03:34 JST
simsa03
That is a fitting image. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 11-Nov-2024 02:02:14 JST
simsa03
What I saw a few days back is that other than in 2026 this time third-party votes diodn't make a difference to the Dem loss. In the Swing States Stein achieved vetween 0.3% to 0.8%, far less than the winning difference of the T campaign against the Harris campaign. So don't blame daughter, at least not this time.
Anyway, although I understand the various sentiments that factored into the voting decisions, what I do not understand is the oblivion of the U.S. voters not to take into consideration the effect of such elections on the foreign policy and the consequences for the world, be it political, financial, economically, environmentally. U.S. citizens have a responsibility, in my opinionk, to think about such consquences as well, and then I find this strange mix of lack of education, self-aggrandizement, and autism in U.S. voters rather appalling.
But be it as it may, T has a mandate now, and that makes me ache in a way I don't feel very often. I guess that must have been the feeling by many when on January 30th, 1933, Hitler became Reich Chancellor.
And there is the tiny possibility that things may even get worse by T holding back, somehow "solving" the wars in the Middle East and in Europe, not pushing world economy to the brink. What if he turns out tame and more or less successful. How will that change people's attitudes toward authoritarian conduct? Yuck! -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 11-Nov-2024 00:59:30 JST
simsa03
I had the same Reagan association.
Still I'd hold up abportion as factor, plus now adding Harris being a woman. That knocked off too many "traditional" voters. Esp. that Harris is an "imperfect" woman, with no own biological child...
I guess the U.S. is not ready for a woman in that position, not for a long time. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 10-Nov-2024 11:52:07 JST
simsa03
"Shoulda woulda coulda never did nothin’", as a close friend's mother once said.
I don't think that it would have made a difference one way or the other. Dems had to play the cards they held, they decided to play it this way, and whether the other strategy would have achieved a better result is everybody's guess. And irrelvant.
What I don't like, though, is that when the decision was made, that even Nancy Pelosi (whom I admire deeply for all of her political career) first praised Biden for his humility in putting country before ego, and then, when things went south, backstabbed him with ridiculous accusations. That I find indecent. (Apart from the fact that blame games never work and that they never win anything. Things turned out this way, not the other.)
All the blame-games about why Dems lost not only the White House but both Houses of Congress ignore (in my opinion) the impact of one topic that seems to have been decisive in these elections but hasn't yet been spoken about in the post-election discussions. And it has (in my opinion) been so decisive that it would have turned the election to GOP's favour regardless which candidate Dems had finally come up with.
Many talk about the individual person's economic assessment as decisive topic. Others name migration and "the border situation". Fair enough.
But the more driving factor (again: in my opinion) has been abortion. And here Dems were in a bind. They chose abortion to rally a certain segment of the population. And that worked fine in white middle class people with higher education. But at the same time it seems to have alienated another important part of the traditional voting blocs of the Dems, viz. the Latino voters, who are said to be more faith driven and more family value driven.
If you add abortion to migration/border and economic hardship, you get a powerful surge for the T campaign.
1) Many low-income earners and many "minorities" feared that more migrants would take away their jobs and put more strain on already scarce resources of #infrastructure (housing, education, health services). They acted like they didn't want to see "their" "opportunities" they once received now offered to others, a "close the door quickly after me" sentiment. Not directly racist but an example of lateral violence.
2) Advertise abortion and "minorities" and low-income people, most often faith and family value driven, get the feeling of their sense of identity being threatened. And here not T, not tax cuts for the rich, not the rise in consumer good prices due to his planned tarrifs, not Project 2025, not his fascism, not the surveillance capitalists' tech imperialism, or whatever you like to come up with, matters. The only thing that matters is that Dems (and only Dems!) threaten the identity of the vulnerable.
So perhaps Dems could have avoided the outcome of the election if they could have desisted from using abortion as topic at all. It's my impression that they blew it with this topic. And it is my impression that they not really had a choice: They probably couldn't have *not* used this topic as they needed the strong female support.
There was no way around, I guess. Dems were doomed with the abortion topic, one way ot the other. It blew up their Big Tent. Regardless whom they would have finally selected as candidate, by whatever process. -
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tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Nov-2024 02:49:18 JST 
tinydoctor
I don’t know if it does a bit of good, but this old man is willing to stand on the street like a target. It may be foolish but it is righteous.
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 08:39:02 JST
simsa03
This thread https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1854030304677073233.html made its way around and everybody freaked out. Calm done, it's pretty much nonsense, born out of the author projecting his fears rather than displaying his understanding.
True, my belief in #peakfascism, utterly justified in early summer, has been smashed by the state elections in Germany and the various elections now in the U.S. I had hoped otherwise and it didn't turn out. Yet.
But that doesn't mean that the nonsense displayed in this thread (esp. posts # 11-17, 20-25) should be taken as reliable prediction or even profound insights instead. It's not based on an informed understanding of facts, but based on fear. Which is, as one doesn't need to learn anything for that, easier to act out and act upon.
Calling T and Musk "the worst men in the United States" [#11] and conveniently ignoring Peter Thiel, Miriam Adelson, Mitch McConnell, some of the Supreme Court justices, etc., is just silly.
Anyway, NATO will not cease to exist [#12] (although perhaps shrink); most of Gazans will not be killed [as claimed in #13] (although Israel will, in my opinion, annex the West Bank and leave Gaza to international administration); the EU will not shrink in size [#14] (no arguments given for the preposterous claim it would); a "new axis of evil" [#15] (rather: its enlargement) especially with the "new members" mentioned is so utter and uninformed nonsense that I don't even know where to start debunking that claim. Suffice perhaps that most of these new members are too poor and weak to pose as a threat.
