Subway’s got a lot more problems than the unsavory personal life of its past spokesperson, but the sandwitch guy at the local one is just a wretch who doesn’t get commissions (or, likely, tips) for his service. I’d take a look at John Oliver’s main LWT segment on Subway Sandwiches.
However, the child sexual assault scandals and cover-ups of religious ministries is not unique to the Roman Catholic Church and but is epidemic among major ones, conspicuously centered around youth ministries.
And it’s indicative of a system that doesn’t sufficiently vet people who work with kids (contrast faculty of public schools) and aims more to silence victims and preserve the (now false) reputation of the church rather than preserve justice and transparency and care for the victims.
It speaks ill of organizations that allegedly carry God’s favor that they feel compelled to keep secrets and allow sexual violence to fester within their own ranks.
Sheer numbers assures us that there are dastards among all walks.
But yes the Christian nationalist movement does seem to have high numbers glad to dispose of the rest of us and turn the US and its states into a one-party autocracy.
Curiously, Evangelist academics have warned this could really set back the acceptance of Christianity, who will be regarded for decades the way Nazis were in the late 20th century. (Shunned and sometimes hunted.)
A friend of mine is deeply Catholic, teaches high school American history, has progressive values (is pro-civil-rights) and explains it that he has a spot in his brain for all the church stuff, wheras the rest of his brain adheres to science and the secular morality we’ve developed through trial and error and beating back the dominance-minded shenanigans of plutocrats. I’ve met many Catholics like him.
But then theres Brett Kavanaugh and all the rest of the Federalist Society, who believe in pre-constitutional feudalism (so long as they get to be aristocrats).
So I’m pretty sure Catholics can be kind and compassionate and merciful despite their faith. But doing so is quite common.
They kill over 50,000 dogs a year. Among The 1000+ (up to 5000) people they kill, half of them are unarmed and not resisting.
A long time ago, another country had a similar problem, the Weimar Republic which was patrolled by Freikorps militias who took and killed what they wanted, and it was better to comply than see a massacre in your village. It’d be from these that the Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel would be recruited in the early days of NSDAP.
The second amendment in the US has never been extended to marginalized groups, and when the (successfully anarcho-capitalist anarcho-communist!) Black Panthers rose in the 1960s to protect black neighborhoods and engage in mutual aid, FBI engaged in an assassination campaign to hunt down and murder its leaders and theorists.
Edit: BPP were anarcho-communist, not an-cap. I’m a derp and was typing on mobile. Sorry all.
Curiously, the societies that used horses as a primary transit mode beat out the ones for whom oxen were the primary transit mode. Horses in Europe in the early middle ages were so specific to the noble class that it was assumed a guy with a horse was noble, and a noble without a horse was just a commoner. (This was before the merchant class messed the hierarchy up.)
So yeah, when the Mongols came with their society in which everyone was on horseback, it was a game changer.
Curiously, with the rise of firearms (involving centuries of tech races between crossbows and firearms vs. heavier armor) there was an overabundance for a while of heavy warhorses. Then someone invented the shoulder harness which allowed horses to pull a load without getting strangled.
That said, it’s always neat to see when fiction writers actually do their worldbuilding homework and work out details like personal transit, freight, mail and so on and how they are affected by the diegetic mythical aspects.
It still befuddles me, especially since it’s a specific format for a horror story: A bunch of rich people pay through the nose for a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and of course it kills them (though the final girl might escape). The Menu was a recent example. Maybe to get Stockton Rushed should now mean to buy a super expensive experience or trip or thing that kills you.
A drug named Stockton Rush would be super expensive, and the most amazing trip ever, and fatally toxic.
So if you’re hiring someone to chart out your trip to Everest or the Titanic or the moon or something, it’s good to get your legal team to do some due diligence and make sure the company knows what its doing. (For a deeper dive, check out Behind the Bastards’ two-parter on Stockton Rush. All the warning signs were there he was doing mad science and not listening to his deep-sea experts.
