What a potentially powerful tool of protest. Imagine if you got a movement of a few million people. They all move to a target bank. A few months later, they all demand their full account liquidation. Then you move on to the next megabank. One by one, drop them like flies.

Door’s Agar.

Hmm, are you still covered by the FDIC if you deliberately engineer a bank failure? Let’s say all of Bank of America’s customers decided that they just really wanted to fuck BoA hard. So they arrange to all demand the complete liquidations of their accounts, all at once. Or maybe people arrange a series of bank failures as part of some broader political movement. But hypothetically, if a group of people deliberately caused their bank to fail, would their deposits still be FDIC-insured? In other words, if you deliberately arrange a bank run, will you still be covered by FDIC insurance?

Mr. T famously advocated for people to not drop out of school with the phrase, “I pity the fool who don’t stay in school.” I always imagined him taking this to absurd degrees. I imagine him harassing and shaming people to endlessly stay in school until they’re enrolled in doctoral programs they have no interest in.

“Leave me alone Mr. T, I don’t want to do a post-doc!”

“I PITY THE FOOL WHO DON’T STAY IN SCHOOL!”

Or, you can be, Abserd!

http://historyonfirepodcast.com/episodes/tag/Aztec

I find graffiti via chisel is also particularly effective.

Exactly. You know what I would like to see? I would like to see the Democratic Party act like parties due in many countries. The norm internationally is that if you are running a party, and that party loses catastrophically, that it is your moral responsibility to give up the reigns of that party. You had your chance. It didn’t work. There are plenty of people out there with good ideas. Your opinions will still be welcome. Or, for a corporate example, if you’re a CEO, and you crash the company’s stock, you’re usually going to lose your job.

Anyone in a top-20 leadership position of Democrats in 2024 should simply be done with running things. They can’t run as candidates. They can’t serve party leadership roles. They can’t serve on party committees. They can only participate as a regular party member.

That’s how the party should be run. One strike and you’re out. Let the strong survive. We want the party to be a god-damned thunderdome.

We live in a post-truth society. Let that really sink in for a moment. Take it literally and think what that means. With modern social media, we have unleashed technology we were not remotely prepared for.

Walz should just start running for president now. Become an instant symbol for people to rally around.

Trump started his 2024 campaign immediately after the 2020 election’s inauguration. If Trump can start campaigning 4 years in advance, so can Walz.

The purpose of presidential candidates need not be simply a candidate for the office. They can be a president-in-waiting. They can continuously rally the base. They can provide someone on the side of the opposition with a giant megaphone in the media. Trump benefited from all these things in the 2020-2024 period. He was the president-in-waiting, the presumptive nominee. This could be one individual, or it could be 3 or 4 leading candidates. But if we had some declared primary candidates running around shouting the message now, that could really help things.

You could even launch it from an extreme distance away. Launch it from the middle of a state forest, in a different state from the target. Have it programmed to fly to a remote location at the limit of its range, then land in a discreet location. Charge its batteries via solar power, then go again. A drone could hopscotch its way to target hundreds of miles away with this method. If you’re worried about a drone successfully making it, then launch a dozen of them. You could even build in a self-destruct mechanism. If the drone ever becomes stuck, or if someone tries to pick it up or move it, have it literally announce “this drone will self-destruct in 20 seconds.” As soon as anyone picks it up, this sequence activates. it gives a warning and then sets off the incendiary. Every incendiary drone has a built-in self-destruct.

Those are pretty damn traceable. There are cameras everywhere. Even if you manage to burn a building down, the buildings next door and every building for blocks around have cameras. Plate reader cameras are everywhere. Etc. It is almost impossible to move through a city in a vehicle in a way that cannot be traced. If you cover your license plate, then you have to worry about being pulled over just for that. And even if you making your plate invisible, you still have to worry about your face being visible through the windscreen. Hell, they might be able to just track your vehicle, one camera to the next, all the way back to your front door. You could try doing this on foot or bicycle, but look at how well that worked for Luigi.

Compare that to a drone. You go for a hike into the woods in a city park or reserve, in a city hours from where you live. In your backpack, you have the drone. You carry the drone to a remote clearing in the woods that is rarely if ever visited. You leave the drone in the clearing. Three days later at 2 in the morning, at a time you conveniently have an air-tight alibi, the drone’s timer activates, it flies upward, and goes on its mission. In the unlikely event that the drone is discovered before it launches, have a self-destruct mechanism built it. Once placed, have it enter an “armed” state. If the drone is moved or picked up by someone, have it audibly broadcast a warning. Literally “this drone will self destruct in 20 seconds.” Then it counts down and sets off the incendiary, immolating itself.

Hell, if you were clever enough, you might even manage to launch such a drone from hundreds of miles away. Have it travel from one remote rooftop to another. Launch it from a different state. Have it fly to different remote locations or rooftops, flying as far as it can on each hop. Then land and charge its batteries for the next leg.

These things will make very terrifying weapons. They allow someone to commit an act of destruction with far far less traceability than any other method.

Three days

Only to a certain extent. What’s key is that those parts have applications far outside drones. You might even be able to scavenge the non-printable components from old electronics bought for cash at thrift stores, craigslist, Facebook marketplace, etc. There’s a big difference in the traceability of a generic motor that can be used for thousands of applications vs. a fully assembled drone. Hell, if you want to go full unabomber, you could draw your own wires, wind your own motors, and use chips salvaged from old GPS navigation devices and cell phones, everything bought in cash.

The other big issue with traceability is that these devices would be deliberately intended to cause a large fire. They would be far less traceable than a bomb. A bomb blows itself to pieces, but it still leaves many fragments. An incendiary? If it works, the entire building it lands on will be reduced to ashes. There will be precious little of that drone remaining, especially considering that it will be at the very center of the fire.

