Is the US a dystopia?

Good luck with chemo in NC.

https://www.newsweek.com/jasmine-crockett-marjorie-taylor-greene-diss-track-1901743

The US world has always been a dystopia, with snatches of something slightly less horrible occasionally emerging from the morass for the sake of contrast

The US world has always been a dystopia, with snatches of something slightly less horrible occasionally emerging from the morass for the sake of contrast

― Great-Tasting Burger Perceptions (Old Lunch)

fuck this manichean blackpill shit

we can have better

we _deserve_ better

no personal offense to you OL

fuck it i'm just gonna post the thing i wrote here instead of the autism thread, #onethread

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I mean the thing is it's not accidental, you know? The "top shortage" here isn't accidental.

With or without an autism diagnosis, people gotta find ways to get by. I went off to college when I was 18 and I didn't have the skills, social or practical, to take care of myself, so I moved back in with my mom. I moved out again to get a job, and again, I didn't have the practical skills or the emotional support network to function, so I moved back in with my mom. I spent a couple years addicted to drugs, cold turkeyed them, was fortunate enough to survive. Met someone who had low enough self-esteem to become my caretaker despite my, like, not having the skills to treat other people with basic kindness and respect, married her, and the trade-off with caretaker relationships is that it... Like you have a job that sucks and you steal office supplies, right? Being a caretaker is a shitty, demanding job. I don't blame my caretakers for doing the things they did. Judging them as beside the point.

I spent a long time trying to learn skills that I the people in my life didn't have the skills or support to teach me, and so I'm out here living on my own, taking care of myself. It's really hard, and I'm not really good at it. And it's not just me. I have dozens of memes humorously expressing the sentiment of "God, taking care of myself is so fucking hard." And some of them are puppygirl memes. I do know a fair number of people who are autistic puppygirls. The shit the right-wingers say on TV, that there are people out there who identify as dogs, who wants to sleep in a cage and drink water out of a dogbowl, that's true. That's not me, I'm not like that, but I understand where that comes from. I've looked at a guy out in public with his dog and looked at how he treated her and sighed and said "God, I wish that was me."

But it's not, and you know, I'm proud of myself and I'm happy about what I've been able to accomplish. I'm better off where I am now, to be able to live on my own, live independently. I buy my own groceries. I do my own laundry. I pay my own bills. I sweep my floor occasionally. I check the mail. I'm able to take the bus to and from medical appointments. I'm able to manage, by myself, the large number of medications I'm taking to be able to function independently.

I mean all this is a lot. Maybe for some people it's like "Oh well of course that's just normal people stuff" and for me it's not. It's work, it's really hard work. And I've learned to celebrate that for myself, what a good job I'm doing, how hard I'm working, because nobody's going to go out there and say "Good job, Kate! You checked your mail today _and_ you took a shower even though you really didn't want to!"

The hardest bit right now for me is holding down a job. Because, I know this is a very autistic thing to say, the job I am working for is meaningless and stupid, it has no value, provides no value to the world at large, and knowing this, it is very hard for me to do this job. I'm work from home, I'm isolated, I live on my own, and this is I guess supposed to be a "privilege". With autism, though, there's this thing called "parallel play", which means that when I'm around other people, it's easier for me to do things. Having friends is important for me for a number of reasons, and one of the main ones is that I can invite them over to my place. There's this assumption that when you invite someone over it's for, I don't know, immoral purposes, unnatural acts, and that's not how it is for me. I have someone over and once they're over it's a lot easier for me to do functional tasks to take care of myself.

Or even, like... just having a good time by myself, it's not something I can do. I mean like. I got a TV and a video game system and thousands upon thousands of movies I could watch. I want to watch these movies, they seem really cool, but it's just not something I can do by myself. So I have friends and I say "Hey why don't you come over, we can watch anime". Or not anime. I've been meaning to watch Jacques Tati's _Playtime_ for over a decade, and I had a friend over a couple weeks ago and I said "Hey, why don't we watch this?" And it is, in fact, a great fucking movie. Also I guess maybe a little relevant to autism, isn't it? These systems, these machines made of people, these small absurdities. And they're funny, but these little meaningless routines, walking slowly down a wall to press a button and pressing slowly back... sometimes it's how I make meaning of things. It's how I make sense out of a chaotic and overwhelming environment.

I mean I do get overstimulated by my environment and people act like that's, like, a functional deficit, and Christ, I don't understand how someone can _not_ be. There's _so much shit_ going on around me _all the time_. For me it's sound, I focus on sounds, and there are airplanes and drag racers and ambulances and shit that I don't even know what it is. Yes I have a hard time looking people in the eyes and it's not because I don't _feel emotion_ it's because there's so _much_ there. So much of everything.

And holding down a job I'm supposed to do ten thousand stupid things at once, and I'm supposed to do them by myself with a boss who makes frequent immediate and factually incorrect demands of me, and I'm supposed to do it while I'm sitting alone in my apartment by myself. Except for the lesbians and puppygirls and fetish artists and I don't even know who, the ones who I alt-tab over to. Because if I'm going to be by myself of course I'm going to want to be by myself with _them_. I don't even know how to talk to a lot of the people at my workplace. I'm sure they're fine people but they have no idea what my life is like. They want to understand, but they have no clue about how to go about it.