Also, the door that only can be opened from the outside was total early foreshadowing.
No one should be monitoring children for more than six hours at a time. A childcare person on their seventh hour is too fatigued to be functional in an emergency.
That said, more than a 20-hour work week will start taxing adults so they can no longer serve their functions regarding civic duties (voting, staying knowledgeable about issues so as to govern policy, etc) and parenting.
Laziness is indistinguishable from avolition a symptom of depression. Laziness, and its predecessor sloth are just terms of abuse used by the ownership class to admonish the working class.
No one wants to work in a toxic work environment, and the only reason we tolerate them, and workplace bullying is through extortion, because we have to, to eat.
But 2020 lockdown furlough and the great resignation that followed demonstrates to us that people aren’t lazy at all, and will turn to other ways to be productive when given half a chance. But bosses really like to enjoy their place in dominance hierarchy, and can’t actually be bothered to manage their companies – we see very little exercise of management, that is getting to know and understand the workforce and regard them in a way to maximize productivity – instead we see bosses deliberately choosing to engage in abusive and self-indulgent behavior, or enact policy that only deteriorates productivity, as we’ve seen with the return-to-work mandates. (Studies have shown people who work from home are as productive or even more so on average.)
So no. Laziness is not a thing. If someone can couch-potato for two weeks and not get cabin fever, then they’re dealing with mental health issues, possibly exacerbated by a mean boss and a shitty work environment.
Some nazis were given high ranking jobs in the US, typically those who were good at science and math (although we got a lot more of our big science brains from refugees fleeing the German Reich. Brain drain in autocratic and fascist movements is a very real thing, and has happened in multiple fields here in the states).
When it came to NSDAP Idealogues, we didn’t really need to import any, as all of our big industrialists were pro-NSDAP and believed in the ideology independently (which is to say they agreed with them, and still do, even if they don’t regard themselves as aligned with the NSDAP political party). Those that did come here were friends of gazillionaires (who would be billionaires today, though the dollar was stronger then. J. P. Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller all were 100-millionaires.
Plenty of escaping Nazi officers fled across the world. South American nations are notorious because they weren’t actively hunting them down (yet) so they required less subversion getting through customs, and then could work out identity changes and fade into seclusion later. Plenty did come to the United States, pretending to be someone else, since they didn’t have rocket science cred.
In the early 2010s, If you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear had already been resurfacing as a common thought-stopping cliché here in the states, since SCOTUS had been adding carve-outs by the dozens to the fourth amendment to the Constitution to the United States (the one about protections from unreasonable searches and seizures). At first, if you didn’t speak english, or are within 100 miles of a US border or coast (that’s most of the US), the police got free probable cause. Eventually SCOTUS ruled that if you were searched illegally and evidence for a crime was found, that evidence could not be suppressed if the crime was significant enough (e.g. the clothes of a missing child no wait, simple drug possession was enough.)
We were already aware of the FISC, FBI National Security Letters (the origins of the NSL canary statements) and the disposition matrix, by which even US citizens could be sentenced to execution by secret trial; the right to face one’s accuser was long forfeit.
But then, it was also a period in which US citizens averaged about three crimes a day, mostly violations of the CFAA (which Reagan signed into law after watching Wargames 1983. Violation of the TOS of a website was a federal felony, which meant every tween that got a Facebook Friendster or Myspace account was committing a crime that could be sentenced up to 25 years (what is the upper limit for murder one in some states). It wasn’t enforced… unless some official needed you to go away, say because he wanted your wife, or your property, or for you to shut up about his crimes.
And this is one example, and why telephone encryption is such a problem. Today, it’s illegal in most states for law enforcement to search your phone once you’re in custody without a warrant. They do anyway, and might or might not be able to crack the encryption with current tech (it’s an ongoing race between exploits and fixes). If they find something worth prosecuting, or assets worth seizing or extorting you over, or if they just don’t like you, then yes, expect to lose all your valuable property and assets, and become their informant. Sexual favors may also be necessary if you’re attractive.
