This is your democracy coming to an end.

Can’t end if it never started. If you weren’t looking sideways at the American Democracy since Bush v Gore, nevermind Operation Eagle Eye, idk man. Feels like far too many people don’t realize what kind of country they’ve been living in. Trump’s just a wakeup call.

I recommend buying guns while you can.

Adventurism: The history of Russian Social-Democracy teems with tiny groups, which sprang up for an hour, for several months, with no roots whatever among the masses (and politics without the masses are adventurist politics), and with no serious and stable principles. In a petty-bourgeois country, which is passing through a historical period of bourgeois reconstruction, it is inevitable that a motley assortment of intellectuals should join the workers, and that these intellectuals should attempt to form all kinds of groups, adventurist in character in the sense referred to above.

…

Though there were no few honest and conscientious Social-Democrats in these groups, they proved adventurist in the sense that they had no stable or serious principles, programme, tactics, organisation, and no roots among the masses.

A smart person would recognize that there are degrees of smartness and degrees of immunity.

And I’m the smartest person, therefore I enjoy the maximum amount of immunity.

there is no threshold of smartness that grants immunity to propaganda.

Just be smarter, idiot.

The most important service one can provide to a kind-of-smart person is to tell them when they’ve said something stupid.

Impossible for me to say something stupid. It is actually stupid to suggest what I said wasn’t the Immaculate Truth as Delivered By God.

The only people who would suggest what I said wasn’t stupid are

a) Idiots

b) A vast and sinister conspiracy of malicious actors attempting to destroy me, everyone I hold dear, and my country.

Example two makes perfect sense if you know even the most elementary bits of physics.

An object in motion will remain in motion at the same speed and in the same straight-line direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

This is Netwon’s First Law. Practically the Day One of Physics.

if their government doesn’t like you, the border then binds you but does not protect you.

Okay, but that’s just why this is the most important election of our lives and you need to turn out to vote or we’ll be under the boot of the vile fascist-communist government of the Other Party That Doesn’t Like Me.

Borders exist because it projects power onto people within

I mean, that’s a very narrow perspective. Borders exist as a compromise between neighboring governments, indicating where one set of legal codes ends and another begins.

If you want truly free movement, you can’t have projections of power

Free movement is power projection. It’s just projection by the people (and their attendant organizations and ideologies) doing the moving.

The whole neoliberal One Big Global Market wet dream was about projecting the power of Western financial and regulatory authorities around the globe. Open Borders can be as much about projecting power as closed ones. And whether you believe that’s good or bad really hinges on whether you believe you’re aligned with the people doing the power projection.

You absolutely could describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine (or the US invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria) as a kind-of Open Borders policy under the Bush Doctrine. The borders are simply open to those with a big enough battering ram to kick through the door.

Old Price: $68

New Price: $267

Change in Price: -29%

Amazon Math.

Which is in fact true

It does get very tiresome to see people reject decades of Cold War and post-Soviet collapse history, because the (US-backed) fascist dictator of Russia turned on his western handlers.

Anyway, the general idea for Europe is to take care of Russia, so the US is able to focus on the indo-pacific, meaning China. It‘s the geo-strategic reality of the western block to remain (or regain) world dominance. It‘s capitalism in it‘s highest stage, imperialism.

Okay, but have you considered that China Bad and we need to save all those good-hearted, liberty-loving, free-market Australians and Philippians and Taiwanese from the oppressive yoke of The Red Dragon?

It‘s just that most folks on lemmy are basing their political understanding on vibes and what western corporate media tells them.

Nonsense. I’m immune to propaganda because I’m smart.

Only you idiot tankies have been fooled.

The entire world is taking a hard fascist turn. Trying to single out any one country misses the forest for the trees.

But if you’re wondering why people were extremely leery at Ukraine early on, well… there are reasons. Still, much more of a problem with Canadian fascists than Ukrainian ones.

It’ll be interesting to see what China does.

If the Ukrainians shoot down a Chinese civilian airliner, they would be fucking themselves at a level that has not been seen since Pearl Harbor.

What? No. I was told they were the Job Creators.

The Tea Party was pushing on an open door. Democrats and Republicans alike were enthusiastically in favor of slashing SS/Medicare, gutting education and housing development, privatizing prisons, and cutting taxes.

The DSA will have an uphill battle. Everything they’re asking for in the US is Haram under the current socio-economic order.

I was going to guess Stablecoins, but they only appear to hold $250B. Hedge Funds apparently hold over $2T.

Then I was going to guess Japan or the UK, but it turns out they hold way more - $1.1T and $925B - respectively.

Apparently, the Cayman Islands holds $460B. Is that the answer?

Most people I know that want an end to borders also want the end of government.

