It's also inherently fash, as the reason "boat people" is used is to evoke the image of a bunch of grateful petitioning colonialist subjects begging for protection from a native government, when really there were substantial class differences in the different groups who left Vietnam after the U.S. lost. Saigon's comprador class were not among those held for years in U.S.-funded concentration camps in Bataan. The same brand of propaganda was used to establish and maintain the white supremacist state of Rhodesia in Africa at around the same time, and it's still used today in propaganda against land reform.
The "boat people" narrative also bears the usual hallmark of Nazi-inspired anti-Communist propaganda: empirically impossible death figures pseudo-patterned after the realities of the Nazi Holocaust, with the implicit function of rehabilitating fascism. Between a hundred thousand and a half-million people are supposed to have drowned at sea fleeing the Red Menace according to Western scholars, as though the U.S. could lose track of enough people in the south unnoticed to make a range that wide feasible, especially after a decade of U.S. puppet rule of RVN that involved mass concentration of the population into "fortified hamlets".
Overall, you can see the intended trajectory of the story. The Holocaust, the Phoenix Program, etc., were discrete events because they were acts of genocide carried out as unified state policy. "Boat people" refers to nothing of the sort, but if it's packaged the same way, it can be used to turn the truth about Nazis into a lie about Communists.
This is of specific interest to me because of the way that sedevacantist-friendly, fascist elements of the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the U.S. and Southeast Asia exploited the Hoa for propaganda purposes. Petrol has some good posts about this stuff in the KKKonspiracy thread iirc.
personal ideological/spiritual confusion aside i think i'm really, really going to Clown Canon College! had a visit today, gonna stay for dinner and seminarrr, should get crackin on the application bc rn is rolling admissions. feels like the positives outweigh the negatives...
my mom is apparently really proud that i'm finally doing this, couldn't even do my reflexive 'jokey' self doubting "oh you shouldn't be" bullshit (which i realise now is probably pretty hurtful?), just the tone of her voice and body lanugage. she really means it,
love u rhizzone. wen day is dark always rember happy day
jansenist_drugstore posted:recently started hanging out with someone i met here. we got really drunk last night which was cool. toward the end of the night, he suddenly stood up from the table, suspiciously turned around once (we were in my house) and unironically said: i might be wrong, but i think i know you well enough by now to ask this. what do you think about 9/11?
i thought we agreed we wouldn't post about the chemtrails. wow. don't meet this guy
ialdabaoth posted:instead of logging onto the internet, try lifeing onto the outernet
During the Matthew Shepard case, Westboro Baptist Church’s Web site had a little audio plugin, and when you pressed the play button, it started this short clip that was supposed to be Matthew Shepard screaming as he burned in Hell. The guy pretending to be Shepard finished up by shouting “Listen to Phelps!”, which came across like those commercials where someone goes to Heaven and everyone there is eating the new Velveeta dip.
colddays posted:I bought some snorkeling gear from a local shop. The owner's a nice guy, highly experienced with all the gear he sells, and extremely helpful to people like me who have no experience at all. Part of his store is dedicated to selling American libertarian literature mostly centered around the "John Birch Society". He's got a big banner advocating for the US to leave the United Nations in the parking lot, and that poster that's like "Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all agree that gun control works". I overheard him slip some kind of point about "socialized medicine" into a phone conversation about scheduling scuba classes while I was trying out some masks. As I was checking out, he called taxes "the cost of socialism". It's like I met Dale Gribble irl.
Dale helped native americans get their rights recognized, he's probably a left libertarian. Regardless of his sins don't compare dale to libertarian child fuckers.
Populares posted:colddays posted:
I bought some snorkeling gear from a local shop. The owner's a nice guy, highly experienced with all the gear he sells, and extremely helpful to people like me who have no experience at all. Part of his store is dedicated to selling American libertarian literature mostly centered around the "John Birch Society". He's got a big banner advocating for the US to leave the United Nations in the parking lot, and that poster that's like "Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all agree that gun control works". I overheard him slip some kind of point about "socialized medicine" into a phone conversation about scheduling scuba classes while I was trying out some masks. As I was checking out, he called taxes "the cost of socialism". It's like I met Dale Gribble irl.
Dale helped native americans get their rights recognized, he's probably a left libertarian. Regardless of his sins don't compare dale to libertarian child fuckers.
My apologies to Dale Gribble and his supporters
colddays posted:I bought some snorkeling gear from a local shop. The owner's a nice guy, highly experienced with all the gear he sells, and extremely helpful to people like me who have no experience at all. Part of his store is dedicated to selling American libertarian literature mostly centered around the "John Birch Society". He's got a big banner advocating for the US to leave the United Nations in the parking lot, and that poster that's like "Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all agree that gun control works". I overheard him slip some kind of point about "socialized medicine" into a phone conversation about scheduling scuba classes while I was trying out some masks. As I was checking out, he called taxes "the cost of socialism". It's like I met Dale Gribble irl.
