ErsatzCoalButter

joined 2 weeks ago
[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 19 points 1 day ago

why was there a sudden increase in building in games after minecraft

someone splain it

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh so it sounds like we will be in good shape with some patches.

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Sure. Here's pair of examples as mentioned. Sorry if this bums you out, it bums me out.

Elon Musk article

RFK Transcript

STONE: It's certainly a strange, almost dizzying moment for the public health field. Kennedy is well known for questioning the scientific consensus, pushing inaccurate information about vaccines. He's founded an antivaccine advocacy group and is generally antagonistic toward mainstream medicine. As NPR has covered, he's promoted unproven treatments for COVID and made other basless claims related to health.

At the same time, there's no denying that on chronic disease prevention, there is some real overlap between what he talks about as his priorities and what you hear from scientists who work in this field. One of them is Barry Popkin, a professor at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. He says, he would welcome meaningful action on nutrition and the food supply.

BARRY POPKIN: If it comes, I'll support it, and I'll be super surprised, and academia will be behind them and so on. But I do not see that. I fear the worst.

More RFK Credulity

AUBREY: RFK Jr. puts food- and diet-related policy changes at the top of his agenda, getting rid of a host of food additives and dyes and reforming the SNAP food assistance program, formerly known as food stamps. Kennedy says beneficiaries of the program should not be allowed to use their benefits to buy soda or processed foods, and points to the need for change. Dr. Mozaffarian agrees there's plenty of room for innovation in this program.

MOZAFFARIAN: SNAP is one of the biggest handouts to the food industry, including for lots of junk food and unhealthy food. I think it's absolutely critical that states are allowed to innovate and try new approaches and test them.

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Sad that it has happened to Vice but I am more upset about NPR. They have Nazified so quickly it makes my head spin. They have posted fawning articles about RFK Jr and Elon Musk recently that are so credulous and anti-social it hurts to read.

Imagine trying to call up Chappell Roan for a tiny desk after you've become a propaganda outlet for a nazi government.

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 6 points 2 days ago

Because the United States was founded as a loosely confederated colonial slave empire, and it benefits the caste of people who founded the empire and still control it to continue this form of government, I don't think "shifting to state's rights" is going to bring us any closer to freedom. Fascist slave empires shouldn't exist. You shouldn't contribute to them. Individually, if you are trapped in a fascist slave empire, you should seek to distance yourself from it in whatever ways you can. You should slow and stop spending money where possible. You should leave the country if you can, and remove yourself from the direct power of petty lords if not by moving out of their jurisdictions. If you are adamant about staying where you are at, you can build and contribute to a local mutual aid network, but understand that makes you 'the local mutual aid network within a Fascist captured zone.'

Governments are not immortal. Fascist governments have risen and died before. Unfortunately fascists steal their people's futures. I liked my future a lot better before I heard about Trump but he isn't the first and he won't be the last American Fascist.

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Saved to watch later, does anyone know what he covers in this video?

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 3 points 3 days ago

Yes that's somewhat true but it has mostly translated to less programming generally and especially fewer "bandcamp fridays"

the feeds are still pretty good and you can see what indie music people are actually buying

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 7 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I suggest you check out the feeds on Bandcamp. I find a lot of great new music that way. If you like comedy, lots of comedy shows have musical guests. Late Stage Live for example has great musical guests that may be new to you.

Generally speaking, corpos like Spotify are more interested in paying Joe Rogan than helping you find quality music.

 

Following is synopsis of Justus Rosenberg's book on Kobo's shop. Thanks to @ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net for reminding me of this text with your previous relevant post. The book itself is both pretty entertaining (Justus is a very good story teller AND IT'S SHORT) and you know, sobering and terrifying in that whole "witness to man-made horrors beyond all comprehension" kinda way.


“Thrillingly tells the story of an Eastern European Jew’s flight from the Holocaust and the years he spent fighting in the French underground.” —USA Today

An American Library in Paris Book Award “Coups de Coeur” Selection

In 1937, after witnessing a violent Nazi mob in his hometown of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, sixteen-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent by his Jewish parents to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, the Nazis came again, as France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, Justus fled Paris, heading south. A chance meeting led him to Varian Fry, an American journalist in Marseille who led a clandestine network helping thousands of men and women—including many legendary artists and intellectuals, among them Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst—escape the Nazis. With his intimate understanding of French and German culture, and fluency in several languages, including English, Justus became an invaluable member of Fry’s operation as a spy and scout.

