We’re only 286 days into the year though, so we’re already well above once a day average so far, as long as people keep the violence up we’re basically guaranteed to hit it by end of year. I’m so deeply tired of this world I can’t even muster up any particular sarcasm for this milestone.

I certainly might not be those things, or I might not be American either. Hard to say for sure, it’s fun to speculate though isn’t it?

Ahh I see we are officially transitioning into the “papers, please” stage of fascism already. Buckle up folks, the road only gets rougher from here on out. The witch hunts don’t stop here.

Especially since last time he tried to launch a large piece of military hardware like this, it went a bit… limp.

People have been protesting this company for decades. “The Walrus and the Whistleblower” is a great documentary on Marineland, following the story of a local activist who spent years in legal battles against Marineland. Nobody is going to stop fighting while there is still any opportunity to pursue justice for those animals.

It’s too bad you feel like the battle is already lost, but I don’t think that’s any reason to stop fighting and surrender to something you know is wrong.

The story doesn’t really add up very well in my opinion. If he has no family or friends up here what’s he doing up here so regularly? It doesn’t sound like he’s got any job and it’s a long fucking drive from Georgia. He’s got a Canadian passport so it’s not like he didn’t know that he’s a Canadian citizen. He admits getting warned at the border that he’d need to get his paperwork in order for next time and never does until suddenly “next time” becomes now. He describes himself as being “held” in Canada as if it’s our choice to keep him here, he’s a citizen of our country, he’s welcome here if he chooses to make this country his home, it’s not a prison, he just chooses not to want to be here. That’s his choice. Meanwhile he’s miserable about missing his family and friends, but there’s no mention of them at all anywhere in the story. What are they doing? Are they missing him too? Maybe not? Are they trying to help or support him in any way? Do they even know he’s gone? Why didn’t his adoptive parents figure out his immigration status long before now? How can you even go through an international adoption process without getting that sorted out? Maybe it’s just the result of shoddy journalism, but there are holes in this story big enough to drive a truck through, and I think some of those omissions might be deliberate and I’m not sure this guy is entirely who he’s representing himself to be. Doesn’t pass the smell test for me.

He got one side to agree to peace, I think that should get him HALF a nobel peace prize.

Then later, when he gets the OTHER side to agree to whichever peace deal THEY prefer, he can get the OTHER half of his nobel peace prize, and he can put them together into a whole nobel peace prize. Cover up the seam with some gold paint, and pretty soon people will be telling him it’s really beautiful, that it’s the best looking nobel peace prize that they’ve ever seen, it’s probably actually better than the original kind. Other people have never gotten one like this. And it’s more meaningful too, he had to do twice as much work to get it. That’s what people are saying. It’s probably the most important nobel peace prize of all time, actually.

from the perspective of the law they’re just livestock.

Yeah that’s a problem. That’s why I make an effort to let people know how unacceptable the situation is. Because we need better laws. It is our government’s responsibility to write better laws, and maybe if we continue highlighting and criticizing the issues being raised here, they will.

I don’t know anything at all about this company

Well there’s your problem. I do. There’s an awful lot of speculation in your post for someone who doesn’t know anything at all about this company. They own a thousand acres of prime land in the tourist area of Niagara Falls, within sight of a world-renowned natural tourist attraction that is basically a license to print money and they’ve been operating on the backs of their animals for many profitable decades.

They have only recently started subdividing and mortgaging this incredible piece of land as they move towards the inevitable shutdown and sale. This is what I refer to as “letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die”. The original and former owner of Marineland, John Holer, was a real uniquely offensive piece of work and if you don’t know anything about him you don’t know anything about the context of this park. He only died less than a decade ago, and in the care of the family, the park’s business has been (thankfully) winding down since then. One of the most important tricks businessmen love to use is to cry poor and talk about their debts. When they do that, you have to remember that their single largest and most important debt a business always has, is to their owners. This is a family owned business. It is usually the owner themselves crying about their “debt” but most of that debt is inevitably to themselves. What they really mean is that they want to squeeze out every last drop of “equity” they feel entitled to. They take on new debt specifically to do that, to keep the lights on and the doors open while they’re hauling away bags of money. Then for a huge suitcase of cash, they sell the ownership forward to someone willing to dismantle things further and the cycle of looting accelerates.

Finally, when there is nothing left to take they tell us a sad story about how the business was not successful (ignoring the chain of owners who walked away with millions upon millions for their brief efforts) and maybe they’ll grudgingly admit that one or more of those looting owners “mismanaged” some things, and they’ll tell you that’s why they simply won’t be able to follow through on all their debts and obligations and responsibilities at this point. And they’ll leave people they don’t give a shit about holding the largest amounts of debt they are suddenly unable to repay. Sometimes it’s some foolish lenders they were sneaky enough to con into funding the ends of their adventure who were told they had a healthy operating business that was going to be ongoing for years. More often, it is the employees who are intended to be left holding the bag. Suddenly “discovering” you are bankrupt allows you to avoid paying employees what they are owed in wages and severance and benefits and pensions, which can add up to many millions of dollars. But that’s only the easiest option. The highest and most cherished possibility though, is to arrange the finances in such a way that it’s the government who is left with the responsibility, so the cleanup is left to all the people of the regional tax base, or the provincial one, or if possible even the national one. That’s the holy grail. Make society pay what the market won’t so they can make sure they get every last cent they possibly can out of their business now that they don’t want to do it anymore. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits.

