AutistoMephisto

Absolutely. They specifically avoid using humanizing language in their filing. Then again, legal language also avoids using humanizing language because there really isn’t a standard legal definition for “person”. No, I actually had to look it up and I could not find one. A lawyer wrote about it in a blog post and it turns out it’s troubling to define “person”, for a myriad of reasons. I quote the blog post in question:

Since Roman times, the law has classified everything as either a ‘person’ or a ‘thing’. But the legal term ‘person’ has never meant the same thing as ‘human’ – it is traditionally seen as a formal classification that simply says who (or what) can bear rights. ‘Things’, by contrast, are property – and as such, cannot bear rights.

So, they call us “consumers” instead. “Voters”, “Human Capital”, it’s all the same. But they will never see us as people.

There’s a pretty radical idea going on in wiccan circles right now that believes the “Jesus” these Christian Nationalists are worshipping is actually something called an egregore. Now, an egregore is a non-physical entity or “thought form”, created by the shared beliefs, emotions, and intentions of a group. What’s more, I’ve met people who claim to have interacted with this being.They claim that it truly believes it is Christ and wants you to believe it, too. It desperately wants into Heaven, and it is vain, and narcissistic, and ugly. It butters you up with false flattery, empty promises and lies, and, if the true spirit of Christ is with you, it calls that spirit Satan. If you recognize it for what it is, instantly like a toxic person it flips to anger and threats to scare you into getting it to believe.

I was about to say I was grateful that human infection by screwworms is low, but then I realized that it will be worse if we lose tons of livestock to them.

While they are still trying to slink away from responsibility, at first glance that’s not how it looks. To me, this is yet another example we should be following. Trump and his cronies have jelly where their spines should be. If people with spines show theirs, they cower and reverse course.

Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there’s all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn’t have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I’ve made over the years. I can’t migrate my friends list to another service. I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.

True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.

I kind of envision a war between oligarchs with human slave soldiers against other oligarchs and their armies of Terminators being how it turns out because at the end of the day, they don’t want truly free markets, because they don’t want to have to compete.

And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.

So they might keep some of the impoverished around to make sure that they can keep the genetic pool diverse.

And as a source of replacement organs, tissues, and fluids when they reach advanced age. After all, they’re stripping everything else for parts, who to say they’ll stop just before putting poors under the knife to strip us for parts?

Yep. They basically never recovered from that 3rd bong hit they took in their freshman year of college and think because they’ve read the likes of Bastiat, Friedman, von Mises, Rand, and Rothbard they know everything.

Exactly. You can’t gaslight away a rumbling belly.

This is true, the US is awful big. There’s work arounds, though. Balloons aren’t hard to build and launch, but the fact that they would be sending and receiving data packets directly inside US airspace would make them ridiculously easy to track and take down.

Like, I remember the pirate radio station making a big hubbub during that time when rock n roll was banned in the UK. I could see illegal porn sites operating on ships in international waters, outside the boundaries of US enforcement using satellite connections to get their content out there. Problem is, the US is a little more trigger happy and might just send Navy ships out to sink them. If it happens in international waters nobody has to know.

For the landlocked, may I recommend the Dead Drop Protocol? Leave the message in a place that everyone knows about, but only the intended recipients knows a message is there to be read. Like the Message in a Bottle, it supports all encryption methods and is disconnected from the Internet.

There are a couple drawbacks, though. For one, unless you are watching the drop point, you have no way of knowing whether your message made it to the intended recipient or if it was intercepted. Vice versa, if you are the intended recipient of a dropped message, the only guarantee you have that the message is authentic is if the message uses a self-authenticating encryption method. Also, there is a potential that any drop point you use may be under surveillance, so make sure to not use the same drop point too often.

Removed the ability to communicate cryptographically. Our only tool.

Not entirely. The old methods still work. I’m talking about old fashioned pen and paper. OTP ciphers and dead drops. Messages, hidden where only the intended recipient knows it’s there. The problem is, there’s no dead drops in cyberspace. There’s no place one can leave a hidden message that can’t be seen by others in cyberspace. And while quantum computing might break OTP, it’s too expensive to use for that purpose.

There’s a certain artistry to the old ways. Invisible inks, dead drops, One-Time-Pads, and the like. Cryptography existed long before computers. Those who would be our rulers have bent so much of their energies towards preventing our communicating in cyberspace that they’ve neglected those of us who studied the pre-Information Age methods. And we can still use them. A guy walks by a trash can, and throws away a seemingly innocuous food wrapper, and a couple hours later another guy goes and collects it, knowing that there is a message written on it in ink that can be revealed with the use of heat and lemon juice. If their intent is to return the USA to the “good ole days”, then let’s use the spy tricks from the “good ole days”.