The choice is between imprisonment/discharge and participating in the actions of the fascist war machine. Is obeying orders worth ruining the rest of your life with the knowledge and scars (physical + mental) that stem from them?

You do still have agency, the choice is just between being punished for doing the right thing, or participating in something illegal and monstrous with the slim chance of never being punished for it. Even if that punishment never comes, the internal torment and external judgement will be unavoidable.

Seriously, there is absolutely no disguising what is being defended here, the israelis have been starving, torturing, and murdering Palestinian children for over 600 days. There is no shortage of evidence of their heinous conduct. If someone is ordered to participate in an illegal war of aggression on their behalf, it is their moral and ethical duty to disobey those orders.

the full quote, which is actually quite accurate and succinct:

“Because of racism, that’s the simple answer I would say. Racism, and uh, basically, desperately trying to defend a destructive deadly system, that systematically puts short term economic profit, and to maximize geopolitical power, over the well being of humans and the planet. And right now it’s very very difficult to morally defend that, it is impossible, but still, they are desperately trying which is… absurd is not the word, but there are no words to describe it.”

When people are having members of their community kidnapped at graduation ceremonies, hearing stories of secret police trying to enter elementary schools to abduct 1st graders, that affects you. Masked agents of the state who hide their identities are routinely disappearing people, and when communities respond to protect each other from abduction, or protest these monstrous actions, the police show up to disperse them so the kidnappers can do what they came to do. They routinely attack people unprovoked.

If you have never been to a protest where the cops decided to escalate, you cannot know how crystal clear the barbarity becomes. These cops have been pelting peaceful people with pepper balls, tear gas, concussion grenades, and baton rounds. According to a study, those “less lethal” rubber rounds permanently injure ~15% of the people hit by them. 3% are killed, eventually dying to injuries sustained.

Here’s a video of someone being shot with one point blank for asking an officer to identify himself, who refuses to do so. Here’s a police horse being used to trample a man that is already subdued and surrounded.

The other thing to understand is that while the outrageously ghoulish shit ICE and other state bodies have been getting up to, this situation with the police has been the status quo for a very long time. The same forces have been doing this shit to virtually every form of protest for ages. These are the same people that are responsible for the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a for-profit prison industry, and contracts to exploit incarcerated labour.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the situation is already incredibly violent, that violence has just been normalized, and people are literally trying to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped by the state. Communities have been experiencing relentless institutional and systemic oppression for generations. Appealing to the conscience of people brutalizing and kidnapping targeted groups on behalf of the state is a fool’s errand, they clearly have none.

Asking people to remain completely peaceful is to ask them to sit back and watch their neighbors disappear. It’s to ask them to passively watch as more people get subjected to greater levels of violence, to show up and be beaten themselves for daring to resist the expansion of fascism. Burnt Waymos and shattered glass can be replaced, rebuilt. Objects are not people, and it’s overwhelmingly cops that have been damaging people.

I am not advocating for violence, but I think every person understands the innate urge to rebel against oppression. Whatever shape that takes, people that are not putting their bodies on the line do not get to tell those that are what to do.

There are also people who have no choice in the matter, their bodies are on the line either way because state agents have orders to take control of them in some way or other. Before you think to tell people what they should or should not do, take a moment to ask yourself how it would sound if it was you and yours in that position.

Beyond that, expecting that years of passivity will somehow pay off is absurd. If it worked, the situation would be getting better over time, not worse. This regime is going to escalate no matter what, it’s already deporting dissidents and shipping innocent people off to foreign concentration camps. They’re already actively trying to revoke citizenship from all sorts, unilaterally criminalizing completely law-abiding people overnight.

We know where this road leads. Whatever actions people take to shut it down, history will be on their side.

I can’t speak for all provinces but the three I’ve lived in all had smaller private clinics for specialists, imaging, specific fields of medicine and so on that are established parts of the public healthcare system. In these cases, the government effectively works as the insurer on behalf of patients, but many of these clinics also offer services which are not covered. The Canadian Medical Association provides a more thorough explanation of this here.

Here’s a different source for you.

The National Institutes of Health will begin collecting Americans’ private health records as part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s controversial plan to discover a cause and a cure for autism. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a panel of experts about the plan this week.

The NIH plans to gather information from a wide range of private sources, including pharmacy chains, hospitals and wearable devices with health sensors, like smartwatches.

“The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource,” Bhattacharya told the panel, according to The Guardian. “Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain.”

The NIH did not return a request for comment.

Kennedy has made autism research a central pillar of his role as America’s official health advocate. He has made a number of conspiratorial, anti-science claims, including that childhood vaccinations could cause autism, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Earlier this month, he called autism an “epidemic” and vowed to find an “environmental toxin” responsible for the disorder by September.

“Overall autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate,” Kennedy told reporters at the time. “We’re going to get back to it with an answer to the American people very, very quickly.”

He further described autism as “a preventable disease.”

[…]

Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also has a controversial background in the medical community, questioning early on the lethality of COVID-19 and being a vocal opponent to lockdown mandates.

That’s fair and I understand the impulse. The point of flooding the zone is partially to create panic and confusion, but it’s also a way to rapidly scatter a bunch of possible seeds of division or control at once, then focus on tending whatever works best, whatever has the least opposition afterwards.

There’s absolutely no situation in which a fascist regime making registries of “diseased” children is unworthy of alarm though.

I point out the vulnerability of kids because fascists always start with their easiest targets. It allows them to normalize, practice, and develop the systems they are building while also instilling fear and eroding opposition. That’s why we have to take this shit seriously from the start, the longer anyone waits the fewer there are around to fight back.

If you think that eugenicist views being more common at the time is any kind of defense you’re sorely mistaken, and if you think there’s much of a difference between someone who kills kids and one who tries to decide which kids are worth killing first, you’re wrong.