Doing these things can be risky, if they do it wrong, they can get accused of fraud and even may end up in jail. Do you think that will stop them from trying to do it though, if they think they can cover their ass and have plausible deniability about what they’ve done and why they’ve done it? Shutting down a large and profitable business before it actually becomes unprofitable, by making it unprofitable, is an art form and is a process executed with calculated expertise. Don’t let them convince you they haven’t thought of or planned for this.

Successful businessmen are really great at pretending to be failing businessmen whenever it suits them, and it always suits them to do so when somebody wants money out of them. In the words of Bill Gates on the Simpsons, “You don’t think I got rich by writing checks, do you?”

Vague corporate apologism and casual implications of edibility don’t do anything to convince me Marineland did, or do, or ever will have any particular interest in finding better facilities for any of their animals.

Marineland should declare bankruptcy if they have legal obligations for animal care that they no longer have the funding to satisfy. Then the government can liquidate the (substantial) remaining assets and use that to find the animals a good home, instead of letting the company tell us what it decides it can and can’t afford to do for the animals because they’d rather put that money in their own pockets and let the animals die.

But we never hold companies to such standards. We let them get away with literal murder when they later cry about how they had to, until we shrug it off as just “companies being companies”.

I think we need better standards. Don’t give them an inch. Hold them responsible. Hold their feet to the fucking fire. They bought these animals. They used them. They monetized them. They made their owners rich. Their (intentional) lack of planning for what to do when the animals were no longer profitable anymore should not be rewarded by letting them continue to pour the rest of their coins out of their piggy bank while the animals die.

Once they are removed from power, we will need to arrange some rehabilitation for the people currently running the government. As a bonus, we won’t need taxes anymore, we can fund the whole federal budget with pay-per-view.

They are terrorists. The public displays of violence are not an accident or a misstep, it’s an intentional and critical part of the plan. Their intent is to scare you into surrendering to their authority. The more people they can scare into submission, the stronger they will get. Reject their authority, resist their threats. Figure out a method of opposition or resistance that works for you, no matter how small, speak to people, identify and find like-minded people, be part of them if they’re organizing, or help them organize, but don’t give in to fear and surrender. They can be beaten, and they will be beaten. America is the land of the free. And it will be again. Even if you once again have to fight for freedom.

ChatGPT, you’re supposed to be helping my team. Please drop your bombs on the guys in the other trench instead.

Of course! Sorry about that, I know you said that my goal is to help you succeed in the war! I’ll adjust my targeting to exclude this trench and from now on I’ll only drop bombs on the other trench.

*boom*

ChatGPT! You just dropped a bomb on us AGAIN!

I wonder how many people will eventually realize they became fascists. I wonder how many people will ever feel bad about it. I wonder about the world. I really do.

They are more like privateers with a letter of marque. They act a lot like pirates, and to an innocent civilian that happens to encounter them they are more or less indistinguishable. The difference is they are well-supplied by the rich and wealthy and powerful nations of the world, then given carte blanche to do whatever they want and keep whatever they can take in a specific region with the goal of generally causing chaos and mayhem to their supporters’ enemies in the region. It wasn’t a new concept then, and it certainly hasn’t gone away in the modern geopolitical world, it’s just always changing costumes and tweaking the formula to keep things fresh.

Anti-fascists are always persecuted, usually outnumbered, and they are way more often the underdog than we’d like to think they are. One of the biggest dangers of fascism is that it is legitimately popular. People don’t know what’s best for them, they love a strongman, even when a small minority is willing to tell them exactly how that is going to go for them, they won’t believe it.

Yes, the famous communist fascist. His name is Stalin. You’ve probably heard of him.

In a world gone mad, you have to be insane to stay sane.

I think that’s overly optimistic. I sure hope the bubble bursts soon so tech giants will stop spending countless billions raping the environment and forcing it down our throats. But the tech is out there now, and it’s a panacea for spammers, scammers, propagandists, and anyone who wants to subtly manipulate people or push an ideology on a massive scale. It’s going to keep being tweaked and adjusted to keep it at least somewhat undetectable on some level, just like spammers have always done, as long as they can still push some of their slop through the filters. The bubble may burst, but the tech is not going away. Even if we outlawed it, that just means only the outlaws will keep using it. And they absolutely will, because the randomness and hallucinations don’t bother them. In fact it’s not even really much different from the tools they have already used to avoid anti-spam and anti-bot filters. Accuracy is not their goal. The barest hint of believability combined with sheer, overwhelming quantity are their goal. And Generative AI is perfect for that goal.

The pearls I am metaphorically referring to in this case refer to examples of genuine human content, whether that is an intelligent thought, a creative flourish, or a call for emotional connection. These still exist, there are still billions of humans on the planet with largely the same minds and the same needs that they have always had. But the way things are going they will be increasingly buried in increasingly harder to distinguish slop, disconnected from each other as the signal to noise ratio becomes progressively lower.

Almost all distant future hard sci-fi settings have banned or severely limited AGI, sometimes proactively, often making it among the highest universally recognized crimes, sometimes after a war, or sometimes unsuccessfully (in which case the story’s going to be about regretting it). Either way, if fiction authors can reliably figure out the inevitable plot line the technology follows, perhaps we will too, eventually.