anything that opposes or thoroughly critiques anything is just as bad as that thing!

which makes you just as bad as me!

which makes you, and anyone who says this is fucking stupid, by the transitive property; a nazi! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

what’s the word for a thing that worms its way into your life, makes you depend on it, then uses that to exploit and damage you?

there’s a word for that.

I had friends he called in the national guard on, when they were upset about their friends being murdered so much by fuckers on his payroll, to assist aforementioned fuckers on his payroll. I don’t give a shit if he’s charming. he opted out.

it WAS dealt with pretty quick, but yeah I bet it’s still pretty absurd, even if they at least ask… some questions?

what the fuck is wrong with boats on principle? I’m not anti-civ. I would suggest that we should switch to sails or solar though, for slow container ships.

but for land transportation: switch to fucking trains and (e)bikes/scooters

yeah, you can whine about “MUH FREEDUMS” but a modern commercial car can’t go off road for a substantial length of time. if you’ve ever DONE off-roading, it is not the same as traveling over asphalt. you cannot go long distance like that; not as a consumer. it’s a fucking expedition, and even vehicles capable of it (most modern 4wd vehicles are not) you need to be willing to put that extreme wear+tear on your vehicle, and go through that ordeal. you fucking aren’t. no, shut the fuck up, you aren’t. not as a regular thing to get somewhere. maybe once or twice a year as a cool adventure.

so your car needs well maintained infrastructure to get there just like a train does. except the train’s infrastructure is safer, easier to build, easier to maintain, massively higher capacity, and substantially cheaper to use.

plus, you can use overhead wire/third rail, which means you don’t have to carry any power (petrol, batteries, whatever. weight is weight) on board. think of it like the speed boost things you drive over in a racing game. it’s really that good.

plus, you can just, like, sit on a train and chill. last train I was on? I took a NAP. can’t do that shit in your car. don’t talk about self driving-that’s not real without infrastructure investment, which locks you more into expensive infrastructure, and why even bother when you could have cheaper more efficient infrastructure with literal centuries of testing and iteration? other things I’ve done on a train: run a D&D game, watched a movie, written a paper, had sex without it being a safety hazard (we splurged on a sleeper car), paced, ordered lunch, gotten completely shit faced (amtrak’s coctail selection is pretty sub-par and their wines aren’t great, but nobody in california cares if you’re on edibles, and it’s not really ‘allowed’ but you can absolutely trip on acid on a train relatively safely), physical therapy, pooped (yeah not my finest hour, but the paper is better than average) read a god damn book, attended a remote conference while traveling to an in-person conference. in india, where the trains mostly work; they have trains that offer massages and five star meals.

okay, so, some nitty gritty. sorry about where I started that, I probably didn’t intend a pun. gravel rails and ties to keep them the right distance apart. pot hole? add more gravel and bang it back into shape. there are (barely) functional rail lines from before automobiles existed. meanwhile, in cold climates where they need road salt, asphalt roads don’t last a year before becoming unusable. even the basic physics of it favor trains-steel wheels on steel rails are just more efficient-you’re not bouncing around and steering side to side constantly, plus you’re carrying less weight of machine for the same amount of humans/cargo. there are places that currently have asphalt roads where you couldn’t take a heavy freight train, that is true, but those places also have weight limits for trailers going over them, for exactly the same reason. if you can take a car there, in any practical terms, you could build equivalent quality rail (or bike path) and run cars of similar weight/function over it.

we are running out of sand. we are not running out of gravel. road salt is an ecological disaster ruining our precious fresh water. tire dust is visible in the air where I live; that’s what the famous smog of los angeles is mostly made of, and if you have testicles, it is in there (that’s most of the microplastics that are in everything). trains have none of these problems. little bit of steel dust, too heavy to end up in the air, easy to clean up, even hypothetically possible to recycle it.

trains may depart on a regular schedule, but where the system actually functions and isn’t subservient to cars, which mostly make themselves look good by ruining the fuck out of everything else-don’t even get me started on induced demand, look it the fuck up- you usually get there faster with less frustration and more shit done in the meantime.

I really don’t want to hear your counter-argument. if you can’t imagine how this is better, you’re not engaging in good faith. if your excuse is that the people you let have your power are pieces of shit who would never do anything that wasn’t shitty, that sounds like it’s not really a problem with trains (or bikes or whatever), and you need a guillotine ASAP, but you probably knew that because of all the genocides or whatever they did/endorsed and the fact you don’t have healthcare.

oh, and high speed rail can go MUCH faster than 75 MPH with relative safety. look up the original shinkansen, then look up the modern ones.

it’s not about being the same species.

