I believe you pay for the privilege too.

That’s a little better, but seems like a weird UI oversight.

Yeah, are they genuinely not already doing this kind of stuff already? My Xiaomi does that as well as adaptive charging based on my usage etc.

It’s from last year, but the album “Altutude” by Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives is still my go to upbeat, uplifting record. A lifetime legend of country music doing an unapologetically fun, slightly psychadelic nod to not just The Byrds, but British 60s pop, and Mowtown. It’s lively, funny, catchy, and even what could be more melancholy songs have a strong vibe of optimism - Space is a chill guitar lick about being overwhelmed by society, but finding peace in nature, A Friend Of Mine is all about solidarity from the the universality of shit going wrong, Sitting Alone is about feeling disconnected but it being a blissful experience that allows you to enjoy the simple things, and so on.

I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of higher education in the states, but getting capitalist money out of things like science journals would be hugely beneficially everywhere.

Every single British paper and media outlet so far today has covered this as an anti-semetic pogrom while making zero mention of the fact that this was a group of far right, fascist football hooligans, including members of the IDF, who chatted racist slogans, vandalised property, attacked people’s homes, violently attack random brown people in the street, and deliberately cheered and set off fireworks throughout a minutes silence for flood victims during the game. It’s outright and deliberately propaganda for the Israeli state while defending and making victims of the exact same people (or worse) that our entire media spent weeks talking about being thugs and disgraces during the race riots here.

I just read your reply to Owl above on the first point and think we agree on most of that.

Organising needs to be collaborative, organising seminars are good, mailing lists or newsletters aren’t a substitute for action and relationships.

I have however been around some orgs over the years, especially much smaller ones unsurprisingly, that have been borderline hostile to the idea of not only collaborative organising but every other organisation in general. They certainly weren’t collaborating or incorporating other groups or activists to achieve anything.

I read Owl’s first point as specifically talking about that kind of behaviour from a limited number of experiences, not a blanket sweeping statement of vendetta against ML groups in general, as you seem to have. Which I suspect is a big part of our disagreement here.

Anyway, I hope you got that beauty sleep comrade.

Hard agree on the first one.

The second is a matter of degrees I think. Bureaucracy gets a bad rep, but it can be essential to ensure that especially action focused org don’t descend into just a discussion group, and also it offers some protection against cops and wreckers deliberately trying to derail orgs. If you’ve got the kind of bureaucracy where you’re having meetings about voting on a meeting chair for the next meeting or whatever, then you’ve already failed on those points anyway.

And what exactly are you doing here, outreach and solidarity? Movement building?

There’s a lengthly point by point deconstruction of it above, but that would require you to actually read the very thing you’re complaining about, ironically enough.

You have thousands of accounts to circumvent bans on niche forums so that you can go and post deliberately vague statements and throw around insults whilst entirely refusing to engage or even state your point of view, but people here are the ones just doing recreation instead of promoting their cause?

And yes, many of us do come here to shitpost and chat for recreation, including myself. Because we’re functional people who actually do activism and organising in the real world, instead of thinking low-energy trolling is activism, and would prefer to chill on the sofa or on the boss’ time scrolling Hexbear instead of whatever Reddit-brained place has formed your petulant online manner.

According to an article in the same zine telling important truths like this

Yes, exactly. Calvinism was the term I was reaching for, thank you. Now was he the tiger or the spikey haired lad? I kid, I kid.

Like so much about American Christianity I find it to be such a bizarre inversion of the dynamics of more traditional religiosity. Rather than living a moral (and largely uncomplaining, obidient) life for the promise of eternal happiness in the next life, the American religious or quasi-religious seems to basically say ‘Live whatever hedonistic, selfish, piece of shit life you want! You’re still going to heaven so long as your monthly subscription doesn’t lapse!’

Maybe it just seems particularly bizarre to me as someone who partially grew up in a modern Quaker tradition (with guardians finding that after basically fleeing / drifting from other Christian faiths), which also has a loose, almost anarchist, interpretist approach to faith but does so in a way where the focus is upon thoughfulness, solidarity, and communication. The Calvinst streak seems like a bizarre inversion that screams, No requirements. Don’t think about it. Money down.

Obviously there’s a long and integral dynamic of ‘good in-group / bad out-group’, but I’m convinced its further exacerbated in the US by the so thoroughly intertwined Christian aspect, particularly the WASPy say the right things, give the church money, and do what you like types to still be righteous.

The Americans had already used the bomb, twice, and even before that there wasn’t really any doubt they would if they could. As history proved both before and after Nagasaki, the US was happy to cause any amount of death and destruction to fight the (mostly extremely paranoid and overstated) ‘threat of communism’. And whatever you think about the idea of nuclear deterrence in the modern era, there’s little to no doubt it was the only thing preventing the US using nukes against the USSR.

I wrote this comment for a thread that just got deleted, so I’m just gonna post it here. It’s on the subject of the CIA pushing and popularising the idea of conspiracy theories in order to give themselves cultural cover…

Pretty much, certainly the US government at large. People often point to the aftermath of the JFK assassination as the Warren Comission report famously referred to ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ frequently and the press ran with those terms. To the degree that this idea has been ‘debunked’ by modern corporate media, they use the classic sleight of hand by investigating whether the Warren Commission coined those terms, rather than popularised them.

One of the primary counter-agruements these people use is that Karl Popper’s influential philosophical book Open Society & Its Enemies used the terms when discussing how society creates meaning from events in 1945. And if you couldn’t tell by the title of that work, yes, Popper was a reactionary with a deepseated hatred for historicism, Marxist based thought, who believed that historicism was responsible for “20th Century totalitarianism” and that liberal democracy was the only acceptable form of government (because it didn’t require ‘bloodshed or violence’ for improvement ). And yes, he was of course popular with the US political class and establishment academics at the time, meaning the very people that would go on to be part of the state (from those elected to the intelligence community) in the 1960s when they popularised the term.

If you’re interested, the book Mirage Men might be worth a read. It’s a history of how the US military industrial complex and government perpetuated and used the UFO phenomenon not only as a smokescreen for secret projects and military action, but also psychological operations against the public. I think someone made a documentary of it years ago, but I’ve never seen itnso can’t say whether it’s a good portrayal of the book or not.

Or you’re a couple who plays together and/or you have kids.

Perhaps not for big new Sony titles, but if you’re a family / have kids you definitely want at least two as there’s still lots of good couch multiplayer games out there.

If it’s just for you then possibly for stick drift (rather than getting them later when they’ve gone up in price again) or because they still use a built-in battery instead of rechargeables, and they don’t last very long by comparison (and that play time gets even lower as they age obviously).

Including a second controller and bits you need (stand, disc drive) this is £900 in the UK. That’s almost $1200. Without a game.

Modern game graphics have killed the console market.

How do people balance being really drunk / high with being a) comparatively very capable and b) not having the self-destructive instinct anymore compared to others?