Which of course what people say about my "functional deficit". I don't think we're, like, equal. Me and allistic people. I don't think that the way I go about things is _equally valid_. I'm glad I've learned the social skills I've learned. I think it's necessary to... I mean when I was younger someone would say the stupidest thing I'd ever heard and I'd just say, without thinking, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I mean now I know it's not helpful or valuable or _kind_ for me to say that. I know how to not say that, and I know that it's not _lying_ just because it's true and I don't say it.

It's a lot of work, though, to be kind, because a lot of people in power say and do things that are very stupid and cruel and I say nothing because there's nothing I can do about it. I radically accept it, is what I've learned.

But it's hard and yeah I'd drink out of a dog bowl and sleep in a dog cage and wear a collar if it meant I didn't have to do that. Even though none of those things are really things I want to do. I just want someone to care for me. Sometimes. And so does, like.... everybody else here. And that's how you get a top shortage.

ahh cool, cool cool cool

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/05/15/harris-county-election-challenge-180th-district-court/

xpost That was just the inky sludge festering inside of me briefly escaping into the world, my apologies. Just getting harder to keep it tamped down these days.

no worries OL we all get that way sometimes, it wasn't about you personally

Billionaire CEOs didn't just reach Mayor Adams in a private chat urging him to arrest pro-Palestine Columbia students, they also offered PRIVATE staff to help NYPD. The Mayor accepted.

Members of the group also coordinated with Israel's war cabinet, UN ambassador and former PM. pic.twitter.com/r54yv87eqy

— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) May 17, 2024

Go Bernie... I've felt this way for years

A bill introduced by the US senator Bernie Sanders would dramatically expand access to oral healthcare by adding dental benefits to Medicare and enhance them in Medicaid, public health insurance programs that together cover 115 million older and lower-income Americans.

Despite Americans’ reputation for the flashy “Hollywood smile”, millions struggle to access basic dental care. One in five US seniors have lost all their natural teeth, almost half of adults have some kind of gum disease and painful cavities are one of the most common reasons children miss school.

“Any objective look at the reality facing the American people recognizes there is a crisis in dental care in America,” Sanders told the Guardian in an exclusive interview. “Imagine that in the richest country in the world.”

An extraordinary case of police "psychological torture" in Fontana, CA: When Thomas Perez reported his elderly father missing, cops brought him in for a 17-hour interrogation + coerced him to falsely confess killing his dad.

His dad was alive.

🧵https://t.co/3WLOUQ3lnB

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) May 24, 2024

absolutely horrifying. one especially dystopian part: they settled out of court because the victim feared the case would not ultimately succeed due to the qualified immunity doctrine.

From another article.

Perez agreed to the settlement rather than take the case to trial out of concern that a jury award could be overturned on appeal on grounds of qualified immunity for police. Generally, qualified immunity protects law enforcement officers unless they violate clearly established law arising from a case with nearly identical facts, according to the Legal Defense Fund.

So essentially they can get away with anything as long as it's bizarre enough?

yes - the "clearly established" thing comes early in a string of bad Supreme Court decisions on this. ime the episode of the 5:4 podcast on Qualified Immunity was an informative and sobering listen.

The scale of the US military-industrial complex's grip on higher education is just staggering—if you want to understand why schools went so ballistic over calls to divest from war, start here https://t.co/PDb64wGUPP pic.twitter.com/BwLP7zPV2y

— Jack Mirkinson (@jackmirkinson) May 29, 2024

The M-I complex has had a death grip on US universities and colleges for most of the past 70 years. It started seriously gearing up in the 1950s and was unshakably entrenched by 1970.

reminds me of the Cyber Patriot program in grade schools, which is available thru LAUSD for example, and while it's not explicitly military-industrial complex it's sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, Air Force Reserve, American Military University, and founded in part by CIAS (not to be confused with the CIA but still....)

7th graders should just be in chess clubs.

it's not a *direct* pipeline to the MIC, and school districts don't invest in it afaict, but it's amazing how that stuff just trickles all the way down in education.

The Cyberpatriot (mobile) site is even datedly creepy like something produced for a Starship Troopers deleted scene.

The M-I complex has had a death grip on US universities and colleges for most of the past 70 years. It started seriously gearing up in the 1950s and was unshakably entrenched by 1970.

I think I ranted about this on the Oppenheimer movie thread, but American academia wasn't exactly pushed into this - it should be M-I-A, the invisible partner. By the beginning of '43, every physicist in America knew that the Manhattan Project was a science Skull & Bones - whoever got the tap on the shoulder was going to be part of setting the direction of american physics - which leads to the UC running Los Alamos and Livermore, electrical engineering school partnerships with corporate towns like IBM in Kingston, and the o.g. Silicon Valley. All the M & I hired from the A like they were pro football teams. When I entered UC Irvine in 1983, the number of corporate partnerships the university had was front and center as advertising.

FWIW, in 1981 General Dynamics took my entire high school to Disneyland for free. All of the rides were free. Way more effective propaganda than Cyber Patriot

i recently went to a book fair where the author of this book happened to be and i meant to check it out -- has anyone read it?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61108472-palo-alto

I read his first book, but the length of Palo Alto put me off.

yes it is HUGE! i would only read as ebook

I kinda lost a bit of interest in that book after reading this review: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/grieving-redness-in-the-west-reading-malcolm-harris-after-mike-davis/