Stage 2:
Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?
I think this aspect of far right recruitment is the same everywhere: Wealth disparity and a strong, negative news cycle drive people to anything that claims to be against the established order.
And despite all of this being a direct result of 40 years of ring wing policies (Reagan, Thatcher, privatization, deregulation, etc.), they successfully pinned it on liberals the the left at large and declared those to be the establishment.
It is all too easy for someone wanting to rebel against the existing system to fall into the hands of this far right “counter-culture.”
I liked that about the comic.
Our society has adopted this expectation that once a relationship has turned into love, it must remain that, and if its not eternal soul mates in total devotion, it’s not true love. You’re not allowed to dial it down, take a break from it or return to being friends, or it’s a “failed” relationship.
The message of the comic subverts this, showing that without such baggage, you could just change the relationship to something else and still be happy.
Instead, we assume from the beginning that the relationship is forever, throw our households together, and when the point would be right to return to normal friendship, we force ourselves to stick close until we can’t stand each other anymore.
I’m the weird one in the room. I’ve been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in “best” mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.
zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst
I liked agile as it was practiced in the “Extreme Programming” days.
Rather than attempt to design the perfect system from the get-go, you accept that software architecture is a living, moving target that needs to evolve as your understanding of the problem evolves.
Rather than stare down a mountain of ill-defined work, you have neat little user stories that can be completed in a few days at most and you just move around some Kanban cards instead of feeding a soul-sucking bureaucratic ticketing, time tracking and monitoring system.
Rather than sweat and enter crunch mode for deadlines, the project owners see how many user stories (or story points or perfect hours) the team completes per week and can use a velocity graph / burndown chart to estimate when all work will be completed.
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But it’s just a corporate buzzword now. “We’re agile” often enough means “we have no plan, take no responsibility and expect the team to wing it somehow” or “we cargo cult a few agile ideas that feel good to management, like endless meetings with infinite course changes where everyone gives feel-good responses to the managers.”
Having a goal, a specification, a release plan, a vision and someone who is responsible and approachable (the “project owner”) are all part of the agile manifesto, not something it tries to do away with. I would be sad if agile faces the same fate as the waterfall model back in its time and even sadder if we return to the time-tracking-ticket-system-with-Gantt-chart hell as the default.
Maybe we need a new term or an “agility index” to separate the cases of “incompetent manager uses buzzword to cover up messy planning” from the cases of “project owner with a clearly defined goal creates a low-bureaucracy work environment for his team.” :)
Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go
Without trying to be combative, but that sounds like one of those tidbits which one side believes about the other, circulated only to divide. At least I don’t have the impression that it is a view with any footing amongst liberal-minded people.
Most liberals want to move further left, ideas like free college and public education, public transport, less corporate power and splitting up large corporations, even unconditional basic income, etc. are popular with the majority. Just violent revolution and authoritarianism won’t roll, after all, liberal means “live and let live.”
As a mixed-ideology lefty (maybe I fit within your definition of liberal), I’m not worried about tankies being too far left, not at all, rather, I am tempted to think of them as confused right wingers believing themselves to be “the left.”
Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.
Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.
I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.
That what I read out of it, too.
Disillusion with our future is setting in (and to what part it’s due to the negative news cycle, the growing gap between rich and poor, social media propaganda or other things can be argued).
But there was, and is, no large, left movement with an attractive message to pick up those people, and right wingers both own all the big media and have long been conditioned to blame liberals and the left at large for all of their problems.
During the Occupy Wallstreet days, I had hope, but what once was a movement of angry people with a good cause feels like it has since been replaced by a movement of even angrier people fighting those that want to fix things.
Man, I remember when the “Tea Party” (what became the Freedom Caucus, then MAGA) was laughed out of the room by the vast majority of people, and Sarah Palin, who, it is rumored, can still see Russia from her house in Alaska, was not idolized but ridiculed to the point where movies like “Iron Sky” spoofed her with clueless villain characters. Good times.
