When the ebay listing is for the frame only but the fork and tank are in the background but never in focus but clearly there and you check the seller's listings and they are indeed separate listings
When a minority of individuals is doing much better over time while everyone else languishes, the capitalist's retort is a summary statistic that pretends that minority's success is everyone's: they'll say wages overall are rising, society overall is better off, if you don't personally feel wealthier you're imagining things or undeserving or unlucky or just complaining. But that's not what has happened: inequality has dragged up the mean to hide the median
You know that whole bit in 7th or 8th grade when they're teaching averages and they're explaining the differences between mean, median, and mode, and then "average" becomes shorthand for "mean" because "mean" is meant to be the most accurate average
That's literally training
They're training you to prefer the number that is more easily influenced by outliers over the two other, less manipulable measures of typicality
The Acolyte reviews are like "well it's definitely not as exciting as Andor and we really wish all Star Wars was as good as Andor from now on" and like,
Andor is a freak, its story framework (Les Mis) spawned a better film than any of the feature length Star Wars movies
So if you watch the original Star Wars and pretend you know nothing about it, there's a little bit of setup in the beginning where Luke's whining about wanting to see the galaxy and how all his friends are leaving and Owen needs him to stay on the farm and that's final
Which is a believable enough setup that you can kinda move on to the rest of the movie but then he meets his friend Biggs in the rebellion and they make comments about "back home" and it makes zero sense BECAUSE
There's a deleted scene from the beginning of the movie where Luke has friends and Biggs is there and tells Luke about the Rebellion and this gives us a picture of how Luke interacts with and relates to his peers (he's the geek) and provides context for the conflict between staying on the farm and going to flight school
António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, says we are "playing russian roulette" with our planet
My guy, you're supposed to be the one who understands: the odds are way worse than that
If this were a game of Russian Roulette, the current state of play is that every chamber in the cylinder is loaded. We have yet to remove any of the bullets, and there's no sign that we're ever going to
Their assignment was to do the best they can with about 1/4 the time and a tenth the budget and a script that's being written on the fly - and they did a good job, somehow!
The Central Bankers of the world will say two things plainly*:
They believe in the "independence of the central bank" from democracy: in absolute, unaccountable, private control the power to design and modify monetary policy
They believe in using this power to advance the ideological agenda that they believe established and maintains US/Western hegemony: namely, upward wealth redistribution resulting in ever-increasing wealth inequality.
It was a dishonest defense, because the Fed in its wisdom could have put the onus on Congress, and was choosing instead to dial up middle class misery and increase wealth inequality
Given the Fed has the power to independently and unaccountably fiddle with monetary policy, the Fed has as much power to say "No, we're not going to act, you should fix it on your end" as it does to say "Yes we'll handle that for you"
What it chooses to do is in fact: a choice. If you don't believe it's an ideological choice: you're not understanding why Central Bankers want to remain independent. (It's because they don't want democracy interfering with their agenda, these are their own words)
To be clear I think this essay basically concludes that while it may not be completely accurate to label Biden a fascist, it's more accurate to say that he is one than to say that he isn't. The ideas that historical fascists fused together to define their movements preexisted fascist armies and survived their destruction: to the extent that while fascist armies lost a military conflict, fascist philosophy won the 20th century
One of the more maddening seasonally recurring arguments of the 2020s is "you're the fascist!" "no, YOU'RE the fascist!"
This video doesn't offer a direct answer to the community's discussion today except that it does offer a critical, scholarly understanding of the ideology, and watching it all the way through will bolster your confidence while making your argument
Zoom's CEO is telling everyone that he wants to invent AI "twins" that you can send to your Zoom meetings on your behalf, which is a startlingly honest assessment of the value of a Zoom meeting