And that’s why we need privacy, even as SCOTUS continues to strip it away from us.
In the 2020s, though, it’s all the other technologies: IMSI spoofing, camera drones, ALPRs, Facial Recognition (which is a good way to get falsely convicted), Ring doorbell camera botnets, reverse warrants based on location or websearches, and so on. Big Brother is left holding the beer of IRL 2024.
As Behind the Bastards elaborated Stockton Rush got a bit mad scientist about it and ignored all the deep-sea experts that were telling him the carbon fiber shell was deteriorating even from the test dives.
It didn’t have standard safey mechanisms. For example, the door could be opened from the outside only. There was no emergency escape (say, in the event of an emergency surface situation.)
Rush laughed at safety, but then he went down in it, so full mad science cred.
The billionaires could afford to hire a team to do due diligence to make sure they would safely come back, and lawyers to tell them to do due diligence. But the kid and the family didn’t. Superrich families often are super-dysfunctional.
So now, to get Stockton Rushed is to be sold a ride or experience for a conspicuously high price. And that kills you, like eating at the Hawthorn.
Curiously, the when famous artists who go through a porn phase that’s an indication that the big capitalist economy isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing (e.g. lifting all boats).
This is something that people need to be reminded about:
The OG conservatives, the Reagan and George H. W Bush conservatives, the fiscal responsibility conservatives, the tough-on-crime conservatives are the very same movement as the MAGA movement, the transnational white power movement, the Christian nationalist movement, the Project 2025 / Project 47 movement.
The policies advocated for and still pushed by the OGs are what led to Trump’s takeover of the GOP in 2016, the MAGA uprising and the movement towards one-party autocracy. The ones that are complaining now that the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and Trump and MAGA are going to far still believe in the same policies that got us here. They just wish we had a few dozen more miles to plummet before smashing into the ground.
They didn’t just by tickets to ride this train. They invested in the railroad company. They told the company where the destination was when they hired on the workforce. The railroad was built to their specifications.
In fact, we were pretty close to here during the Great Depression, only the people were much more into communism and what the Soviet Union was trying to do than what was happening in Italy and Germany. Only the industrialists wanted the fashy stuff.
After the New Deal, WWII, the Cold War, the Great Society, and then forty years of right-wing propaganda spoon fed to us and our kids, We’re marching to a faster pace once again. But the conservatives were always on board from the beginning. They just imagined the parades and not so much the brutality and genocide.
And they certainly didn’t imagine the genocide projects would eventually come for them. ( Narrator:The genocide programs will totally come for the OG conservatives. )
Thought this was a good read exploring some how the “how and why” including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.
Historically there have been several instances of anarcho-communist organizations and social movements flourishing.
Most of them were sabotaged by plutocrat agents invoking violence or mischief. Often just giving an angry militants in the region some materiel support and bad intel.
Torpedo juice is American slang for an alcoholic beverage, first mixed in World War II, made from pineapple juice and the 180-proof grain alcohol fuel used in United States Navy torpedo motors.
— Wikipedia
The article notes that despite poisonous additives to deter sailors from bleeding the torpedos to get smashed, the enlisted would take the risk and then work out ways to filter out the additives.
Pinkie Pie is just a recent incarnation of an old god.
I don’t like Biden either, but anyone with half a brain knows there are two choices in the 2020 election. If we had a sane voting system, voting third party might be worth it, but as it stands, no one but you knows your favorite candidate exists and unless you want to become their campaign manager that will still be true in...
Rest assured, the US is not a democracy and we know it.
We do still lie to our kids about it as a part of indoctrination, and so we have to have this conversation every year.
But we’re also on the verge of change just because there are no more excuses. The public can record the situation on the street and the rest of the public can see it when it’s uploaded to the internet. All the myths that kept liberals in doubt are gone. Hence the far right is going full autocracy.
