Sorry, you gotta upgrade everything every 5 years, because otherwise there’s a security vulnerability! Sorry, looks like there will be no new updates on your software, no compatibility! Surely, things have become so much more efficient in the last 5 years as a result of processing gains, and surely that will be passed onto the consumer rather than eaten up in the middle, and surely we need that increased processing power so you can run the increasingly dwindling number of social media sites that are actually relevant!

Sorry, looks like we got rid of the headphone jack because it takes up too much space and it’s too hard to make the phone water resistant! The IR blaster isn’t relevant anymore because everyone has unilaterally switched to wifi operated smart TVs! Surely! Sorry, the micro SD card slot took up too much space, we need to use that space for processing power! Same with irreplaceable batteries! Sorry, the 16:9 aspect ratio we used to have for phones isn’t available in any phone anymore, because we decided to replace the physical buttons and ugly bezels with basically unusable screen space! But we’re still gonna have a hole punched in the screen for the camera!

I dunno. Modern phones are fucking dogshit now, I hate them so much it’s unreal. Even the software is progressively getting worse year over year. Shit used to be so basically functional and it’s become so horrible.

This is probably why the tech industry has been hardened against that sort of thing, and is, say, famously hard to unionize.

And… a great example of that is Palestine. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call what Hamas did “attacking a target”. What was the outcome of that? Israel had “justification” to engage in mass ethnic cleansing for over a year.

You put justification in quotes here, and I think you clearly understand why. Netenyanhu propped up hamas as the de facto government specifically in order to ensure a more militant party would give israel the necessary “justification” to attack the people there. So, even their governance, and that attack itself, is traceable to israel’s state violence. A minor note, but an important one, I think. And I think one which requires more thought than just like, pointing to that and then saying “See, I told you, violence doesn’t work, and is bad, and israel wants it!”, because israel’s obviously not an overly rational state which is actually functional, either for it’s people or for it’s goals.

More broadly though, it’s not necessary at all for people to have guns, in order for cops to kill them. Cops can invent any number of reasons to kill someone in their day to day. The gun is something you just see in the news media a lot because it’s incredibly common in america, and especially common in the hoods where cops go out and kill people in larger numbers. Again, we can see that as an extension of a context, created by the state, which has naturally created violence. Partially through the valuable, and illegal, property, mostly in the form of drugs, which must be protected through extralegal means, i.e. cartels and gangs, but also just naturally as a result of police violence in those places as an extension of that, which is an intentional decision to create by the ruling class. It’s a way to create CIA black budgets, it’s a way to incarcerate and vilify your political opponents at higher rates, etc. You can’t be intolerant to the idea of guns as a blanket case, in that context, because it’s a totally different kind of context, and is one which is created by the state.

I would maybe also make the point that a protest is incentive enough against killing people, because it would be widely known and televised as a massacre in the media. You know, just gunning people down in the street, en masse. That line is sort of, becoming less clear over time, as the government seems to be more and more willing to condone that, if not outright do that, but I don’t really think that if, say, everyone in the BLM riots was armed, the cops would just start randomly firing into the crowd. They’d be hopelessly outnumbered, for one, so that’s a pretty clear reason for the police not to just start sputtering off rounds like a bunch of idiots, but you’d also probably see a protracted national guard response over the course of the next several weeks, which nobody really wants to deal with, both in terms of the media response and just the basic type of shit that would happen.

You also have several extrapolations you can make from just that happening in the first place, even though it never would. Like, the kind of city which could get up to that, in america, would maybe reveal something incredibly uncomfortable to the ruling institutions about that particular city and its political disposition and potentially that could be extrapolated to the entire country. Most places don’t get to that point because they reach civil war before that, which is kind of more along the lines of what the preceding commenter is talking about. More along the lines of, say, IRA tactics.

Which is all to say, that this is something which is shaped entirely by the government’s intentional responses and the contexts that they create. When they decide to escalate, that should be seen, naturally, as being on them, and not on your average person. I think what the previous commenter is trying to say, with a good faith reading, is that we are probably due, in the next 4 years and perhaps beyond, for an escalation. I don’t think that’s really a morally great thing, or a good context, but I do think they’re potentially right based on how things shake out, and I think that people should probably come to terms with that even as we try to avoid it.

