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I was seconding the comment I replied to, not arguing against a misreading? Though I might be misunderstanding who you mean by GP. I'm confused, sorry

don't forget Rimworld. One guy making a huge and sprawling game that ignored the studio sensibilities and became hit (and a couple of memes).

the * is the important part. Little to do with the big bang, much more to do with where we export environmentally disastrous mining operations to. The countries the West destroyed by (among many other things) putting the mines there now (at least that) reap a dividend in leash power. Good for them.

I was about to comment on the obvious projection inherent in the "the Chinese are forcing drugs on the US" narrative. But it's a classic. If you want to know the nefarious things the US is doing, just look at what the claim their adversaries are doing.

this misses the structural analysis. As Zizek says, easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Critiques like this are thinking deep inside the box. The freezer protection inside the bubble wrap inside the box inside the shipping box.

in our current system, do these jobs serve a function? Yes, sure. The institutions have to be fed statitics about the corporation because that's how money is generated; the lawyers have to keep an eye on admissions and lawsuits because there are constant legal challenges, or the threat of them. The point is that modern capitalism is set up to require them. It's not necessary. The nurses reporting numbers to number-collector jobs is actively harmful to medical care. A system where students sue universities is very often actively harmful to education. Our system has been set up to support and require all these support desk jobs that add no value to the thing these institutions actually make.

it's really interesting where this comes from, and why this seems to some such an easy "gotcha".

first off, that these come up doesn't mean they're wrong, though it does likely mean they're shallow.

more deeply, this is an old, well-known dynamic often decried by the left. the left will dig deeper into often pretty obvious social dysfunctions and pioneer a social critique, analyzing the political and economic structures and systems that underpin it, and turn it into a challenge to existing authorities. This challenge is complicated, it hinges on teaching you political economy first, before it can even start to tell you what the systemic problem actually is. but it touches on real problems people feel every day.

The conservatives make a media thing out of it. Now, mass media, forever, has made their money by selling your prejudices back to you; from entertainment to news, they all basically work this way. Conservatives work this way as well (making for that sweet synergy between the two): it takes a run-down, stripped-down, dumbed-down version of the criticism, strips all political economy analysis from it (can't have them blame capitalism!), frinds some easy scarecrow figures - Gates, Soros, whoever (not that they're not horrible people, but that's not the point really), ascribes "debauchery and corruption" to them (because then the SYSTEM is fine).

In the end, when people then google the problems, they find these easy stories, which makes them associate the identification of the problem with these dumbed-down assaults. Then even mentioning the problem becomes that.

this is it! yes, thank you. 15 months, even.

always important to remind ourselves that what we consider normal and outrageous is often a quite recent phenomenon (and also vastly different across social groups even in the present). While I can't predict detail, I am 100% with this prediction: in 200 years, should we still be around, people will look at our ways of handling things as outrageous, and this will include things we find completely unremarkable and wouldn't give a second thought to.

I'm not surprised. Lord of the Flies was always a misanthropic fantasy fueled on Western dog eat dog-ideologies, our modern ideologies take this weird contemporary "kids are useless little fragile eggs" approach. Kids are neither as evil nor as helpless as our culture makes them.

I think it was David Graeber (I'll have to go look for it)= who once recounted the story of islander children getting lost on a boat and washing up on the shore of a small island. They were there a few weeks. They found chickens and captured them, scavenged fruits, and even remembered from their families (islander, after all) how to do small farming. They were absolutely fine, without any dystopian violence to be found.