After the Vichy government expelled Fry from France, Justus worked in Grenoble, recruiting young men and women for the Underground Army. For the next four years, he would be an essential component of the Resistance, relying on his wits and skills to survive several close calls with death. Once, he found himself in a Nazi internment camp, with his next stop Auschwitz—and yet Justus found an ingenious way to escape. He spent two years gathering intelligence, surveying German installations and troop movements on the Mediterranean. Then, after the allied invasion at Normandy in 1944, Justus became a guerrilla fighter, participating in and leading commando raids to disrupt the German retreat across France.

At the end of the Second World War, Justus emigrated to America, and built a new life. After decades teaching literature at Bard College, he now adds his own story to the library of great coming-of-age memoirs, a “gripping” chronicle of his youth in Nazi-occupied Europe, when he risked everything to stand against evil (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I have read some firsthand stuff from French resistance folks and artists in more similar situations to my own from this time period. I find their accounts easy to commiserate with and it is a very frustrating time to be alive. Foresight and historical knowledge have been so unhelpful to me.

Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

Hey, wow. Been there.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked[...]

If you were seriously activated at a recent-ish point in America, 'Occupy' era until today, you've experienced situations where you field at a critical protest point only to find:

  • most people actually don't support anything progressive
  • most people who claim to support you are committed to inaction under even very dire circumstances, they will always draw a new line in the sand
  • representatives like politicians and nonprofits for causes are mostly there to diffuse energy and frustrate efforts, and at the very least tie action to money
  • there actually are many people who are openly against things like feeding kids, racial equality, preventing climate change and they have more money than you
  • there are serious, life altering costs to real activism

I guess a more positive way to look at it would be "wow, so stuff also sucked for this dude..." like hey another time comrade

PS: Most people don't get which historical point in time we're at because the camps started at the borders and most people don't look there

 

The latest update video from Leon the Lobster, a cozy docu-series about a lobster rescued from the grocery store.

As of this post, Leon the Lobster is alive and appears to be recovering from dropping a claw. Sorry-not-sorry for spoilers, nobody needs to be introduced to a cool animal with a fake-out like the video's real title. Brady. You jerk. All of us have high enough blood pressure.

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 14 points 1 week ago

😭 its the funniest joke they have ever made

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 5 points 1 week ago

Grousing about Mr. Graff's silly hyperbolic description of the DOTWant to take this seriously as much of it merits serious discussion, but I just don't know what to do with weird nonsense like this:

The Transportation Department, which has had such a literal renaissance of imagination, innovation, and investment under Mayor Pete and the flood of infrastructure money from the Inflation Reduction Act, would be cut back extensively.

Here is the DOT's own propaganda: [https://blog.bayareametro.gov/posts/us-dot-highlights-infrastructure-accomplishments](US DOT highlights infrastructure accomplishments) What the heck does "literal renaissance of imagination, innovation-" mean here? Gosh Biden's years were such a letdown, and then they tout the barest accomplishment of their jobs as the second coming as if people don't have eyes and ears.

What if suddenly living in Denver versus Austin or Charlotte versus Tampa start to come with very different sets of rights as an individual in terms of your family’s access to basic health care, what books your child gets to read in school, whether you can walk the streets without carrying your “papers,” whether your kid’s school requires basic vaccines, or even whether the public water supply is considered safe?

This is already the case in the Rust Belt. Default is you don't have basic healthcare, your kid goes to some fake voucher school or an extremely underfunded school (books comment is weird, Texas decides most of the books already), you can't get vaxed or operate in the economy without your "papers", public water supplies are not safe by modern standards. This crumbling ramped up during Trump 1 and became the default in the pandemic and the region didn't really recover.

Anyway the Fed isn't my friend and the decline of that faction isn't the part of this mess that has me worried. Has the Fed been really helpful or a positive influence where you are located? Mostly to me they are ICE and FBI offices and I don't think those folks do good work.

[–] ErsatzCoalButter@beehaw.org 2 points 1 week ago

The hard nationalist name is a great giveaway

 

Wikipedia TL;DR

Oil! is a novel by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1926–27 and told as a third-person narrative, with only the opening pages written in the first person. The book was written in the context of the Harding administration's Teapot Dome Scandal and takes place in Southern California. It is a social and political satire skewering the human foibles of all its characters.

The main character is James Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed Bunny, son of an oil tycoon. Bunny's sympathetic feelings toward oilfield workers and socialists provoke arguments with his father throughout the story. The beginning of the novel served as a loose inspiration for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood.

My Take: Basically the TL;DR is that Oil companies have been buying politicians and stalling progress while their actions destroy the lives of untold masses forever. This book is like 100 years old, so that means it has been a big enough problem to write a whole pulpy novel about it for longer than any of us will ever live. Corporations are bad. Great characters and retro cultural obscura!

Linked below is an excellent copy by Standard Ebooks you can legally have for free if you also want to be mad about the oil industry and capitalism more broadly.

Oil! 🌋 Upton Sinclair

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