Notices by D Dino (garbados@toot.cat), page 15

@kara_dreamer fuck anti-semites and anti-semitism. that’s not the association i intended though i recognize i maybe should have been more careful with my metaphors 😬

@kara_dreamer like aliens who are unconcerned with the stakes, for whom the billions of lives in the balance are like yards run and points scored

@freakazoid @meena this article also poses a scenario like that. faced with irresolvable federal dysfunction, states organize into compacts, forming sub-federations, in order to pass major reforms such as single-payer healthcare. this article walks through this possibility: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/maybe-its-time-for-america-to-split-up.html

i found its speculation went off the rails pretty quick, but the basic presumption that states will be forced to take the reigns is sound. what worries me is that these party-region-blocs will basically trade off control of an increasingly draconian federal apparatus until one of them finds cause to deploy the military against the other bloc directly. even if they don't, the US falls off the world stage simply because it loses the ability to maintain cohesive diplomatic relations. that power vacuum strikes me as more momentous than the US' slow collapse.

@freakazoid @meena my money is on this series of events:

- the concentration of power in the executive (ex: the irrelevance of congress regarding war powers) combined with the irreconcilable division between parties that causes foreign policy to swing wildly between administrations will lead to a form of diplomatic paralysis, where other countries cannot rely on the US to maintain their commitments, while knowing that they can tamper with US electoral systems because that very same paralysis prevents retaliation.
- states like california then do two things: negotiate their own foreign policies, and reject certain federal rulings; for example, if SCOTUS rules such that abortion is made nationally illegal (unlikely, but stranger things have happened) or Title IX is ruled to require anti-trans discrimination, would california accept it?

@meena it was a federation until the civil war, when the precedent emerged that any serious internal threat to the union justified war. the union will not peacefully dissolve; any act that could be called secessionist grants casus belli to the reigning regime.

@gcupc my neighbor and i were talking about hellworld and after laughing so hard i started to tear up he goes "it's not funny" and i'm just losing my shit saying "oh i know, oh god i know"

@gcupc me, a millenial, having honed a joyless guffaw from coping with the absurdity of the nightmare that only deepens: haha yeah

sartre's No Exit but it takes place in a call center

@polymerwitch the banality of hell

when a boomer says to you "it is our grandchildren's grandchildren who will suffer the consequences of climate change" as you strap on your air mask because there will be no more summers in your lifetime without yellow air and bloody suns

@freakazoid @bhtooefr yeah, i can see that. fascists have forced the questions neoliberals cannot answer: what are borders for if not racist exclusion? what is a nation for if not subjugation? what is a government for if it can be bought and sold? since the dawn of the enlightenment, the birth of that false rationalism, the liberal has navigated a tentative alliance between the profiteer and the progressive; at last the bond unfurls and the friend becomes foe