passenger

passenger , 15 days ago

@Loukas

"Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place." - Ignatio Silone

passenger , 19 days ago

@HeavenlyPossum @foolishowl

I usually hear it phrased in what I think of as "Europa Universalis-speak": where people talk about Ukraine and Palestine and Russia and Israel and America as if those are individual thinking entities. This is of course absurd. A state cannot think, nor can it suffer. Humans and societies can think and suffer, but those existed for millenia before states and they'll continue to exist for millenia after states.

If someone asks "should we let Ukraine cease to exist?" then it feels like a weird question. Obviously the state of Ukraine should cease to exist if that'll provide even the smallest uptick in general human happiness, the same as any other state. States are just some stuff we made up on paper because they benefitted us, and if they stop benefitting us we should tear up that paper.

Judging from the number of people who either fled from Ukraine or took up arms in its defence, many people do not believe that their lives would be improved if they stopped being Ukrainians and became Russians.

Judging from the number of people who didn't take up arms until conscription was introduced, not everyone feels that way.

Perhaps the corpses piled up in Bakhmut and Avdiivka would choose to renounce their patriotism if it meant remaining alive. Perhaps not. Humans are diverse at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times. It's easy for the callous to write words into the mouths of the dead.

What gets me about the whole thing is that so many people, regardless of their stated political position, simply do not give a shit about the Ukrainians as human beings. They talk only in Europa Universalis-speak, about states, and regard the individual humans as simply a means of carrying out the wills of those states.

Honestly it sickens me.

passenger , 1 month ago

@futurebird

Hypothesis: "the powerful" are those who are not harmed by a criticism of them.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos don't care if you mock them or point out their crimes, because what does it matter? The emperor may have no clothes but he's still emperor.

Elon Musk does care if you mock him, because he's a thin-skinned piece of shit, but that's not the same as being harmed by it.

On the other hand, if J.K. Rowling says something cruel about trans women or Donald Trump says something cruel about Black teenage boys, that does harm them, because the act of them speaking mobilises a power structure against their victims.

passenger , 1 month ago

@Eva_RespectExistence @precariousmind @jwcph @ariadne

Stalin is also a really good example of:

A) A dictator who becomes slowly more insulated from reality, from a mix of him believing his own propaganda and his lieutenants controlling what information reached him.

B) A dictator whose death led to a succession crisis, as his lieutenants turned their various parts of the apparatus of state against one another.

These are both really common issues in dictatorships across the political spectrum, and we see them a lot in dictatorial non-state organisations too.

passenger , 1 month ago

@Eva_RespectExistence @precariousmind @jwcph @ariadne

Elizabeth I of England and Catherine the Great of Russia were both pretty dictatorial: ruling on a whim, appointing their favourites to whatever role they wanted, and imprisoning anyone who looked at them funny. We often say that Catherine's ministers ran the country for her, but the same was true of Mussolini and nobody's claiming that he wasn't a dictator.

I think you could argue that this is a case of the boys' club situation: women in traditionally male fields feel pressure to act in very macho ways in order to reassure the men around them that they're suitable for the role; and absolute rulership is absolutely a traditionally male field.

However, I can't think of any women who seized dictatorial power in the same way that Mussolini did, yeah.

passenger , 1 month ago

@GottaLaff @Wileymiller @darthstar

Every so often I'm reminded that while Cohen is smarter and more honest than Trump, he wasn't smart enough or honest enough to not get involved with him in the first place. He's still ultimately a crook and a creep.

passenger , 1 month ago

@lee_quadkorps

Oh, what a great question!

I'm a fan of "per X" where X is something determined by the particular needs of the game, as it gives the game what I think of as a heartbeat. That heartbeat can then be adjusted as needed.

