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Cake day: February 26th, 2024

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  • Excerpts from a short piece, called “Back to the Wall,” by a famous writer; abridged:

    The individual soul is under attack…
    Ten years ago it may have been inconceivable that the great sweet “cassaba melon” as it was called of “American Century” prosperity was really a great psychic hoax a mirage of electronic mass-hypnosis…
    The choice given - or CHOSEN? by us between an oldfashioned politician…, which is to say conservative, and an outright Authoritarian rightwinger? We never had a choice between middle and left, we were always stuck between middle and right. Finally it becomes too much to fight. But the stakes are too great to lose…
    To live in a country which supposedly dominates the entire planet and to be responsible for the outrages of ones Own country! Woe to the Germans silent under Hitler woe to the Americans silent now.
    Not a matter of Policy, rational discourse etc.
    Things no longer merely out of proportion, things are UNREAL. Manipulating the unreal from centers of power - how can the soul endure?
    Movie blather, news broadcast blather … social blather of a totally maladjusted tribe engaged in struggle to retain power-dominance and control over an entire planet (nay an entire solar system!)

    He also mentions a “synchronistic putch.” The writer is called Allen Ginsberg and this piece was published 1966.
    Which is to say, the Overton window has been shifting for a long time and Nazism has never been truly defeated, only forced to hibernate. And certainly not just in the US. At least that’s my pessimistic conclusion at this point.


  • Empower the White, Christian, Sexually Aggressive/Frustrated Misogynists.

    Only as much and for as long as he deems necessary. Should they become a liability after getting him elected into power, they’d be dealt with swiftly. Remember Henry Hill in “GoodFellas”?

    If you’re part of a crew, nobody ever tells you that they’re going to kill you, doesn’t happen that way. There weren’t any arguments or curses like in the movies. See, your murderers come with smiles, they come as your friends, the people who’ve cared for you all of your life. And they always seem to come at a time that you’re at your weakest and most in need of their help.



  • From the other side of the pond, I find it very worrying and, indeed, disconnected from reality that Americans on Lemmy discuss the body odor or groping or even raping connected to one man that could and, given the chance, absolutely will completely unhinge their entire country at once.
    You might think it smug, but many people all over the world have experienced a tyranny, or are currently experiencing it. There is no second warning, nor will there be a deadline; one day, the disappearings just start, and they will become increasingly random. You will not be in control of the process anymore.
    Or, in the words of Andrew Mack, albeit about the failed Vietnam War: “The American experience [is] in no sense unique, except to Americans.”
    I understand people need to vent, but what I would really hope to see would be discussions on how easy, or how difficult, it is to uproot one’s live and emigrate; how to go about getting a visa, or asylum, or a job in a different country; how long it takes to become fluent in a foreign language; or how long it would take Canada to close its borders once huge waves of refugees set in.
    Today’s “too alarmist” is tomorrow’s “wasn’t alarmist enough.”
    /offmychest








  • Solé’s fantastic and extremely recommendable book “Phase Transitions” covers this as well. Quoting Janssen et al.: “even when the group is faced with negative results, members may not suggest abandoning an earlier course of action, since this might break the existing unanimity.”
    “More generally, the underlying problem here is why complex societies might fail to adapt […]. Even if there is some social perception of risk, short-term thinking often prevails when facing long-term vulnerabilities. Such undesirable behavior is often favored by a combination of incomplete understanding of the problem, together with the misleading view that all changes are reversible.”