Author: Alan Buddug

This is satire. It is a joke.

Last week, police in the small town of Redding, California responded to reports of antifa infiltrators invading in buses with the intent of doing terrorism. Unfortunately, the police were not able to locate the terrorists, so they could still be at large in the town, ready to do terrorism at any moment. Some possible terrorism that the antifas could do includes standing around looking angry, bringing attention to legitimately racist social interactions, and demanding that all human beings be allowed to exist.

At first, no photos or descriptions were available of the antifa bus, but today, Redding police released the following photo provided by a resident.

According to the witness, the antifa bus did not roll through town like a normal, decent bus, but rather floated through, held aloft by an enormous hot air balloon. The most concerning aspect of the bus is that it is a dark blue instead of the traditional safety yellow — a clear sign of how unpatriotic these antifas are. The witness hypothesized that the bus might function through the power of Satan rather than good, Christian diesel fuel. The invading antifas parachuted into Redding, wearing all manner of ridiculous costumes, as is typical of antifas.

Redding police have asked residents to look out for strangely dressed people carrying pick axes and other weapons, and either dancing or hitting each other with those weapons. If a possible antifa is sighted, Redding police encourage citizens to, “Go git um!” and then only call 911 after the threat has been neutralized.

Related: Although this post was a joke, conservatives really did start a ridiculous rumor about antifas invading Redding, CA in buses.

The short answer is “no”, but the longer answer is that they’re better than what we’re currently doing. Kate Walton-Elliot gets into the details in this video from Transport Evolved.

Today is the first day of school for Columbia Public Schools which makes it a good time to review the predicament we’re all in regarding COVID-19. When this all started, it was conceivable that we could solve the problem of COVID-19 by holding back the spread long enough for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, and that would prevent it from inflicting an enormous death toll. It was always destined to be endemic, just not deadly and endemic. Unfortunately, people (conservatives, specifically) refused to go along with those behavioral controls and the different groups in power didn’t cooperate with one another quite enough to get those vaccines into people’s arms fast enough — they were more concerned with patent rights, for example. We have to now look at COVID-19 as a predicament to be mitigated instead of a problem to be solved.

Specifically, the virus won because it is evolving faster than we can get people vaccinated. In the long term, the result will be the same: an endemic virus much like the flu that kills people every year, just not a staggering number. In the short term, a lot of conservatives and people with weakened immune systems are going to die. With kids back in school, the virus will spread much faster than it did before, and we will see another big spike in cases. In the US south, where conservativism is endemic, we will see a spike in deaths because hospitals have been stretched far beyond their capacity. Even people who don’t have COVID-19 will die because when they go to the hospital, there just won’t be space or medical staff available to help them.

And remember, it isn’t that tons of children are going to become seriously ill, have long term illness, and/or die (though we don’t actually know that for sure). Rather, the bigger issue is that they’re going to bring the virus home to Mom and Dad, and then to their grandparents. Some people have a weakened immune system and don’t even know it. I guess they’re about to find out.

What we don’t know right now is whether the delta variant is more dangerous to children, specifically. There just hasn’t been enough time yet to determine that, and at the rate the virus is mutating, we might be several variants down the line before we know, so it won’t even matter from a practical perspective. Regarding mitigation of the risk to children, our institutions (including schools) seem more interested in performing specific mitigations (e.g., masking) as if they are magic charms than in actually understanding the details of the way virus droplets move in the air. A cloth mask only protects a person from COVID-19 for a maximum of 27 minutes in an indoor space with normal ventilation, so have our schools been upgraded to increased ventilation with HEPA filters to catch and dry out virus particles in the air? I don’t know, either. Will the children be 6 feet apart to maximize the amount of time those masks are effective? I’m confident that they will not — schools just don’t have that much space.

It may be that we’ve failed so completely at this point that it makes sense to end all behavioral mitigations. I’m fairly horrified at the idea of just giving up, but the logic is sound: Children are probably going to continue to be affected very little by COVID-19, and everyone else who was going to be vaccinated already is; therefore, we should let ourselves get exposed to the current and future variants of COVID-19 because that allows our immune systems to learn about those new variants gradually, as they occur. The idea is that this strategy would keep vaccinated people with normal immune systems safe without requiring continuous booster shots, while conservatives and people with weakened immune systems suffer and die. Again, I hate this idea, but at the same time, I have to agree with the logic of it because it does appear that we’ve lost the battle.