Petitioning our representatives for the redress of grievances doesn’t work either, so it’s going to get exciting either way. But I’d rather we didn’t go gentle into fascist autocracy, but went down flinging our sabots into the gears of capitalist industry.
I’m much less okay with the Republicans having a first term. A vote not against Republicans is a vote to let the Heritage Society’s Project 2025 move forward.
Project 2025 playing out in 2025 is worse than it playing out in 2029.
For one thing, more of us undesirables might be able to actually escape from the US.
For another thing, we might be able to delay it further or prevent it entirely. For one thing, so long as the Republican party is not the entire government, there’s a chance we’ll actually see the justice procedures play out. With every week, more information becomes public about the illegal or immoral dealings that got us here, which becomes moot once the US goes full autocracy. And in the meantime pressure on the GOP is causing it to collapse from within. But again that’s not going to matter once they control everything.
So there are good reasons to postpone the fall of democracy in the US, even when it’s a corrupt, meager handful of democratic features.
Then there’s the matter that while I am high on the purge list, You and everyone else here are also on that list (with some very few friends-of-General-Keitel exceptions) and will eventually be packed on the cattle cars. If you’re lucky the allies will reach Berlin (proverbially in this case) but they’re not going to be in a forgiving mood when they get here.
ALPR databases are anti-privacy and anti-public, and all efforts to sabotage the police state are praiseworthy.
That said, I was sanitizing my data fields in 1985 (partly because we expected users to try to cause interrupts), so its worrysome they don’t do it now.
To be fair, I’m not vigilant about screening my manufacturing feeds in Satisfactory.
All my life I wanted blue ( We’re all sexy here ) but recently my libido has gone through the floor. It’s like I still like I still like cute people but my brain doesn’t know what to do with them, so I pet them like I do my cat.
Anarcho-communist movements do exist and actually work.
They also get continuously assaulted by militias and law enforcement departments financed by plutocratic interests.
Our oligarchs aphave shown they’d sooner scorch the earth than give up their power and become one of the commons. In fact, they are literally doing so.
Our species just may not me into massive cooperative states, until we figure out a sociological trick to get the to favor lifting everyone (including themselves) rather than being satisfied they can kick at lower rungs of the hierarchy.
But we really like dominance hierarchy and are glad to perpetuate it from schoolyard bullying to tribal genocide. Our primal drives to other and kill each other is currently beating out reason. My own hope is skeptical.
This is a long established problem with FPTP voting (FPTP = First Past The Post: One voter = one vote). You don’t really get to vote for your choice candidate, rather you vote against the worst of the two popular candidates by voting for the other guy.
Now there are plenty of election reform solutions, but in the US, both parties are weakened by the people having more choice, so neither party is willing to back amendments to the Constitution of the United States that would install a more public serving voting system.
This also means, according to CIA analysts who have studied nations on the brink and how they can avoid civil war, the US is very likely to see a civil war in its near future (next decade). But then we’re also likely to see elections neutered anyway, so that the Republican party controls all elected positions (and appointed ones after that). And then local genocides can get underway.
So yes, if you’re voting to make a point (other than you want the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to play out or want to delay it for a while) the point won’t be heard. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign national propaganda machine supporters are probably very glad you’re willing to withhold blue votes to make a point. It won’t make that point, but they’re glad for you for trying.
The Democratic Party chose Biden, what was a tactical choice. The DNC uses FPTP for its primary as well (then has a list of 2000 principal party members whose votes are given additional weight. The DNC is a far right coalition party that still is guided by the interests of its monied contributors. But since the 1980s we’ve only been allowed to choose between them and the Christian Nationalist monsters.
Even after Occasio-Cortez won her primary, the DNC and DCCC changed their policy to prevent young upstarts like her from pushing aside establishment Democrat candidates. (Some of those policy changes were reversed due to pressure, but still the Democratic party is not interested in serving the public.)
