I couldn't sleep after last night's excellent game between the Rockets and Warriors, so I tuned into the midnight re-broadcast of Maddow. She had an ex-CIA guy on as the big guest, he has a book out. He says he believes, now that he's retired, that the Russians did influence the outcome of the election. Rachel paused, as if some big moment had passed. She seemed to be saying, aha now at last the truth has come out. I thought this is so laughably ridiculous. Of course we all knew that the Russians influenced the outcome of the election. This. Is. Not. News. Stop being so ridiculous Rachel. Let's move beyond what we all know. We all know what happened in 2016. Now let's put up some defenses against what's happening now. #
What if, instead of only studying the way Trump is crashing our democracy, we devoted equal time to studying life in a totalitarian state, so we can anticipate what's coming next. We still have a long way to go before the Constitution is gone, so the more we know about what's coming next, the more effective we can be at heading it off. In other words, what if we didn't panic and instead learned how to put up the best defense possible. This is especially relevant for tech people, because life in our totalitarian state will be more completely totalitarian than any before, thanks to the incredible spying devices we carry in our pockets and install in our homes, naïvely assuming they only have benign applications. We create that technology. And already we are refusing to help, and that's a good sign, of course.#
I always figured that our oligarchs know full well that climate change is real, they just have a different strategy for dealing with it. #
I read this piece by Charles Stross yesterday where he outlined what I assumed was their actual plan. Here's the relevant section.#
Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it's increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they'll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world. #
I have told this story myself, once at full volume in a crowded NYC subway car (inadvertently, I tend to speak loudly) and was rewarded with agreement from fellow subway riders. #
I couldn't sleep after last night's excellent game between the Rockets and Warriors, so I tuned into the midnight re-broadcast of Maddow. She had an ex-CIA guy on as the big guest, he has a book out. He says he believes, now that he's retired, that the Russians did influence the outcome of the election. Rachel paused, as if some big moment had passed. She seemed to be saying, aha now at last the truth has come out. I thought this is so laughably ridiculous. Of course we all knew that the Russians influenced the outcome of the election. This. Is. Not. News. Stop being so ridiculous Rachel. Let's move beyond what we all know. We all know what happened in 2016. Now let's put up some defenses against what's happening now. #
What if, instead of only studying the way Trump is crashing our democracy, we devoted equal time to studying life in a totalitarian state, so we can anticipate what's coming next. We still have a long way to go before the Constitution is gone, so the more we know about what's coming next, the more effective we can be at heading it off. In other words, what if we didn't panic and instead learned how to put up the best defense possible. This is especially relevant for tech people, because life in our totalitarian state will be more completely totalitarian than any before, thanks to the incredible spying devices we carry in our pockets and install in our homes, naïvely assuming they only have benign applications. We create that technology. And already we are refusing to help, and that's a good sign, of course.#