No need to be rude. Let me attempt to further elucidate on my point.

Colonialism came before fascism was ever coined or uttered much less a movement that’s true but I dispute it being an entirely different animal and insist it’s merely colonialism adapted for specific circumstances of a specific time in Europe. Some people might say just the same that it was “proto-fascism” and our disagreement is not about what came first but whether it is a different animal instead of just a rebranding.

I think the conversation about colonialism as an enduring phenomenon is more important to center the conversation around than allowing certain parties to reframe the conversation and the victim-hood of 20th century European people as particularly special and unique and isolated from these practices when there are so many clear connections openly admitted by the perpetrators themselves.

Don’t ask meaningful questions about history and politics and systems and then get defensive when people give you academic answers that address it and give context and information. Don’t agree? That’s fine.

Now for you I’ll even expand a bit further since you’re so fixated on “proto”. History is not a series of events happening in separate vacuums. It is a series of connected processes going back all the way to the start. Some connections are stronger than others yes, some closer to one another, directly preceding or even being necessary for the development of for example.

Fascism is a loaded word. People bandy it about not to mean a specific phenomenon in Europe in the 20th century from say the 1920s to the mid 1940s centered on Germany and Italy but to mean broadly “oppressive bad political system or act”. Yet that’s not what it was or means. If you’re using it in those loose and inaccurate terms then well there are lot of historical oppressive, repressive, reactionary, and what we might call bad systems including but not limited to monarchy. But in my opinion there’s no direct line between monarchism and the actual historical fascism. Monarchism didn’t directly give rise to it. Arguments about whether it was historically necessary are more complicated, I’ll just say that colonialism was much, much more necessary as was the American example of genocide and settling and for that matter as was capitalism. For that matter the rise of socialism was a necessity because fascism existed and rose to power in opposition to communists and its rule was seen as preferable to the communists by big business and industry and by a variety of reactionary political ideologues and ideologies including but not limited to monarchists.

Not really.

Colonialism is proto-fascism or more correctly fascism is merely colonialism turned on white people by their immediate neighbors instead of an empire an ocean away. All the tactics and horrors of fascism were adopted from colonial practices by European empires in Africa, by American settler colonizers in the Americas, etc. The mass propaganda model was designed based on American advertising psychological studies and practices. The only true innovations were mechanization (use of extensive trains, computer systems for organizing the exterminations, etc), and white people being the victims. Fascism itself arose specifically due to the threat of socialism as a way of combating it by the capitalists.

Monarchism is an unjust, vile, backwards, reactionary system of government and rule. It has presided over colonialism but it also predated it and colonialism has also occurred from nations without monarchies (US is prime example, but France is another, they continued colonialism well into the very end of the 20th century long after they chopped off the heads of their own monarchs and some including myself would argue their neo-colonialism has continued right up until recent events like the formation of AES in the African sahel).

Now I haven’t thought a lot on this particular question or explored it in depth looking for a connection (maybe you can find one if you want to start drawing lines from x through y to then z) but right now I wouldn’t say that there is any kind of direct line from monarchism to fascism per se. Monarchism upholds itself through brutality and injustice yes and is predicated on unjust thinking and supremacy and I suppose one could explore the influence of monarchism and monarchist thinking on the development of colonialism and racism but in truth capitalism and proto-capitalist modes of production are the father of fascism via the development of colonialism.

Bullshit. Shift the decimal and claim 2.1 trillion and I’d believe it possible but that’s just a ridiculous amount of money and corresponding work.

As for how these alleged cities and facilities are powered, Fitts said she believes the government has found a way to generate breakthrough energy that she believes is being used to keep them going.

“I’m convinced that this energy exists. If you look at a lot of the really fast ships, flying around the planet, they’re not using classical electricity,” she claimed.

100% reactionary conspiracy crank brain. Probably believes that they’re in alliance with the subterranean lizardmen. This is just conservative “government is wasting money” brain smashing into reactionary conspiracy-brain.

Now I wouldn’t be surprised if the US government was plowing hundreds of billions, even a couple trillion into secret cities like these for the elites and planning to nuke China and have the political class, military brass, and top bourgeoisie along with a few select others like top scientists, etc ride out the retaliation in these, stay underground for a few years or so and then re-emerge and start re-asserting control.

I’m actually quite afraid they have an advanced plan for doing just that because they are fucked and they know it and the interceptors programs are not getting to the point they need them to be to be able to “win” a nuclear war. That’s quite possible to do using nuclear power stations located underground and possibly some geothermal projects in some areas and you could easily build several of them along with storage for large amounts of military equipment and hide the purchases of that equipment in the money the Pentagon disappears all the time or “shipped to Ukraine” or whatever.

