Well, I insist it’s “moral” to throw Mike Johnson off a bridge.

I personally won’t be doing it, but there’s nothing immoral about it in my book.

I guess my point is that if we don’t make some attempt to set a standard then we are allowing literally anything.

You have a standard. Men play in the men’s category, women in the women’s. In this context, a man is anyone with a testosterone-dominant biology, and a woman anyone with an estrogen-dominated biology. There is your objective standard.

If sports were as fair as possible, every sport would have handicaps built into it. Ensuring sports are as fair as possible is only ever brought up when new minority groups want to participate in sports they were previously excluded from.

That’s the “big car small engine” problem. If anything, this puts trans women at a disadvantage in many sports. You’re stuck with the large skeleton formed in a male puberty, but now you have female-level musculature moving it. There are many sports where trans women are actually at a disadvantage compared to cis women. To see the absolute absurdity of trans sports bans, consider that they apply to all sports. In what possible universe does a trans woman have an advantage in women’s gymnastics?

It may not be a law, but when NVidia has numerous contracts with the federal government, and the feds ask NVidia to do them a favor…Well, NVidia does it. That assumes they didn’t secretly order NVidia to do so via some obscure provision in a national security law.

Well, screw the IAU. What the hell does “clearing your neighborhood” even mean?

The French revolution wasn’t lead by the rural peasants.

You’re right. We need to get real. Those who support Democrats are just throwing their votes away. At this point, the Democratic Party has proven itself utterly incapable of winning a national election. Voting for Democrats is throwing your vote away. A vote for a Democrat is a vote for a Republican. We need to focus on real political parties like the Working Families Party that actually have a vision that they’re trying to fight for. Democrats don’t believe in anything. Democrats don’t even care about winning elections. A vote for a Democrat is a vote for MAGA. Centrists may not like voting for a progressive candidate, but they need to get over themselves. If centrists want to vote for Democrats, they’re choosing Fascism over Democracy.

California, Oregon, Washington.

New independent country. We’ll call ourselves, “North Chile.”

It’s possible that we’re also just seeing a fundamental shift in tech here. When this plane was being developed, the only way to track the F-35 was to have a world-class radar system. That’s the kind of defense net it’s meant to evade. But now? You can track things optically just by having a bunch of cameras pointed at the sky, combining data together using some cheap AI system. Did this event happen in the daytime?

Let’s look at the series of events:

1. California severely restricts the supply of housing to benefit the wealthy. Existing homeowners and corporate landlords get rich as the price of housing soars, as the state actively restricts people from building enough to keep up with the need.

2. Homelessness rates soar. Millions find that the market value of their labor is now exceeded by the market value of rent. They become homeless through no fault of their own.

3. Instead of providing adequate services to the homeless, the state responds by demonizing the homeless. Homeless people are stereotyped. Any crime committed by a homeless person is shouted about from the rooftops. A hate campaign is enacted to portray the homeless as violent, drug-addicted, and insane. The homeless use drugs at a lower rate than the housed, but public opinion believes the opposite. Their disheveled state is portrayed as a deep character flaw rather than simply an inevitable consequence of their material reality. People are made homeless through no fault of their own. But the public is convinced through a vast propaganda campaign that the homeless deserve to be homeless and are fundamentally evil people.

4. The state unleashes a campaign of performative terror on the homeless population. Police disband camps and force people out, without providing anywhere for these people to go. It is simply action for action’s sake. Newsom can proudly state, “I didn’t solve homelessness, but I sure made their lives a living hell by forcing them to endlessly move from place to place! The dirty hobos deserve it!”

That’s textbook fascism. Newsom doesn’t have a solution to this problem. Solutions do exist, but they would require building enough housing to drive down its cost. And that would hurt the bank accounts of rich people. So instead, Newsom has unleashed a state terror campaign against California’s homeless population. The goal of this terror campaign isn’t to solve homelessness or to help anyone in any manner. It is meant to show middle class and wealthy people that Newsom is making those “dirty homeless people” pay for their sins. Well off folks are tired of seeing the homeless that they created in public view. So Newsom is promising to use state terror to drive them out of the public sphere entirely.

If you think this isn’t fascism, well…you need to learn what fascism actually is.

Do you know what fascism is? I am not saying that Newsom is exhibiting fascist behavior as some cheap and quick pejorative. I’m not using fascism as a synonym for “bad” here. I’m pointing out that this kind of policy literally is the textbook definition of fascism.

This is fascism 101. Among Umberto Eco’s 14 common features of fascism is the cult of action for action’s sake.

The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

Your response would make sense if I was complaining that the police disbanding camps simply wasn’t going to enough good. But this action doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t reduce homelessness at all. In fact, it actually makes homelessness worse. Every time camps are torn down, people lose possessions and documents they need to escape homelessness. If you bulldoze a homeless camp, you’re sending a fair number of personal and ID documents to the landfill. Every time you clear a camp, you’re making it that much harder for people to actually get back on their feet.

