“It’s literally landmark,”

“Literally.”

I guess a gravestone is sort of a landmark. Idaho will be needing a lot more of those.

Why are we paying diplomats when everyone is just using a “playbook” these days? I bet they’re not even real books - just PDFs they’re reading on a phone.

And don’t forget, the “doing something” has to be fun and entertaining and kid-friendly and there needs to be a convenient Starbucks nearby. Warm & sunny too, because who wants to be uncomfortable outside “doing something?”

If you’re young enough they might take you up on that offer.

It blows my mind how computer illiterate people are these days. All while congratulating themselves on their “tech skills” in comparison to “old people” who they claim “don’t understand technology” like they do. Most everyone, up until maybe, what, 10 years ago, knew how to use a desktop computer and desktop software like browsers and word processors and spreadsheets and email clients. Now if the software isn’t a phone app and if the interaction is more than voice-recognition or pictures or video or sound, people are helpless and happy that they’re helpless.

Meta: Lemmy doesn’t seem to have something akin to Reddit’s “QAnonCasualties” subreddit. That’s kind of surprising as I think there’d be plenty of interest in such a thing. I can imagine it might be a lot of work to moderate though.

OP: the abovementioned subreddit might help you understand what’s going on and if you tell your story you will definitely get a lot of support from people who have lost friends and loved-ones to MAGA/QAnon. Don’t let the “QAnon” part of the sub name deter you, there’s a big overlap between QAnon and MAGA and the sub has content from people affected by both/either.

Inventing and punishing thoughtcrimes seems to be a favored tactic among dictators. Trump-MAGA and ICE remind me most of Stalin and his NKVD (secret police). Solzhenitsyn wrote about how ordinary citizens would frequently be arrested/shot/sent to the gulag over mere assertions that they held anti-Soviet/anti-Communist beliefs, or had counter-revolutionary sympathies. It was illegal to not rat out others who you suspected held such beliefs and inclinations - if you didn’t you could be shot yourself.

I think we’re getting there. I soon expect to see federal government websites and apps where you can report your friends/neighbors/family members for anti-capitalist and/or anti-fascist and/or anti-evangelical-Christian leanings.

From Wikipedia (Great Terror article)

The purges were largely conducted by the NKVD, which functioned as the interior ministry and secret police of the USSR. Soviet politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned, or executed, by the NKVD. The purges were eventually expanded to the Red Army high command, which had a disastrous effect on the military. The campaigns also affected many other segments of society: the intelligentsia, wealthy peasants—especially those lending money or other wealth (kulaks)—and professionals. As the scope of the purge widened, the omnipresent suspicion of saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries (known collectively as wreckers) began affecting civilian life.

The campaigns were carried out according to the general line of the party, often by direct orders by the Politburo headed by Stalin. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of political crimes, including espionage, wrecking, sabotage, anti-Soviet agitation, and conspiracies to prepare uprisings and coups. They were executed by shooting, or sent to Gulag labor camps. The NKVD targeted certain ethnic minorities with particular force (such as Volga Germans or Soviet citizens of Polish origin), who were subjected to forced deportation and extreme repression. Throughout the purge, the NKVD sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions during its mass operations.

I live in the PNW and had never heard of this event. About 20yrs ago I was considering buying an old house in Old Town and now it looks like that might have involved buying land stolen from Chinese residents after having been stolen from Native residents after … Thanks for the link.

Do you “think” so? Though I have to say, I normally hold my scare quotes “in reserve” in anticipation of the upcoming “war” with China. They’ll never know what hit them - probably don’t have scare quotes in Chinese, I think they’re an invention of the “Military English Language Complex”, the greatest Complex in the World, an American Complex, we have scare quotes like nobody has ever seen, and the radical Left, Bernie Sanders, they want to take them from us.

Ha, kind of a “quiet quitting!”

Don’tcha know, if you buy Apple products and support Apple with your money, that means that you “Think Different”. Yeah, you’re brilliant, a creator, you don’t run with the crowd, and you’re a traitor.

I’ve never understood the Apple Cult, and I understand it even less as its members choose to look the other way when the company does this kind of thing.

What’s all this about buying now and paying later?

Don’t do that.

I haven’t given a thought to my “credit score” in decades. I hope that means that it’s tanked due to the unimaginable, unearthly, inhuman crime of not routinely borrowing money.

“smash”! Ooh ooh, exciting word, boom boom bang must clicky!

TACO time again.

So what’s he looking for, some kind of DEI preferences from the SBA?

What a clickbait piece.

“the pest control guy leading the charge” is the main figure in the article about alleged “pests”. I wonder what he thinks about them? Oh, what do you know, he has nothing good to say about the critter, who’d have thought?

The school system guy is quoted as saying the squirrel issue has been “a continuous battle for them for the last 75 years.” So this has been going on for (human) generations and is just a part of life in that region. Nothing new except the clickbait.

“Minot Air Force Base, which houses bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles” is in their backyard and if the article is to be believed, the citizenry is focused on the risks and evils of a native squirrel. If so I’d say it’s the citizenry that has their heads in the sand.

Creating a modern do-over of Stalinism mixed with Nazism and Christian theocracy.

Oh, I see. It was satire.

Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society. (wikipedia)

Not to be confused with sarcasm. In writing it’s a well-known (I’d thought) technique going back thousands of years. In pre-Idiocracy times, roughly before the widespread use of cell phones and when people read written texts to become informed and for pleasure, satire was common and there were writers who were well-known for specializing in the mode. The quality of the satire was always debatable (as with the quality of any art offering) but it was normally always recognized as satire by people who were able to read it in the first place. In the case of written satire, while it might be accompanied by illustrations to emphasize one point or another, it didn’t require images or animations or the equivalent of “emojis” near the text in question in order to signify to the reader that satire was being employed. The text was self-evident as being satirical, or if not, could be understood from the context to be satire (if it was contained in a satirical book for example).

As for what I wrote, I would have expected that the absurd concepts (government-controlled turbines designed to change the weather both by harnessing the power of winds and by creating new winds by acting as giant fans; describing these “fans” as being able to move people and extremely heavy machinery with great accuracy, again under government control) and borrowed nutter phraseology along with depictions of nutter-like outrage, would have made it apparent that satire was what was on offer. I understand that some may think if to be of poor quality, but I’m surprised that some people cannot recognize the writing as satire at all.

Pre-Idiocracy this would rarely have been a problem, even when the writing appeared in a low-context medium such as an isolated web page or in a forum or Usenet posting. It may be that the satirical written form is now, in Idiocratic times, extinct except to specialized academics and historians and other educated elites. That would be a shame because it was a powerful (influential) communication tool and is a pleasure to write and to read.

A what?

I don’t know where the Wx radars are around here, but you don’t have to drive more than an hour to see a hell of a lot of wind turbines sharing space with crops out on the Palouse . Those turbines absorb wind and therefore they change the weather, right? I’d be very surprised if they can’t be run in reverse to generate winds - winds designed to blow farmers and their giant pickups and their farm equipment wherever the government wants them to be. Full government control. Fortunately I see that the small-town intelligentsia are starting to fight back against this kind of out-of control wind turbine government overreach.