Similarly, it is too late to solve the problem of climate change. It’s already happening, and further destruction is inevitable. Yes, in the very long term (hundreds or maybe thousands of years), the issue of climate change will be over one way or another. In the near term (the next 100 years or so), however, we’re in big trouble. As with COVID-19, people want to latch on to very specific performative behaviors instead of understanding the whole problem, and they certainly don’t want to make the sacrifices necessary for the best outcome. For example, recycling doesn’t really affect climate change at all, and it turns out that most material sent to be recycled ends up in a landfill. The difference is that where COVID-19 wasn’t ever going to kill more than 1% of the population, climate change now has the potential to kill everyone.

With COVID-19, we’re sacrificing conservatives, people with weakened immune systems, and people in nations with less money who were not able to get vaccines because the west bought them all up and refused to freely give away intellectual property that would have allowed those nations to manufacture their own vaccine. Who are we sacrificing with climate change? Right now, it appears that the intent is to sacrifice the poor and especially people in nations with less money, but it may well end up being everyone.

How do we talk to children about all these unsolvable problems? I would hate for kids to think that it is their fault that people are getting sick and dying (especially people they care about), so I guess I would tell them the truth — that certain people were too selfish and misinformed and that’s why this plague couldn’t be stopped, and that it isn’t the fault of any child when adults make bad decisions. Similarly, regarding climate change, I recommend telling them the truth. It’s a horrible truth, but also an extremely important one. If you are not gradually educating your children about every important feature of their world, you are doing them an intense disservice and, by fostering their ignorance, sabotaging the future of all humanity. It’s your children who are going to have to let their peers in on an important secret — that there is no cabal of Satanic lizard people running the world, just a bunch of selfish humans, including the dumbasses that raised them.

Yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of Facebook kicking all of the leftist pages and their admins off their platform; coincidentally, a Taliban spokesperson made some nice points about corporate censorship yesterday as well. The Taliban are not good people — they are right-wing extremists — but Zabihullah Mujahid was absolutely correct that Facebook censors free speech.

I certainly find it easy to laugh at US conservatives as they complain that big corporations are silencing them because they are the ones who created this world where capital can do whatever it wants. According to the doctrine of neoliberalism, it’s only censorship when the government does it. It’s all part of the basic assumption of neoliberalism — that capitalists are the legitimate rulers, and that they deserve power while everyone else should just have rights. Capitalists cleverly outsource all their violence to the state, and then pretend that economic power never involves force (or even power).

Rights are useless if you can’t meaningfully practice them. If you have the right to bear arms, but can’t afford a gun, that right is meaningless. If you have the right to vote, but they close down every polling place that you could reasonably get to on election day, that right is meaningless. (Voting is also meaningless when all the candidates were pre-approved by capitalists.) If you have the right to free speech, but essentially no one will hear what you say, that right is meaningless.

Moreover, capitalists in the United States are the ruling class in a very real sense; they control the government. We can’t let their clever layers of obfuscation succeed in concealing the fact that they are the ones in control. Every single media outlet and social media site of any significance is controlled by them as well. There’s no material difference between “the government” interfering with free speech and a major corporation interfering with it. Both things represent the will of the capitalist class.

If conservatives claim that they are capitalists, how is it that they are so angry about corporate censorship? Supremacists (a word that describes most if not all conservatives) love capitalism precisely because it provides cover for their various bigotries (the very complex hierarchy of race, gender, religion, ethnicity and so on). Then, when corporations instead choose to work toward pure neoliberalism (where money is the only hierarchy), it really pisses conservatives off. They want to use capitalism as cover, and keep the complex hierarchy that props them up materially and psychologically. They thought capitalism served their specific needs, and now they feel betrayed.

A response to Zabihullah Mujahid from Facebook said:

The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under U.S. law and they are banned from our services under our Dangerous Organization policies. This means we remove accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support, and representation of them.

That’s nice, but the capitalist class are just as much a terrorist organization as the Taliban, but I suppose they aren’t terrorists “under US law” since the primary purpose of US law (from the very beginning) was to protect the opulent minority. My reading of Facebook’s published guidelines for the Dangerous Organization policies looks like it should cover almost every firearm manufacturer in the US — and certainly the smaller manufacturers, who are quite often openly advocating for violence against the government and the left (i.e., their fellow citizens).

