eightpix @ eightpix @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

According to Jake Horton & Nick Beake at BBC from 15 October:

• Israel - Hamas (not over as Israel repeatedly violates ceasefire and Palestinians continue to struggle for basic human needs, fend off settler attacks, and heal from de facto genocide while billionaires' mouths water over waterfront property)

  "Hamas and other factions inside Gaza are rejecting the U.S.-backed U.N. plan to place Gaza under the control of a U.S.-led board and an international stabilization force." (Democracy Now, 20 November)

• Israel - Iran (12 days, ceasefire)

  "There is no agreement on a permanent peace or on how to monitor Iran's nuclear programme going forward," argues Mr O'Hanlon. (BBC)

"So what we have is more of a de facto ceasefire than an end to war, but I'd give him some credit, as the weakening of Iran by Israel - with US help - has been strategically significant." (BBC)

• India - Pakistan (4 days, ceasefire, not him)

  "The talks regarding cessation of military action were held directly between India and Pakistan under the existing channels established between both militaries," Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said. (BBC)

• Rwanda - DR Congo (1994 to present, not over)

  "There's still fighting between Congo and Rwanda - so that ceasefire has never really held," says Margaret MacMillan (BBC)

• Thailand - Cambodia (less than a week, ceasefire)

  On 7 August, Thailand and Cambodia reached an agreement aimed at reducing tensions along their shared border. (BBC)

• Armenia - Azerbaijan (nearly 40 years, actually them)

  "The leaders of both countries said Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in securing a peace deal, announced at the White House on 8 August." (BBC)

• Egypt - Ethiopia (what war?)

  There was no "war" here for the president to end, but there have long been tensions over a dam on the River Nile... No formal deal has been reached between Egypt and Ethiopia to resolve their differences. (BBC)

• Serbia - Kosovo (again, what?)

  "Serbia and Kosovo haven't been fighting or firing at each other, so it's not a war to end," Prof MacMillan told us. (BBC)

I've always blamed marketing.

For those who don't know: Over the last 80 years, public relations, marketing, and ad agencies have spent trillions of dollars using Freudian psychology to engineer humans to believe three things:

• youth is desirable — aging is death
• sex is satisfaction — denial is death
• success satisfies desires — failure is death

This is why youthful, feminine humans are used to sell products. They appeal to women who are conditioned into supportive roles and appearing desirable and men who are conditioned into seeking satisfaction and conquest of the desirable. A youthful, sexualized image yields success. Sex sells.

The person you can thank for this is named Edward Bernays. He is the father of public relations as an industry and wrote the book "Propaganda" in — get this — 1928.

Reengineering us to believe that a mid-40s single, black, mother of three who works two jobs and volunteers in the community on Sunday into the most desirable human image and we would have an entirely different world.

This world is based on the Paris Hilton sex tape.

Sounds like Beirut all over again.

I was in a Canadian school zone today and thought that the posted speed, 40 km/h, should simply be referred to as "fast." It's 1.6× the speed of a four-munute mile and 10× walking speed. It's fast.

Stroads would be fast-and-a-half.

Intercity highways, ie. "back roads," would be double-fast.

Expressways, 2.5 fast. Triple-fast and beyond is certainly too fast.

The point is: anything that is fast is doable on a bike. Faster than that should be on rails or have a professional, full-time operator — not anyone who can pass an eye exam, and hold a No.2 pencil or click a mouse 40 times.

Fast is fast enough. If you need to go fast, go alone. If you need to go far, or faster than fast, go together.

For anyone who hasn't listened to ALL of the lyrics from that song, go. Do it.

Off the top of my head:

• Pan's Labyrinth (CGI augments excellent practical effects)
• Ghostbusters (1984)
• The Cell (CGI augments excellent set and costume design).
• The Abyss (1989)
• Interstellar (had to check if this was CGI).

With research: Speed and The Edge of Tomorrow are fun. Also, I am annoyed at myself that I forgot Aronofsky's the Fountain — a beautiful, painful film.

Practical scenes with mentioning:

• That one scene in Chinatown, "they lose their noses!"
• That one scene in Boogie Nights, "I'm a big bright shining star."
• That last arrow in Throne of Blood

Two out of these three are movies I keep coming back to.

Welp, guess I can't avoid the Thing for much longer. Unless, of course, I can.

I'm not much for horror. But, it's also sci-fi. I'm torn.

On a scale of 0 to Event Horizon and Alien (1979), I assume the Thing is beyond even these.

Makes you wonder whether the calculations serve anyone other than the top 0.1%.

Their portfolios bring up the average for the US because some swinging dicks decided that a (temporarily) decisive strategic advantage in faster calculators makes the graph look "good."

Meanwhile, people are hungry, getting furloughed, evicted, bombed, arrested, bound, gagged, and shot in America. Democratic institutions, the fundamental raison d'être for the American experiment, are undermined, bulldozed, disregarded, or blown up.

That's fine, they say. That's who and what they VOTED for. That's the mandate, they say.

Horseshit, I say.

Psilocybin sparkle.

Now I'm confused. I thought it was 50% grey. Wikipedia has a lot more middle greys.

Know what works better than boycotts? A general strike. Stop the economy in its tracks. Have a clear, articulated goal. No leadership. No one to arrest. No one to identify as a troublemaker.

The trouble, when systemic, is the system. A boycott is meant to strike at an individual or group of allied organization(s). A general strike is the last level.

