astroboy's posterior

Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons.

Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.

moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing.

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/copaganda-when-the-police-and-the-media-manipulate-our-news

this method effectively allows these organizations to link mobile browsing sessions and web cookies to user identities, hence de-anonymizing users’ visiting sites embedding their scripts.

https://localmess.github.io

if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time.

Snooker declines to lend itself so readily to the amusement of dilettantes.

The mercurial temperament, the absurd talent, the lurching highs and lows: it all just goes together.

Professional players are visually indistinguishable from ordinary people, except that almost all of them are men.

 Snooker dramatizes obsession in a very pure form, hyperfixation made visible.

In other sports, the sphere of play is coterminous with the sphere of competition—players are not obliged to do anything in excess of trying to win matches. But snooker is different.

What field of study could articulate the answer—physics, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of mind?

Why can computers beat human beings at chess, but not (yet) at snooker?

How is it possible for a snooker player to predict the outcomes of complex interactions in physics, with millimeter-level precision—without appearing to perform any calculations at all?

£10,000 isn’t nothing. And throwing it away—for no reason, just out of mischief, just because you’re the only person in the world who can—that isn’t nothing either.

https://nybooks.com/articles/2025/03/27/angles-of-approach-unbreakable-ronnie-osullivan/

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

https://kottke.org/25/05/what-is-fascism

Today, democracy teeters as our capacity for collective action seems to have withered away.

Structural change is rooted in people, human beings, and the power we can create with each other when we find values we share, and our capacity to turn those values into sources of power.

Power does not exist out there, in some bank or something.

the general was called stratigos, and then the soldiers were called tacticas.

Structure is the commitments we make to one another about how we’re going to work together.

The benefit of rock bottom is that it delegitimizes what’s gone before.

Organizing is about enabling people to speak for themselves. It’s not a charity project. It’s a justice project.

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/marshall-ganz-interview-building-power#

TeleMessage’s server – hosted on the public AWS cloud, run by an Israeli company that’s led by a former IDF spook – has plaintext access to the Signal chat logs they’re archiving.

The modified Signal app is almost entirely identical to the authentic version of Signal, except it also archives copies of every message.

The communication between the TM SGNL app and the final archive destination is not end-to-end encrypted.

https://micahflee.com/despite-misleading-marketing-israeli-company-telemessage-used-by-trump-officials-can-access-plaintext-chat-logs/

The more we share, the more we have.

Through workshops, locals have learned the basics of power tools, electrical work, plumbing, machine sewing, hand sewing, wood working, little free library building, sign making and more. With these new skills, people are better equipped to repair their belongings when they break, saving them money and keeping things out of landfills.

You don’t have to be a consumer. You can be a repairer.

https://truthout.org/articles/no-tariffs-on-sharing-tool-libraries-offer-resilience-amid-federal-chaos/

authoritarian followers share three tendencies:

they obey authority figures from their in-group (called authoritarian submission); they punish rule breakers (authoritarian aggression); and they rigidly endorse long-held traditions (conventionalism).

When we think that the world is unstable and unsafe, we search for ways to regain control. Unfortunately for our democratic institutions, placing trust in a dictator and becoming an authoritarian follower is one way to reestablish a sense of control.

Multicultural neighborhoods likely provide people with the chance to form close friendships with others from diverse backgrounds. In turn these experiences dispel worries that immigrants threaten deeply held cultural values or will take their jobs.

Democracy rarely falls at the hands of a single individual. Rather it dies through the complacency and obedience of otherwise well-intentioned authoritarian followers.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-some-people-follow-authoritarian-leaders-and-the-key-to-stopping-it/

This is being circulated at #NASA regarding new performance evaluations to be done 4x a year. Note: “Faithful Support of Administration of the Law and the President’s Policies” are Number 1 criteria for both SES & SL/ST NASA personnel.

This is being circulated at #NASA regarding new performance evaluations to be done 4x a year. Note: "Faithful Support of Administration of the Law and the President's Policies" are Number 1 criteria for both SES & SL/ST NASA personnel.

— NASAWATCH (@nasawatch.bsky.social) 2025-05-01T16:09:47.061Z

It wont end because these people have no personality. No identity of their own. So they latch onto political parties and conspiracies and anything else to give them a feeling of purpose and moral high ground.