interestng that pretty much every US company seems to think that of their bots, ehm, I mean, employees. I don't accept it for any company, and the church is also not entitled to convert all their people into good little bots who are 100% company man facade, 100% of the time

only that those two are intimately related. Countries don't hold US treasuries because they're great investments (..... obviously). They hold them BECAUSE they have liabilities in USD BECAUSE their international trade is in USD, and having to covert their local currency to USD not only introduces a currency risk. The world financial system is also organized to make local currencies of poorer countries depreciate over time, more than the USD does. Just like inflation is a silent tax that robs wealth from the poorer stratums inside a country, faster inflation/depreciation in the global south than in the north does the same on a global scale; it's a means of exploitation. Holding USD treasuries protects against that, at least a little. The fall in USD use in world trade doesn't immediately translate into an equivalent fall of reserve holdings because the trade isn't the only reason they hold them. The other big one is serving international debt, also in USD (for.. the same reasons as above, again an exploitation mechanism). So even if you stopped ALL trade in USD tomorrow, countries would have years' worth of USD denominated debt to pay off (which, of course, never pays off, because just like student loans, it accrues fees and interest and will never be paid down under "normal" circumstances, just rolled over). So there's a second change to watch: the change in debt denominated in other countires' currencies. It's a slow moving train.

old insight though: some of the best anti-police-advice comes from cops, to their families and kids. They know what the police actually have access to, and what they actually do with it, and they have no patience for that happening to THEM and their families. but of course, they have that convenient citizen/criminal distinction cutout thought process to view the world through, which makes it okay to subject "unknown others" to it, who are "criminals" if they come into the purview of police and thus deserve this.

I've never used linux. After a hundred frustrations with my new laptop that runs Win11, I'm now looking to install ubuntu. Windows pushed me there.

cool site! used it immediately to check if there are interesting places to add to my next trip. "normal" museums bore me.

May I suggest two additions? Kassel, Germany has two weird ones: A museum for death culture (Sepulkralkulturmuseum, https://www.sepulkralmuseum.de/), and a museum of wallpaper (https://www.tapeten.museum-kassel.de/) :)

Still ironic. Twitter had rolled out the "government-affiliated media" tag as a panic signal to mark -adversary- states' media, on the old chestnut of "other governments do propaganda, Western governments are honest!", combined with "governments lie, corporations are trustworthy!" - nobody ever labeled anything as "profit-driven corporation that will boost any foolish moral panic to make money off off you".

Nobody in their right mind should ever have fallen for this in the first place, but here we are. It made the "government-affiliated" tag toxic. If you want to right this ship somehow, two options for immediate first steps: Leave this foolishness completely. No labels by the platform.

Or add other tags, like they do now; but then you just add to the bezzle, why are profit media still not labeled? Why .. not a million other things you could? who would even decide what the labels are? With what justification? Labeling by a central authority is bound to be a joke.

Elon went for option two, which makes the joke that are labels obvious. This is, of course, the social function trolling has always had (there's a great study by Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, which emphasizes this: On the surface, trolling is just silly, perhaps "dirty"; but it also reveals the foolishness behind the outrage machine.)

that's the Western media framing of it. Not what global south countries are saying. China forgave loads of African debt. The West never does that, as it needs that debt in its neocolonial model.

https://allafrica.com/stories/202208240056.html

Let's hope so. The "World governance system" he's talking about is the US-led institutional international financial system, majorly the World Bank and IMF. Those are organized as neocolonial extraction institutions: they bring global south countries into the position of needing debt, then keep them in perpetual debt that cannot and will not be forgiven, as it is the wrench with which the extraction functions. As conditions to receive it, that "order" forces austerity and "structural adjustments" that serve to prevent any own industrial development and thereby the chance to gain value-added wealth. The debt also forces the countries to devalue their currencies, which in turn makes the raw materials in these countries cheaper, which have international, world market prices paid in a US dollar that conversely strengthens against these currencies. That drives the need for more IMF debt, worsening the cycle.

There is a reason the global south is looking to China to escape this pit. forces the denomination of debt in dollars that

the wealthy profit-maximizing executives paid for the engineers who trained the AI, and ran it through the legal department designed to protect the wealth and status of the corporation they are executives of. Under present circumstances, I don't know what an "autonomous" AI might even look like; someone must have trained it, and if another AI trained it, that was also at some point in the chain trained by these same institutional actors...

