I genuinely forgot Karl Rove was still alive.

Anyway, he’s an evil piece of shit and there is almost certainly some ulterior motive behind this. If he gave two flying fucks about bigotry he wouldn’t have done… anything he’s done for the 30 years or so.

Yeah I’ve been saying this for a while, I think like a lot of other animal species we have a certain way we like to arrange ourselves as a group and we pretty much always stick to that, just with different names. Essentially, we just naturally seem to end up with a figurehead leader and a little group of powerful people surrounding them, while everyone else just does their best under whatever system them impose.

Democracy = a president/prime minister and a senate/parliament.

Monarchy = A king/queen, and a bunch of lords.

Dictatorship = A dictator, usually with a small group (often a military junta or something similar) surrounding them.

Communism = A chairman and the party heads.

The Vatican = A pope/cardinals.

Businesses = A CEO and then the rest of the C-suite people/a group of shareholders.

Army = General/Sergeants or whatever

Even families tend to often have a kind of matriarch/patriarch figure, and sort of arrange themselves in the same way.

It’s not a complicated system and it makes sense why we do it, I just think it’s kind of interesting that we pretty much always arrange ourselves in the same pattern without even really thinking about it. It might also explain why some things like anarchism don’t often tend to work out in the longer term, they don’t really fit the pattern.

Even things like the internet, which started out with most websites having a more-or-less equal footing, we’ve gradually arranged it over time so that there’s usually one big ‘main website’ for each thing, with a bunch of slightly less powerful but similar sites orbiting them.

Man, Doom really does run on anything.

Reading House of Leaves feels like you’re looking at something you’re not supposed to be seeing.

It’s also a book that I don’t think could be adapted into anything. I’m not sure how you would even make it an eBook.

“Come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off”

Well I was against AI before, but now that I’ve read the demented gibberings of this 80 year old shit-encrusted pedophile on the subject, I’m convinced!

Person in Canada here! This is true, mainly because of the whole “constantly threatening to invade us, shit-talking the Prime Minister non-stop, starting an idiotic trade war and trying to rename our lakes” thing.

I live in Canada in one of those places. Once the area I live in was on the news because it was colder than Mars that day lol.

I have no idea if this is helpful or not (and sorry if it isn’t) but I generally tend to approach things as like:

Can I do anything about it right now?

If YES —> Do the thing ----> Don’t worry about it.

If NO ----> There’s nothing to do ----> Don’t worry about it.

Obviously that’s super simplified and doesn’t apply to everything, but I find it helps to just sift out the small-medium sized annoyances.

So for example with your boat ticket:

If you have proof you paid ----> Send proof -----> Nothing more to do.

Could they reject it anyway? ----> Maybe but you can’t control that -----> Nothing more to do.

And then if they do reject it, you can start the loop again from there, which I guess would either be escalate or just let it go etc.

This was the one I came to mention lol.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Also from the introduction/short story The Day Before The Revolution:

My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

I’m on a big Kim Stanley Robinson kick lately (currently reading Aurora) and I haven’t heard of this one. Definitely picking that up lol

There was also a guy who mailed an entire bank to another city brick-by-brick.

I heard someone say the other day that most of the time when there’s a ‘bad’ technology it starts off as something good that everyone likes, and gradually becomes bad over time, like social media. But AI is something a bit more rare in that it came out and the majority of people didn’t especially want or like it, but it really feels like it’s being ‘forced’ into existence, so to speak. Which makes me think there’s something else going on.

Homage to Catalonia might be my favourite Orwell book. You can kind of see all the seeds being planted for his later more famous books in his experiences there.

The Big Lebowski is sort of like this too I think. I actually can’t remember if he even gets his rug back lol, but also it doesn’t matter.

Take control of the media.

People don’t like to admit it and they hate it when you say it usually, but TBH if you put something on blast on the news, most people will go along with it even if it’s fairly crazy. Or at least, enough people to get what you want done.

There’s a reason why oligarchs almost always buy some sort of media network once they get to a certain point of wealth.

Yeah I just switched to IVPN because of this. I had about 30 days left on my subscription when the news first broke, so I figured I’d give them that long to see if they handled it well. Their wishy-washy response to it made me pull the plug.

Jesus’ Birthday = December 25, Year changes = January 1, so 7 days later.

I always thought it was weird that the year (aka Jesus’ age) changes a week after his birthday. Like 2,026 weeks must add up to quite a bit.

Edit: just under 39 years apparently, so it should really be the year 1987 or 2065 depending on which way you want to correct it.

Yeah it’s pretty much a meme at this point that Bethesda games are unplayable at launch. Presumably the next step is adding AI slop into the mix or something like that.