"That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally."
You think so?
I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.
Yeah a lot of us are tired of it. I dislike the democrats intensely.
I also dislike the GOP folks intensely.
Which is why I dislike your line of reasoning here: -you- are playing the game we are all tired of.
Like, no shit the Dems didn't drop the files because it implicates folks like Bill Clinton.
But that doesn't make it the case that DT would be okay with the files dropping either.
And it doesn't make it the case that much of the highly spectacular actions his admin takes has nothing to do with achieving material goals and everything to do with keeping his base (which at this point should seem pretty damn dumb given how much damage he has personally done to them) entertained, angry, and confused.
And --you-- are the one who brought out the Dems here.
You. You are the person doing the thing we are all tired of.
I quit in '23. I didn't have F-U money (heck, I don't have running water) but I did inherit some money from my parents when they passed, enough to buy a shack on some land and to get my living expenses low enough that running sound and playing music could pay the bills.
I will note that I did quit before my parents passed on, mostly because my kids (I am 48 and had them young) had graduated college and I realized I wasn't going to make enough in my remaining working years to both buy a house where I want to live and fully retire.
So I quit and lived in my truck and did stage hand gigs that payed a better day rate than I got programming, even though they were only a couple of days a month.
I am in EMT school because I like to do first aid at festivals and support my local free clinic. One of my recording clients just left with the masters of his album he cut out at my off-grid, solar-powered recording studio.
In additions to the realizations about the reality of retirement, I just got tired of answer pages to reboot a server at 1am because my boss was to cheap to offload some containers to a second server.
Also, I enjoy programming (this last winter I re-learned C to work with ESP32), but watching the less-talented folks at the biz use it as a crutch to make ever cruftier, bug riddled stuff made me a little repulsed.
It didn't help that I was doing WordPress customization/hosting/troubleshooting for large institutional clients- for as much money as it made me, it is was still a towering pile of shit that required being able to really work all parts of the stack including layer-zero issues.
So here I am, Dale-Gribbling it up in the middle of nowhere, unemployed, unable to tell the difference between massive inflation and massive gains in my portfolio, sitting a rural shack in Colorado surrounded by a bunch of musical instruments.
Yall should quit while there is still time, if you can.
" If you want to start shooting people, then prepare for a well-deserved, long prison sentence."
* unless you're a law-enforcement officer, in which case folks like laughing_man are totally okay with you killing folks for vandalism because it upholds the legal system.
I only lived in Austin for a couple of years, but I grew up in the Amarillo and Lubbock and am a direct descendant of the racist, slave-holding white settlers who signed on the Texas Declaration of Independence.
I can concede that there are plenty of nice folks and pretty places in the state.
That's the line the person you're responding to is fishing for: somehow the people in the state aren't responsible for the oligarchy that runs it. Somehow folks aren't responsible for not knowing how oppressive that political situation is for everyone who isn't shaped like them.
I've left Texas; your points here agree with my understanding.
Texas is nothing special- I can get the same cedar fever out on my 40 acres in rural Colorado, but the view is better. I'd rather live out here where I have an outhouse than try and find parking in the green belt and go climb on a few chipped and shitty 40-foot rock climbs in a 104* sauna.
I did go down for 18 days of the Kerrville Folk Festival this year- that and my kiddo who lives in Dallas are the only things that can pull me that far south any more.
It's a just-fine place if you're okay with the highly authoritarian politics.
A lot of folks clearly are okay with those restrictions on their behavior. They see the state as only repressing other people; if the state is murdering black and brown folks (say, folks like Sandra Bland for instance), it's clearly because that's the natural, normal thing for a state to do. And it's somehow never going to affect them.
Maybe their sister has never wanted reproductive healthcare and needed a drive from Lubbock to San Antonio and back to get 2 pills. Of course, now that's not even possible, so maybe that kind of state repression is no longer relevant?
But I feel that kind of stuff in my day to day life, and I can't really ignore it.
It's not much better west of the Pecos, but at least there are fewer people here.
Oh no, you mean I might not be able to get another really annoying job so I can, what, have more money than I need to live on?
I used to get paged at 1am to mess with downed webservers, now I hang out in a shack with no running water in rural CO.
I'm 48 and have a chunk of cash that made more last year than I've ever been able to make in a single year doing salaried labor as a programmer.
I quit 3 years ago when my kiddo graduated college and have been just living on that and my small A/V production business.
It's great.
I do a lot of work; I have done first aid at one music festival, paid sound at a bluegrass festival, and sat around doing random volunteer stuff at another. I can give the local music school and the local civic orchestra really good bids on doing sound for them. I am going to get an EMT cert because I have a friend who contracts to do first-aid at festivals.
I'm not at all worried that my (pre-LLM) programming skills and connections are going away- I've replaced them with mandolin skills and much happier.
Well, it's a weird site. Most of my interactions are through the /active page or specific search terms. When I started to do that in about 2021 it certainly made it a lot easier to find what I as curious about.
Unfortunately, what I wanted to know also changed, in that I now use the site to keep tabs on the thoughts of folks are or who fund and work for hard-right technocrats.
There are, of course, many other folks on the site.
At the same time, the US techno-fascists both have an outsized influence on our lives and it's much harder to find their voices in other places: folks who, for instance, think Peter Thiel is of course quite sane and probably not trying to figure out a way to kill vast chunks of us off (and that it would be a reasonable thing if he were).
As much as I enjoy DA, Kuhn takes it a little further- it's almost like folks live in completely different worlds because the worlds are made up of fundamentally different basic parts...
I mean, they aren't there to police the hyper-wealthy, so I'm not sure why you'd expect them to go after those folks... that's like expecting the DEA to go after the CIA.
To these folks the constitution is just paper. Just like their bible, the words mean whatever they say they mean.
Politically, I am an anarchist, so I already believed that they operate with disdain for the folks they govern- I look at how they treat the natives where I live in the rural West and it's obvious, and I have never believed that their racism would save me from that treatment. So to me there's nothing new here except the aesthetics of how they implement control over populations of people and the depth of their faith in surveillance technolgy.
Pragmatically, though, it's wild to watch them try and burn that paper.
When they stop pretending to care about the rule of law (a pretense they have undone a little each day of my adult life, and I am almost 50), they undermine the legitimacy of their government in the eyes of the general population.
These folks (the folks in the political mainstream of US political ideology, the ones with hands on the levers of capital and US force) are so far up their own asses high on literal amphetamines and social media that they thought they could control Minneapolis with 3k troops or take the Persian gulf by sniping some old and dying priest.
They have not been in touch with reality for a long time, insulated from it by their massive wealth.
Fine with me; I've never had enough folks on my side to think about pushing back so my life has been and will be spent caring for my local folks and watching the internal contradictions that the Marxists understand so well pull these systems down on themselves.
I'm not under any illusions that I personally will survive the fire they are lighting or, that this won't bring about human suffering on a scale that is impossible to comprehend. But I don't have any power over that and my people don't have any power over that outcome; there is little to be gained in fighting the heat-death of the sun, any more than telling the Democrat folks that running Harris would doubtlessly lead to the election of Trump or complaining that some day I'm going to die.
But it is wild to watch them burn this house down in such short order.
Anyhow, to answer your question: no. The constitution is whatever they say it is and always has been.
While there is no worls in which I support DJT, I don't think that his supporters and (more importantly) his material situation care about anything the guy actually does.
I could look at the "grab them by the pussy" thing and be disgusted but still think that there's something even worse that could come out which might discredit the guy.
But if the Epstein connections and his massive incompetence and massive corruption can't do anything, I can't see what would.
You think so?
I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.