I don't know why this is getting downvoted, all of this is true. Prosecution in Germany is 100% a political decision. Policing (below this level) is supposed to be "automatic by law", but in practice, that of course also is not the case. All state bureaucracy is of political, always, but in the case of German prosecution, it's openly legal.

Lower Decks is hands down my favorite of the new Star Trek shows. As for the episodic collection, Strange New Worlds is somewhat trying to return to it. As was The Orville!

the "regional broadcasters getting the rights" was part of the business plan for all the shows of that time: re-runs in syndication. Those would regularly not be in order, and the TV stations would schedule more popular episodes to run more often. So it's not just that people couldn't record/watch later what they missed; the shows were actively made to be run out of order, so they had to be standalone for the business model to work.

B5's characters felt real to me when nothing else on TV really did. This is why.

to have a working cult of traditions, you have to invent them first. And to invent them, you have to destroy the traditions that were invented before, but are old enough to have evolved, sprawled, and gone out of control. The newly invented ones are much easily controllable.

Side reference, but of course historian Eric Hobsbawm is the central name here, who wrote "the invention of traditions" about how this happens.

Book reviews are, by definition, opinion pieces. And I've written a bunch of them. They're assessments of the book, and thereby assessments of the content, theoretical orientation, and conclusion of the book, and thereby of the subject matter that the book covers.

This narrative relies on a media narrative. The media focus is always on the right-wing resistance, because that serves as the narrative to manufacture consent for police and surveillance powers (look at these evil white supremacists!".)

As a person firmly on the left (like, the actual left, not Joe-Bernie-whatever), I detest what happened to the trucker protests, and the anti-covid lockdown protests, which were all, in the media, portrayed as radical and violent right-wingers - when that was, when you saw any in person, NEVER the core of them and not even a large minority.

The media has you believe otherwise. It pars-pro-totos the most radical element as the core, or the whole, of them, which then bludgeons the milquetoast left (party-political left type) into acquiesce with the police/banking powers used against them. "after all, we do have to contain the right wing!"

And then these police powers set a precedent, and then they're established, and then they get converted into code with little opposition from what deems itself "progressive" civil society. And then we all sit in it.

do you realize that roads are optional? you don't have to leave your house to talk to friends.

do you realize that using the mail service is optional? nobody forces you to write post cards.

do you realize that electricity is optional? you can get a shack in the forest and burn wood.

do you realize that water pipes are optional? you can dig for your own ground water.

the world is not made of solipsistic individuals. infrastructure encases, shapes, and forms the possibilities and constraints in which all of us live.

I didn't read this just materially. There's a language, customs, "ways of thinking" you inherit; also, there is an image, there are power structures and positions you're born into. Sociologists speak of different forms of capital: not just financial capital, also social capital, cultural capital, etc., that can all be "exchanged" for other things later (the relationships of your parents with other people, the ease qith which you can get an education title, etc)

and still: for the person born to "deserve" living with these benefits nebulously assumes the person, and the "deserving", were there first, and THEN you are born and by sheer chance, you got it - or not. Again, when you stop thinking this way, sort of "thinking of an abstract person" first, but rather realize that there are no abstract people, just real ones, this starts to feel weird.

the term "coincidence" is weird. I read it as somehow relying on the idea that first, there is a person (like a soul?), and then, that soul is "coincidentally" put somewhere. Correct me if you think that's strange, but the idea of "coincidence" to me only seems to make sense if the person somehow predates the location of birth. But if that's not the case, as I would guess most of us believe, then there is no coincidence here, "just" a birth that is already positioned - and your nationality, heritage, culture, language are dependent on that birth. And hence, that is the frame in which a person can only develop - after that fact. And THAT is nowhere near coincidence...

This is why I block all updates I can block. The security narrative is the piggy on which the control fantasies ride.

those 15 year old talking points from "the more you know"-talking points financed by transnational entertainment exploiters just won't die, will they?