Let’s see how that shakes out, though. Would a capitalist corporation that promotes violence against the government and is actively arming violent non-state actors be allowed on Facebook? Turns out that yes, it would. Facebook’s policy on dangerous organizations is very similar to a lot of aspects of law in the sense that selective enforcement allows the enforcing organization to use the policy/law as a tool to crush criticism and meaningful organizing against capitalism. Meanwhile, pro-capital voices are allowed to continue no matter what they say.

Some conservatives (e.g., QAnon) have gone off the rails enough that their speech is specifically harmful to capitalists — that is why they were removed. In contrast, a certain amount of antigovernment sentiment is helpful to capitalists because it keeps the government weak which allows them to have greater power over our lives. Yet, no matter how much power they gain, they continue to blame the government (which they control) for everything that goes wrong even while they use it to their advantage.

Facebook has banned positive posts about the Taliban, which is interesting because, as person who doesn’t know much about Afghanistan, I’m curious as to what positive things one might say about the Taliban. I guess I may never know, and this post won’t say anything positive about the Taliban. Probably.

What I do know is that the Soviet Union went to war against Afghanistan for nearly 10 years for the purpose of keeping the pro-Soviet government in power despite attacks from Afghan fighters supporting both an Islamic theocracy and, interestingly, Maoist communism. That little detail is pretty interesting, isn’t it? Anyway, the Soviets lost around 26,000 troops, the Soviet-backed Afghan government lost 18,000, and the Islamic/Maoist side lost about 96,000 people, making the conflict similar in a way to the Soviet fight against invading Nazis in that the Soviets technically won, but suffered much higher losses relative to the invaders. As many as 2 million civilians died in the Soviet-Afghan war, about 5 million left the country as refugees, and another 2 million lost their homes and had to relocate inside Afghanistan.

The US looked at this situation and said, “That’s nice, but can I have a turn?”

If we assume the US war in Afghanistan is about to end, then it lasted about 20 years, beating the Soviets by a whole decade! Good for the US, I guess. Let’s see what those casualties look like! The Americans have lost around 7,500 troops (I’m including their mercenaries in that statistic), the US-backed Afghan government lost over 65,000 (ouch!), and the Taliban side lost about 55,000 people. Only about 50,000 civilians are reported killed on the Wikipedia page, which I’m using to quantify both conflicts for the sake of fairness. In summary, though, a much longer conflict with far fewer deaths, it seems.

Both the Soviets and Americans ended up equipping their enemies throughout the course of their respective conflicts. The Taliban are now replacing their worn out Soviet weapons with newer spoils from the west.

The US fought a similarly ill-advised conflict in Vietnam, but lost over 58,000 people during a much shorter period of time (perhaps 11 years, depending on how you determine when the US got involved). Basically, the US government has learned that to continue a foreign war, they must keep the US military deaths per year relatively low. In terms of losses by the foreign invader, the Soviet-Afghan conflict was 2,600/year, the US-Afghan conflict was 375/year, and the US-Vietnam conflict was 5,273/year. When people say that Afghanistan was the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, well it was really about half a Vietnam.

Though the situation in Afghanistan looks quite bleak, and though I hate to agree with Joe Biden (and Donald Trump, who is the US President factually responsible for US troops leaving Afghanistan), leaving Afghanistan alone for a while — or even treating it nicely — does seem like a better course of action than propping up a pro-capitalist regime, or a pro-Soviet regime, or a pro-Chinese regime, and it is certainly better than continuing to throw away human lives for nothing. I can certainly see why the Afghan government just gave up when the US decided to pull out — they were getting slaughtered even with the US there! Though it does appear that the situation for women in Afghanistan will be very, very bad, I think we should all keep in mind that we really only know about the Taliban through the lens of western media, and that it is not a neutral source of information.

What’s clear, though, is that Taliban rule in Afghanistan does NOT present any kind of immediate danger to the US, despite what the hysteria of conservative commentators would imply. If you read carefully, they don’t really have any kind of concrete reason for believing that the US is somehow in danger. Some would point to September 11, 2001 as evidence of what the Taliban can do; however, the Taliban did not plan 9/11, it is not the same thing as Al-Queda, and the vectors of attack that Al-Queda used are no longer available. Afghanistan does not have any kind of intercontinental missile technology, and anyone who looks at a globe will readily see that Afghanistan is on the other side of the world. Britain is literally a greater threat to the US than Afghanistan at this point. American-born right-wing extremists continue to be the greatest danger to Americans living in the United States.