This isn’t the perfect being the enemy of the good. This is simply an unambiguously harmful policy that does no good at all for the community.

Why is this action fascist? It meets several of Eco’s points. From the linked list numbers:

(3) Cult of action for action’s sake. It is purely performative. It will actually increase the number of unhoused people, as the more unstable someone’s situation, the harder it is to return to housing. It’s an objectively negative policy, but people support it because Newsom is “doing something.” This meets Eco’s point 3, the cult of action.

(6) Appeal to social frustration. People are tired of seeing the homeless and being reminded of their own precarious state. Better sweep them out of view.

(10) Contempt for the weak. Pretty obvious. These people have simply been priced out of the housing market. But Newsom vilifies these people and treats them like animals.

(12) Machismo and weaponry. Better send in the SWAT team to tear down some tents.

This is quite literally textbook fascism. I’m not condemning camp sweeps because they fail to meet some ideological purity test. I’m condemning them because they’re completely unproductive and are a textbook definition of fascist policy.

Do you not know what fascism is? The cult of action is one of the hallmarks of Fascism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

“The cult of action for action’s sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

This policy has all the marks of the cult of action. It does nothing to actually solve the homelessness issue. It focuses on using cruel brute force to punish the undesirable members of society. It’s a performative action not meant to actually achieve any noble end, but simply to show that the regime is “doing something.”

How is this actually helping anyone? What good actually comes from spending millions in public resources to endlessly shuffle homeless people from one location to another?

The state is using performative violence simply as a propaganda tool to make citizens think the government is “doing something.” That is the cult of action for action’s sake. It’s literally one of the textbook characteristics of fascism.

This isn’t hyperbole. We’re talking fascism 101 here. California is sending in the jack boots to terrorize the undesiables. How is that not fascism?

I understand why he’s chosen to do something.

You’re falling for fascist propaganda. Notice, Newsom isn’t actually doing anything to fix the problem. He’s not providing these people housing at all. All he’s doing is sending out law enforcement to endlessly harass the homeless. That’s what his “doing something” actually is. He’s sending the police to “deal with” the homeless.

You recognize there’s a problem. But you can’t identify a solution. A fascist strongman comes along and promises to “do something,” without any real plans or promises, just the vague cult of action for the sake of action. Newsom tortures some poor people, and you walk away feeling good, believing that at last someone is “doing something.”

This won’t actually house anyone. People don’t disappear simply because you kicked them out of their camping spot. All you really do every time you disburse the homeless is make it that much harder for them to escape homelessness at all. Every time a camp is torn down, people lose invaluable possessions, resources, and documents that are really their only hope of ever pulling themselves out of homelessness. Newsom’s actions are only exacerbating the homelessness crisis.

It’s the poorest of the poor that will pay the price for Newsom’s fascist propaganda campaign. But, at least you get to feel good knowing that he’s “doing something.” You must be a big fan of the TSA.

Something has to be done, at least Gavin is trying things.

This is fascist thinking - the cult of action for the sake of action. You can’t identify any real solution to the problem, but by God, you want SOMETHING done. And that something, when undefined, inevitably just means, “send law enforcement to torture them until they kill themselves.”

This is one of those comforting lies people tell themselves. It’s the just world fallacy.

Drug use and homelessness are mostly orthogonal issues, but people latch onto it as a quick and easy way to dismiss providing housing for the homeless. People of all income levels have mental illnesses and drug use issues. But for the homeless, we decide that their drug use issues are such a moral failing that it’s OK to deny them housing as punishment.

Also, people confuse cause and effect. Being homeless causes mental health and drug abuse, not the other way around.

Exactly. People of all income levels struggle with mental health and drug issues. The drug use and mental health struggles of the homeless are just much more publicly visible.

Housing really is the main issue though. People get the cause and effect backwards. People don’t become homeless because they do drugs; they do drugs because they’re homeless. If you were stuck sleeping on the sidewalk, wouldn’t you want to be high 24/7? I sure would.

Depending on the design of its memory, a device with a full drive will literally weigh slightly more or slightly less than one with an empty drive. Charging the battery in all cases causes it to weigh more.

Man, I never thought I would live to see the day when the president of the United States faced a literal Trojan horse situation! Usually the only “Trojan horses” our leaders faced were metaphorical. Like, maybe a trade deal or alliance would seemed like a great opportunity at the time, but we would end up worse off in the long run. Or a computer virus that had a propagation method reminiscent of the tale of the Trojan War. That sort of thing. A metaphorical Trojan horse.

But this? This is a literal Trojan horse! Someone is literally offering the president a giant big dumb opulent PHYSICAL OBJECT, and it threatens the security of the nation. This is a materially direct 1:1 reenactment of the the the Greeks giving the Trojans the famous Trojan Horse.

Irony is dead.