Why did the article feel the need to mention US foreign policy from the early Trump administration? I can’t imagine it would be hard to find hypocrisy from the Biden administration itself.

Instead of talking about the US human rights failures, it spends time downplaying the accusations about Uighurs. None of the information constructed here builds into a cohesive thesis.

Fascists think they do

I can’t really imagine danger being particularly extreme for anyone other than trans people, for trans folk updating passports is likely a good idea. But keep in mind that blue states would still be relatively safe.

If shit truly gets to the point where it’s death squads and fascist street gangs, realistically there would not be anywhere in the world that would be safe.

I don’t think we need to be worried about full-blown civil war, but preparing for an increase in stochastic terrorism probably isn’t the worst idea.

truth is dead

new skill learned: “investigative journalism”

That doesn’t really respond to what I said

but it applies to voting, we can argue about the effectiveness of voting as a tactic but people who vote are more politically engaged than the type of person described in the quote

There are many people who vote, and do nothing else, and that is condemnible. But unless you have direct evidence that the quote originates with someone who explicitly denied the effectiveness of voting in totality I see no reason why the quote would not apply to forms of political advocacy you happen consider ineffective

I don’t particularly want to argue about the effectiveness of voting, beyond to say that I strongly disagree with any bright-line distinction between “electoralism” and whatever other strategies you would care to mention, and that EVERY successful movement (leftist or otherwise) that had the option had the ballot as part of their strategy.

but it applies to voting, we can argue about the effectiveness of voting as a tactic but people who vote are more politically engaged than the type of person described in the quote

An important aspect of the success of D&D/40k has been fan creations and lore explainers. A challenge for growing a creative commons (alternatives is that there isn’t a unified set of “cannon” stories for independent creators to make “TOP 10 WACKIEST THINGS IN [franchise]” which are the intellectual equivalent to baby food (which I don’t mean as an insult).

then again, d&d and 40k are popular because the companies that own them decided to let smaller creators do the work of reprocessing the decades worth of lore into easily consumable and marketable chunks. Both the small creators and the central company got to symbiotically feed off of the brand value of the other. Then begins the enshitification once the brand reaches the mainstream

The problem for less centrally controlled media isn’t just that there isn’t decades worth interconnected lore within one overarching franchise, it’s that stories that aren’t centrally controlled will mutate and be remixed too much to have the sort of symbiotic brand growth of 40k and d&d

Honestly I think the drama is a fundamental outgrowth of the way we think about a “feed”. The setup was devised to give people more reason to stay online exposed to advertising, in expense of an overall positive experience. But that’s sort speculation and I wouldn’t be able to point to specifics.

I don’t know what you mean here

I could understand an NDA if you’re talking about the particulars of the backend, but the fact that we don’t know what the NDA contains, AND the author of the entire protocol hasn’t been approached doesn’t bode well (https://octodon.social/@cwebber/110567421460454488)

Ya hear that Lloyd Austin? Time for another 20 billion