To take two examples, Vampire the Masquerade and Werewolf the Apocalypse are popular TTRPGs originally by White Wolf. As the titles suggest, in the first you play a vampire and in the second you play a werewolf. Several mechanics in the first game have a "per night" heartbeat, because vampires are nocturnal. Several mechanics in the second game have a "per lunar month" heartbeat, because werewolves are linked to the moon. This ties the mechanics to the fantasy in a way that feels very natural.

passenger , 1 month ago

@julieofthespirits @peachfront @franciscawrites @bookstodon

Philip K. Dick short stories have led to a surprisingly long list of films.

passenger , 1 month ago

@elysegrasso @adriano @janbartosik @franciscawrites @gevoel @octothorpe @bookstodon

The Mule, you mean? They do foreshadow him, but he's represented as something predictable and also different from this "pivotal woman." It's kinda a mess.

The series focuses on Seldon himself and other heroic figures doing heroic things, rather than on the idea of psychohistory working with large populations over long time scales. This may be because Asimov's Marxist-influenced interpretation of history is something they found distasteful, or it may be because the idea of replacing the entire cast every few episodes was considered commercially unviable. Either way, it's really not very Foundation once you scratch the paint off.

passenger , 2 months ago

@MikeDunnAuthor @MakBerberovic

Yeah, this.

"It's the lesser evil so you shouldn't call it evil" is the new "well the violence was done by cops so it's not really violence."

passenger , 2 months ago

@ChrisMayLA6 @bookstodon

As someone who loves all three mediums: I think the biggest story is to do with who gets to make them.

You and I cannot make a film with special effects or anything like that, it's just too expensive. If we made a small film, as many people do, we would have real trouble distributing it. We would almost certainly find it hard to get it into cinemas. This is because the gatekeepers of film distribution are interested in the top of the market.

You have published several books, I have not. You don't need me to tell you how tough it is for authors of small-run books, and how little support modern publishers give to anyone who isn't already a successful author. This is because the gatekeepers of books are interested in the top of the market. (The bottom of the market, to my understanding, belongs to Amazon and only exists online.)

But.

The largest gatekeeper of video game distribution is a company called Steam. They have successfully bet on the middle and bottom of the market - what distributors call the "long tail." Loads of single creators or small teams have made games and seen them become surprising smash hits. Other gatekeepers (Epic, itch, etc) have been doing likewise, and there's a flourishing self-publishing and self-distribution scene going on.

The reporting focuses on stories like that of Marcus Persson, who made a small game called Minecraft in his spare time, and it became so popular that he sold it to Microsoft for a reported $2.5bn. (Persson's other games have mostly been abandoned or flopped. Also, Persson is a terrible human being.) However, it's more instructive to look at cases like that of Jake Birkett, who makes games by himself, has never made a hit, and makes enough to pay his mortgage.

Imagine, as an author, being someone that nobody except fans of your niche have heard of, able to not only make a decent living but having the same access to distribution that megastars do. Imagine that as a filmmaker.

I don't know why this is, and I don't know whether this is because of distributor behaviour or whether it drives it. But I think it's been significant in the rise of the industry, and in the health of the middle and bottom of the market compared to that of other industries.

passenger , 2 months ago

@RolloTreadway

I hope things get better.

passenger , 2 months ago

@gangrif @ElleGray @dntlookbehindu

Yes! We call this a "perfect eclipse", as in "Earth currently has a perfect eclipse." They're thought to be so rare that if we didn't live on a planet with one, we'd consider it an absurd implausibility.

Space is large: almost anything that can happen, will happen somewhere. In our case, we happened to evolve on a planet which (for one era of its existence) has a perfect eclipse.

This is pretty cool if you think about it.

passenger , 2 months ago

@TomSwirly @ayushbhattacharya @futurebird

Yes!

The Whole Foods thing is a good example of this.

