uriel238

Screaming from the far left, there are a lot of people in scarcity or precairity in our society, a society that would collapse if they all suddenly fell incapacitated from their want.

It is our fucking duty as fellow citizens to stabilize them.

Conservatism at its core is ignoring their need in the name of tradition. To the ninth charnel circle of Hell with that.

65% of life forms on the planet engage in parasitic survival strategies. This was a risk we took when we started using agriculture, allowing for specializations other than chieftain and shaman. (Everyone else was a generalist.)

Our instincts are still the same hunter-gatherer stuff from 25,000 years ago. Which includes behaviors antithetical to large, complex civilization.

One of those is a bias towards obedience to authority, and to loyalty to clan, over principle (creeds, laws, codes of ethics). We tend to want to obey the chieftain who commands us rather than challenge them when they demand the unconscionable.

Demagogues, who exploit these biases, were known in classic Athens, hence we have a Greek name for such people, and Athenians tried to recognize and shun them.

The bible has a lot of proscriptions against manipulative tyrants and priests. It also has many decrees to uplift the widow, the stranger, the immigrant, the destitute. This tells us the problem of dudes seeking to consolidate social power (money and authority) and then abuse that power has been a problem throughout known human history.

Obviously we haven't fixed it yet and still want high tech water, sewage, power and information infrastructure.

We need a movement that is willing to assert its collective power not just for a few concessions but until we have an ironclad social contract that distributes political power widely, and does not tolerate surplus when there is scarcity and need.

Currently, the primary targets are said to be undocumented immigrants, but naturalized Americans and legal aliens are getting caught up in the ICE dragnet, and rendered to CECOT. The movement to restrict trans folk access to medication and life activities continues.

This rhymes a lot with the early history of the German Reich. Heydrich and the Chancellery were fully aware of the need for the enemy within rhetoric and the need to capture and contain a growing list of undesirables.

Even though it's the Tiger Repellant Rock fallacy, when the public sees authorities at work arresting people (and making them disappear into the custody system) it shows the authorities are sincere in their effort to make society safer. The Trump Regime is doing exactly the same thing.

And as the Niemöller poem observes, the list of undesirables continues to grow, including more and more of the marginalize until it starts tapping into the mainstream. Every last one of us who is not a billionaire or a billionaire's favored sex-puppet is on the list. Some of us are higher on that list than others.

Shortly after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploded in 2004, more news showed that this was the first appearance of a larger CIA extrajudicial detention and torture program. Rumsfeld suggested that torture was necessary and waterboarding isn't really torture anyway, and a conspicuous lot of Republicans fell right in line, saying torture of terrorists (without due process) was acceptable, and waterboarding wasn't even torture. My dad was among those toeing the Republican line, about which I was aghast.

So I went on deep dives into moral philosophy and dared to stare into the maw of Holocaust history. ::: Of note, the marks inside the genocide chambers at Auschwitz were victims were clawing at the walls as they died. :::

So when news of CECOT emerged only last week, I lost my mind, and to this hour I can't think of a proper appropriate, rational response to such news. Alexei Yurchak, survivor of USSR and teacher at Berkeley talks of hypernormalization in which we humans tend to try to just conduct our normal everyday lives as civilization falls apart around us. Is that what people around me are doing? It's hard to believe I'm overreacting.

I'm still beside myself about these events, and for now I'm distracting and avoiding thinking about them, which is really not a great response.

(feedback appreciated)

Is this new? I'm pretty sure responder services (such as 911 operators and suicide hotline operators) have immunity so long as they're acting in good faith. Also, there used to be good Samaritan laws that allowed independent civilians to offer help, so long as they act in good faith.

Yes, a dead victim's family might want to try to sue the hotline service, but the entire dialog is recorded and proving bad faith would be difficult to do.

Granted, our courts are corrupt like a Seagate HD, but even a click-wrap ToS won't affect those judges who have something to prove.

I find it comparable to the old Rodney Dangerfield joke I called suicide prevention and they put me on hold. I've actually had that happen, since rushes can overwhelm the operator pool.

I'm more okay than my recent questions have let on. I've sometimes been too spicy for my (few) friends, and was looking for the old recovery network (pre-internet) where I might get a support group and a sponsor.

After exhausting a list of contacts in Sacramento (either they cost money I can't afford, or they require interest in a specific brand of Jesus), I called 988 to see if they had leads. The good news is they have a robust search engine at www.findhelp.org so I have more phone calls to make.

Coincidentally, I was quite spicy at the time, as the mere existence of CECOT hit me hard, let alone that ICE is collecting innocent folks and sending them there. My country is for-realsies doing the concentration camp / gulag thing. It's difficult since I've been screaming like Cassandra about it since 2004, and here we are.

But while I'm not a suicide risk (I have dependents), living in a society that is being burned, and is purging undesirables appears to be a valid concern, and I can't tell if those around me are confident we're safe for the foreseeable future or are engaging in hypernormal behavior (🐶☕🔥)

But if the White House instructs ICE to collect and evacuate the crazies and then ICE starts sweeping California, then I'm really not sure there's a sane response. The other concern is if my benefits discontinue and all the resources are impacted or disabled.

and, I'm trying new meds since my previous regimen isn't cutting it any longer so I'm playing that roulette game as well.

Thank you for asking.

Betcha some US citizens are going to get caught up in this sweep.

I wonder if we could get ten percent of taxpayers to not.

Depends on what they expected. Savoir faire? Je ne sais quoi? Bling? A hunger for the flesh of mortals?

Vampires come in the range of most demographics. I am a goblin-mode reclusive vampire, allergic to the sun, and I appreciate clearly defined thresholds and social boundaries.

I also do math.

Note that ownership-class vampires empathize more with their ownership-class fellows (dead, mortal or otherwise) than with working-class vampires.

The same is true with liberal media and liberal politicians.

Good looks are temporary. Vampires like character, both the ethical kind and the fascinating kind.

Me: <in the middle of a psychotic break, on suicide watch> Well, at very least I'm not that guy.

Here's the thing (other than basic enshittification):

For a lot of rural and wild (mountain and desert) places in the US, USPS covers the last mile (or last 100 miles) that no other service does. At a loss.

Private delivery service gives no fucks. We know this because UPS and FedEx or any other hand their parcels to the USPS pony headed out beyond the pale to keep their oath.

If we privatize, then those places vanish. They also stop paying taxes.