The Quuuuuill

this is also what living in a terrorist state is like. and there’s a ton of terrorism that the powers that be simply allow, and that isn’t reported on as terrorism. they don’t strip our rights away to prevent terrorism, which is how they always frame it. they strip our rights away to make sure the condoned terrorism has the desired effect. how many mass shootings, vehicles driving into crowds, and unplanned televised acts of violence have there been since the patriot act was passed? bear in mind, it’s going to be hard to find numbers because these things have become so commonplace that our news magazines of record have given up on covering all of them in large part because they’ve lost novelty and they don’t get the attention from the audience they once did.

but this normalization of terror is part of fascism. it’s why the buzz bombs feature so prominently in 1984. we the people are easier to manipulate if we are kept in permanent fear. that’s what all these mass shootings, vehicles driving into crowds, and unplanned television violence does for the ruling class. things like the patriot act let them sell their state sponsored terror to the unaware by promising to remedy their constant fear. meanwhile, marginalized people like George Floyd, Freddy Gray, Brionna Taylor aren’t made any more safe. in fact they, and everyone else, are made less safe.

let me ask this. did anyone else find it odd that after donald trump’s first failed assassination the media decried political violence? because we’ve been living in political violence. we’ve been here for years. the fbi spied on us. reagan said on record he hoped kids would get bochalism from black panther school lunches. rodney king was beaten over basically nothing. donald trump himself fomented a violent mod in 2021. they don’t want to prevent political violence. they want to protect their overlords. if collapse into technofuedalism we must, then they want to be in position to have an estate and some serfs

i say all this as a warning. “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is a sick joke, and it’s one that consistently works on people the hegemony works for. they don’t understand what it feels like to live in terror because the system works for them. but fascists will always narrow their in groups tighter and tighter, and lump more and more people into the out groups until eventually there’s an in group of one and everyone else has both reason to fear, and reasons to hide things.

so while you’re right this is the patriot act on steroids, it’s also the logical outcome of the patriot act. mass surveillance will never benefit you, and will always leave you vulnerable. even seemingly innocuous surveillance like all those ring doorbells and advertising metrics make you less safe

everything that happens in Ukraine happens everywhere else 5-15 years later. i don’t know who our comedian president to clean up after our russian puppet president is yet, but my front runners are Bill Burr, Jon Stewart, and Josh Johnson

nelson mandela said “it always feels impossible until it is done” or something to that effect

which is so fucking sad. the last good president this country had was imo jimry carter. before that, probably fdr, and before that grant

i swear to god they used to work better. modern ones either send your cursor flying off the screen with a gentle nudge, or they barely move at all. it used to be people would hold onto the nipple nubs for extended times because they preferred the precision of them over touchpads. as touchpads have gotten better, nipple nubs have gotten worse. i’d probably point to 2015 when things all went wrong. i don’t know if the manufatcurers switched to a new sensor because it was cheaper or if the software / firmware / drivers that make touchpads good also make nipple nubs horrible

i know that’s what the core of the party is up to, but what the fuck is the deal with the base? how are 75m people like “it’s SUPER important to me that disney be more conservative”

out here going after the fucking most conservative media company outside of fox for not being conservative enough. god, they’re just so fucking petty

democrats working with republicans led us to weimar joe and the appeasement era

hey great news. i’m one of those jews they hate. yeah. that’s exactly what’s going on. their antisemitic fear of globalism blinds them to the real conspiracy to collect all power into a centralized cabal

the right has no room in it to consider the possibility that the hippies, punks, black panthers, or any other anti-authoritarian movement, has a point until it’s already too late.

the deep irony is that the people electing the globalists are frothed up to do so by the fear of globalism.

a deal with trump has just as many guarantees as a deal with putin: none

a mix of liars, too dumb to understand what’s going on, and bootlickers who will do anything their daddy dom tells them to do

only if we make it a problem

not even unprecedented in american politics. it’s a tried and tested way to commit a genocide as a populist dictator

that’s what i’m saying. those of us who are pushing back against fascism are currently trying to get our coalitions bigger, and i need anyone on lemmy not outside getting on that timing. the bigger and stronger our coalition the safer it is for our activists to act

our big problem is too many people hooked into propaganda machines like they’re in the matrix. too many people on bluesky, twitter, facebook, lemmy, and at their local mcdonalds watching mass media news, all without connecting to anyone else who can help them muster resistance or help them direct their feelings.

the revolution will not be televised. people need to go outside and start talking to their neighbors to dislodge them of the notion that this is politics as usual

during the first big migration to lemmy a lot of folks were splitting between discord and here, and a really common refrain was “anything but old school forums” and i absolutely did not and do not get this attitude. old school forums were great! the discussions were always super relevant because everyone was there to discuss whatever specific thing everyone had signed up for, and the people posting were always super reliable, knowledge wise, because, again, it was a dedicated place for discussing something specific, and the frequently asked questions would always end up in a really good wiki. sometimes i wonder if people had bad experiences on those forums because they’re much more focused. like on reddit everyone would complain about the arch forums on r/arch, but none of what they said matched the actual tone of the arch forums. it made me think they posted short one liner questions as thread starters instead of giving a full breakdown of the error they were seeing, what they did to troubleshoot the problem, and what errors had come about during that process.

overall, i think we’ve had a shift in the architecture of the internet thanks to general purpose discussion sites like twitter and reddit. before, the internet was cathedrals filled with texts related to their specific topic. everything on a sportster related forum was going to be about the maintenance and modification of sportsters. maybe there was a subsection where people could talk about their other motorcycles, but that was more of a social lounge than anything, like the equivalent of the fellowship hall in my cathedral analogy.

after reddit and twitter took over those scenes, the internet became a mall. unfocused, impersonal, and only meant to pipeline you into purchasing products. none of the people up front are very knowledgeable because you don’t need to be knowledgeable to make sales, you need to be attention getting. especially when what’s for sale is disposable

the role of the lightning changed with the introduction of the P-51 since the mustang was such a high performance long range bird that it remained relevant even as a jet far longer than any other converted prop to jet design. early in the war the lightning was almost exclusively used as an interceptor given its high top speeds but lower maneuverability. however, it also changed the way interceptor strategy was conceived forever. for example, the other famous interceptor of the war, the spitfire, was a pure dogfighter. it had a high top speed, good climbing performance, low wing loading for maneuverability, and no range. meanwhile the lighting was good for strafing enemy fighters before they ever had a chance to engage by just being insanely fast compared to the birds it was up against.

again though, it has everything to do with that fighters in WW2 were becoming obsolete at an astounding rate as manufacturing became more advanced as the war progressed. a plane introduced in one role at the start of its service might be relegated into another role within a year or two because operational realities shifted so much. i think there’s no greater example of this than the Mitsubishi Zero. it started the war as an air supremacy fighter and ended its service as a guided bomb whose control module was a human being.

anyway. i’m rambling. by far the most interesting designs to me were the ones with long service lives. the p-38 and the p-51 are particularly interesting in that they both demonstrate that the united states was heavily focused on operational supremacy with their hardware designs. both were designed to operate at long ranges unsupported without sacrificing combat performance

that’s the point. everything is going according to plan. it seems the only thing they hadn’t planned for was the populace actually doing anything about it. every time they complain about graffiti, refuse to hold town halls, or arrest protestors they tell us something: these things are undermining them.

keep the pressure on, people. we’re in a marathon here