I also wouldn’t be shocked if they took the climate change crisis as a chance to “reset” the world to a better win condition for themselves by using nuclear weapons to wipe out a large chunk of humanity and all their rivals either. But this, this is just nonsense.

This is going to get DV victims killed. At least on phone tracking like iPhone’s family sharing makes it clear it’s happening and often has a way of disabling it when you make your final run for it allowing you to keep your phone.

Private property isn’t a sacrifice. I don’t own any.

There’s a difference between personal property and private property. Private property is a mall, is a factory, is machinery at your workplace. Personal property is your toothbrush, your Playstation, your Television, your blender, your set of German knives, your computer, your books, etc.

Freedom of speech has never existed. The illusion of it has been allowed to be stronger or weaker in various places at various times, if your speech is no threat it’s often allowed, it’s when it’s a threat that suddenly the freedom vanishes and hides behind excuses like national security or illegal ideologies, etc.

I question how you would get rid of freedom of thought without some sort of hellish brain implants being made mandatory so it’s an odd thing to mention.

I’d be willing to sacrifice an awful lot of fascists, reactionaries, and an awful lot of enabling liberals. I’d be willing to sacrifice bourgeoisie. The expropriation of their private property is not a sacrifice but a necessity for things being held in common trust for the people.

Yes, absolutely. And they can drag Canonical into it as well if they wish though it’s harder. Being UK based doesn’t protect them from the long arm of US law including arresting any US personnel, freezing and seizing their funds, putting out arrest warrants for and harassing those in the UK with the fear of arrest and rendition to the US if they go to a third country (for a conference, vacation, etc, most would buckle rather than live under that). Additionally the US could sanction them for non-cooperation by making it illegal for US companies to sell them products and services, for US citizens to work for or aid them, etc.

They can go after community led projects too, just send the feds over to the houses of some senior US developers and threaten and intimidate them, intimate their imminent arrest and prison sentence unless they stop contact and work with parties from whatever countries the US wishes to choose to name. Raid their houses, seize their electronics, detain them for hours in poor conditions. Lots of ways to apply pressure that doesn’t even have to stand up to extensive legal scrutiny (they can keep devices and things and the people would have to sue to get them back).

The code itself is likely to exist in multiple places so if someone wanted to fork from say next week’s builds for an EU build they could and there would be little the US could do to stop that but they could stop cooperation and force these developers to apply technical measures to attempt to prevent downloads from IP addresses known to belong to sanctioned countries of their choosing.

It’s not like the US can slam the door and take its Linux home and China and the EU and Russia are left with nothing, they’d still have old builds and code and could develop off of those though with broken international cooperation it would be a fragmented process prone to various teething issues.

“Increasingly unfit” how about how the entire media (aside from reactionary media) and his aides and the Democratic party hid his senility, lied about it, ignored it, made excuses for it, and accused anyone who pointed it out of distortion and having an agenda in order to let him push ahead with running again and save themselves the embarrassment of admitting the president of the US was not all there. All so the Democratic party could keep control and prevent scary things like a debate on supporting the genocide of Palestine and other issues they’d rather not allow discussion on.

Anyone else in this position would do no such thing.

Trump is in this position because he wants to do this AT LARGE SCALE.

He doesn’t care about being cruel to a couple of people, it’s about getting the precedent and go-ahead to deport millions of people. What happens to this one guy is much less important than the precedent of at the very least being able to deport without due process. Ideally he and his friends would like to be able to deport without courts being able to order them to bring people back after the fact so they can just purge a bunch of people from the country.

They pulled out of the illegal settlements and maybe the greater occupation some years ago and reactionaries were furious.

Paywall.

Anyways can’t wait for that and for nasal rinses to have that brain eating water parasite in them and kill hundreds/thousands because of relaxed regulations among other things. Fuck.

And you just know it won’t hit a major company, they’ll blame a third party contracted supplier for the problem instead and get them shut down and continue on their ways without any improvements.

Neither of which they’re going to do or address.

This is Lucy with the football and Dem voters are Charlie Brown sure this time she won’t pull it away. Well she will. And if she doesn’t they have the Republicans who magically have the power to break laws, rules, ignore the parliamentarian and Senate decorum and so on and do whatever they need to put a stop to this to which Dems put up feeble resistance then shrug and say they tried but oh well. They didn’t really try. They never will. And they’ll never break rules, never stack the supreme court, never play ball.