People who are like Dale Gribble are 100x more interesting. You just met a Republican
colddays posted:My apologies to Dale Gribble and his supporters
Thank you.
red_dread posted:i'm working in an amazon warehouse and this is probably the first job i've had where i can describe the industrial organization as actively hostile.
i'm coming to the realization that automation is a comforting pipedream and this kind of modern corporate ladder-climbing + manchester capitalism kind of model is a lot more enticing for the remaining productive core industries. plus, the secondary tendency to decentralize and prop up increasingly casualized work with sleek user interfaces and software will probably absorb all the PR glamor that automation would have in its place.
littlegreenpills posted:i dont think automation will make much headway while wages remain so low
Yeah I agree. I only have anecdotes, but was watching a video about automation in the construction industry the other day showing these workers with their new brick-laying machine. But the machine requires workers to service it and keep filled with mortar, and workers still must physically wipe off the excess mortar after it lays a brick and clean everything up with hand tools. The process allows the bricks to be laid down faster but they were still employing the same number of people more or less.
Or, like, touch screens at fast food restaurants. It speeds things up but the most successful firms around here are still employing a lot of workers. I want to take the rhizzone on a tour of Buc-ee's which has a small army of workers; something like 200+ in a single location with the business being just basically gas + food + knick knacks. But they have touch screens if you want to order a sandwich. Automation? Pfeh! It's like fuel and road snacks from a place operating at a super-sized, industrial scale. That is our future, I claim.
There was a pretty good demo, at least in relative terms. I heard some Brazilian expats had made a showing earlier in the morning but were pretty small in number.
Molly Ivins wrote an accurate thing about Dallas in 1987: "There is a black Dallas, there is a Chicano Dallas, there is a Vietnamese Dallas, there is a gay Dallas, there is even a funky-Bohemian Dallas. But mostly there is North Dallas, a place so materialistic and Republican it makes your teeth hurt to contemplate it ... The colorful native costume includes Izod shirts and tassle loafers, and the native food is pasta salad. In North Dallas they hold mustard tastings and play polo. Dallas women dress to the teeth. It is the make-up capital of the universe." I should note that the university in North Dallas was given the NCAA "death penalty" for systematic corruption involving its football program back in the 1980s. The fans used to chant "our maids went to UT" during rival games.
Also: "You need a Benz, you gotta have a Merc, it's gotta be silver-gray."
It was largely uneventful, but I did see one of these extremely smug and arrogant North Dallas hedge fund guys absolutely lose his shit when he tried to drive his car (yes, a silver Mercedes) through the main entrance before hitting a wall of cops. Verbatim quote (in an aggrieved, outraged tone) to the police: "I don't care if the president of Brazil is in there or not -- I work here!" He was then heckled by the protesters and yelled something back like "oh go do something else!" As he tried to reverse his ass out of there, the protesters started chanting "eat the rich" and he kind of hesitated, like he wanted to say something, but then drove off in a hurry. I wouldn't say "in a panic" but he definitely made his escape in a jiffy. I even saw one of the cops break character and laugh. The situation was just ludicrous. This might not be especially interesting but I thought it was pretty funny.
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I also recently spent an hour in Las Colinas, which is a master-planned business / residential / recreation complex a.k.a. "modern experience" and developed by a cattle-ranching millionaire and originally called El Ranchito de Las Colinas. I found the whole thing to be pretty bizarre because the developers built a bunch of 1980s-style RoboCop office buildings and added a light rail system connecting it all (ridership: around 400 per day, I was told). But when the savings and loan crisis hit in the late '80s, the recession collapsed real-estate values in the state, so the development was never completed.
Fast forward decades later and development has resumed, however, because of cheap liquidity being pumped into the financial system since the 2007-2008 crisis ending up in real estate. The effect here is developers building apartment complexes inside El Ranchito done in a kind of vaguely "contemporary," vaguely Spanish Revival style mixed in with the RoboCop stuff. Pretty weird place to visit although I liked riding around in the little car and talking to the operator, who was very friendly.
Edited by trakfactri ()
trakfactri posted:Pfeh!
trakfactri posted:Or, like, touch screens at fast food restaurants. It speeds things up but the most successful firms around here are still employing a lot of workers. I want to take the rhizzone on a tour of Buc-ee's which has a small army of workers; something like 200+ in a single location with the business being just basically gas + food + knick knacks. But they have touch screens if you want to order a sandwich. Automation? Pfeh! It's like fuel and road snacks from a place operating at a super-sized, industrial scale. That is our future, I claim.
Touch screen tech for ordering food has been widely available since the mid oughts but the idea of giving it to customers became more prevalent with most people now having been trained to use a smartphone. As to convenience stores being a replacement model for brand dining, it's like you've accepted people will eat machine paste over blaming an employee who served you questionable food.
Parenti posted:received a package in the mail from fascist occupied ukraine with this in it, still figuring out how to hang it on my wall
Nice setup. Single bed?
jansenist_drugstore posted:going on an airplane ride tomorrow. special ordered the 'bland meal' just for fun
i've wanted to do this but i have no faith in my ability to not crack up as soon as the flight attendant came over to say "sir, you ordered the bland meal?" pls report back. i like to imagine it's accidentally tasty