@pmonks@RickiTarr I have so many thoughts but I just really can't right now! I've already thought about it too much and I'm burning daylight over here!
My taste in music is pretty eclectic, but it's not really a result of being particularly knowledgeable or having my finger on the pulse of anything. I'll just hear something and it gets stuck in my head and then that's all I can listen to for about four months. The problem is that kind of serendipity isn't very repeatable, and most of the new stuff I hear ends up sounding like sleepy English cats half-heartedly doing a rave, so my music discovery process has now devolved into stumbling through random alleys and falling into dumpsters full of sheet metal that looks like it might sound interesting.
@mentallyalex Streaming has been great for delving deeper into things that have already caught my attention, but it hasn't really been helpful for music discovery. There's just too much stuff available it's like scrolling through Netflix too paralyzed by all the choice to actually pick something.
I need to perform some OS upgrades on the Beige Party servers. This is a little more involved than upgrading the Mastodon software so I will be taking the site down to make server snapshots first, so the site will be unavailable for about half an hour while I'm making these snapshots.
The maintenance window will start at our regularly scheduled time of 3:00 AM UTC on Monday, April 1st, and will continue through 5:00 AM UTC. For those of you in the Western Hemisphere, that's 11:00 PM EDT on Sunday, March 31st - 1:00 AM EDT on Monday, April 1st. As stated above, you can expect the site to be down for about half an hour, but please be prepared for the site to go down at any time during the maintenance window.
Remember in Blues Brothers when they end up at the Nazi rally and the point isn't even that Jake really hates Nazis, it's that Nazis are about the biggest losers that anyone could imagine. They are portrayed as completely pathetic dead-ender assholes.
Or in the Rocketeer when the mobsters find our the Sinclair guy is a Nazi and join forces with the FBI to stop them because Nazis are clearly the worst thing.
Or when Christopher Plummer rips the Nazi flag in two in Sound of Music.
None of these films were making bold political statements. The Nazis were the bad guys because that was something that everyone in the audience could agree one. Dunking on Nazis was a guaranteed crowd pleaser.
When the hell did we stop agreeing on something so simple and self-evident as Nazis Are Fucking Losers?
@danjac I'm fortunate enough to have a grandmother who lived through it in Berlin and who ingrained in me from a young age exactly what the consequences of fascism were, and that it was not something that was comfortably in the past, but could arise again anywhere and at any time. She's still with us but unfortunately has lived long enough to see most of the world forget these lessons.
@northernlights Absolutely. Weimar Germany was one of the most open and progressive societies in the world at the time. By the late 20s even the hyperinflation was under control and the war reparations had been refinanced to something at least managable. All it took was an economic downturn to wipe it all away. Hitler was not inevitable but he was also not unique. He was at the right place at the right time to do maximal damage. If it could happen there it can happen anywhere.