Insurance isn’t a magic money machine that erases costs; insurance isn’t free money. This is the logic that results in thieves driving small mom and pop shops out of business. Someone will hold up a gas station thinking, “well, insurance will pay for it.” But every time a business makes a claim, their insurance premiums go up. And just like car insurance, if you make too many claims, eventually you’ll be dropped from coverage, or your premiums will become completely unaffordable. You simply become too great a risk for insurance to cover.

Honestly, torching a Tesla dealership is likely the quickest way to get it shut down. If you just let the cars sit there, they’ll keep cutting the asking price until they sell. Teslas might be unfashionable, but plenty of people living paycheck-to-paycheck will ignore the bad optics if it means they get a hell of a deal on a new car.

But if a dealership is burned to the ground? The dealer was probably already resenting being in the business before the arson attack. Most of these guys became Tesla dealers back when Elon had a very different reputation. But now they can’t just walk away; they have contracts, leases to pay, a franchise agreement, and a pile of inventory that won’t sell. Hell, they probably have once or twice contemplated burning the whole place down themselves just to get the insurance money. And now they have the perfect opportunity to walk away, without having to commit felony insurance fraud. Some random do-gooder just came by and did the criming for them. Sure, they could rebuild, but why? They have an insurance check for millions of dollars. They could spend that rebuilding, getting new inventory etc. But why? Why go to all that trouble, just to end up back selling cars people revile?

I think most people in that situation, unless they were already die-hard MAGA types, would simply chose to take the win and walk away. Maybe they stay in the car business and open up a franchise with some other automaker. Maybe they get out of car sales all together. But there’s little reason to stick with Tesla.

That’s the real value of arson right now. There are tons of Tesla dealers who would honestly probably welcome an arson attack against their dealership, as long as no one was in the building at the time. They could never say so publicly, but honestly, an arson against a Tesla dealership might be the best thing that ever happened to many of the dealership owners.

Just wait til someone invents the first practical incendiary drone that can be easily made on a consumer 3D printer.

In principle, it’s quite simple. All a drone has to do is take off, travel to a fixed set of GPS coordinates, land, and then activate an incendiary of some kind. Maybe a thermite charge, maybe something simpler to set off.

This tech already exists due to the Ukraine conflict. But to my knowledge, it’s never been packaged in a form that’s easily replicable by an average random person in their home. But I see no reason why it couldn’t be. And when it does, all Hell’s going to break loose.

On the more class liberation side, it will make burning down the assets of the rich much, much easier and harder to stop. On the other hand, it will also make it easier for fascists to target those resisting fascism. You’re an activist of some sort. One night, a drone lands on your roof at 2 AM and sets fire to your house. Who did it? Who knows. Good luck finding out.

Hell, on a large scale, this will make it possible for a single individual to cause a disaster on the scale of the firebombing of Dresden. Consider the extremely dry weather and accompanying fires in Los Angeles. That moment, when the city was dry as tinder and the winds were blowing strong. Imagine if at that moment, someone had decided to release a few thousand incendiary drones on the city. Maybe they saved them up, just for this purpose. Consider how valiantly the fire fighters there worked to protect Los Angeles. And now imagine an alternate history where at that moment 5,000 structure fires erupted simultaneously across the city, including multiples started on the roof of every fire station.

The technology already exists. It’s just a matter of someone figuring out how to package it in an accessible form. When that happens, God help us all.

As far as I’m aware, the military, in the best case, will simply refuse to follow unlawful orders. There are formal processes to do so. That’s part of military culture and law. Whether that system will hold up to Trump is unknown. When he issues unlawful orders, will soldiers simply refuse to comply? Unknown.

But one thing is for sure. It’s not part of military culture to actively resist. There is no formal process for that to be protected or OK. That’s simply insurrection and rebellion.

We need to wipe them from existence.

Let every nation have a maximum wealth cap. 1000x the median national household income. Anything else is taxed at 100%. This cap in the US would be about $80 million today.

But if you’re somehow in flagrant violation of this limit? If your wealth is the equivalent of over one billion 2025 dollars? Unless you quickly earn a multi-billion fortune and immediate give it away or spend it, having a net worth over $1 billion will be a felony. It will be a capital offense. Oh you’re secretly billionaire, having hid your vast illegal fortune from the IRS? You are guilty of trying to amass a geopolitically-significant level of wealth. We’re going to treat this as seriously as we would someone who attempts to build their own personal nuclear weapons. Really, you are guilty of a form of treason. Except instead of aiding a foreign nation, you were trying to become a threat to your nation yourself. And the traditional penalty for treason will be applied.

This is the world we could have. We could, if we wanted it badly enough, simply make being a billionaire a capital offense. Force them to give away or spend most everything they have. Either way, given or spent, wealth is distributed enough so that no individual can threaten the nation through their own personal wealth.

It is time we wiped billionaires off the face of the Earth. No individual should ever be allowed to become so wealthy that they become a threat to nation states.

Palestine. Maybe not successfully, but note that the idea that Palestinians have the same natural right to armed self defense as any other group is completely absent from mainstream political discourse. Most simply cannot even comprehend that the Palestinians should have just as much right to kill to defend themselves as Israelis do. Partly this is due to colonialism. Part of it is classism. The violence of the Israelis is clean and high tech. The violence of the Palestinians is crude and performed with simple weapons. We judge the morality of violence based upon the wealth of the people committing the violence.

Mannheim Steamroller flattens crowd.

Vance is the creepiest motherfucker I have ever seen. That man has no soul. Not in the sense that he’s cruel. No, look into those eyes, and tell me there is a soul in that husk. Vance is a philosophical zombie. There is nobody home.