skulblaka

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. The abject destruction of all aspects of law and government being carried out by Trump/Musk right now is, objectively, a bad thing that’s going to hurt a lot of people very badly. But once their system inevitably completely collapses, I think a lot of Americans are going to be open to new ideas of governance.

Previously, we could all see problems in our systems but the path to actually getting them solved involved generations of focused political maneuvering to actually stand a chance of putting them in place. Take federal adoption of ranked choice voting as an example. Many people would say they were in favor of that but we all knew it had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever actually happening because of how our system of governance was set up. I fully expected we’d just coast along with FPTP voting until we’re all dead from climate catastrophe.

But now, we’re actually looking at a potential full scale, whole hog destruction of the foundations of American government. Whoever inherits it afterward - and someone will, this reign won’t last forever, it’s incapable of sustaining itself even if we all just left them alone - has the potential for nearly a ground-up rewrite of some fundamental assumptions of American government. We’re talking about changing the baseline voting systems, changing eligibility for office for many roles, even fundamentally changing the way our representation is appointed (such as by population size instead of by land, for instance - one rep for every, say, 500,000 citizens, not two reps per state regardless of population) and so on.

Rising from our own ashes may just end up being one of the best things to ever happen to America, in a historical context. Inevitably, no matter how this farce ends up resolving, we will have an opportunity for this afterward. Trump, in his bumbling fury, has swept away decades worth of red tape and inertia that we otherwise would have had to struggle through to make this happen, and in addition has galvanized a lot of latent anger with the system within the citizens. We will have a real chance to turn that into something constructive after all this finishes in whatever way it does.

That’s my light at the end of the tunnel for all this, and in a weird way, I guess I have Trump to thank for this. His signature style of completely ignoring norms and regulations means that he can blast through a ton of bullshit while being completely immune to the feedback, and we can just build it all up again from scratch later in a term or two instead of taking six decades to effect gradual change.

Previously I would have called this accelerationism and maybe condemned it, but we’re in the shit now, so may as well get it over with I guess. He’s already throwing all his toys out of the crib no matter what I say about it so I’m no longer ashamed about cheering for it. America has had a deep sickness in its government for a very long time and maybe now we can excise it. We’re losing a lot of healthy tissue alongside it, and that’s bad, but it’s not likely to kill us altogether. We’ll grow back stronger.

but so far the number of dead children has dramatically decreased since Biden was in office.

The reporting on it has certainly decreased, but I don’t think either you nor I can say this is true with any amount of certainty.

Besides, “Israel is playing nice now that they have their ace in the White House” isn’t really the big win you make it out to be. Biden continued shipping armaments, Trump is doing that and more as well as actively making plans with Netanyahu for the expulsion and destruction of Gaza.

The only way we were ever going to fix this from our side of the ocean was by putting a warhead on Netanyahu’s forehead but that was never going to happen with either choice.

Replace every instance that a conservative has said “DEI” with the n-word and you’ll figure it out pretty quick

The rule of law is important, that’s the entire point. It’s being flouted openly in all corners or our government. I can support a just government, but we do not have one, and we do not stand a chance of instating one without removing the openly corrupt one that we have in place. Simple as that.

It is not only acceptable but is required when the judicial system is compromised how it is.

I want to bring back the days of beating a motherfucker half to death on the senate floor.

Gold will not hold value if the market crashes like that. Food, water, and land will be what holds value.

#SCREECHING

Just call him what he is - a scared, disgusting little boy who can’t exist comfortably anywhere unless it is literally illegal to criticize him.

The technology already exists today for a leader to lead their people from a remote secure arcology orbiting the moon. Nobody’s done it, but we could. The only people that can reach you out there are entire countries and their militaries, or other people just as rich as you, and no matter who’s coming out there they aren’t going to sneak up on you.

A malicious hosting server could use fake points to blast any message to the top of everyone’s feeds until manually banned or defederated

Might want to lay off the colloidal silver there, bud.

