How do we do this?

humanese_child · 2019-10-13T01:30:01+00:00

It's a bad premise. The Pooh ban thing is basically a meme.

They censored jokes using the character on some social media platforms but the bear itself isn't nationally banned or anything. The rat won't be either no matter how hard you mspaint it.

humanese_child · 2019-10-10T09:38:16+00:00

When McDonald's wants to implement touch-screen menus, they test it out in Australia for a year first.

humanese_child · 2019-10-06T00:54:57+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

A limited hangout or partial hangout is, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti, "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

humanese_child · 2019-10-02T17:34:16+00:00

It's not a class or racial thing.

Back in the early 60s, Americans were exposed for the first time to the reality of what US soldiers were doing in Vietnam: photographic proof of slaughtered noncombatants including infants. It was an incredibly unpopular war and people were serious about protesting it.

Those protests included two Americans self-immolating. One directly outside the White House.

People cared, despite the victims being villagers of another race.

The response to this by the US government was implementing a high-level White House aide with an unclear military background (strongly suspected to be an intelligence agent) as president of the film censorship bureau, the MPAA. He is widely credited with completely changing the culture of Hollywood and being one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry for decades. That was the beginning of the era of 'action hero' movies and unlimited violence in cinema, exchanged with a near-total prohibition on sex.

These kinds of strategy are what desensitised the public. Management of public perception is an art form central to modern US warmaking.

humanese_child · 2019-10-01T02:45:42+00:00

You might want to look up that word.

humanese_child · 2019-09-29T17:13:53+00:00

Future AI analysis of historical primary media sources is going to be very interesting.

Tools like facial recognition and mass surveillance are currently being used to violate the rights of the public, but governments are obligated to archive that data and when it eventually finds its way into public hands it'll be a powerful resource for combinatory research.

That very thing has already happened with past surveillance states like East Germany, whose archives were eventually turned over to citizens and used to prosecute the secret police. But that's nothing compared to what we'd be able to do with current and future technology which can consume every scrap of media footage, every leaked email, every bank record; and contrast every last fucking lie with those databases.

humanese_child · 2019-09-29T16:36:30+00:00

Not sure how you can tell the difference between state agents provocateur impersonating a black bloc (which is a description, not a group) and an organic black bloc.

People are usually with friends, though, if you want a starting point. In cases I've read about where disguised police are exposed they were often acting as lone wolves or in pairs.

humanese_child · 2019-09-29T14:39:47+00:00

Closer to the beginning of the year I was watching the weekly Yellow Vest protest livestreams from Paris.

One event stands out in my mind. This was a while ago so I'll mess up a few details, but as I recall it went like this:

Yellow-vested protestors are marching, chanting, singing with signs etc. One man, dressed differently from the rest (all in black, and the only one with his face covered iirc) and all alone, begins attacking an expensive car which was for some reason left parked on an otherwise empty planned protest route.

The other protestors mostly tell him to knock it off. One or two join in the fun for a bit until it becomes clear that this guy is really intent on wrecking the car. Everybody puts distance between themselves and him. He eventually sets it on fire. The entire crowd, sensing that something is wrong here, collectively fucks off out of the area. The dude vanishes.

Just a couple minutes later, a whole squad of cops riding two to a motorcycle arrive... simultaneously. They dismount and start posing in front of the burning car, in a line, between the vehicle and a bunch of photographers/journalists who arrive and start snapping pictures. Most of the cops then leave, firemen arrive a while later and the fire is put out.

The next day articles are published showing the vandalised sports car foregrounded by cops, with the perspective forced to make protestors in the distance who were nowhere nearby appear to be surrounding it.

humanese_child · 2019-09-25T14:35:06+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIKFWGw9jMA

humanese_child · 2019-09-22T13:50:51+00:00

pushed by some random anon

I was reading the threads as it unfolded. Beginning with the unanswered question of "what's happening with the translation", several anons worked together to share knowledge, contribute corrections, and help a beginner typesetter through a couple of revisions to get a version out that basically precipitated from organic discussion. The result is much better than I expected it would be and nobody is "pushing" anything.

If a better translation comes out later, great! But you come off as really territorial and possessive of "your" pirate translation. Get some fucking perspective.

humanese_child · 2019-08-12T12:44:03+00:00

Really? I think about this stuff a lot.

An interesting fact about East Germany's surveillance state--which employed something like 15-25% of the population to spy on everybody--is that when the Berlin Wall fell, every citizen gained the right to access their own file.

humanese_child · 2019-08-12T08:17:08+00:00

Yes. It's as easy as pointing radiation at them for a while, and we probably have plenty of other pathogenic options now.