Governments tend to be allergic to general strikes. Their reactions are heavy-handed, thoughtless, and reactionary. Howard Zinn recounts several in A People's History of the United States. But, when primed and done well, it is a demonstration of political will unlike any other. It is a change agent.

I was in Guatemala in 2015 for the one-day general strike that led to the arrest of then-President Otto Perez Molina. His party had been funnelling tax revenues into a slush fund. Look up #noletoca and #LaLinea. He was removed from the presidency, tried, convicted, and served time.

Another easy answer would be Six Feet Under. This show has the most beautiful finale.

The most expensive thing ever built and maintained is the International Space Station. At $160B over its lifetime, the ISS is a model for the excessively wealthy.

True, it is not primed for self-sustaining flight, and the quarters are very cramped, but a space-faring über-rich individual has to have a Plan B in case they're not on the same continent as one of their "end of days" bunkers. Those start at $1 million and can run upwards of $300 million.

About the same time as the first private space station comes into service, we will also find that the rocket and tandem-independent space shuttle will also be feasible. Necessity is the mother of invention.

I might add, start good trouble. This follows from 5. above.

Hold your state and federal representatives' feet to the fire. Protest injustice. Demand transparency and equity. Understand how your local community works. If it doesn't work, build on that.

Always excellent, The Evolution of Trust, and interactive exercise in Game Theory.

Welcome to the Internet. Hopefully, I read as a good person. I am not a bot.

I lived as a young adult through Bush II. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Halliburton, Blackwater, and loads of corruption. It was tough to trust anything then. The goal was pure profit.

Apparently, Dubya was the warm-up presidency for this shit.

First, let me share a clip from Margin Call, 2011.

As long as the prevailing mode has been capital, there has been speculation. As long as there has been speculation, there have been lying liars who exploit the system.

The last few pump and dump bubbles he mentioned (1987, 1992, 1997, 2000, and 2008) are all market crashes I can remember. The market is a casino. Crashes since '08 include 2010 (Flash Crash), 2015 (sell-off), 2018 (cryptocrash), 2020 (Covid), 2022 (Ukraine War), and 2025 (tariffs).

These were once "once in a lifetime" events.

Second, everything in the world is designed to generate more:

• self-serving, self-centered, selfish
• short-term-focused
• extroverted, charismatic, vain
• action-oriented
• thoughtless

psychopaths and sociopaths. This ethos runs things because of profit motives, monopolies on the exercise of violence, and the development of contemporary morés rooted in exploitation, expropriation, and (deemed) externalities of colonialism. Identifying some humans as "the other" makes much more inhumanity possible.

So, I'm here to tell you, it's real alright. What you're feeling is real. What you're feeling against is real. We are immersed in it. Algorithms are doing their best to lock it in.

Finally, what to do and who to trust.

Establish your own moral center. Decide what matters to you. Find those who are telling the most truth, especially when tested. Demogogues fall apart under examination. Lies fall apart when questioned. The unchallenged authority is no authority at all. Get the receipts; find primary sources as often as possible. Seek those who share at great personal cost.

For me, it started with Star Trek. Then, hip-hop. Then, journalists I could trust. Even films that challenge prevailing narratives. I read a lot of books from many perspectives.

20 years later, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Henry A. Giroux, Amy Goodman, Arundhati Roy, and Noam Chomsky have never wavered. Films like The Insider, Erin Brockovich, and The Corporation light a fire in me. I'm rewatched David Simon and Barry Levinson's Homicide: Life on the Street and, hilariously, Murphy Brown.

Challenge the prevailing narratives. You're not alone.

The right half of the frame is doingmy head in. The mélange of people is very well realized.

Julian Assange has something to say about this.

Edward Snowden has something to say about this.

Reality Winner has something to say about this.

Chelsea Manning has something to say about this.

Woodward and Bernstein had something to say about this.

Joseph Gedeon at the Guardian reports that Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC for stating:

“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions, ... You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”

Richard Luscombe at the Guardian reports:

Among those to have been fired, suspended or censured in recent days for their opinions include teachers, firefighters, journalists, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team.

Whoa, no way. THAT'S why he's the Count? I thought it was a royalty/ bloodline thing.

In general, vampires existed to me as a commentary on colonialism, class, and the advantages to longevity. Vampires as "blood suckers of the poor", to quote Popa Wu, who was quoting Louis Farrakhan.

I didn't know the 'stop and count objects' element.

Question, though, as I think this through: would that not extend as an antisemitic trope?

(A half hour of reading later.)

TIL there is an antisemitic history to vampires.

"As rendered by Bram Stoker, the literary depiction of Count Dracula is deeply antisemitic, with roots in the long-standing blood libel against Jews and the antisemitic archetype of the wealth-hoarding degenerate." [2]

"Today, the vampire remains one of cinema’s most popular horror villains, and the connections to prejudice are largely forgotten, or erased. They still lurk around the edges of the genre though, as generations of creators have either furtively invited them in or tried to put a stake through their heart." [1]

"The symbolic link between Jews and blood through a history of blood libel and the depiction of Jews as alien and parasitic are seen the main themes that allowed the merging of the two image." [3]

[1] Bloodsuckers: Vampires, Antisemitism And Nosferatu At 100

[2] The Antisemitic History of Vampires

[3] How Vampires Became Jewish

[4] Blood Libel: The Anti-Semitic Roots of Vampirism