this is, in fact, about the criteria for intelligence inclusive of non-human intelligences

we can’t just say ‘all humans are automatically in’. if you’re not going to be a bigoted piece of shit. and I think it’s pretty clear there are entirely non-hypothetical non-human people. elephants, dolphins, corvids, octopi, etc. these are persons. on top of hypothetical non-human people we might make from the thought-sand or find out amongst the stars, who we should have some metric to at least indicate personhood for.

so, if the criteria isn’t just “human” (which is bigoted as shit) then you need other criteria; a bar which it is at least hypothetically possible for a human to limbo under, with fascists being the world limbo champions. on purpose. intentionally. to the point insisting they are human and have all the capacities and fullness of humans (which, remember, they don’t want, and are mostly upset by the existence of) seems disrespectful. they’re objects. like a desk. that isn’t to say you should attack them because they’re objects. I am currently surrounded by objects that I would rather not see attacked. it just means there’s no moral dimension to any degree of self defense, if, say; my purse tries to kill me and I need to stab it.

no, im saying we should respect their dehumanization of themselves.

it’s not a reason to do violence to them. my shoes aren’t people, and I would be upset if you fed them through a wood chipper. just a reason not to feel too bad if we need to.

yes but that’s not how they wrote it, because christians wouldn’t be christians if they were properly literate.

it’s not that they don’t agree with me. it’s that they choose it. they deliberately reject all the parts of humanity I care about, the parts that things like human decency are FOR.

If your idea of a person is this essentialized magical thing-in-itself that cannot change or be changed, and exists independently of context like the hegelian absolute; I guess you do you, but I think that’s absurd nonsense. there are reasons a person is a person. things that make them a person. it’s why we could, someday, possibly create a person from thinking-sand, why an elephant or octopus or crow should be assumed to be a person, and why a fascist is, entirely on purpose and with as much self knowledge and intention as they do anything, not a person.

im not proposing we abuse them because they’re not people. pretty sure my desk isn’t a person, and I would rather nobody abuse it, please. the dirt outside my apartment isn’t a person, and if I saw someone kicking it I’d think they were fucking weird. I’m proposing we treat them poorly because they’re a fucking danger, and will fucking kill us if we don’t stop them, and there’s no moral hazard here.

this has been explicitly stated by some fascists in the past, there was this one german guy, forget his name, after world war one, fucked him up a bunch I think, and then went hard into that masturbating-to-being-crushed-in-the-bowels-of-the-machine marionetti shit to be a super-loyal nazi with the explicitly stated goal of crushing out all the humanity from him/the world (IDR it was a footnote on something I read years ago) then switched to bolshevism when he met a lenninist, because he thought that was worse.

it’s like shitting on someone’s weird it/it’s neopronouns. treating fascists like people is rude. to the fascists. and to all the kids who played games where they shot a bunch of extremely blocky nazis growing up and dont want to have to be fucking woke about it and pretend they’re people now.

basic state logic.

they’re incapable of sucking less. their whole episteme is about centralizing, about reducing thought the farther it gets from the central authority (whether that’s one guy, a class, or a building like the pentagon), but you CAN increase violence, threaten, flatten, disable, basically wherever.

for several years in the early 00’s, the process for getting security clearance involved no background check, just knowing who to ask. they literally rubber stamped it.

getting a fed job or something still did, but just security clearance, on its own, for anyone? just ask. not even nicely.

of course.

this feels like you think car roads just appear magically from nowhere, and are an elemental feature of the world, not a ridiculously bloated maintenance expenditure of literally every municipality in the country.

places a trolley or train can’t get you

okay.

highway system

so um… I feel like if a car without 4wd can get there, a train can get there, with the same or less amount of effort+maintenance+ecological-fallout.

this shit is unsustainable, and if we want a future, we cannot wait for it to die on its own.

which it eventually will, because that’s what “unsustainable” means, but holy shit. the amount of resources and ecological damage that goes into maintaining it, the amount of LABOR than goes into maintaining it, fuck.

no, they did that, deliberately and by choice. if you treat them like people they get mad, and I think it might be unethical if you see them as such.

unethical as in, like, violating their consent and contradicting their self image and shit. they do not consent to common human decency, and wouldn’t accept it in good faith if they could, which they cannot.

edit: think about it like using the wrong pronouns for someone because you think they’re such a cute (their AAB gender), it’s fucking rude. no matter how cute a (whatever) you think of them as. they don’t want you to.

where do you think we are, dear?

have you heard of ‘hinduism’? pretty sure this is just, like, cannon.

now if you really want to go nuts with it, find a hindu community in mexico.

I think the greeks may have also had something like this but it was kinda cringe if it happened.

okay but without fear isn’t there no morality? and, like, if nobody’s suffering, is there really such a thing as justice? if there’s not at least one child in a basement being tortured and treated like dirt, can you even call it a society? I mean, obviously the optimal number of people being horrible tortured in society is “everyone but me, in the sickest ways I can imagine”, but, y’know, progress is progress

-every fascist