True. It’s a matter of how you spin it. I mourned for WaPo when Bezos bought it, as I saw the writing on the wall. The journalists who stayed may have intended to keep the culture of good journalism alive, but by this perspective were just providing a veneer of respectability to a propaganda outlet, which is a form of compliance.

Either way, let’s hope that they land at one of the new generation of journalism outlets that’s springing up online.

The frustration here is that the common refrain whenever somebody proposes a bike lane anywhere is, “It’s bad for business! Where will their customers park?!”

It’s completely bogus, which a snowstorm makes manifest: Without the snow, we can pretend that these cars belong to the drivers allegedly stopping to patronize local businesses. With the snow, we see the truth that space is here used by three people to store their private property for a week. This example illustrates why experience shows, over and over, people walking and biking are better for business than people in cars. Hundreds, or even thousands, of potential customers who can easily stop in, versus drivers (non-customers) who are so close, but so far away.

In short, it’s not that people did what the city intended, it’s that the city is kneecapping itself.

We do, we’ve very good at it. We’re just not very honest about what we consider to be bad things.

Billionaire elites raping kids? A-okay!

Riding a bicycle on the street? Deserves the death penalty.

Bend the knee to the fascist regime, still get laid off. Awkward!

Leave aside the issue of blame. Other nations have no leverage to change the U.S. government. It’s arguably even beyond our influence, but Americans have the best shot at changing it. All that others can do is to try to tear down the whole empire, and it’s in their existential self-interest to try. If that leaves us Americans caught in the middle, that’s just harsh reality. Denial is human, but if we want to escape it, we have to get organized.

But that is exactly what happened, and it’s what the article is about. “Hunt down” is an idiomatic phrase in English, and it would be not at all unusual for me to, say, hunt down a USB adapter in my office. Leaving that detail out of the headline would be burying the lede.

It’s not normal or proper for the DHS to subpoena information about citizens who express an opinion to government officials. This is transparently an action undertaken to intimidate. The language used in the headline conveys the meaning much more clearly than a “neutral” (read: complicit) phrasing would.

Apparently not. ¯\(ツ)/¯

If you have the privilege to ignore “politics” while people are gravely suffering in real life, is it so hard to just ignore it in your Lemmy feed?

Majel Barrett also appeared in an episode of Babylon 5 as a show of good will because of the intense fueding between the B5 and DS9 fandoms. (IDK, this beef was a thing back then. 🤷‍♂️)

Yes. Very much so. Calling it a “virus” is an analogy to simplify the concept to a sound bite, and an author like Neal Stephenson made a “mind virus” central to the plot of his book, Snow Crash. But strip away the literary liberties, and it’s based on real neuroscience. See, for example, this article from a few years ago.

Quote:

It is well-documented that for example words like “reptiles” and “parasites” were used by the Nazi regime to compare outsiders and minorities to animals. Strongmen throughout history have referred to targeted social groups as “rats” or “pests” or “a plague.” And it’s effective regardless of whether the people who hear this language are predisposed to jump to extreme conclusions. Once someone is tuned into these metaphors, their brain actually changes in ways that make them more likely to believe bigger lies, even conspiracy theories.

I have this pet theory that the fact that some of the first TV broadcasts were Hitler’s speeches is more than just a historical curiosity. Broadcast media (i.e. radio) had come along just a few years before. Right after it provided a way for authoritarian leaders like Hitler to reach great numbers of people with their spoken words., the world saw an explosion of right-wing populism at a scale never seen before. I suspect it’s not just a coincidence. (The Nazis certainly understood the propaganda opportunity.)

It certainly resembled a viral outbreak.

I’m reasonably confident that the reason has a lot to do with social proof. I don’t think it has much to do with UX, or amount of content, because both of those reasons would require people to actually try the fediverse to find out. In my experience, people don’t cite reasons as to why they won’t try a lesser-known platform, they enter a low-key fight-or-flight mode and sort of go blank, shut down, and don’t engage with the idea either way. It’s kind of spooky once you notice it in person.

To speculate, I think perhaps centralized, corporate services have an immediate advantage, because a brand name and a logo inherently provides a certain amount of social proof, since corporate brands and logos are so central to Western culture.

Goddamn, the body language of those cops indicates that they’re terrified of a guy laying face down on the ground. That’s really pathetic.

The common loon flies and swims, but isn’t able to walk.

Would that be a human with ostrich legs, or an ostrich with a human body? Indeed, there are a lot of philosophical questions, but if we’re allowing technological augmentation, then Todd Reichert is indisputably human and managed 144 kph.

Kinesiologists and mechanical engineers are the who. Ostriches have a radically different body plan than humans, one that’s mechanically much more suited to running fast. Add long, lightweight legs which bend the other way and hence have advantageous leverage and a stride length of 3 to 5 meters. (Usain Bolt has a stride length of less than 2.5 meters, and he’s an outlier among humans.) Even if we genetically engineered a hyper-fast-twitch muscle fiber and springy tendons, those would just tear apart our joints when paired with the body mechanics and locomotion style we’re working with.

Bubba is aroused.

No, they told me I could stop.

Come to think of it, the word they used was “should”. They were really quite emphatic about it.

All of it.

If Québec would be open to making poutine with deep-fried cheese curds, it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.