How do we get a public-serving government? Dunno. Some say supporting our community mutual-aid organizations will help. (It will, actually) but in more contentious states law enforcement are looking for ways to harass and arrest mutual aid organizations, even for doing benign things like feeding the homeless. Civil war will lose the plot quickly, and will end up (typically) in a string of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next until everyone is related to casualties of war and are just plum tired of fighting, and we might get a democratic election out of it if we can fend off all the foreign influencers trying to pressure their puppets into power.
There are a few active anarcho-communist coalitions out there doing their thing, but they are continuously attacked by plutocrat financed militants and mischief-makers looking to make an example of them much like FBI’s assassination campaign on the Black Panthers. We humans may just be too easily tempted by corruption to create a functional public-serving government that doesn’t depend on a labor caste. (But do please keep working on it!)
Taking a wild guess here, I suspect people not voting comes from a number of addressable causes. Here in the States, we are far more enamored with capitalism than Democracy, and the way we regard our civic duties (e.g. trying to get out of jury duty, mostly due to the hardship it would cause by skipping work without pay). We work our labor class so hard they are too exhausted to parent, cook or engage in health activities, much less engage in civics. It doesn’t help that this is exactly how our plutocratic masters want it.
After we address allowing people the time to think about what they want from government, and voting accordingly, then we can start looking into giving the people actual agency in their destinies, toward which election reform is only one front.
But all this is to say the United States doesn’t really try very hard to get the people to engage in civics. Rather, it would really prefer that we lie down and let ourselves be ruled by the wealthy according to their ideals and business interests. That, of course, brings us back to the same problems feudalism has: one Joffrey or Caligula or John of England / Richard II can bring to ruin all that a dozen prior generations have built up. Even Charles III is living up to the traditional standards of monarchy, and the UK has a parliament and a constitution with which to keep his shenanigans in check. (Parliament is up to its own shenanigans to turn the UK hardline fascist, but that’s another discussion.)
In elementary school government and western civilization class, we learn that we vote so that the government does what we want it to. But we quickly learn (sometimes as soon as intermediate or high-school) that our agency in selecting our government is very, very limited, and historian careers have been built on the corruption of government into an oligarchy with trivial democratic features.
Except right now, those trivial democratic features are the last line of defense between the two party state and a one-party autocracy. It’s a state of affairs that shows not only did we take a wrong turn, but we’re on a fast train to somewhere we never should have gone. Curiously, the never-Trump conservatives have been pouring billions into the proverbial railroad that lead us to Trump and the next line of Musolinni-wannabe strongman dictators. They didn’t just buy the ticket, but laid the rails.
A PBS interview of retired analysts who’d spent their life studying regions of civil unrest and the conditions that lead to civil war. It was since the Biden administration began so it shouldn’t be too hard to hunt down.
As for the neutered elections, this had been part of the Republican project REDMAP, but is laid out in the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 as well.
Note that Baltimore never defunded the BPD. In fact it got a funding increase and a marketing boost so that it promises to protect and serve better.
Considering an officer clip-dumped at an unarmed man in November 2023, the BPD seems as robustly killology-ready as ever.
Note that no law enforcement department or agency has been defunded since the George Floyd incident. Not even Minneapolis where the city council voted to do so. (They got cold feet after pressure from the police unions.) Some cities are creating new alternative responder teams to handle mental health situations. Oakland, California, for instance, now has a department of first responders trained to handle and deescalate mental-illness-related crises who are directed by 911 emergency dispatch, but this hasn’t reduced the budget of the police. (Oakland is also one of the municipal areas with an elevated officer-involved homicide rate).
Bad news. Everyone’s a hero, since it’s a communist society where everyone is eager to add their own unique contribution to the common good. Everyone has a Hero! plaque on their wall.
Good news! You’re in a communist society where everyone is eager to add their own unique contribution to the common good!