The real reason all these conservatives are freaking out is because the US retreat from Afghanistan makes the US look weak, and their concern is more about their own fragile masculinity than any kind of material threat. I hate to break it to you, but the Trump years did far more to make the US look weak and pathetic than this decision to withdraw from Afghanistan (though, again, that decision is the responsibility of the Trump administration — not Biden). We look like a country that is about to collapse into civil war, populated by crazed clowns.

Since we live in the US, it is easy to get bogged down in the racist history of the United States and overlook the fact that European colonialism affected the entire world. Here’s a nice article about the legacy of colonialism in Mexico.

500 years after Spanish conquest, still under ‘colonial domination’? by Arturo Conde writing for NBC News.

As Mexico looks back on the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, an award-winning filmmaker wants his fellow Mexicans and others to confront their national identity — and re-examine how the legacy of colonial history still impacts people today.

It really pisses me off that the left is almost universally considered to be the most dangerous group while Republicans are out there causing actual harm to people and somehow they are normal. Sure, right wing, but not “dangerous extremists”. Factually speaking, they are dangerous extremists but America is so right wing as a whole that they’re given a pass.

On January 6, 2021, around a thousand of these dangerous extremists tried to overthrow the US government. They weren’t smart people, so their tactics were terrible, and they failed. They were extra special people, but their ideas were at that time shared with 30% of US voters. Similarly, people could argue that the Nazis were a tiny minority at first, but in fact, their ideas were shared by many, many Germans before the government made their fatal deal with Hitler.

Occasionally, one of these 45 million dangerous extremists does something truly psychotic. Recently, a California dad took his 2 kids to Mexico to murder them because he thought they had “serpent DNA” that they had inherited from their mother. The press isn’t explaining what exactly that means — probably because they don’t want to spread the madness — but it probably has something to do with the completely insane conspiracy theory that “lizard people” are secretly controlling the world. There’s some indication that these supposed “lizard people” all happen to be Jewish, making this exactly the same as the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about Jewish people.

Related: Bizarre reason surfer dad ‘killed kids with speargun’ by Brianne Tolj

That’s certainly the most viscerally horrifying recent news of Republicans gone wild, but the most significant news is the absolute walnuts attending Sturgis this year — without masks and without vaccination. To be clear, I’m saying that virtually none of the 700,000 people at Sturgis are vaccinated and no one is wearing masks. These infectious psychos will be achieving two complete infection cycles while they are there meaning that the contagious people who arrive there will each infect perhaps 10 people who will go on to infect 10 more before the end of the event on Sunday. Essentially, every single person will be exposed, and then they will bring their infections back to their communities.

Related: ‘No One I Know Is Vaccinated’: Sturgis Rally Bikers Are Coming for America

I understand that if a Republican is going crazy about some conspiracy theory on a plane, that the people who work on the plane are now allowed to duct tape them to a seat for the remainder of the flight, and then they are arrested and sometimes even imprisoned. Could we adopt a similar policy for all Republicans doing crazy shit everywhere? I swear I do not own any stock in a duct tape manufacturer. I just think this is an idea that could work. When all the dangerous Republicans are duct taped to chairs with their mouths covered, maybe we will be able to finally solve some problems in this country.

The Republicans you work with, are related to, and perhaps even are married to (3 to 4% of marriages are “mixed”) are extremely dangerous people and any one of them could completely lose their minds at any time. They’re being fed a constant diet of insanity. Even if they still seem to be under control, they are a physical danger to everyone at all times due to their constant dangerous, irrational behavior.

Related:

A Man Was Arrested After A School Board Meeting Erupted In Protests Against Critical Race Theory

Outraged protesters harass parent outside school board mask vote

Surely you’ve noticed one of your social media friends — a Republican — saying, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” I don’t know why you keep people like that on your friends list, but that person is technically correct. In an interview with Slate, Astra Taylor explains the whole thing.

The Founding Fathers were very concerned with protecting minority rights. They didn’t understand the phrase minority rights as we understand it today—protections for trans people, immigrants, et cetera. But they were very concerned with the rights of the opulent. And that’s one of their words, right? Madison said that it’s very important to structure the Senate as they did to protect the rights of the opulent minority against the landless masses.

