FriendOfDeSoto

joined 2 years ago

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram's encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I'll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn't mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I'm sure there was harder rock in existence. My point wasn't they were objectively the hardest. It was that our perception of music changes over time.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 30 points 1 month ago (7 children)

You grew up in a world where Rock'n'Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn't before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock'n'Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It's only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It's not just the quality of the music; it's the culture and the change within it that came with it. It's a big package.

I remember listening to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That's the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.

There is enough crime happening on either side of this 15-year divide to care about.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 37 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Zufallsbegegnung, chance encounter, is as close as we can get to it, I think. Germans don't dress to impress. Look at us. I mean, look at us. Norm core to the max. If you are caught wearing the same shirt twice on different days, people tend to think you are merely handling limited resources responsibly.

I'm gonna go out in this limb: without more detail you won't get any good answers.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 29 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It's not just the SS, the Wehrmacht also "suffered" from having to shoot all these people. Read up on Babij Jar, Ukraine. Even Himmler is on record expressing sympathy for his killers. That's why the bullet based plan turns into a gas based one. Because it's "easier" to flip a switch on a room full of people than to shoot naked people to fall on other corpses already in the ditch.

I think what's standing between us today and the bottom of the genocidal slippery slope is the (relatively) free media. There are too many ways to check up on them today. Commercial satellites, FOIA requests, people with smartphones. If ICE were building a death camp or digging mass graves now, we probably would find out.

So it's important to look at how CBS gave in and how the pentagon restricts coverage in exchange for accreditation - those are your first dead canaries in the news coalmine. When commercial satellites are suddenly forced to blur or not cover ICE camps ...

I would be surprised if they hadn't killed more people in detention already. The aim of ICE is to be state terror, their people are of questionable character, poorly trained or vetted. A duty of care is probably not first and foremost on their mind. There probably is a way to brush some cases under the carpet. Deaths by "natural causes," "misplaced" death certificates, "corpses" on repatriation flights. The spotlight of public attention needs to be on these motherfuckers constantly.

Let's hope then that I'm right and even out of towners of the armed forces will not want to shoot.

Regicide is a Latin lego word created at a time when people had long stopped speaking proper Latin. It combines "of the king" with "killer." It followed an established pattern like fratricide, killer of the brother. Note that we slightly perverted the Latin grammar over time by using these words to speak of the killing rather than the killer.

My Latin is shit. I'm not aware of a snappy expression that encompasses "Head of state or government" so we can add -cide to the end like all political scandals since Watergate get -gate at the end.

You are more supporting my gut feeling here by invoking Kent State. A handful of people died there; hundreds+ died in Beijing.

A situation like Kent State is very possible but they will have learned the lesson and it won't be NG or other armed forces opening fire. It'll be the obese SA or a right-wing militia that opens fire from a sniper's nest.

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Neighbors, countrymen - choose your own metaphor.

I'm no expert on the people's army. I don't think they had any way to refuse an illegal order. The US armed forces do have this. I think there are enough people in the US military that would refuse to shoot on protestors. Supposed drug smugglers are the out group and scruples are sadly low enough not to refuse that illegal order. Sending in the tanks in Minneapolis or Boston to shoot on their in group would be crossing the line. Not a good, sterdy, moral line but a line nonetheless.

view more: ‹ prev next ›