To be fair, the entire issue of blackface and its sordid history is much more nasty and nuanced than this thread would suggest.

If you want to find out more, look into the racist nature of minstrel shows, and their role in maintaining hierarchy.

It does seem like a power vacuum if you are fully convinced that power needs to be centralized.

I am reminding the thread that the absence of distributed power is chaos, not anarchism.

Anarchism is anything BUT a power vacuum. All the power is carefully doled out via negotiation and in no way lacking.

Strong propaganda is devoted to supporting your presumption that power only exists when concentrated, so it does feel natural and common sense to say that.

Anarchism is a lot of work negotiating, setting standards and consequences, balancing forces. Constant politics without an overarching state. Any concentration of capability for violence or resource to be shared must be extremely carefully handled.

What you are describing is warlords filling a political vacuum caused by chaos.

Someone has been misrepresenting anarchism to you.

It’s the Hive Mind Stans phenomenon that fascinates me, meme-activated collective action that is a very modern social body.

Some of the stuff BTS ARMY got up to was fantastic and a bit scary. Also large numbers. Very large.

So the Swifties haven’t been weaponized yet. But they could be, soon. Having deepfake A.I. impersonation of fans made by fascist followers of a reality TV star be the thing that raises their state of collective power to Ready is just… well, I am living in a Gibson novel.

Because I can dictate instantly into the Reminders app, without even unlocking my phone, it leaps over executive disfunction issues quite often.

Hold the power button for 2 seconds and say “add oatmeal and blueberries and coffee to the Groceries list” then go back to my task.

When I get to the store the list is grouped by type, mostly.

Or I say “remind me to call the doctor’s office at 9AM tomorrow” and it goes into the default list and the task notifies me at the right time. For the stuff I inevitably brush off, there’s a widget on my home screen that nags me so I can nurture my guilt lol.

So, I am leaning heavily into Apple’s built in ecosystem for keeping track of things (more private, in theory, as well). I have a about a dozen lists that I add to verbally. Some of those lists are geographically activated so I get notifications when I drive into town that I need to pick up a package, etc.

Why are you calling a polite irish male voice “she”?

Um, one thing that helps is reading the entire message, including disclaimers…

Also, please don’t try to reduce media literacy to fact checking, you’ll just get hung up on authenticity.

lol does throwing chickens back over the fence count?

I used to own a W124 series Benz (bought used for 5% of sticker price, I ain’t no fauntelroy). Nearly everything on it was redundant or excessively skookum.

When systems that weren’t as rugged started going down, like the vacuum controllers for doors or the 4matic computer etc, the car still worked safely with reduced convenience. A few minor design flaws like the wiring harness but that’s it. Room to work under the hood, too.

It was built in '93 when the engineers still ran the company.

Current main driver is the super reliable '03 CRV.

One of our cars is a 2016 GM and I just unscrewed the cell antenna instead of ripping out the cell module. Tracking disabled, or at least unreliable. The subscription nav is useless and easy to ignore. I would like to figure out how to prevent the siriusxm ads built into the infotainment system, still.

I look forward to better infotainment hacks down the road.

This is true for nearly everyone!

However, I have been immunized by media literacy studies, digital literacy practice, reading history, having a healthy respect for the scientific method and a basic understanding of political economy.

You know–what in some jurisdictions is called schooling.

[someconditionsmayapply, immunization does not confer immunity, merely resistance, consult your local poets]

Propaganda conflates industrialization with capitalism continually, obscuring the possibility of any other economic system.

You’re right, and he probably thought he was saying Argentina.

It’s not just medieval. Sargon of Akkad started instituting that shit millennia ago. It is embedded in the region and has infected a good chunk of the world. Islam is just one vector; ancient greeks passed the same patriarchal idea of women’s behaviour determining male honour into christianity too.

But your back yard is infinite.

Boats are the original tiny home.

Local classified right now has a 29 foot sloop with extra sails, recent bottom paint, and a 9hp outboard plus dinghy for $5700 CDN. It’s been up a while, you could bargain down, the seller seems motivated. It’s a 1978 boat so really skookum fiberglass on that.

A mooring buoy costs around $1500 to plop down but sometimes you can get one second hand for less. (Every Canadian is entitled by citizenship to a mooring buoy or two.)

An equivalent RV costs around $15k with nowhere to park.

People who assume that they are going to buy stuff new are just locked into a class-based mindset.

Around here you can buy a serviceable 29-foot sailboat for $5k, and a mooring buoy for $1k. It’s cheaper than a van by the river FFS.

People who live on sub-40-ft sailboats are usually just hanging in there. Source: that was nearly me before my fortunes changed slightly. Boats are underpriced because they are a lot of work.

My sister is a corporate executive. Her walk in closet is objectively larger than a 29-ft live aboard. Hell her ensuite bathroom is bigger than that and she lives in a duplex. You are lacking real world context I think.

Fraud, treason, endangerment, etc.–all normal and reasonable restrictions on speech.

Nazi propaganda checks all those boxes.

Yet Putin published an opinion that Ukraine is a modern fiction and should return to Russia. It isn’t official… just the geopolitical opinion of the dictator.

I’m unfortunately dependent upon said company, as a “partner”, which just means a hack indie developer who herds customers to the slaughter for the corp.

The last round of layoffs was a brutal experience for the “Plus” customers. They lost crucial advisers and support, and now the guidance available is a bored and untrained chat support thrall on the other side of the world, or a stochastic parrot.

You can smell the enshittification from here. The vendor lock-in is so intense it seemed inevitable.