If they’re doing it, I hope they’re doing it quietly. That’s all I have to say.

I’m glad someone gets it. It won’t be ‘civil war’ it will be ‘civil unrest’ with any true attempts to organize or enact violence quickly being neutralized by the complicit surveillance state. It doesn’t matter what the majority believe or want. It matters what you can enact in defense of your principles and your right to exist. This is how the fascist mind works. If they can’t be stopped then they won’t stop.

Frankly, it’s already too late. We already know how this works because we’ve seen it. In Russia, Hong Kong, Tiananmen Square, Iran, and a smattering of other places. It won’t be civil war. You need a military force for civil war. a cohesive engine with infrastructure and capital and weaponry. It will be protests and varying degree of ‘riots’ with maybe a peppering individual actors carrying out actual terrorist violence. None of that amounts to a civil war. At best you’re talking about a handful of dumb kids that got guns and went to a protest and then got everyone at the protest killed when they tried to defend themselves.

Hell, the war for independence was more or less a civil war but it only succeeded because the French came in and whipped the colonies into an actual fighting force. There is no equivalent outside force today that is going to come in and train the American populace, and even if there were you would be talking about some funding of terrorist cells kinda CIA style. The only place that could even remotely, (and I mean a snowflakes chance in hell) work is in the less populated middle of the country but there’s no force out there that agrees with left wing ideology and there’s no way to get supplies to them.

I’m sorry folks. I wish it weren’t so, but the moral high ground is useless if you can’t defend it.

Wipe your digital footprint, learn to obfuscate yourself and stfu until you can figure out how to leave if you’re a vulnerable demographic because shit’s going to hit the fan hard and you might find yourself dying in an ‘accidental’ prison fire or something the next time you go to a big protest and get arrested.

All names are washed away in the grandness of time. The sin is not to burn out but to waste your light in darkness alone. The virtue is in knowing personal cost of the clarity that your light grants to others.

I was pretty young at the time, but the thing that I always think about is the movie Enemy of the State when I think about 9/11. Because before the attack, the general narrative was that we need to be worried about what power we give our government and how much they spy on their people and how far they are willing to go to maintain power. I think about Tomorrow Never Dies a lot too, where a media mogul tries to control world governments and people by controlling the news. I was maybe 7 or 8 when the later came out, but I always remember them in terms of 9/11 because after that attack, both movies started to become prescient. The internet was the only thing that kept me informed on what was really going on in the world. Now even that’s changing.

It wasn’t just 9/11. There’s nuance to what they do that gets lost in translation. The most 1-to-1 for me would be Pearl Harbor.

No one from the US planned the Pearl Harbor attack, but it is believed by some that Roosevelt made policy decisions that goaded Japan into attacking the US as a means of gaining support for entering WWII.

No one in the US administration planned 9/11. What is today framed as incompetence was clearly stonewalling from people in key places of power to allow an attack to manifest. It’s been years and I don’t remember everything I’ve ever heard that’s been debunked. I do remember the head of the CIA refusing to send intel to the FBI was a big sticking point. I think I remember there being a drill going on that day about hijacked planes that made communication confused. I still don’t get why building 7 went down, or why some claimed it was almost totally empty that day.

So too with Israel. HAMAS has been allowed to fester in Palestine by the top Israeli officials, going so far as to assassinate more moderate candidates and even smuggle in money to fund the organization. Israel has for a long time had what is considered one of the most sophisticated and robust information networks in the world. There is no way that at least grumbles of this attack were unknown.

I grew up through 9/11. I saw what patriotism does to people and what leaders use it for.

I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.

It’s not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn’t pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn’t have content at all.

The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.

It’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about them… well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.

She’s angling to be my handler while I’m just angling to handle her.

shit, I think I spilled some VtM in my Sponge-bob.

Nah man, This here American just thinks we’re fucked.

I’m constantly thinking about how much we’ve domesticated ourselves over the last few hundred years.

The problem is that everyone’s internet experience is very different these days. Your friends might be boring and actually have nothing in their lives that need compartmentalized/obfuscated. It’s unlikely but not impossible.

The easiest way to demonstrate the problem would be when they show you something on an unprotected device you note the ads and give them shit for it. Those ads are likely targeted, and so your jabs would be targeted and personal too. Then point out that those ads are tied to THEM. Just ask every time, “have you been looking at X? Gross dude.” It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s the point that they are uncomfortable with your guess and it’s an opening to explain that, yeah it’s not just those ads buddy.

I’m not dying for rich people that got power and decided to break literally every stabilizing thing in geopolitics so that they could make more money and then start a war to cover it up.

I might die because of them, but there’s no way I’m dying for them. If they draft, I’m running. call me whatever you want.

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music would be a problem but I won’t complain about the cars in their front yard if they don’t complain about the giant garden in mine. Besides, maybe they’d let me borrow their jack stand or help me change my rotors.

I suppose at 8 years old the difference between the two was lost. I just enjoyed getting to listen to Rob Zombie without my mom knowing.

Flock cameras aside, I would never buy a home that’s part of an HOA. There have been too many stories over the last 10 years of these terrible people abusing their power, up-to and including stealing people’s home out from under them. That neighborhood is unlivable.

Kid, I’m old enough to have played Playstation games in my walkman for the music.

two older ones I always go back to are The Protomen and Gunship.

and if you like the story telling in a Protomen album and you like The Magnus Archives podcast, you may also find some joy in The Mechanisms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppmcM_aEMTY but that’s the biggest stretch because it’s less music and more audio storytelling weirdness.