With regard to the horror porn the author sketches of the U.S. turned end-Weimar Republic [# 20-25] with all the screeching of martial law and police murder rates sykrocketting due to police activities, stock market crashes, and all, seriously, man, on what does the author base such fever dreams? Esp. when most of the stuff he is in the prerogatives of the individual states and not the federal government.
Where I think the author is partly right is that nuclear weapons will get proliferated to more states. The author mentions Saudi Arabia, the Emirate of Dubai, and Egypt [#16] but ignores, e.g., the aspirations of Turkey. He also ignores that the UK and France think about sharing their nuclear weaponry with the European countries and even Germany thinking about acquiring nuclear deterrence, and all not for the authors beloved reason, i.e., T playing with witholding the U.S. nuclear shield, but for the other main reason, i.e., the imperialism of Russia and Putin. Which, of course, the author fails to mention; as he fails to mentio the other imperialism in China and Xi. (With that the author lands in the lala-land of conspiracy theories which all fail because they neglect or ignore the complexities they are supposed to explain.)
The author is likewise partly right, in my opinion, that there will be a "new axis of evil". [#15] But definitely not the one he thinks of. (Venezuela, El Salvador, and Israel are in this new axis, but Iran is not? Seriously?)
What emerges with T's second term of office, in my opinion, is an emerging and balancing alliance of oligarchic families, crime networks, states turned to mafia organisations,¹ greedy autocrats, influential billionairs, surveillance capitalists, etc., trying to run states like corporations, transgressing state boundaries and replacing international treaties with oligarchic accords and influence spheres. Their main goal is wealth, sweetened with power. In order for them to get rich and their activities unrestricted, they will use the means and institutions of national states to advance their aspirations. If Ukraine stands in their way, they will obliterate it. If not, they will find a more cost-efficient way around. One that is better for "business". (Imagine a Russian movie gangster's heavy English.)
Financial greed does not need to be the sole motivation; finding meaning and purpose beyond, esp. when combined with a reason to fight and exert power, is a second one. Putin is a good example. Greedy like hell he still invests heaviliy in historical romaticism. Money doesn't provide meaning and purpose. Neither power. Meaning comes from somewhere else. Virility too.
But all that does not mean that "fascism" (in lack of a better word) is now on the loose. It means that many oligarchic endeavours will turn out not to work or to work better when not combined with violence, when climate crisis is taken seriously, etc. That is: The rising and increasing worldwide oligarchic interconnectedness that results in reshaping whole national states into mafia organistation (with the president or leader as the Capo dei capi of such a mafia organisation) is far more likely than "the end of the world" as the author of the thread knows it.
And if that outcome or development is the more likely scenario, than the instabilities that we will confront is less so in the civic spheres of societies than it is in the hierarchies of such crime syndicates posing as states themselves.
What most people ignore when looking at such mafia systems is that they are intrinsically volatile and insecure to all of their members. Violence, paranoia, alliances, mistrust, and constant power struggles make not for the stability of such entities but for the violent character of these. And as one can see in the history of Russia of the past 30 years: Leave the mafia organsation and the Capo unchallenged, and life can be pretty normal for the burgeois peasant.
That does not mean that I prefer such a life. But it means that I think the author of thread misplaces the area where violence will occur. The end is still far away. From that arises hope and obligation.
¹ This is not about a state being infiltrated by some mafia activities – and thus in part being harmed and in another capable to fight back – but a state that is turned completely into a mafia organisation: a criminal enterprise that uses the resources and legal perogatives of a national state in the service of the criminal entity. Or put differently: a mafia organisation that poses as a national state.
#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 02:04:20 JST
simsa03
Who needs a brown shirt when he can have a red hat? -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 01:51:19 JST
simsa03
Saw Biden's speech. A tear in my eye. I will miss this politician, his courage to be decent, his unpretentious work ethics of a politician just trying to deliver. A true public servant, like so many. I will miss him and his like as they are replaced by the awful crowd in red hats, already salivating in their glee to burn all down just for the sake of burning it all down. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 11:51:54 JST
simsa03
♪ Boris Grebenshchikov, "Time to Get Well" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbo-JQEL04E
« Время умирать и время рождаться,
Время обнимать и время уклоняться,
Время бить челом и время ерепениться,
И вот оно - время наебениться.
Я просил у ангела за меня вступиться,
Я смотрел в небо и видел в нем лица,
Я вышел к реке высохший от жажды,
И вот я стою, но не могу войти дважды. »
« Time to die and time to be born,
Time to embrace and time to dodge,
Time to beat your forehead and time to resist,
And here it is - time to get fucked.
I asked an angel to intercede for me,
I looked at the sky and saw faces in it,
I went out to the river dried up from thirst,
And here I stand, but I can't enter twice. »
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 11:25:19 JST
simsa03
♪ Bob Dylan, "Not Dark Yet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ1bzKISLBw
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 10:27:29 JST
simsa03
@lnxw37j1
Thanks for that. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 08:28:18 JST
simsa03
That is: T has a mandate! -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 02:59:31 JST
simsa03
The exceptional feature in this: T for the first time won the popular vote. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 02:08:32 JST
simsa03
Courtenay Brown & Neil Irwin, "What markets see in the Trump 2.0 economy" https://www.axios.com/2024/11/06/stock-market-trump-economy-policies
Says it all. Also why Dems miscalculated in their campaign messaging: Voters were interested in their personal finances, not fascism.
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