ElevenLathe
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
In terms of lawyerly distinctions, I would actually argue that there is still no legal basis to the rename. The president has directed the federal executive branch to refer to Lake Ontario as Lake America, but...that's it. It literally doesn't and can't apply to Google. No law has been passed, and even if there had been it's pretty clear that it's a 1st Amendment issue to compel private entities to refer to things in particular ways -- it would be a slam dunk even on this Supreme Court. Their decision to do it is a voluntary act meant to curry favor with this administration, or at least to avoid pissing it off. This isn't like the Indian laws that make it illegal to publish a map that shows Kashmir as part of Pakistan, it's just a memo to the federal bureaucracy. Yes, this doesn't really matter because there are punishments that are within the power of the president (like cancelling contracts, or cooking up bogus DoJ investigations, or failing to resist antitrust enforcement, etc.) that they want to avoid. This just goes to illustrate that the rule of law in the United States is mostly a fantasy.
The only alternative would be a whisper campaign to suss out the trustworthy pockets within the existing police apparatus, but that is probably even more dangerous. Imagine the police chief in your city going public with information that there is a left wing plot to overthrow order from within the police department!
The big question then becomes: what is the market value of these things? Is it even positive? Creditors will eat the difference between that number and whatever they actually lent (less what they've been paid back so far, if anything).
If we don't band together to help one another, we're stuck playing by the rigged existing rules of the game. Organizing (either in the traditional labor sense, or via super PACs and racism) allows us to change the rules in our own favor, because we can wield more power.
With that laid out, what kind of group should we organize? The bigger the group, the more power it has. But also: the more coherent and lockstep the group is in its actions, the more power it has, at any size. So the goal of all politics is to form the biggest coalition you can that still holds together.
Many socialists think, as a strategic question (not one of ideology), that the goal should be to organize the whole working class (everyone who must sell their labor in order to survive). This is the biggest group you can possibly have that still shares a common interest. The problem is obviously that this is an unwieldy group and it's really really hard to do, particularly in the face of almost infinite money trying to stop us. There are various thoughts on how to address this problem, the classic one being to organize whole shops or industries at once, and slowly building momentum that was, but fundamentally it is about putting together the biggest possible political grouping that coheres.
Right wingers have a different strategy, which is to use identity politics (racism, xenophobia, sectarianism, sectionalism, etc.) to organize a smaller coalition but in a very tight, coordinated way. The play is that a relatively small group of committed actors can use things like propaganda, violence, and dirty tricks to seize or maintain power.
Fundamentally the left and the right are trying to do the same thing, which is to put together a coalition that let's them change the status quo. If we protect our individuality too much, we get rolled by the other side. Establishment oriented people tend to miss this.
TBH I feel like a dinosaur working this way, reading about others' more autonomous workflows. One merit it has is that it is a very cheap way to use AI, at least on the apps I work on, because Kimi K2.6 is more than adequate to give good results with this workflow.
SRE at a company you've heard of. I don't speak for them.
elevenlathe <a𝓽> justemail.net