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Chibi is boss. Bring her her coffee. Bring her her squeaky ball. Type up her homework. Bossy. Bossy. Boss dog.

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Let’s disappear people to foreign prisons based on allegations they committed crimes isn’t a slippery slope, you’ve already rolled all the way down the mountain.

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They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

nicole boosted

When tech dudes say ‘we’re disruptive’ what they really mean is ‘we found a way to extract rent from a thing that worked fine before we got here.’

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Hi, I'm the guy who used to oversee the federal government's agency IT telecommunications contracts. This is extremely bad. There is absolutely no need for this. Not only is it a huge security exposure, but the simplest explanation for this is that it is meant to be a security exposure.

Elon Musk’s Starlink Expands A...

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I would say that at some point, the normie left is going to have to accept that The System™ isn’t going to help.

Waiting for The System™ to fix everything is how you get decades of dictatorship and “competitive authoritarianism”.

When The System™ is corrupted, you must work outside The System™. That’s just basic Systems 101.

When your blender stops working, you don’t just keep pressing buttons on it. You take it apart.

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nicole boosted

The sharper the hierarchies of capitalism become, the larger the divides, the more clear it is that the capitalists are profoundly unfit to lead.

Sure, Musk is on everyone's brain, and obviously he's a total moron. But also look at folks like Bill Gates who tried to revolutionize education and was literally so arrogant and stupid he destroyed education for a whole generation around the world. Peter Thiel is a man who literally struggles to understand Lord of the Rings and has been mesmerized by the least interesting dork on most forums. These are all incredibly destructive, useless people. Why?

Capitalists are self-selected to be the kind of people who lack the moral competence to not rob other people, lack the work ethic to explore anything productive, lack the self-reflection to question whether they really know more than others, and lack the intellect to ever recognize any of this. A person who was moral, clever, insightful, trustworthy, and intelligent would by definition struggle to do what one needs to do in order to achieve the great heights of the robber barons.

nicole boosted

I know this firsthand. When I was a child, my entire community was branded as spies and saboteurs, justifying our internment inside barbed wire camps for years without due process, trial or charge.

nicole boosted

I went on a date on Saturday. First one in 20 years.

Milestones!

At one point, just as I was excusing myself to go the ladies room, my date asked me if I watched Star Trek.

I leaned in and whispered, “hun, I’m literally wearing a Bajoran earring right now.”

Points for everyone!

One of the most-challenging aspects about trying to operate a software company that’s premised on public good is that public good, alone, doesn’t resolve into a viable business plan.

Heritage Auctions has a lot of anime art up for sale, including this amazing layout cel from my fave, Gunbuster!

comics.ha.com/itm/animation-ar

Unfortunately, … I already bought … this cel … at auction … years ago?

I’m starting to think the whole cel economy is fake. 🥹

nicole boosted

Not bad for a girl who grew up with the NES. Party time! 💃

nicole boosted

Using Mastodon
and the Fediverse is an act of rebellion in itself.

By being here,
you are contributing to grow an alternative system that is led by the people and for the people, not for profits.

By being here,
you are encouraging a solution to a deteriorating social climate that thrives on outrage and the monetization of hate.

By being here,
you are participating to the development of a new system that can slowly build a better world.

Thank you for being here 💚

#Mastodon #Fediverse

Can we restore the 1990’s save point and try out some other options? I’m really not sure we’re on course for the best ending.

At seven, she’s officially a senior citizen. 🙀

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myna.social

Basic models of flocking behavior are controlled by three simple rules: 1) separation: avoid crowding neighbours (short range repulsion); 2) alignment: steer towards average heading of neighbors; 3) cohesion: steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction). With these three simple rules, the flock moves in an extremely realistic way.