The Quuuuuill @ Quill7513 @slrpnk.net

Alt account of @Cube6392@beehaw.org for looking at stuff Beehaw defederated

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2 yr. ago

the frustrating thing is this is well known if you know who to listen to. abolitionists, union organizers, civil rights activists, hippies, punks, hip-hop artists, academics. they all been saying it

they are losing their minds. granted not enough energy is being put toward doing anything. but that's what libs do. they hand wring and ask politely because that's what you do in a framework of rules and norms. we need to convert some libs to that their strategy doesn't work into actual resistance

big box store managers don't know that the full saying is "the customer is always right in matters of taste"

they legitimately think that "the customer is always right" is the full extent of making good business decisions. the average manager at one of these chains (and i'm switching terms here, because what i'm about to say applies to applebee's, target, payless shoes, any chain at all, really) is a member of the karen class. they are entitled. they are dumb. they are petty. they are mean.

and these are the red hats in your community. the people who have inserted themselves into positions of power by being presentable enough for the people really running the business, the owner class, to think they can put someone that cruel in charge of their location and run a little fascist dictatorship for cheap. and none of this is new. this is the same Big Whites, Small Whites, and Workers setup that was present in early colonial north america. because that's the system the owner class inherited their wealth from. they know it works for them because it's been working for them. meanwhile the small whites are a mixture of thinking someday they'll be the big whites if they resent and oppress the workers enough and people who know they have no upward mobility in the system but still perform the role of violent oppressor because they don't want to risk sliding down the ladder into violently oppressed.

the plantation system in america has never really changed, fundamentally. it has just changed shapes. walmart, target, dollar general, none are so different from the mining companies' company stores when you get down to it. klarna and afterpay are the new company scrip. i'm sure these things go back further into the plantation system, but my ancestors came here after the civil war. the coal wars was when they figured out how fucked america is. i've just pieced some of the puzzle back together with how the big whites, small whites, and workers relate to eachother. if you want to know more you'll probably have to go outside and ask a black person how food was distributed in the plantation system. the only thing i do know for sure is that the modern thing, where white poverty and black poverty are different because black people are kept away from prepared foods, and white people are kept not affording the time to make meals and learning to cook is SUPER old. that's been happening the entire time. whiteness has always been culturally dependent on someone else to make the food.

for decades the value proposition of target was "walmart for people who don't want to deal with walmart"

then target got it in their heads they could leave their prices where they were and engage in the exact same evil as walmart. obviously we all didn't play along.

because that being the reason for the existence of the electoral college is a propaganda myth. the real reason is that virginia wanted to play king maker and was the early united states' california. the reason virginia wanted to play kingmaker is that their economic power was built through slavery. the thing where the electoral college skews elections by giving more electoral power to states with more wide open land? yeah. that's not an accident. that was just the system that was most favorable to slave holding southerners. alexander hamilton just pitched to northerners that "well this is fine actually, see, we can use this system to prevent someone truly incompetent from taking office" and people ever since have misinterpretted that as being the point. it would be nice if we could propagandize it into the truth, but the last chance to do that has come and past, and it's time to confront that the electoral college was never going to save us because it was never meant to save us.

i think people don't get that that the union army wasn't uncomplicated good guys. the emancipation proclamation wasn't declared for moral reasons but for strategic ones. the goal of the union wasn't to free the slaves but to preserve the union.

they're in Tel Aviv

LOWER!

what a putz

yup. that's very similar to my stance

that being the case, why was he appointed from the start, and given that this is the type of person 47 wants when there's no oversight, why did the dems vote to confirm any of his cabinet picks.

art of the steal

depends on the year this originated

secdef dipshit

how is that evidence against discrimination? wtf? not directed at you, obviously, but seriously, wtf

nazis are professional losers. they make their power by losing and then claiming the system is rigged against them in order to garner sympathy

Phones used to be small enough to fit in your pocket, had features that made them useful, and came in a variety of form factors (remember sliding keyboards!?). This is not the future we were promised or the future that we wanted. Today every phone is a rectangular slab that most people can't reach from the bottom all the way to the top with their thumbs. They are made flimsy so that you must buy a case to entomb your phone in if you want it to last. They have weird bulbous protrusions like google's camera bar and apple's lenses so that you even have to look for a case that makes the device ergonomic to have in your hand. They come with spyware you didn't want, and battery draining features. It used to be a single charge could get your phone through a day and a half. Now they promise us batteries that will last 3+ days and deliver experiences that the battery is drained after 12 hours.

Smartphones are not for us. They are tools of the oppressor class. Kurt Vonnegut was terrified at the prospect of television as a mechanism for addictive control of the populace, but never could he have imagined the terrifying reality of the smartphone. William Gibson did though. He didn't think it would be a compact rectangle that fits in our pocket, but he did think we would all become addicted to a massively online network of computers that we were never truly separated from even as we navigated the physical world. The problem is too many people read the Sprawl trilogy and thought they would be the super cool hackers that have lots of sex, failing to recognize that the main characters of those books are brutally depressed broken people who are addicted to sex, drugs, and the internet.

And I'm one to talk. I have my phone sitting here next to me. It was made by a big tech company using slave labor. It's ensconced in a rubbery pink case to keep it from getting brutalized by the realities of my clumsiness. I have apps installed on it. I check it throughout the day. But I would get rid of it instantly if my work would provide me with a hardware MFA device. They will not because "it costs too much money." It would cost them $60 to furnish me with one. "But that doesn't scale to all of our employees and contractors." We all get paid 6 figures and receive various benefits through the company. That when faced with a choice between furnishing us with MFA devices or requiring we own smartphones, they choose the latter. They even give us a $150 stipend to make sure we have a smartphone. They are spending more to make sure we have smartphones that it would cost to have MFA devices that they claim are too expensive.

Why? The only reason I can fathomably come up with is that a smartphone also keeps us shackled to our work. We can be out walking our dogs and get a notification ding on our phones and immediately be back to thinking about what we were doing at our desk. Nowhere are we free from work when we have a smartphone in our pocket. The administrative state has us at their constant beck and call. And what's more, the law enforcement agencies love our phones, too. They have GPS, tower triangulation, and with 5G the towers are closer together and the triangulation is more precise. Never, so long as your smartphone is powered on, are you truly free from the surveillance state. And I don't even think there's any one person (except for maybe Peter Thiel) who likes every aspect of this system of power between the bosses, landlords, law enforcement agencies, and technocrats. I don't even think each aspect of the system is aware of their role in the system. But nevertheless, the system of oppression and torture we live under persists to the benefit of 22 truly horrible human beings.

well now i know it's true

Manipulates you into going to the toy store and seeing that there is a boy's section and girl's section. And they are separate. Because there are two genders and they are in binary opposition to each other.

Marketing, propaganda, and politics is everything that you engage with all of the time. Any time you are in a group of three friends and you have to make a decision, the process by which you do it will be political in nature. The conclusion you reach will be based on the cultural context of the propaganda you were steeped in.

With this knowledge you can analyze the everyday politics and propaganda you encounter that you never even think about. You can make small changes to the politics you present and the propaganda you spread in the world. Every decision and action you take influences the people around you and all of that ripples out into the world. Something you do can inspire another person to act in a way that you would be inspired by. You may take an action and someone sees you and says "Yeah I've been feeling that, too! I was just too alone to say it, but now I know other people are out there"