Edit: Also I forgot to note this, but this isn’t really a disagreement in core ideals, but just of tactics. Dual power isn’t so much a deliberate choice of tactic so much as it should just be a certainty, being that both sides of this debate are mutually beneficial to one another. If you have, or can place, a more reasonable politician in office, either through violence (highly unusual, but does happen occasionally if the dice reroll lands well enough), or through the political system itself, then that reasonable politician is just that, more reasonable. i.e. more likely to accomplish goals which are desirable to any violent guerillas. Likewise, the pressure that violent guerillas exert can be seen as a kind of abstract economic cost constantly being leveraged against unreasonable political powers, in favor of reasonable elements of that political system.

The main point against this, is that the united states is currently so unreasonable, politically, that it’s functionally impossible to bargain with in really any way. Any violence, under such a political system, one which refuses any attempt at change, is seen as kind of ultimately meaningless. But I think that’s maybe also part of a broader point about how people just generally feel, understandably, incredibly pessimistic about the future, and are sort of retreating back into a kind of survival mode. Especially, I think, because they’ve been made to feel totally responsible for the weight of the world, when ultimately the decision of the political power to retaliate and do mass violence is, as previously stated, both inevitable, and entirely their own decision, that they must be held responsible for, rather than the people.

Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.

this also, yeah, there’s plenty of people china could drop bombs on, or, opposition groups they could fund in proxy wars or civil wars, probably to their strategic advantage, and they mostly don’t do it. they’ve taken a much softer strain in terms of geopolitics, I think.

I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.

See, now that’s totally different, as a claim, slightly more reasonable, glad you clarified.

I also, I dunno, I think I just dispute that the disposition of the US empire would immediately lead to some sort of mass arms race, or struggle. I think at most you’d expect to see some more minor movement on china’s other political objectives, like just, taking control of taiwan, which I imagine would be a pretty much instantaneous and relatively bloodless kind of move, since they’re most of the way there already. But militaries, and military spending, isn’t infinite, it’s a direct drain on the economy in real terms, especially with modern warfare, as we’ve seen with ukraine, and especially with the threat of nukes.

We’re able to produce all that military shit because we just dump a frankly massive and insane portion of our economy (and especially our extractive economy) into it, in a kind of constant feedback loop where people in power pay themselves. People who work at lockheed martin get hired from positions as US military personnel, where the FAANG is a revolving door with the CIA, that sort of shit. All as sort of a massive sunk cost, that would be pretty hard to disentangle from while maintaining the US economy, since the US economy is so tied to the US empire. We can look at the sort of, landscape that emerged out of the slow dissolution of the new deal, and post new deal government projects, as being less a sort of desert where everything just fell into ruins, and more being a morph kind of slow and incestuous merge between government organizations and private companies, since the “necessity” of those organizations still existed.

I think there’s also definitely some extent to which we’re getting cooked by china more than we realize with this kind of stuff because our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.

If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on. Obviously I’m not a soothsayer, so I can’t say what the landscape would form into given this hypothetical, but I don’t see a whole lot of geopolitical conflicts of interest, or uncrossable roads, so far as china is concerned in terms of their longer term economic growth or outlook.

I think there’s also something to note there about how like, I dunno. I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia. I think it would be naive to say that plays no role, either, but I don’t think it’s as nearly shaping a factor as people make it out to be. Certainly, if your nation’s finding itself in such a position where someone so idealistic and delusional is making your higher level decisions, and especially your military decisions, as the US currently finds themselves in, you’d probably be cooked like, whatever that person’s position is. Probably there’s some sort of back and forth here also about china’s interactions with their uyghur population, perhaps, as an example of how they’ve responded to that kinda stuff, and I don’t think they have a bad track record.

Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?

Because I don’t think it’s human nature that people just inevitably drop bombs on on another as soon as they’re given the opportunity to do so, and I think that’s an extremely oversimplified view of both human nature and history, to think that’s the case. I think, broadly, it depends on a lot of factors. Economic factors, normal economic realities, and the ability of the economic systems to self-regulate and feed information from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, as a result of their political structures. Cultural factors, like the base level of xenophobia present in a culture for other cultures, you know, to what degree that xenophobia shapes the economic realities or is shaped by the economic reality.

I think saying, oh, well, if china was the world hegemon tomorrow, they’d drop bombs as soon as they could, I don’t even really think that passes the smell test. They’d still have to deal with the EU, with Russia, with the militaries of basically every force they’d want to contend with, and with their lack of as nearly of a well-funded military industrial complex. They’ve shown a much higher tendency to approach geopolitical situations with their huge amounts of economic leverage as a result of their manufacturing base rather than just using a big stick to get everything they want.