I just made the switch from Sync to Summit literally yesterday. Sync was fine for a while but it hadn’t been updated in ages (basically since the first major reddit migration wave) and it was starting to suffer as Lemmy incremented a few version numbers and Sync did not. Besides which I was paying a yearly subscription fee for an app that failed to load 2/3 of image posts.

If Sync gets an update I might still recommend it. It’s a good app, it just needs maintenance. In the meantime Summit does everything I wanted out of Sync, has an active developer with a Lemmy account, and doesn’t cost me money. I think it looks better too but that’s personal preference.

I did not see this, this is excellent news. Thank you for sharing this.

It’s a lot easier to fix a railroad than it is to remove a dragon.

Besides, the town provided the explosives after a charisma check, they had to know what they were going toward.

Does the track have random ramps on it as well to complete the F-Zero experience?

I also wasn’t familiar so I looked them up.

Reality Labs is Meta’s VR/metaverse branch.

Mapillary was previously a crowdsourced maps program like OpenStreetMaps, which was acquired by Meta in 2020. Presumably they’re looking to EEE it and fold it into Meta proper.

Beluga is a Twitter clone, I can’t find anything objectively bad about it other than being a Twitter clone.

All major US news outlets are in the pockets of the oligarchs. The revolution will not be televised.

We need a far-future setting Pokémon in the year 28,000 where we can find Ash still alive, the oldest being in the universe beside the actual gods, still looks and acts like a 12 year old dumbass

That’s the whole story. Kanye has been off his meds for the better part of a decade now and that started, continued, and is still continuing to manifest as rampant antisemitism. You can’t interview him for more than three sentences anymore without him bringing up the Jews about something.

Edit: Actually, I’m going to add on to this. I had a hunch and did a little research, and it seems I might be pretty on point. I remember Kanye first starting to seem kind of weird (well - weirder than expected from a rapper with more money than God) around the release of The Life of Pablo. The previous album, Yeezus, was pretty much a spot on killer, crisp, good album. TLoP was a mess in many ways, and at the time it was viewed as an interesting and out of the norm artistic endeavor and actually had pretty good reviews, but it’s universally regarded as messy, incomplete, and disjointed. Kanye stans will say that “the album is intended to sound unfinished” and that nobody else could have actually pulled that off except for Kanye because of his unique musical genius and status in the industry. And they could even be right. But that still means the album is choppy and strange and unfinished. And check this out:

Ray Rahman of Entertainment Weekly noted the album’s frequent meditations on matters of faith, family, and West’s own role as a cultural figure while observing that “Pablo frequently (some might say abruptly) toggles between Sad Kanye and the bombastic and celebratory Kanye”.[64] McCormick described West as “constantly veering between swaggering bravado and insecurity bordering on paranoia, smashing the sacred against the profane and disrupting his own flowing grooves with interjections”.[54] He claimed the interjections sound as if “they are spilling over from another studio altogether”.[54] Referencing West’s lyrical performance, Sheffield wrote that he “knows he’s got some issues to work on”.[52] The Life of Pablo features “gloomy, doomy” discussions of trust issues, antidepressants, and familial problems on tracks such as “FML” and “Real Friends”.[64]

Source: Wikipedia

And after he released the album he still continued to tweak and change things on it and release new cuts and new entire songs on the already released, triple plat album. Again, at the time seen as brilliant, striking, and strange artistry, in hindsight maybe signs of instability.

Somewhere between 2014, at the release of Yeezus, and 2016, at the release of TLoP, Kanye started losing his battle with whatever illness he struggles with. Since then he has slid down farther and farther with time. Kanye, once famously quoted saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” wholeheartedly endorsed Donald Trump in 2020. In 2024 Kanye West openly self identifies as a Nazi and sells swastika merch on a Super Bowl ad and invades an award ceremony he wasn’t invited to in order to force his wife to strip nude on camera.

Kanye West died in 2015, R.I.P. to a real honest to God hip hop legend. Whatever is left piloting his corpse around is no longer who he once was. I mourn the artist we lost and I hope he can find help to recover himself, but I find that unlikely given his attitude.