The Quuuuuill

that assumes the point is something other than cruelty. the wealthy need us to suffer so that they can justify being wealthy as being a protection from suffering

they need live babies to they can become dead soldiers

— George Carlin

i’ll grant you the prior but absolutely not the latter. the french resistance tied up german resources in the western mainland they couldn’t afford to do

the praetorian guard is as conservative and fascist as they come

what strong poll support

i swear to god they used to work better. modern ones either send your cursor flying off the screen with a gentle nudge, or they barely move at all. it used to be people would hold onto the nipple nubs for extended times because they preferred the precision of them over touchpads. as touchpads have gotten better, nipple nubs have gotten worse. i’d probably point to 2015 when things all went wrong. i don’t know if the manufatcurers switched to a new sensor because it was cheaper or if the software / firmware / drivers that make touchpads good also make nipple nubs horrible

a deal with trump has just as many guarantees as a deal with putin: none

only if we make it a problem

not even unprecedented in american politics. it’s a tried and tested way to commit a genocide as a populist dictator

that’s what i’m saying. those of us who are pushing back against fascism are currently trying to get our coalitions bigger, and i need anyone on lemmy not outside getting on that timing. the bigger and stronger our coalition the safer it is for our activists to act

our big problem is too many people hooked into propaganda machines like they’re in the matrix. too many people on bluesky, twitter, facebook, lemmy, and at their local mcdonalds watching mass media news, all without connecting to anyone else who can help them muster resistance or help them direct their feelings.

the revolution will not be televised. people need to go outside and start talking to their neighbors to dislodge them of the notion that this is politics as usual

more likely young

the role of the lightning changed with the introduction of the P-51 since the mustang was such a high performance long range bird that it remained relevant even as a jet far longer than any other converted prop to jet design. early in the war the lightning was almost exclusively used as an interceptor given its high top speeds but lower maneuverability. however, it also changed the way interceptor strategy was conceived forever. for example, the other famous interceptor of the war, the spitfire, was a pure dogfighter. it had a high top speed, good climbing performance, low wing loading for maneuverability, and no range. meanwhile the lighting was good for strafing enemy fighters before they ever had a chance to engage by just being insanely fast compared to the birds it was up against.

again though, it has everything to do with that fighters in WW2 were becoming obsolete at an astounding rate as manufacturing became more advanced as the war progressed. a plane introduced in one role at the start of its service might be relegated into another role within a year or two because operational realities shifted so much. i think there’s no greater example of this than the Mitsubishi Zero. it started the war as an air supremacy fighter and ended its service as a guided bomb whose control module was a human being.

anyway. i’m rambling. by far the most interesting designs to me were the ones with long service lives. the p-38 and the p-51 are particularly interesting in that they both demonstrate that the united states was heavily focused on operational supremacy with their hardware designs. both were designed to operate at long ranges unsupported without sacrificing combat performance

right? they’re not well made

the speed with which you encounter your first nazi on nostr is not indicative of a system worth spending time on

i’m sure in his addled brain, this is one of the possible plans

United States format is very different from the european format and often the apple maps algorithm makes some boneheaded assuptions to translate from a US address to something OSM understands. i contribute, too, but the next time i have an example of apple maps fucking up… i’ll have already forgot this convo happened, but i’ll try

i know that. you know that. but not enough people do. they don’t understand scale or large numbers. they think if we increase minimum wage by $7, the price of a big mac will go up $7.

our education system is designed to make people susceptible to exploitation.

everything is going according to plan

they believe in the status quo. really, truly, and deeply. any threat to the status quo is perceived as a dangerous move away from freedom. when black people say that the status quo is fueled by blood, the right hears a dangerous move to authoritarian communism. the past 80 years have seen our society establish an oppressive hegemony meant to stand counter to the oppressive hegemony of bolshevik branded fascism. the result is what many people call neo-liberal fascism. the aspects of bolshevism we sought to counterbalance were:

• overt propaganda (the counter propaganda was the CIA’s promotion of “show, don’t tell”)
• atheism (counter propaganda is the addition of “under god” to the pledge of allegience and adding “in god we trust” to everything everywhere)
• centrally planned economy in which a core political party controls the means of production (counter propaganda to this is an unplanned economy in which a core politcal elite group controls the means of production)

i could go on, but you get the idea. functionally both arrangements are oppressive and cruel. but for the people these systems comfort, they don’t see the oppression and cruelty. ironically, they usually do see the cruelty of the other side for exactly what it is. this is because existing outside that hegemony, they can see what’s really going on better than the people steeped in it.

so anyway. when black people say “the hegemony doesn’t work for us. mass incarceration is a form of slavery, our lack of access to upward mobility in this system is a form of slavery, and your willingness to kill us all is objectively cruel” the people who have been propagandized to think this is as good as it can get interpret what’s being said as something that isn’t being said at all. it’s how tomi lahren can trick people into thinking the real meaning of “black lives matter” is “black lives matter more”: the people she’s tricking already on some level think that’s what’s being said, so she’s just confirming something they were already thinking might be being said.

if you’ve read 1984 you probably understand this next part already. 1984 was about the society we are currently seeing collapse. the reason it seems so much like right now is 1984 is because 1984 is a literary description of how every hegemony ever has worked. there’s always three super powers that play off each other to exploit the workers, there’s always some far off place where the superpowers exploit the resources under the guise of a proxy war to spread their own ideology and limit the spread of the others. the point has never been the ideologies, but rather the amassation of wealth to the elite.

what we are seeing right now is a result of the dissolution of the soviet union as one of the three super powers vying for global dominance. our imperial core has taken 35 years to adjust its hegemonic propaganda to match. it seems more obvious now because the superpowers are trying to figure out how to dominate us for the next century. it’s easier to be aware this is all happening because it’s all happening out in the open.

but what you are seeing with the absolute incongruence of the “all lives matter” free speech absolutists is that some people have been so deeply propagandized to sleep a la brave new world that they can’t possibly imagine they need to be liberated or that they should act in solidarity with oppressed minorities.

the way the media talks about immigration and trumps policies are very specific and very corrosive. most of us here having this conversation understand what’s really at stake because we think about and analyze these things, but american media intentionally lets people who don’t know think they know what they don’t.

let me explain.

when donald trump talks about criminal aliens in our country, he means anyone born on foreign soil, born to foreign parents, or with citizenship somewhere else who has committed a crime. a crime to him is any breach of law. and he uses the terms “illegals” and “aliens” to distance people from their own humanity. but the media will cover it as he’s only interested in criminals. you know, like drug kingpins, traffickers, gun runners. our mass media misleads the populace. the reason they do this is doing so does numbers for them. when you have a for profit media apparatus, you will make more money if there is always an emergency. this way they can trick people like this guy into making their own emergency, and then they can package his tragedy and sell it to us.

everything is going according to plan