1. The supermarket doesn't charge less to its customers - they still charge as much as people are willing to pay.

2. The workers are replaced with AI.

3. The AI turns out to also just be workers, except with lower wages and fewer legal rights.

4. Since wages are lower and prices are still as high, the resulting savings are passed on directly to investors.

Naturally this is a self-destructive pattern, because it relies on there being customers, which means it relies on some other company still paying its workers a decent salary - which of course the investors will not tolerate.

passenger , 2 months ago

@RolloTreadway

❤️

They really do like to blame you for their own incompetence, don't they?

passenger , 2 months ago

@RolloTreadway @ChrisMayLA6

"Brexit was a bad idea and we shouldn't trust any organisation or publication who said otherwise at the time" would be both an honest admission about the past and a sensible policy going forwards.

It may be a painful admission, yes. But as Brecht said, the road to extremism begins when one picks a comforting lie over a painful truth.

passenger , 2 months ago

@nicholas @KarunaX @faab64 @palestine @israel @mondoweiss

The thing is that the ICJ exists to settle disputes between states that the ICJ recognises. Colonised indigenous peoples (for example the Palestinians) are denied representation at that court because it doesn't recognise them as being a state, and so are non-state groups such as Hamas.

Other groups who are not represented at the ICJ and so can't bring a case or have a case brought against them include but are not limited to: you, me, the Coca-Cola company, Bayern Munich Football Club, the French Communist Party, and Johns Hopkins University. Only states.

It's like walking into a meeting of agriculture companies and asking why car companies are not represented. They aren't represented because that isn't the nature of the occasion.

passenger , 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum @KarunaX @faab64 @mondoweiss @nicholas

Remember that to a lot of Israeli and pro-Israeli people, "Hamas" just means any Palestinian person of any age or political affiliation, in the same way as "Hezbollah" is now coming to be used to refer to any Lebanese person.

To such a bigot, a hospital full of Palestinians is therefore, by definition, a Hamas base and a valid military target. Obviously, there's no sense in engaging with such a person: they've left both their honesty and their humanity behind.

(Hilariously, nicholas tried to follow me. I think he's just a troll.)

passenger , 2 months ago

@HeavenlyPossum @KarunaX @faab64 @mondoweiss @nicholas

I don't think it's performative trolling, I think it's an older version of trolling: find someone you dislike, then get them to waste their time and energy writing long pages of text. He will never be persuaded because he's not here to be persuaded: he's here to exploit good faith by writing a sentence to get you to write a page.

passenger , 2 months ago

@Mary625 @violetmadder

The immense size of the backlash against the genocide and its enablers really fills me with hope.

It really seems like most people are good. It's just that the powerful, and those who grovel at their feet, are not.

passenger , 3 months ago

@philip_cardella @mekkaokereke

While I am proud, as an IWW member, that we were always a union with no race bar and gender bar, I am sad that that is something to be proud of.

passenger , 3 months ago

@MadeyeTheCarnaptious @RhinosWorryMe @fkamiah17

My favourite (read: most horrifying) part of that was how the UK special forces had been vetoing former Afghan soldiers from coming to the UK.

Given what's coming out about UK special forces and what they got up to in Afghanistan, this strikes me as suspiciously close to saying "we don't want witnesses coming forwards."

passenger , 3 months ago

@futurebird

Craneflies are my favourite sort of spider!

passenger , 3 months ago

@futurebird @sidereal @alloydflanagan @hazelnot

A wise person on fedi persuaded me that the Democrats (at least, the currently-ascendant faction within it) would rather lose the election than raise those taxes.

If they raise the taxes, they reduce the power of the hyperwealthy, which to them is bad.

If they let the Republicans win, then the electorate will be punished brutally for daring to not lick boot, and will crawl back to the Democrats at the next election anyway.

passenger , 3 months ago

@dymaxion @HQ42 @cstross

Yeah but for some reason they don't come in grey, just white or black, so they won't go with the rest of my furniture.

passenger , 3 months ago

@JenYetAgain

"Go see great clown."

"But doctor, I am already in your office."

passenger , 3 months ago

@futurebird

I was told as a kid that this phrase comes from the investment industry following the 1840s railway bubble, in which people lost lots of money on overvalued railway stocks (the hot tech of the day.) After that, many chastened investors fell back onto residential property speculation instead, which was perceived as being a far safer investment.