I assume this is about the physical connections.
It could be for monitoring (even with unbroken encryption, the routing information and time/server correlation can shed light on social media influence campaigns or where VPN beachheads are located). This information could probably be gathered with ISP cooperation, too, but private business and Russian money can be a problematic mix.
It could also be preparations to isolate Russia from the internet when/if their war expands into Europe. Russia has done the reverse already in 2019, BBC: Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet, probably either to stop Russian people from getting news outside of government-controlled media if the tide turns against Putin or to fend off the possibility of Western countries turning the tables and running disinformation campaigns inside Russia.
Incomplete map of internet crossover points to Russia (sorry, couldn’t find a better one, it had low resolution and I upscaled it):
Um, no? You can vote and push for change at the same time.
Imagine half of the people in the room wants shrimp pizza, which you happen to detest. Yet you’re exclusively dunking on and shouting at the mushroom group to keep it shut and stop suggesting mushrooms. Well?
You could do both. Keep the fascists out and actively pressure the Democratic Party to move left. These memes don’t do that though.
So, like,
I believe the idea is:
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But increasingly, I see step 2 fail and people simply hate the guy more for his destructive megalomania, as they should.
Typical past ceasefires or truces with Russia:
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Fool me once…
I wonder what their idea of the outcome is.
Tankie: “I convinced 20 Democratic Party voters to stay at home (and did the same for 0 Republican Party voters). Wait until Democratic politicians see that more voters favored the far right party. Then they’re going to move left and fall on their knees and beg me to forgive them.”
(Cue scene: swastika-adorned tanks rolling past the window)
“Stupid liberals, unwilling to fight the fascists like us true leftists.” (Watches tanks and twiddles thumbs.) (Fetches keyboard.) “Let’s tell everyone online that it’s their own fault and they deserve this.” (Sudden sound of harsh knocking on front door.)
At best, their actions will “only” cause another grid-locked presidency where progressives can’t get their reforms to pass (which will then be used as the reason to abandon the likely last line of non-violent defense against fascists).
If you’re wondering about the downvotes:
I think @pacrist quoted tankie statements there to show how they’re aiding fascists (should have prefixed it with “things tankies say” or so).
A subgroup of people on the left who believe in communism and mostly hold pro-Russia and pro-China views, while often having a “doomer” mentality in regard to the US.
Unfortunately, that has them made very susceptible to Russian propaganda, to the point where they’re now doing the bidding of Russia and helping fascists rise to power.
The mechanisms are similar to MAGA. They’ve disconnected from classical media and their echo chambers censor posts that highlight positive developments in the US or posts critical of Russia/China. Once inside, their world view collides with the outside and it’s hard to get out again. Similarly to Russians and Republicans, they vilify liberals (“liberals are complicit in xy”, “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”, “Marx warned liberalism inevitably leads to fascism”, etc.).
On here, they’re largely the people dissuading US Democratic Party voters from turning out, via “both sides bad” and recently via claim-to-purity (I’m sure you’ve encountered one of those “genocide joe” posts, which are kinda awkward, since tankies commonly support/deny China’s genocide on the Uyghurs and Russia’s genocide on Ukrainians).
Theistic Satanists
These would be the (mostly imaginary) ones that conservative Christians are fearmongering about. They’d believe the actual devil exists and that by serving him, they could gain something.
Atheistic Satanists
The kind that is pulling this stunt to fight for religious freedom. Specifically, The Satanic Temple. Their “commandments” are secular compassion, empathy and justice.
Amusingly, the biblical Satan seemed to value many of those things. Freedom (“non serviam” / “I will not serve”), Reason (apple from tree of knowledge in paradise), and perhaps Self Reliance and Equality (in some variants of the creation myth, Adam has a divorced first wive named Lilith who gave him the middle finger when he pulled that alpha male malarkey)
They always release their “Creation Kit” which is apparently also what the Bethesda employees use to build the quests and NPCs in their games:
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The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven’t done any modding since the Skyrim days).