I don’t see any reason why that would majorly change if the US were gone. If they were to pivot to military industrial capacity, there’s a certain cost-opportunity there in terms of what it would take out of their economic capacity, and it wouldn’t really be the same cost-opportunity that we have (or, mostly, used to have histrorically) in the US, since their public and private sectors are more fused than ours, so they’re not benefiting from the natural efficiency of a large government organization in terms of overall savings, when that’s basically what every corporation over there is, or, is more than over here. Why would they risk their position bombing the shit out of other nations when they could basically just not?

The belt and road initiative has already showcased their geopolitical approach. It’s still something they use a military to protect in terms of infrastructural investments, but those infrastructural investments seem to me to be more significant than those of most western occupying forces, and seem to take a different fundamental stance in terms of technology. China’s economy doesn’t revolve, to the same extent as the US, around the extraction, control, and importation of cheap, sour, heavy, crude oil, from other nations, which can then be refined into much more valuable petroleum products in terms of shipping while the US positions itself as a middle-man between this extractive base and the rest of the world’s energy market. China’s built like 50 nuclear plants since like 2014-ish, we’ve built 2 new plants since the year 2000. That’s obviously shaped by necessity, but that’s also just a vastly different approach.

China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could.

Yeah, except they’re different countries, made up of different people, with a different culture, with a pretty much fundamentally different kind of organizational structure governing them. I don’t think “well, they’d probably do it too, if the US were gone” is a super convincing argument in favor of the US dropping bombs on people.

yerp, I partially think that was necessary for this route (which probably would’ve happened agnostic to either party), since central california does a shit ton of agriculture.

do you not think, that potentially, they just go the indentured servitude route, after holding people for the “crime” of illegal immigration?

I would like to point out that this is just what robin hood is

basically, the US is a one party system, but it has two parties

some of us make good pets, some of us make good masters, the main problem I’m having right now is that it lacks the kind of erotic kind of framing that I tend to prefer

Use illogical, bad faith arguments to trick them into believing that the sky is blue, of course. People fall for horrible stupid dumb propaganda, it’s the nature of humanity. Only like 5% of people are really gonna bother to go actually read studies and shit, I don’t even really do that, I just look at the abstracts and then hope that the scientists didn’t fuck up and run the study wrong or engage in p-hacking or something. I couldn’t afford to go to college and take a statistics course, and my only form of education beyond that is watching 3brown1blue videos at 2x speed interspersed with useless escapist brainrot.

Everyone wants to believe that humans are some highly logical computer creatures that can just be convinced if we get hit with enough rigorous logical argumentation. We’re really not. You can make something much more convincing to someone if you validate their ego, or if you incentivize someone into believing a certain kind of truth as a result of their survival in a certain context, right. Even if we were purely logical beings, that wouldn’t even really solve the problem, because we’re all exposed to vastly different information landscapes, i.e. every MAGA guy you run into has probably be tweaking out to AM radio for 8 contiguous hours at their job, or socializing with a bunch of insularly sexist, homophobic, or racist good old boys in an echo chamber for most hours of the day, or whatever else, right. So, what hope can you have to change their minds over the course of a 1 or 2 hour conversation? If even that. And double this for everyone out there that spends their time listening to NPR, or has milder takes about things, or even just spends their time passively absorbing whatever propaganda floats at them through pop culture and escapist media consumption.

Well that’s why the point of arguing with other people isn’t really to convince them, but just to make yourself smarter and more informed by reading 200,000 pages of government legislation for fun, like it’s just another tuesday. Light work for a person like you

This is false actually. Any claim can be dismissed and evidence doesn’t matter because nobody cares. The best way to convince people of things is with cheap psychological parlor tricks

Generally yes, I think for this model of pager, that is the case. I think pagers operate on some oldass unencrypted 80’s era protocol where a station just transmits the message freely on all waves until the pager comes into range and accepts it. You could’ve probably triggered this bombing with a big enough antenna inside of israel broadcasting the message. You can read as much on the wikipedia page.

this is relatively recent, and i barely care about the IP conflict at large, let alone some millitia in fucking lebanon. All i know is that pagers fucking exploded lmao.

why are you deciding to weigh in on a topic that you’re not invested in and don’t even claim to know anything about?

you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”

I just mean that I don’t think they were a good faith interlocutor. Probably if I were to put a specific explanation on it, I’d say that they are probably tired of having the same argument over and over again and being corrected repetitively, to the point where they’re not genuinely engaging anymore, I’ve seen that a lot. Especially with how quickly they backed out but also still left a comment. I dunno if that level of bad faith would be considered trolling in the strictest sense, but I would probably still classify it as such.