The movie Soylent Green is based on the Harry Harrison novel, Make Room, Make Room! which is described on Wikipedia:
Set in a future August 1999, the novel explores trends in the proportion of world resources used by the United States and other countries compared to population growth, depicting a world where the global population is seven billion people
This wasn’t exciting enough, so turning Soylent Green into people meat was added to the movie for extra drama. Normally it’s soy and lentils, ergo Soylent
In Bladerunner 2049 bugs are farmed for protein, but we already eat bugs in additives which only offends religious people. And ever since the spice Melange turned out to be fermented worm shit, intentional food processing nightmares have been more subdued.
However, in The Jungle documenting pre-PFDA meat production, rats, rat-poison and the occasional accidental fallen millworker all find their way into the sausage. It’s why you don’t want to know how the sausage is made.
I’m pretty sure as they were fighting wild animals, they were all Y’know, this sucks. Let’s invent things so our children’s children never have to fight wild animals just to live.
Agriculture is the culprit. As hunter-gatherers, there wasn’t enough food to create winter stores, and we had to migrate towards the equator during winter months and back during the hot summer. Then we developed growing enough that we could homestead and stay in place with winter stores (and get cabin fever).
Then raiders figured out they could raid homesteads, and some raiders figured out they could just tax the homesteads in a protection racket, though it meant protecting them from other raiders. And bam! Feudalism!
(Later on we’d realize, with generations and generations, that one Joffrey or John of England or Caligula can bring to ruin the legacy of ten fair and just kings prior to them, and we didn’t really get fair and just all that often. Now we’re still trying to figure out how to prevent aristocrats, plutocrats and autocrats from consolidating power away from the people. It’s a sociological development we don’t have yet.)
Yes, modern primitives work eight hours a week compared to us. On the other hand, it’s not the mountain lions. It’s famine and plague that will kill you (and your family) horribly. The ones killed by a wandering bear are the lucky ones.
Boat rule (slrpnk.net)
Rulethlic Converts (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
protect yourself rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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Girlhood Rule (files.catbox.moe)
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If you’re starting a new game, what class and build are you picking?...
rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
I did not know the origin of the quote (lemmy.world)
Cross-posted from lemmy.world/post/13888155
Imagine beeing in a millionaire hug machine (i.imgur.com)
They say that getting squeezed can release fealings of anxiety. Imagine how good it must feel getting crushed by titanic depth pressure.
Forced Arbitration Rule (imgflip.com)
Artist rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Rule (lemmy.world)
XZ Hack - "If this timeline is correct, it’s not the modus operandi of a hobbyist. [...] It wouldn’t be surprising if it was paid for by a state actor." (lcamtuf.substack.com)
Thought this was a good read exploring some how the “how and why” including several apparent sock puppet accounts that convinced the original dev (Lasse Collin) to hand over the baton.
Map rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Happy Double XP Weekend Rule (files.catbox.moe)
Article...
Party Time Rule (lemmy.world)
Please, for the love of God, VOTE! (pawb.social)
I don’t like Biden either, but anyone with half a brain knows there are two choices in the 2020 election. If we had a sane voting system, voting third party might be worth it, but as it stands, no one but you knows your favorite candidate exists and unless you want to become their campaign manager that will still be true in...
SQL Rule (lemmy.ca)
Pick 3 Rules (files.catbox.moe)
I’ll choose 3, 5, and 7.
be considerate, part ii (lemmy.cafe)
Palestine 🇵🇸...
He who controls the spice controls the rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Alt text:...
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FAQ...
Rule Playing Game (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Not Foreign Shills Rule (sh.itjust.works)
Sowing DEI division after tragedy: =>1 of these posters has to be a paid actor right?
Interstell(rule)
First post! Here’s a stolen meme!...
Feds Ordered Google To Unmask Certain YouTube Users. Critics Say It’s ‘Terrifying.’ (www.forbes.com)
Glassware rule (i.ibb.co)
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