Idk about that. The line I’ve always seen is that most people want a system which protects-but-does-not-bind. And what they recoil at is a system that binds-but-does-not-protect.

I want the border to be frictionless for me. But I don’t want the border to be frictionless for people I don’t like.

As if a democratically elected government representing people in a certain place should have no right to its own sovereignty

I mean, “democratically elected” does a lot of heavy lifting in countries that are choked out by fascist governance and fear-mongering media. “Sovereignty” also has a weird way of being used to weaponize self-determination into surveillance-state policing and xenophobic policy.

But then when it comes to countries that struggle to find work for their own people, they also get flooded by people from places where no government functions at all. Specifically Nigerians in South Africa and Ghana. Legally present, and subject to xenophobic attacks because there no hope for them in Nigeria because it’s a hot mess.

Why is it that a French citizen traveling to Germany or Spain is considered benign, but a Libyan citizen traveling to Germany or Spain is considered part of a “flood” that has some kind of existential threat to the locals? Why does Libya’s dogshit government get raised as a reason why this Libyan visitor can’t stay at my hotel or eat at my restaurant or work in my office?

Does being born in Country A stain someone’s soul in a way that makes them incompatible with Country B?

how is it supposed to work without literally magic being involved?

You don’t need magic to not have borders. If anything, you need a certain degree of magic to rigidly enforce borders. You need mass surveillance to track the identities of everyone entering and leaving your country. You need to engineer increasingly complex systems of identification, digital fingerprinting, financial controls, regulation on business and social activities, and prohibitions enforcement pursuant to a constantly shifting web of sanctions. You need an enormous body of labor to manage these rules and enforce them. You need prisons to hold all the trespassers. You sprawling bureaucracies to figure out who is “legal” and to change the legal status in a timely manner.

None of this shit works as intended. Legal residents routinely get harassed because records aren’t properly maintained and distributed. Illegal residents slip through blind spots in the system. Black market trade grows faster than the regulated trade, because there’s a larger profit margin in it. Legal business activity suffocates under the higher costs of compliance.

You ask how no-borders are supposed to work? I’d say, incredibly easily! Do nothing. Boom! You’ve achieved your goal.

I ask you how closed-borders are supposed to work? You’re going to spend several lifetimes and untold fortunes trying to achieve this fantasy.

Grew up in Texas, and back in the 80s it was very normal for kids to just hop into a car and drive south of the border for Spring Break. This was the most normal thing in the world for hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults.

And then national media realized they could make a lot of cheap news coverage by scandalizing the practice. So we got a slew of news stories, which became inflated with an even more over-dramatized series of books, tv shows, and movies, showing kids going across the border for drug use and rape and animal abuse and to dispose of dead bodies for the cartels and to get eaten alive by the Chupacabra. We got bombarded by a slew of media with a flashlight under the chin whispering “Oh, you think these kids are having fun? Well, what if the news threw a red filter over the images and used graphical effects to imply everyone was murdered?!”

Both the US and the Mexican police got more and more involved. The borders became militarized. You ended up with these obnoxious traffic situations, which really killed the appeal of any kind of vacationing. Also didn’t help that a lot of the popular destinations got enclosed and privatized, for the benefit of a few insider luxury developers. The cost of a vacation exploded, as cruise lines and chain hotels and resorts took over the best spots. And now it’s been fully Disney-fied, with a heavily demarcated entry and exit for tourists who are heavily discouraged from mingling with locals.

Shit fucking sucks, man.

You can strive for a future

Can I? I feel like I’m going to get yelled at for striving, because I’m doing it wrong.

If someone I don’t like is allowed to go somewhere I don’t want them to go, they could start killing people at any moment.

Also, I am of the view that every single person south of the border that would want to cross north of Mexico is a gang-affiliated serial killer. Every single person coming from East Asia is a spy, a saboteur, or a left-wing extremist intent on destabilizing the country. Every single African coming to the US has Ebola. Every single Muslim coming to the US is going to impose Sharia Law.

We need to close our borders until I, personally, feel safe. And the TV says I’m not safe. So nobody should be allowed, unless they are white.

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The only scenario where a gun just “goes off” would be if it were sitting somewhere untouched

That’s not what we’re talking about at all.

People drop guns. People do stupid shit with guns, like using the butt as a hammer. People try to show off with pistol twirls and quick-draws. People just handle them wrong - tossing them, sitting on them, holstering them incorrectly, fiddling with them nervously.

Plaxico Burress very famously shot himself in the thigh, because he decided to keep a Glock tucked into the waste band of his pants. Nothing about the story suggests it was intentional.

they are solely responsible for what happens with it.

That’s got nothing to do with whether it was accidental.