That first reply was for everyone else and reality check for you, but seeing as you seem intent on ignoring it I’m not going to bother wasting any more of my time interacting with you. I truly hope you come to realize how fucking disgusting your perspective is, I’ve tried to explain it to you but I can’t understand it for you.

It doesn’t have to be a kill list, that’s what you’re not understanding. Medicalizing dissent, creating registries of potential scapegoats and vulnerable people to target or practice on, that’s the purpose. They create an outsider group to stigmatize and then broaden the definition as necessary.

You need to look at this step within the totality of the conduct of the regime so far. They are already rolling back child labour laws and openly talking about the need for a baby boom. Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in society, especially in conjunction with other factors like a migrant background or being in foster care. How many kids are in precarious situations with either absent or completely disempowered parents?

They’re already putting unattended children in front of immigration judges without legal representation, if the state simply kidnaps and disappears the children of people it’s trying to deport without due process, what’s to stop them? What do you think these ghouls might want to do with lists of kids?

What you need to recognize is that this is the sort of registry that would be directly accessible by those surveillance initiatives you mentioned. It’s not duplicated effort, it’s part of the same effort, this is just one of the ways they are trying to define their enemies and undesirables.

“Let’s not demonize the Nazi, didn’t you know he undertook the arduous and benevolent task of creating a special category just for those of you that were exploitable for your labour? Sure he had a bunch of you exterminated but he sterilized and saved some for work and that should count for something.”

Utterly repugnant worldview. If at any point you find yourself coming up with reasons to defend a Nazi, and you don’t take a moment to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what the fuck you’re doing, you’re failing as a human.

Someone who actively participated in the mass murder of children might have redeeming qualities (and I’d argue the one you think you’re highlighting isn’t one at all), but none of them will ever outweigh the fact that they are monstrously inhuman.

Do you have any idea how profoundly his work has negatively impacted every autistic person since? We’re still trying to excise all the fucked up useless gendered concepts his perspective injected into the diagnostics. The notions that we lack empathy, have some kind of extreme “male intellect” and/or psychopathy, that the way we’re born is some kind of defect in humanity that must be studied and purged, that’s his legacy.

He was one of the first to try to identify and categorize us, not out of altruism, but because he saw us as a diseased branch of humanity that was situationally useful but ultimately unworthy of life. If that’s not worthy of demonization then I don’t know what is.

A couple things I would like to highlight for the unfamiliar, and I’ll preface this by saying that I am autistic myself.

First, autism is not something for which there are any clear medical indicators, no blood tests or brain scans or anything of the sort are involved in diagnosis. It’s entirely subjective and observational, something that states entrust people who are ostensibly professionals to determine.

I point this out because I want people to understand that there is absolutely nothing stopping the present administration from hiring people (or using AI) to simply diagnose undesirables with autism through whatever criteria they decide to deem fit.

This might sound absurd, but we’re seeing people with nothing but tattoos being transformed into “criminals”, “gang members”, and “terrorists” by similar logic.

Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps. Zyklon B was tested on autistic children and other “diseased offspring” long before it was ever used in the gas chambers.

How long do you think it will take before they are using AI to comb through the social media and medical records of teens looking for any indications of anything they don’t like, and flagging them as potentially autistic? September has been RFK’s set date since he first started talking about it, and people have been puzzling about that from the beginning. September is the start of the school year.

It also has nothing to do with discouraging political participation, but rather encouraging more active political participation in processes outside of simply voting intermittently. When both choices offered are dogshit, or no choice is presented in the first place, the point isn’t to say “all hope is lost give up” but rather “this is broken in a way that voting will not fix.”

When the DNC is actively doing things such as obfuscating the very clear decline of the sitting president in order to bypass the primary process and install Harris, or ratfucking someone like Bernie via super delegates, media control, and so on in '16, this was not done by some “nefarious-but-nebulous they”. It’s very explicitly the DNC. Harris was one of the least popular candidates in '20, one of the first to drop from the race, and her term as vice president did very little to ingratiate her to those she ostensibly represents.

Whatever it is that needs to happen in order for people to get the sort of representation and principled opposition to fascism that most of them actually want, the DNC itself is obviously highly resistant or outright incapable of providing it. Voting alone will not fix this.

(edited '16 to '20 for the Harris primary drop out, realized I’d gotten dates mixed up and double checked afterwards to confirm)

$40 million for this bullshit instead of literally anything useful or productive at all.

Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.

Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.

“I have no idea why they were doing that with government money,” said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract. Deployed did not respond to requests for comment about its Greensboro contract.

God damn this is bleak.

Mitch says the first signs of a deepening reliance on AI came when the company’s CEO was found to be rewriting parts of their app so that it would be easier for AI models to understand and help with. “Then”, Mitch says, “I had a meeting with the CEO where he told me he noticed I wasn’t using the Chat GPT account the company had given me. I wasn’t really aware the company was tracking that”.

“Anyway, he told me that I would need to start using Chat GPT to speed up my development process. Furthermore, he said I should start using Claude, another AI tool, to just wholesale create new features for the app. He walked me through setting up the accounts and had me write one with Claude while I was on call with him. I’m still not entirely sure why he did that, but I think it may have been him trying to convince himself that it would work.”

Mitch describes this increasing reliance on AI to be not just “incredibly boring”, but ultimately pointless. “Sure, it was faster, but it had a completely different development rhythm”, they say. “In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it”.

“One thing to note is that just the thought of using AI to generate code was so demotivating that I think it would counteract any of the speed gains that the tool would provide, and on top of that would produce worse code than I didn’t understand. And that’s not even mentioning the ethical concerns of a tool built on plagiarism.”