They will let their most rightward members split to sabotage a vote, they won’t try party discipline, they won’t whip members, they won’t threaten, they won’t do old politics stuff of if you fuck with the party on major things you get shut out of everything, your district doesn’t even get $5000 for a new sign for its park because you get nothing, not assignments, no allowing your bills, no riders, nothing. Play ball or get shut down. Play ball or the party supports a primary challenger on top of those things and does everything it can to push you out. But they won’t do that because they don’t want any of this and are happy to have spoilers derail it so they can pretend they wanted it and pretend they listened to their base and pretend they tried.

Bullshit. Why would you believe it’s good faith? Why wouldn’t you want rules written down if they’re to be enforced? Rules should be spelled out clearly to be fair and transparent.

They may enforce it for a little while, but they can now quietly drop enforcing it and no one will notice because it will be a change documented internally only.

This is a transparent attempt to manage the outrage.

Bullshit. The begging, pleading lies of those caught in the act and facing down a 20 year sentence, promising now that things have come to a head they’ll change the way they’ve been all their life if just once more they’re let off the hook for their actions.

It reminds me so much of the Saddam bit from the South Park movie where Saddam is in an abusive relationship with Satan and keeps winning him back by promising to change and then doing something performative before going back to his old ways. “I can change, I can change!” he sings and it’s the same tune these Democrats are singing. They’ve been singing it off and on for decades every time they lose the base too much then immediately putting away that number as soon as they get the base back and berating them for demanding better, for ‘purity testing’ and so on and brow-beat with accusations that demands for change help Republicans win.

So excuse us if we’re a little skeptical because this song and dance is very worn.

How about actually defending trans people and trans rights instead of getting mealy-mouthed? How about making impassioned speeches in defense of trans kids right to affirming care and transitioning? No they won’t do that.

Or condemning the genocide in Palestine and calling out the elements in their own party supporting it? No they won’t do that either.

Simplewall.

94% of Militia members in the US are foaming at the mouth reactionaries if not open fascists, with many being active or former law enforcement or related to military or intelligence.

There is AFAIK no way to do this.

Apple’s never open-sourced the APIs and interfaces and it only works on Macs and Windows. For this you will need to have either a Windows install (recommend separate drive so it doesn’t break Linux bootloader) or a persistent or not Windows VM with USB passthrough. I’m not even sure how well the VM situation works but it probably should. You don’t even have to have a license for Windows, you can just run it in the VM for this purpose alone but it does mean oh at least 40GB set aside on your drive for the VM image plus more if you want to do things like back-up the phone.

Marx of course understood the dictatorship of capital and the nature of revolution as a violent affair. That Mao quote is abused as a thought-terminating cliche to be honest. He is referring to the fact that if you want to change a system systemically you need tools like guns, if you’re going to be a revolutionary, if you’re going to fight imperialists, you need guns. If you’re going to retain your independence against encroachment and attempts at overthrow by capitalist forces, you need guns. But those are largely affairs of the revolution and external defense. Internally Mao absolutely agreed with Marx on political authority and legitimacy of the party through its connection to the workers, which Mao phrased as the Mass Line. So in this way there would be agreement in a sense with Rousseau’s line (and Marx’s) here though there was a lot more to it from Rousseau obviously and I’m not trying to say Mao or Marx’s thought derives from Rousseau at all.

This cartoon is kind of all over the place. For the first 4 panels it features thinkers, philosophers stating how things -should- be run in their thinking to create a society, not necessarily how things were run in their time but how they should be. Then suddenly in the last two panels it goes from proposals for how to structure society to analysis of how society exists or is seen to exist at a given point in time and how its authority is derived.

They previously sold out email addresses to an anti-piracy law firm which proceeded to extort penalty settlements from the holders of the accounts. This is why their upload bots were banned on leet x.

Whisper is open source and free AI model for transcription. If you’re not comfortable setting it up Audacity has a whisper plugin you can easily add and use.

As to how good it is, it really varies a lot but it is free. You need another plugin to export to a subtitle file.

Edit: Actually the program Subtitleedit (https://www.nikse.dk/) has the ability to run whisper models and you can download them from within the app, also no need for another plug to export so that’s probably the easiest. Once it’s as text you can use the translate menu within SE to translate. You need an API key (paid) for most of the truly good services but you can use basic google translate for free and it should give you the gist of things.

Reminder that the US has been a treaty-violator from the beginning of its existence. Breaching numerous treaties with the Native Americans.