Unfortunately, “Men’s Rights” was a bait and switch. The Alpha/Sigma ideology says there can only ever be a handful of “True Men” worthy of human rights. Everyone else has to either prove themselves through combat or submit to being less than human.
New York is one of the most liberal states in the country, but its got fewer EVs per capita than Texas in no small part because its also one of the few states with a functional mass transit system.
Utah is one of the reddest states in the country, but it also has enormous wealth per capita, so it has far more new EVs than bluer states like Delaware and Rhode Island and New Mexico and Wisconsin.
You need to pretend you live in a democracy or the administrators will take away the illusion.
He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.
That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.
For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.
I’m close enough to politicians and other “powerful” people to say that nobody’s getting a free lunch like that.
I don’t know how close is “close”, but I can point you to a litany of local political insiders just in my municipality who benefit enormously thanks to their proximity to power. The HISD Superintendent just got caught sending Houston money to a network of charter schools in Colorado that he has a personal stake in just for instance.
If you’re talking about white collar crime, you can make a lot of money that way very easily, but you’re also on borrowed time until someone else looks closely at the books.
Not when the person looking at the books is Ken Paxton. Then he simply declines to prosecute anyone who is on his team.
Sure, a good autocracy will always be more effective and fairer than a good democracy. The greek already knew that.
They also knew that a bad autocracy will always be worse than a bad democracy.
Autocracy is good for the cronies. The theory of Democracy is that you make everyone a potential crony and create political incentive for a broad egalitarian base of support.
So democracy is not just about giving people what they want or representing their views, it is about damage limitation between all the established “mafias” vying for power and a ruleset for peaceful evolution.
But in practice, this doesn’t work. Cartels are an effective tool to undermine democracy via Divide and Conquer of the natural social subunits.
Mafias build strong bonds of trust and shared economic advantage at the expense of their neighbors. They form internal patronage networks that promise more than a fair share of reward for compromised ideology and ethics. They also foment superstition and FUD that polarize people against one another.
To make it worse, some modern societies hide de facto autocracy or oligarchy under democracy, which may sour you towards democracy.
The perception of hidden selfish cartels operating underneath broad egalitarian institutions is what ultimately undermine them.
That is why mass media has such a major role to play in democracy. And why privatization of media ultimately leads to a failed democracy.
Nobody is at the wheel.
There’s no one single person who controls everything, but there are lots of local admins that control choke points in economy and bureaucracy.
The backstabbing is about positioning yourself. But once you’re in a good spot, can extract enormous amounts of wealth with very little effort.
It still works better than autocracies
As the line between autocracy and democracy gets fuzzy, the appeal of democracy declines.
They tend to choose kings
I don’t think people have a lot of agency in a liberal democracy. In my experience, the politicians tend to select their voters - via gerrymander and disenfranchisement and strategic GOTV.
Popular views are poorly represented, but the avenues for opposition are walled in by State and private police forces.
This sours people on what feels increasingly like a farce, and poisons popular opinion against the idea of a true functional democratic system.
What happens when democracy itself becomes a partisan issue? What happens when Democratic Values don’t correspond with continuous economic growth (or, at least, the appearance of it as reported by your news outlet of choice)? What happens when democracy becomes unpopular and demagogues are seen as a social good?
It’s a paradox of sorts. If a savvy enough media campaign or a cynical set of bureaucrats can turn people against the mechanisms of self-representation, how can a democracy survive?
John Locke would tell you it can’t.
There was an abstract conceptual theory of system agnostic game add-ons. It isn’t… completely inconceivable.
You could work with a relatively prolific engine, like Unreal, and set up a standard character model dummy with designated hard points for attaching accessories and certain default movements. Then any accessory could simply scale to the environment - Master Chef could swing a keyblade while the Elden Ring guy gets to wear Iron Man armor, because these are all “human” models with well-defined structures that could map to the associated equipment. The blockchain becomes a universal registry for these assets that a platform can read from to render the art.
The problem is that nobody ever actually implemented this universal protocol. They all just ran off making jpegs of weird animals and running fake auctions to create the illusion of a secondary market. You had zetabytes of data being processed so some Baked Alaskahole could claim his Kumming Koala was worth $40M.
I don’t even strictly begrudge “the blockchain” as an idea for licensing and data storage (just please don’t ask me to think about who is generating the licenses or storing the data). But it was all vaporware. None of it was anywhere close to being created, much less delivered. People were throwing billions with a b of dollars at entirely empty promises.
Why, Linux?! It is said that you would destroy the Blockchain, not join it!
Did East Germany ever host?
I’m staring at the front page of lemmy.ml and I’m trying to find what’s got people so worked up. It seems fairly simple to not go into a prolonged rant about how much you hate China when the content is just silly imgr memes.
I mean, by all means, block it if you don’t like the content. But why are you obsessed with the modlogs of an instance you blocked?
https://hexbear.net/post/2648774?scrollToComments=false
Their top stickied post seems to be a biography of a 19th century French anarchist. That’s about as 10/10 wholesome chungus as it gets.
Past that, the front page is mostly full of screenshots of other social media posts mixed in with the occasional news item.
This guy is asking for help meeting people because he’s an introvert.
This is a meme about the Roman Empire being a vector for olive trees.
Like, this isn’t a difficult challenge.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Unironically the future of capitalism, as it devolves into feudalism with more killer robots.
You’ve got the CEO (Absolute Monarch) who owns all the removed and you work on it in exchange for not being killed or deported. Maybe you get some treats from time to time. More likely, you just get someone from the PMC to tell you to pray more.
Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.
A handful of humans with the power to deliver unlimited genocide on their neighbors are hard to keep in check.
The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face
We’re surrounded by corporate entities all trying to leech profit out of us.
It’s less a question of trust and more of information alternatives. When all you can hear is the din of advertisement, it’s difficult to chart a path through the racket.
You’re bound to get suckered by someone, eventually.
My whole library is wipped out
I assumed this was about an actual library and not some shmuck who got suckered into a thinly veiled rental service.
Only the poor ones. You know, the “betas”.
They’re driving the disparity. Artificially constricting the demand for labor in order to drive down wages. Privatizing public services to squeeze working people for their last dime. Bombarding audiences with FUD in order to get them to blame every conceivable external agent - illegal migrants, evil foreign governments, spies, terrorists, literal removeding space aliens - so that the public is in a constant state of anxiety and exhaustion. Busting unions. Busting street protests. Busting college campuses. Corrupting the foundations of the political system to shield themselves from accountability for their shady actions. Then dumping vast fortunes into policing and the military in order to unleash wave upon wave of violence on working class communities.
At the forefront of all of these moves are “Alpha” men. People who believe themselves entitled to enormous wealth and social privilege, extracting at the expense of the rest of us. Its only after we’ve been ravaged that we see the lackeys and sycophants of these self-entitled paymasters step back in to recruit for the next generation of gladiatorial fighters, street cops, and foreign mercenaries.