PhilipTheBucket

If I ever turn into a supervillain, my shtick is going to be kidnapping people and then putting them in little Dante's Inferno scenarios like that.

• Hasan has to wear his dog's shock collar and sit in the corner, and someone else is streaming and explaining all the good things that USAID used to do around the world and the Armenian genocide, and if he says anything or gets out off his spot, he gets shocked.
• Dmitri Lavrov goes on an interview program, and every time he tries to say that use of physical military munitions against civilians is justified if Russia says it is, someone off camera shoots him with a 40mm non lethal round in the abdomen.
• Stephen Miller gets to have a pair of handcuffs and a baton, and his task is to subdue and detain an actual vigorously healthy undocumented immigrant one on one, while the clip of him saying "we are so much more hardcore than they are" plays on repeat in the background.

And so on

Literally every streamer I have ever seen just interacts socially with their animals when they interrupt the stream, and then whether they were irritated or happy to have them involved right at that moment, they just remove them and just get back to what they were doing. It is okay.

I can't even fathom being such a piece of shit as is on display in these videos. It's not just the physical action (although yes that too), it's how annoyed he sounds that there is another being involved in this equation and now he has to deal with the inconvenience of their needs and actions. And he doesn't even register that it's weird to express that annoyance in such a cruel and entitled fashion on stream. Look at the woman's face glancing at him right at the end of the "collar too tight" stream.

The whole thing is hilarious. The artists asked permission from the park service, which was granted. Then, obviously, Trump's people got mad, and Park Police and some various unmarked vehicles showed up and tipped it over (which broke in Trump's head among some other damage) and removed it. The artist was irritated, because her permit specifically said that it was to be given security and not removed (And also she was supposed to get notice if it was going to be removed, showing some level of awareness of the realpolitik involved I think. She did not receive the promised notice.)

Anyway, she was given back the pieces of the statue, and repaired it, and now it's back. Some of the same unmarked vehicles were hanging around when they put it back up, and lo and behold they put it back up, undeterred, showing a certain level of commendable courage and a good value system, I think.

They are never as strong as they want you to think they are. Everything they do depends on someone else's cooperation, and cooperation is always a slippery thing for certain types of regimes to maintain.

I'm sucking my thumb and heating up some chicken soup right now as we speak.

Bird flu is still out there too, and it seems likely that by the time it figures out humans, the US public health apparatus will be basically destroyed.

Ever lived through a plague in the middle ages? Would you like to?

What's the worst that could happen

Yeah. Issues of wealth inequality in the US aside, I think it is indicative of how well the lemmy.ml hivemind grapples with factual reality (which is, it doesn't).

"She didn’t get there through album sales, she got there through hoarding real estate and becoming a landlord, and investing heavily in the corporations that have ruined our lives." was specifically what the lemmy.ml people said that I disagreed with.

The actual reality is that she made a little over 2 billion dollars in her career, almost all of it on selling tickets to live shows, and then... (lost half a billion? taxes? unclear) and now her net worth is $1.6 billion of which 10% ($150 million) is real estate. That makes sense to me. If you want to say our whole system where someone can spend $150 million on real estate is fucked (and it sounds like you do), I will completely agree with you. If you want to pretend she's at heart a parasite and bad person because she directly physically traveled around and performed shows in front of enough people that they each bought their individual ticket and she got a cut and it all added up to billions of dollars, I will disagree.

I feel like it's also an example of the kind of "I like to attack people as a way of indicating my displeasure with the wider system, because it's easy and emotionally satisfying, and all issues are black and white now" Lemmy brain thinking.

Nts nts nts

Yeah, and that part is fine. More what I was talking about was insisting that she's secretly a real estate magnate and music is just her side hustle. A more textbook example of "every bad thing is true of people I don't like" would be hard to arrive at.

Fuckin' thank you man.

There are way too many people in this comments section who are thoroughly committed to snatching defeat from the jaws of this good development or finding a way to fit it into their totally counterfactual way of looking at US law enforcement.

I've interacted with US cops from a lot of different POVs, from having friends who were victimized by the old school of corrupt US policing, to having friends-of-friends who were both cops and criminals, to a little interaction with the system myself. This reductive bullshit helps no one. Here's how I see it: Pretty much any group of people that you give power to without checking up on them is going to abuse it. That was US policing for many many years, until in the pretty recent past we actually started making serious efforts to punish bad behavior by the cops, and look at that, they got a lot more reasonable. Pretty much every instance where some cop did something heinously fucked up, in the last few years, has followed up by them not just getting fired but brought up on charges. It hasn't stopped, because they are human and there will always be "bad people" in the world, but it's not this wild street gang loose on the streets like it used to be.

(Well, mostly. Institutional corruption can keep some particular agencies corrupt for a long long time. NYPD and LASD are probably the worst that I'm aware of in that regard, and I'm sure there are some small town departments that are fucking horror shows. And they usually see protestors as "the enemy" which sure isn't fuckin great, I can talk more about that too. But what I am trying to say is that they're not the cartoon villains that almost everyone on the left seems to habitually get all unanimous about them being.)

I have no idea how far it'll go. Historically, Chicago was a pretty corrupt department and I have no idea whether they have gotten better (and I can absolutely guarantee that there are some individual Chicago cops who would rather be ICE right now and play-act as them any time they have a chance.) But if they're beefing with ICE, then good for them. It's that simple, and I have no idea why people are trying to say any different.

1. Elon Musk ruining what was otherwise an absolutely groundbreaking electric car company before he got involved
2. Trump