I don't know whether this is true.

passenger , 3 months ago

@futurebird

If we built a society which didn't see housing as an investment opportunity but as a basic human right, then that would make your original point true, and that would certainly be heartwarming.

passenger , 3 months ago

@futurebird

Oh, for certain.

If we built a society which didn't see housing as an investment opportunity but as a basic human right, then that would make your original point true, and that would certainly be heartwarming.

passenger , 3 months ago

@futurebird @llewelly

I've talked to a few antivaxers in this situation. They're extremely emotionally vulnerable about it: from their perspective, they had just seen proof that their own beloved child was too weak or unfaithful. This is no place for either a fanatic or a parent to be, and now they're both.

I talked to one person who said that she had gotten in touch with a healer. She said he was expensive but was her last hope.

Another was looking into treatments "that doctors don't want you to know about." When I tried to talk to him about the potential dangers, he became aggressive and accused me of being a shill for big pharma.

Both of these interactions made me extremely sad.

I haven't seen any for whom such a crisis turned them away from antivax; it seems to send them further into the arms of grifters and conspiracy theorists. If anyone has seen (or experienced) such a thing, I'd love to hear about it - I like happy stories.

passenger , 3 months ago

@LRRRonEarth

I want to hear the other guy say "hemoclastic." I really, really want to hear that.

passenger , 3 months ago

@coyoty @farah @LRRRonEarth

"It's gonna be hemoclastic. Very hemoclastic. Folks, do you know what hemoclastic means? I do. Most people don't know what hemoclastic means. They don't! They just don't know. But I do."

passenger , 3 months ago

@ariadne @TomSwirly

I was also interested in the answer to Tom's question but from another angle: what does "insist" mean here, given that the Ukrainian government has already been pleading for help for the duration of the war?

Usually if I insist on something then there's some implicit "or else" lurking there, some way to coerce them into doing as I say. Without that coercion it's just begging, and beggars are accustomed to the answer usually being a silent "no."

passenger , 3 months ago

@ariadne @TomSwirly

Sorry, I think I communicated the question badly.

The current situation is that Ukraine is losing the war, and when they lose the war everyone will find out whether the fears of Russian forces pushing on even further were justified or not. This is something that people in Paris and Berlin and London and Warsaw and Washington DC already know. This knowledge has not been enough to make them do anything about it - my understanding is that they're giving less help now that Ukraine is losing than they were early on when Ukraine was not losing.

The Europeans and Americans appear to either have made the decision to leave Ukraine to its fate, or to be too paralysed due to their own lack of state function to do anything about it.

My question is: with this being the case, what new coercion can the Ukrainian government apply to the West to change this decision?

Otherwise, it's not insistence, it's just begging, and as any Kurdish person can tell you, begging the West to help keep you alive doesn't get you much.

passenger , 3 months ago

@ChrisMayLA6 @stuffjolikes @RolloTreadway

I've heard theorising that the "floor" for a major party is about 20% - that this is the percentage of the population whose vote isn't swayed by facts or events, and who would continue to be loyal if the sun went black.

If this is true, then the drop from 45% to 25% polling for the Tories represents a loss of eight out of ten of their non-hardliner voters. This means that while there isn't much further that they can fall, it also means that the party will now be driven by the need to posture to those hardliners, whose priorities may not be the same as those of the rest of the country.

passenger , 3 months ago

@RolloTreadway @ChrisMayLA6 @stuffjolikes

I'm really scared of that point (where the ageing loyalist base can no longer sustain the party) to be honest.

In the US, over the period 1992 and 2014, the average age of a Republican voter went up by almost 20 years. In other words, it was the same cadre of ageing boomers voting for the same cadre of ageing candidates.

When that ended in 2016, it didn't end in the party becoming more reasonable - it ended in the party being sufficiently hollowed-out that its worst impulses could take it over.

