I went to a No Kings block party (mostly because family members wanted to go) but didn't bother to bring a Don't Vote sign.

There is an old joke among actual leftists that in the US, people think that the more a government does something, the more left it is. But of course fascists can run a welfare state, and fascists can intervene in pricing. They just have to virtue signal the latter as looting. They wouldn't say that the government is buying up more oil to lower oil prices for consumers, but they would say that they invaded Venezuela and took its oil.

We last had country-wide price controls in the US under Nixon, not under some putative left-of-center pol. When the mob grows restive every politician who has any sense at all does the same thing. The putative left-of-center pols are often more constrained in their ability to do so because they have to guard against the idea that they are socialists, and as a result they are more vulnerable in this way.

These things are not a sign that Trump is some kind of fool who doesn't know what he's doing. They show that he knows what he's doing better than the defenders of orthodoxy do. It's why he was willing to send out Covid stimulus checks to people and Biden was not.

Price controls are not necessarily literally that, they can also be attempts to introduce new supply that is lower than market price. The Trump administration has been doing this for some time.

That is exactly what sponsoring a coup in Venezuela and "taking their oil" is, or importing low-cost mystery beef from who knows where, or signalling that it's OK to put Russian diesel back on the world market is.

I wrote something about price controls on food and fuel yesterday. #Economists always say that price controls are bad, and that is because their discipline has been formed so that they pretend to have politically neutered themselves. Part of their reason for being is to tell people that price controls are bad.

But every politician understands that when prices are going bad, you need price controls on staples or you get thrown out of office, legally or violently.

In physics, curved spacetime is the mathematical model in which, with Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity naturally arises, as opposed to being described as a fundamental force in Newton's static Euclidean reference frame. Objects move along geodesics—curved paths determined by the local geometry of spacetime—rather than being influenced directly by distant bodies.

"Cyber Denied: A Wake Up Call After the Loss of Autistici/Inventati"

Read it as a zine or online.

https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/zines/cyber-denied

the whole event is like this, it's fantastic

I found my drawing tablet and I'm not afraid to use it

I understand the rhetorical purposes being used in this. But social facts embedded in history get more and more difficult to change with rhetoric.

/fin

There is a sense in which people are right to say that the pandemic is not over: this is true by physical facts and social fact 1.

There is a sense in which people are right to say that the pandemic lasted from 2020-2021. This is the sense in which if society says that special measures are over and now it's time for people to die, then special measures are over and it's time for people to die. This is real and important.

Social fact 2: in the US, and really in most or all of the world including eventually China, initial measures against the pandemic were lessened and often eventually given up in favor of "getting people back to work" and similar concerns. The end of these measures against the pandemic is what people talk about as "the pandemic lasted from 2020-2021".

This is horrible, and it's also a social fact.

So, physical facts: covid is a virus, it is still circulating, people are still being affected by it (stats can be collected on this).

Social fact 1: the definition of pandemic is a social fact, not a physical fact. WHO, probably the most powerful worldwide entity in this regard, declared covid to be a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and as far as I know has not retracted that.

https://www.publichealth.com.ng/world-health-organization-who-pandemic-definition/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@plaguepoems/117452670149695860

OK, a bit on "during the pandemic" and physical vs social facts. Physical facts are things like the properties of gold. and social facts are like does your society use gold as money, do they let people make enough gold to live on and will you die of starvation if you don't have enough gold.

People die from social facts much more often than they die from physical facts. Rarely does someone fall out of a window without there being a social history of window construction and/or pushing people.

I actually forgot that I have 2 Terabytes on this server. Still not enough.

Damn it it feels like a Terabyte is just too small these days. I don't even have enough room left to unzip US Census ACS 5-year data.

"The British government is banning pornography that includes depictions of choking, incest & adults roleplaying as children."

But these are three favorite activities of the British aristocracy.

#UK

Still laughing about the Daring Fireball guy saying that only on X can you get posts from the dictionary

A punk band released this Hanoi Hannah-style piece that is meant for breaking police/ICE/Gestapo morale.
The video is a sample, the full work runs ten hours so it can be put on on a bullhorn, keyboard/PA amp, or other high power speaker system at the start of a battle or community defense.

Same idea as Vietnamese broadcasts targetting US troops during that war, save that this is a civil war.

Police and agents of the regime warned that they are outnumbered 1,000 to one by "the most heavily armed population in human history."

This is about killing the enemy's will to fight. Sun Tzu said achieving this and thus winning before the fight can even start is the ultimate victory.

#morale #propaganda