It’s the Hive Mind Stans phenomenon that fascinates me, meme-activated collective action that is a very modern social body.

Some of the stuff BTS ARMY got up to was fantastic and a bit scary. Also large numbers. Very large.

So the Swifties haven’t been weaponized yet. But they could be, soon. Having deepfake A.I. impersonation of fans made by fascist followers of a reality TV star be the thing that raises their state of collective power to Ready is just… well, I am living in a Gibson novel.

‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ by Marge Piercy is the most solarpunk novel I’ve read so far. Fiction, that is. And it’s early '70s!

Your typical walk in. I got it.

But your back yard is infinite.

Boats are the original tiny home.

Local classified right now has a 29 foot sloop with extra sails, recent bottom paint, and a 9hp outboard plus dinghy for $5700 CDN. It’s been up a while, you could bargain down, the seller seems motivated. It’s a 1978 boat so really skookum fiberglass on that.

A mooring buoy costs around $1500 to plop down but sometimes you can get one second hand for less. (Every Canadian is entitled by citizenship to a mooring buoy or two.)

An equivalent RV costs around $15k with nowhere to park.

People who assume that they are going to buy stuff new are just locked into a class-based mindset.

Around here you can buy a serviceable 29-foot sailboat for $5k, and a mooring buoy for $1k. It’s cheaper than a van by the river FFS.

People who live on sub-40-ft sailboats are usually just hanging in there. Source: that was nearly me before my fortunes changed slightly. Boats are underpriced because they are a lot of work.

My sister is a corporate executive. Her walk in closet is objectively larger than a 29-ft live aboard. Hell her ensuite bathroom is bigger than that and she lives in a duplex. You are lacking real world context I think.

Fraud, treason, endangerment, etc.–all normal and reasonable restrictions on speech.

Nazi propaganda checks all those boxes.

Advocates genociding all authoritarians

Gets put in line for the solar express

Surprise!

Bad news: the 1/3 authoritarian segment of society seems to be a human trait. Culture determines how the trait is expressed.

So fire them into the sun but statistically the hierarchically-minded, active-amygdala, contrarian and cruel segments of the genome will just always be there.

This is probably the primary challenge of the human condition: graduating from a troupe species with ling-refined tribal techniques for handling the problem individuals, to a noöspheric global species successfully coping with with emergent problems due to mass “civilizational” effects.

Yet Putin published an opinion that Ukraine is a modern fiction and should return to Russia. It isn’t official… just the geopolitical opinion of the dictator.

One other given reason that people seem to forget is the published position by Putin that Ukraine is a fiction, that Ukranians don’t exist in a culturally distinct way, and that their claimed history and distinctness should be erased and made properly Russian.

It’s not just imperialism at that point, it’s genocidal.

I actually remain unconvinced by the non-scholarly sources people are providing, authoritatively claiming etymology on scant evidence, and believe they are relying on the self-reported motives of Maverick.

‘Gook’ is only generally used as a slur, and other uses are obsolete by a century or extremely regional and rare. In 1944 the slur was the predominant usage, particularly around Maverick.

Do you have a more authoritative source?

Yes, good point, even though everyone in the US military at the time was using it to dehumanize the enemy and a military guy coined the term, I got caught up in etymology, and really it’s usage that matters.

For a while, particularly in my youth in western Canada, the racist connotations were upfront and emphasized for added contempt.

I think ignoring that historical usage is a mistake.

[edit: I am just realizing that some accents pronounce it quite differently–in w. canada it was and still is pronounced like the slur]

Ah yes, gobble is turkey sounds. Where, in those sources, does the etymology of the rest of the word get examined?

Nowhere, except by ‘elephant in the room’ inference: “first used by Texas politician Maury Maverick (1895-1954), … chairman of U.S. Smaller War Plants Corporation during World War II”

Hmm.

“so prevalent was the use of the word gook during the first few months of the war that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur banned its use, for fear that Asians would become alienated to the United Nations Command because of the insult.” [wikipedia]

Hmmmmmm.

“In modern U.S. usage, “gook” refers particularly to communist soldiers during the Vietnam War and has also been used towards all Vietnamese and at other times to all Southeast Asians in general. It is considered to be highly offensive.” [wikipedia]

It’s not complicated or obscure. No need to whitewash this. Anyone early genX or older (edit: who grew up in North America) will remember.

May I just point out the elephant in the room?

“Gook” is a nasty slur for asian person. This word literally means ‘unintelligible like the nonsense languages of asians’

Let’s just let this word fade away like so many other bullshit slurs, thanks.

Yeah I was pointing out that the prison system may be completely ineffective where it’s based on punishment. It’s a critical view, not prescriptive, and designing a new system requires a revolutionary approach, with consideration for the needs of the victims as well as the mental state of the perpetrators.

I wasn’t proposing anything pat and simple like one-size-fits-all incarceration, completely the opposite, actually. Maybe forever in prison, maybe no jail time. Justice, in terms of repairing things for a victim, might mean a lifelong burden for the convicted, or something else entirely. It would necessarily be complex. More emotional, less rational people would have a problem with that since they can’t see justice without punishment.

Why would they result in the same sentence? That’s a strange proposal that I have never heard before.

Regarding rehab, well that’s a procedural question more than legislative. Ask experts in the field. It’s not like the problem is new, even if it’s evident we are going about it fundamentally wrong.

Uh, sure it does, in the sense that if someone is unable to be rehabilitated, they should be kept away from the public? Not sure what you’re asking except maybe “can I please just have a little revenge?”

We learn over and over again from our various texts-of-wisdom, be it fables or scripture or novels or movies, that revenge is a primitive response to problems. It’s the moral of so many stories, right?

Yet we organize society to satisfy these immature desires. Punishment, for the most part, is neither deterrent nor corrective, and a paltry form of redress.

Do you want justice? Start with redress. You can’t fix the problem of a dead child but the victims need proper support, to alleviate all the other issues caused by the crime. In Canada the prison system is called “corrections” but it mostly fails at that… rehabilitation requires an evidence-based system to succeed, and ours is built on punishment, an emotional response.

If you want deterrence, well that requires eliminating poverty and supplying real education, backed by proactive and robust mental health services.

I define justice as the best possible outcome of a bad situation.

No.

Phobic describes the motivation for the act, which is a ban.