Its time to start talking about "memetic effluent." In the same way corporations polluted our physical world, they're pollution our memetic world. AI spewing garbage data is just the most obvious way, but corporations have been toxifying our memetic space for generations.
This memetic effluent will make sorting through data harder and harder over the years. But the oil and tobacco industries undermined science and democracy for decades with it's own memetic effluent in order to protect their business for decades. Advertising is it's own effluent that distorts and destroys language. Jerry Rubin said it in 1970,
"How can I tell you 'I love you' after hearing 'cars love shell?'"
While physical effluent destroys our physical environment making living in the world harder, memetics effluent destroys meaning and makes thinking about and comprehending the world harder. Both are the garbage side effects of the perpetuation of capitalism.
This example of poisoning the data well is just too obvious to ignore, but there are so many others.
I don't think they're even a solution. They're just another scam like hydrogen fuel cells were. They exist to keep people from pushing for the real change we actually need... Just like the decade we lost because people bought the hydrogen fuel cell grift last time.
Everyone sucks at driving. Humans simply don't have an innate comprehension of the physics of muti-ton metal boxes moving at high speeds or the physical reactions necessary to operate them safely. Even if we actually did, there are underlying psychological phenomenon that make people bad at driving. Humans are social animals, but when you isolate them in a metal box they stop being able to read social queues and start seeing everything outside the car as just obsticals instead of other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.
There are dozens of reasons driving is extremely bad for everyone involved, and why it feels awful for most people most of the time.
Absolutely. If you can bike, it's amazing. We went mostly car free for our last 6 months in the US. It was both wonderful and horrible. There are so many places it's just not safe to go on a bike, but not being in a car reduces your stress levels so much it's hard to imagine.
There is no saving America, there's only buying time. Democrats can't do what's needed to prevent fascism because actually doing something about the Republican party would risk creating actual democracy. Prepare to fight fascism now because at best you're buying yourself another 4 years. Vote, don't vote, vote for a third party out of protest, whatever you do organize with other people and prepare for the worst.
In the best case, I'm wrong and you've made new friends. But if you don't organize now it will be too late to organize in the worst case.
I'm curious how many people are just leaving the US entirely. Technically this probably wouldn't represent it since expats are still counted as a resident of whatever state you lived in last untill you revoke your citizenship.
Or make slavery "illegal except as punishment for a crime" and then create a bunch of laws that specifically targeted former slaves. Given the politics of Andrew Johnson, all they really had to do was assassinate Lincoln...
So, the director hid a swastika in one of the shadows to indicate that he thought the society was evil, among a ton of other things. He talked about it in the director's commentary. But yeah, it's actually super easy to miss unless you know it's actually a warning (which, like you said, the teenage boys it's marketed to wouldn't understand)... Which is kind of the problem with a lot of media, like the entire genre of cyberpunk.
The civil war has been going on for a while. The Oklahoma City bombing, attacks on infrastructure, mass shootings, shooting protestors, etc, are all what modern civil war looks like. In Serbia, Rwanda, Syra, etc, it was generally not two sides with clear borders. It was snipers shooting people on their way to work and kids at schools. It was neighbors locking the doors and setting buildings on fire with people inside.
Right wing terrorism IS their civil war. It won't be a bunch of states seceding. It will be a slow escalation of terrorism with police being more and more involved in protecting or even carrying out terrorist actions.
Y'all are already well in it and most people won't even notice until it's way too late.
Edit: Unless, of course, blue states finally break away after Trump or whoever's right wing coup, at which point it will be a war with clear borders... And also random terrorism/resistence within those borders on both sides.
While I like the sentiment, it's not entirely true.
You can't convince people to change their core beliefs. That's not how deprogramming works anyway. Cult deprogramming starts by asking them to explain and asking questions that let them unravel the problem themselves. Pointing out people's internal contradictions tends to reinforce them, but when they run in to their own contradictions those absurd beliefs tend to unravel.
Depends on your location. Washington has some of the best public records laws in the country. SPD releases all body cam footage when their officers kill someone. Unfortunately it's deceptively edited and when you request the full footage it takes about 2 years where they tell you every month they're delaying because of Covid or something.
Police will hide as long as possible and destroy evidence when they can get away with it. SPD has been sued for deleting vehicle footage after public records requests for the footage. Now they just edit the footage to look like there's nothing to see and hope no one requests the full videos.
"Forced assimilation" is one way to commit genocide. Another is through holocaust. The Holocaust happened to be genocide via holocaust. Gaza happens to be genocide via holocaust. The definition of genocide doesn't require it be committed via holocaust.
Require anything built on a truck frame to require a commercial license or a rural address.