Recently I think Sunak has been leaning in that direction. When he took power he was the consummate "man in a grey suit", the very epitome of the Conservative archetype of dull, uncharismatic but competent centre-Right rulership. Contrast that to where he is now, rambling about "wokeness" and "gender ideology" while ignoring economic realities.

Sunak strikes me as a survivor - a man who'll say or do what it takes to stay relevent. I don't think he's made this shift for personal reasons, I think he's done it because he realises that pandering to their worst impulses is what the party base want.

passenger , 3 months ago

@RickiTarr @tob

Ricki, have you come across the concept of the "cult of tradition"?

passenger , 3 months ago

@RickiTarr @tob

"I like thing X, and I look at the past as being the golden age, therefore thing X must have existed in the past. I dislike thing Y, so thing Y must not have existed in the past."

Tradition gets retroactively rewritten into whatever serves the present.

It's basically the same as the guy on reddit who said that the ancient Greeks must have been homophobic, because he likes them and he likes homophobia.

passenger , 3 months ago

@hrefna

But that would make things harder for Facebook and Twitter, rather than eliminating their competition!

passenger , 3 months ago

@saddestrobots @JenYetAgain

Texan Germans are a thing, like Minnesota Scandinavians or Patagonian Welsh.

passenger , 3 months ago

@CelloMomOnCars

This is amazingly cool.

For millenia, humans have known about dryland agriculture using shade trees to protect the more vulnerable plants from the harsh sun. That isn't new. Using solar cells to provide the same shade seems obvious once someone has pointed it out - but I didn't think of it until then.

Such a clever trick.

passenger , 4 months ago

@futurebird

This is the Zimbardo Experiment, just with shorter iterations of prisoner and guard.

passenger , 4 months ago

@futurebird

You'd need a really small horse and lasso to herd ants, and those are expensive.

passenger , 4 months ago

@faab64 @Crowpine @flawed @palestine

I once went to a presentation by a Black doctor who talked about a time when she had newly qualified and was working in a hospital in North Wales, which is an extremely White area. There was only one other Black doctor in the hospital, an older man. Many patients kept confusing them for one another.

How do you keep confusing a younger woman for an older man? Well, if you're racist enough then you only notice the skin colour and everything else falls away.

This is what I think is happening here. The fact that she's elderly and has Alzheimers doesn't matter to a racist: all that matters is that she's Brown. Once they see that, their racism prevents them from noticing that she isn't an athletic military-age Hamas gunman.

passenger , 5 months ago

@RolloTreadway @CStamp

They're also shockingly bad from a labour viewpoint.

passenger , 5 months ago

@RolloTreadway @CStamp

I keep seeing articles saying "millenials are killing the cruise ship industry", and I'm eating as much avocado toast as I can to do my part, but it isn't happening fast enough.

passenger , 5 months ago

@RolloTreadway @ChrisMayLA6

Also don't forget dealing with Britain's feral Right-wing press. The reason why we have Starmer in charge of Labour instead of Long-Bailey or someone who might mobilise depoliticised people, is because Starmer is Right-wing enough and Establishment enough to be acceptable to the Daily Mail - and Starmer isn't going to want to upset that. He's seen what the papers did to Corbyn and to Johnson. He's going to stay carefully within the boundaries prescribed for him.

passenger , 5 months ago

@RolloTreadway @Sarahw @ChrisMayLA6

I read it a little differently: when I see Sunak banging the war drum about Yemen, I think back a few years to the chaotic evacuation of Kabul.

Do you remember people in Parliament asking things like "if the Americans refuse to go back to Afghanistan, can't Britain do it alone?" I think Sunak remembers. I think he especially remembers the answer they received then - that Britain is too weak to be more than an American auxiliary, that our days of military relevance are behind us - and I think he remembers how humiliating a lot of Conservatives found that answer.

Leftists like to say that we're already against the next war. I think what we're seeing here is Sunak still not being against that last war, the return to Afghanistan that never happened, the war that exists only in the hauntology of British nationalists.