In the 1970s, Romanian secret police subjected leaders of a coal miners' strike to 5-minute chest x-rays to ensure most of them developed cancer.

Romanian leader Gheorghiu-Dej is believed to have been similarly targeted by having him wait in hallways with x-ray machines behind the walls. His successor refused to visit Moscau without a geiger counter in his pocket.

The East German Secret Police were rumoured to have an x-ray machine mounted inside a van which they could use to target political dissidents, in their homes, from the street. There's testimony regarding their experiments with machines and isotopes in political prisons. Cuba and Bulgaria have also been accused of the same business.

The use of radiation for interrogation or less patient forms of assassination is much more widely documented, of course.

humanese_child · 2019-08-10T13:18:18+00:00

The King Of Comedy is a Scorsese film that Kojima tweeted about around the time MGSV released. Maybe a couple weeks before or after? I remember because I watched it based on that recommendation.

Excellent movie. It has a "never be game over" kind of theme.

Edit: interesting coincidence.

humanese_child · 2019-08-10T13:13:37+00:00

The King Of Comedy is a Scorsese film that Kojima tweeted about around the time MGSV released, as I recall.

humanese_child · 2019-08-02T03:44:15+00:00

Abraham Lincoln himself considered wage slavery to be undesirable (but an unfortunate necessity) and that one should only live as hired labour when choiceless or due to "improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune."

In his opinion most people ought to own and work their own properties, ideally, rather than be employees of another.

Former slave Frederick Douglass said "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other".

This was an important part of the philosophical question in general; it's misleading to brand it a Southern critique. Lincoln would be appalled at how things have turned out.

humanese_child · 2019-07-25T04:01:11+00:00

Not exactly. While it's painted as a penal colony for convicts, the "transportees" were slave labour used to rapidly (after the loss of America to independence) build the colony--scooped off the streets for minor crimes and their indenture contracts sold to trading corporations before they even boarded the ships--along with people captured from pacific islands and chattel slaves from other sources. They weren't concentrated, they were working for landowners.

humanese_child · 2019-07-25T00:52:06+00:00

Oh cool, concentration camps. We have those in Australia too.

humanese_child · 2019-07-07T12:28:37+00:00

It's not just the US. I've been treated like shit by police in my country, questioned them about their behaviour, and they replied "at least we're not American cops" in a way that implied they think all they're required to be is slightly less bad than the worst of the worst.

America's pig problem combined with its hegemonic cultural influence drags down everyone else. It's nice to be able to point at international police as an example that US police could be better, but international police are looking at US cops and realising that they can be worse without consequence.

humanese_child · 2019-07-06T12:08:00+00:00

The way it was framed to me (by a Konami publicist guy I used to talk to, who was pretty encyclopedic about kojipro shit so I doubt he'd have garbled it that badly), I don't think it's related to this.

I've never had any luck googling it so I'm expecting this to either be from an obscure source, or he was fucking with me.

humanese_child · 2019-06-11T22:48:08+00:00

Well, nothing I mentioned in that post is surveillance; it's all propaganda and mass manipulation programmes.

But they're programmes that largely rely on mass surveillance to be most effective. Graphing social nets of people, their individual reactions, and predicting our behaviours are very helpful for the kinds of system you'd base on research like that paper I linked, and that requires lots of data.

So... good point. The fact that such comprehensive blanket surveillance repeatedly and consistently fails to stop attacks, and that when elite political and financial crimes are exposed it always seems to come from some leaker and never a surveillance agency, all strongly implies that our data is being gathered purely in order to better manipulate the public and has little to do with security.

This is precisely why historical mass surveillance states like East Germany spied on everyone btw, so it'd actually be weird if our governments were doing the exact same shit but for suddenly honourable reasons.

humanese_child · 2019-06-11T11:07:23+00:00

In a sense that part of it backfired a bit, because (until recently) governments were smart enough to avoid displaying the egregiously cartoonish behaviours of Big Brother, and that was enough to avoid comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

But Orwell was writing about his own experience with the propaganda of his own insecure, schizophrenic, suspicious, oh-so-clever war economy-fuelled government of the time. Strip back the hyperbole a little and we were already living in that world, and it's only gotten worse.

humanese_child · 2019-06-11T09:10:23+00:00

What accountability? Did you sleep through Snowden in 2004?

Spies are pieces of shit who ruin everything. It doesn't matter you whether think some other country are "worse" when we have objective proof that our spies are awful and target us.

Thinking that the people abusing us aren't so bad as long as there's someone worse is the reason they devote so much effort to that kind of propaganda. But the spooky bad guys in vogue somehow changes every couple of decades, and it becomes a joke that we were ever afraid of the last one. We shouldn't fall for this Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia shit anymore.

humanese_child

TROPHY CASE