In keeping with the original intent of liberalism, the Founding Fathers only saw white men who owned land as full citizens. That “opulent minority” should have power, while everyone else only had rights. Neoliberalism is just the further evolution of that idea with a more mathematical justification — money is used to quantify the value of everything, including human beings, and only people with a lot of money should have power according to neoliberals.

Thankfully, the United States has been heading toward more and more democracy — but that really scares Republicans. Republicans hate democracy; they think everyone who isn’t like them is inferior and not competent to vote.

The IPCC report is clear: nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe

Patrick Valance (UK government chief scientific adviser), the Guardian

The IPCC has absolutely nothing to do with “socialism”; in fact, it is a product of capitalism. The IPCC is made up of representatives of capital-controlled governments, capital-dependent scientists, and reviewers that are frequently direct representatives for capital. Global capitalism — which Republicans think is socialism — is actually a movement to free capital from the confines of nation states and democracy. When you see an IPCC report, what you are seeing is a conservative, watered-down version of the facts because the IPCC is run by capitalists (who are center-right) and has a standing policy of not being scary.

In fact, all climate scientists have a long-standing policy of not being “alarmist” because they believe fear will drive people to inaction. That sounds nice in theory, but remaining calm hasn’t motivated people significantly, either. When climate scientists provide us with what is possible for the future, they assume that people — and governments, in particular — will actually take action. The punchline after every IPCC report and every official announcement from climate scientists is that everyone assumes their best possible future will happen if we all do nothing.

That probably has something to do with why America chose to elect Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden as President. As with other neoliberal trash that has served as President of the United States, Biden has gone with the “build back better” mode of thinking, which is all about growing the economy with renewable energy. The problem with that is that fossil fuels are not removed from the economy under that strategy — we continue to use more fossil fuels every year even though the percentage of renewables as an energy source continues to increase. Were it possible for economic growth to continue infinitely on a finite planet, this could go on forever — fossil fuel use always increasing in absolute terms, yet always diminishing as a percentage of energy consumed.

We did have a chance to vote for a candidate for President that was onboard with fundamental change. During the 2016 election, I believed Democrats when they said that they just didn’t believe Bernie Sanders could win. By the 2020 election, I had figured out that they were lying; in fact, they simply are conservatives who are afraid of change. We say that Republicans don’t believe in climate science, but Democrats don’t, either. The quality of their disbelief is different, but they definitely don’t believe the facts.

I encourage you to read the article from the Guardian that I linked to above. The fun thing about that article is that the headline text (“nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe” — which is completely accurate) is not at all reflected in the text of the article. The article itself just talks about how it is too late to avert some catastrophe, how things will inevitably get worse; it implies that we have to do something to avoid our own extinction, and then it talks about technology. Throwing money at new tech is the opposite of “transforming society” — it is, instead, nothing fundamentally changing while the nerds solve the problem for us.

When people choose to find a technological solution for a behavioral problem, I don’t blame the scientists and engineers for the outcome, but we should all understand that this approach does not solve the problem. Rather, it just makes the problem more complicated. The best example of this was the solution to international conflict after World War II — specifically, the inability of western capitalists and Soviet communists to work things out. The technological solution to that was a global nuclear arms race. Technological solutions to behavioral problems are inferior to solving the behavioral problem and come with serious complications and unintended bad side effects.

Moreover, technological solutions are not inevitable. There are innumerable problems in our world that people seem to believe will inevitably be solved with technology, but they have not. The best example of this in my mind is the problem of death. For example, rich ding dongs went through a phase where they were freezing their bodies — or in some cases, just their heads — because they believed there would be a magical future where death had been defeated by tech, and they’d wake up cured of mortality.

Republicans aren’t the only ones getting high off bizarre fictions — Democrats are doing it, too. Is it possible that 51% of Americans will be able to focus on reality for long enough to solve this problem via electoral politics? Using the past 6 years as evidence, I would say that is so unlikely as to be laughable. How else might the human specie survive? If the United States and Britain collapse, would the rest of the world be able to move forward? I don’t know; maybe. If nothing fundamentally changes, humanity will end.

Related: Climate change: IPCC report is ‘code red for humanity’ by Matt McGrath (contains better detail about the contents of the latest IPCC report)