The main motivation for Brexit was racism and xenophobia (hidden behind an embarrassingly thin veil of brain dead financial promises). Now that the british people see that Brexit negatively impacts their own financial situation they want to have their cake and eat it too. Back to EU benefits, while continuing the racist policies.

I’d love for you to be right. I just see this whole thing more cynical. To me the economic arguments were always just a fig leaf so that people who weren’t open racists could hide their shameful views on migration behind it. I’m not talking about the people in Belfast trying to light houses of migrants on fire. Those assholes are out in the open racists. I’m talking about your uncle or colleague who openly has “respectable” conservative views and mostly seems alright but when he’s with his buddy’s having a pint is showing his less palatable ideas.

There is another way of looking at this. People really believed those economic arguments and voted for that. If that’s true they are dumber than a sack of rocks. Idk what is better.

Just finished this:

People say that writing an anti-war war story is impossible. Even if the patriotism, the institutions, the politics and the propaganda are all revealed to be hollow  excuses to justify sending another generation to their doom, the camaraderie, the sacrifices and heroic deeds of the individual soldiers will make war look glorious. Many have tried to avoid this trap; most have failed. William March’s Company K succeeds in this goal, but at a high price. There are two main techniques that are instrumental for this: First and foremost is the structure of the text. The book is a collection of 113 short vignettes, each one about a soldier of the company. This results in the reader never getting attached to any particular person, since we never have time for that attachment to form. But this also kills any semblance of an objective for the narrative and therefore the tension. Joseph Heller‘s Catch22 has a similar episodic structure, but we stay with Yossarian and his companions for a long time. The objective is clear: Survival. This allows for the narrative to develop stakes and tension. Will they survive? Who will die? In Company K we follow the collective, but a company can’t die, and we already know how the war ended. So there isn't really any objective.  There aren’t any stakes and neither is there tension whether the objective will be achieved or not. 

March's second method of achieving the anti-war war story is the tone of the story. It's remarkably bleak, even amongst its peers. The "good guys" do terrible things and commit horrible crimes, justified only by hollow propaganda that is also portrayed as such. Even the humor is black as night. This makes for a quite depressing reading experience. 

In summary: this might be one of the best tries at achieving the anti-war war story, but it definitely isn’t the most readable try.

Man sagt, es sei fast unmöglich, eine Anti-Kriegs-Kriegsgeschichte zu schreiben. Selbst wenn der Patriotismus, die Institutionen, die Politik und die Propaganda als hohle Vorwände dargestellt werden, um die Vernichtung einer weiteren Generation zu rechtfertigen, lassen die Kameradschaft, die Opfer und die Heldentaten der einzelnen Soldaten den Krieg doch in einem glorreichen Licht erscheinen. Viele haben versucht, dieser Falle zu entgehen; die meisten sind gescheitert. 

William Marchs „Company K“ erreicht dieses Ziel, allerdings um einen hohen Preis. Dabei spielen vor allem zwei Techniken eine entscheidende Rolle: An erster Stelle steht die Struktur des Textes. Das Buch ist eine Sammlung von 113 kurzen Vignetten, von denen jede von einem Soldaten der Kompanie handelt. Das führt dazu, dass der Leser zu keiner bestimmten Person eine Bindung aufbaut, da wir nie Zeit haben, diese Bindung entstehen zu lassen. Doch dadurch geht auch jeder Anschein eines Ziels für die Erzählung und damit die Spannung verloren. Joseph Hellers „Catch-22“ hat eine ähnliche episodische Struktur, aber wir bleiben lange Zeit bei Yossarian und seinen Gefährten. Das Ziel ist klar: Überleben. Dadurch kann die Erzählung Einsätze und Spannung aufbauen. Werden sie überleben? Wer wird sterben? In „Company K“ folgen wir der Gruppe, aber eine Kompanie kann nicht sterben, und wir wissen bereits, wie der Krieg endete. Es gibt also eigentlich kein Ziel. Es gibt keine Einsätze und auch keine Spannung darüber, ob das Ziel erreicht wird oder nicht. 

Marchs zweite Methode, eine Anti-Kriegs-Kriegsgeschichte zu schaffen, ist der Ton der Erzählung. Er ist selbst im Vergleich zu ähnlichen Werken bemerkenswert düster. Die „Guten“ tun schreckliche Dinge und begehen grauenhafte Verbrechen, die nur durch hohle Propaganda gerechtfertigt werden, die auch als solche dargestellt wird. Selbst der Humor ist schwarz wie die Nacht. Das sorgt für ein ziemlich deprimierendes Leseerlebnis. 

Zusammenfassend lässt sich sagen: Dies mag einer der besten Versuche sein, eine Anti-Kriegs-Kriegsgeschichte zu schaffen, aber es ist definitiv nicht der lesbarste Versuch.

Deine Theorie mit der Perspektive der Bevölkerung ist auf jeden Fall auch ein gutes Beispiel. Mir fällt spontan am prominentesten Iseo Takahatas Film „Die letzten Glühwürmchen“ (bekannter auf Englisch als Grave of the Fireflies) ein.

Für mich fällt auch viel Deutsche Trümmerliteratur in diese Kategorie. Borcherts Kurzgeschichte „Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch“ wäre ein Beispiel was viele in der Schule gelesen haben dürften. Borchert ist generell ein sehr guter Kandidat was Anti-Kriegs-Kriegsgeschichten angeht, weil er oft nicht über den Krieg an sich, sondern die Zeit danach schreibt. Allerdings muss man auch sagen, dass Trümmerliteratur etc. streng genommen eigentlich keine Kriegsgeschichten sind, sondern Geschichten über die Folgen.

Working for Boeings PR department must be absolute madness right now… imagine having to somehow excuse all those fuck ups and every week there is a new one

Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.

And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…

I know, but no one cares who’s responsible at the moment. What people care about is that they read a new article about Boeings planes endangering passengers every 3 days. So while Delta is most likely at fault, Boeing is gonna take the hit to the company image. That’s why I was specifically speaking about the Boeing PR team. Those guys and the crisis managers won’t be able to catch a break for a loooong time.

I feel like the original quote applies here pretty well, no real need to change it…

War is peace

Freedom is slavery

Ignorance is strength

Don’t get me wrong, fuck Jeff Bezos’ pampered ass. But growing a giant dystopian mega corp out of 250k is kind of impressive.

I know quite a few privileged people with more money than that and every chance in life one could hope for. None of them would be able to achieve anything close to what he did. They simply aren’t ruthless and megalomaniacal enough.

Interesting to read this in the telegraph. If I recall correctly they were pro leave during the campaign leading up to the referendum.

Short answer: yes!

This is all new to me and fascinating. If someone knows more, please correct me.

The way I understand it the system relies on students swearing on their honor not to cheat and then a system of self supervision (aka snitching). There is an honor committee that consists of students who make sure no one cheats, and who investigate cases where it is suspected. Additionally there seems to be a culture of snitching on each other, should anybody break code.

I guess this presupposes a culture of immens pressure and a zero sum game where collaboration between students is unthinkable because your peers are made out to be your direct competitors… sounds toxic as hell to me.

Yo I sympathise with the sentiment and it is really fucked that there is so little done about that stuff.

But, and I don’t mean this as an attack, you sound like you could use a news break for a while and maybe talk to someone in person. Sitting in bed at noon crying is definitely a sign of stuff being a bit out of balance and sometimes shit just gets too much to handle on your own in our time of flooding the zone with shit and hypernormalisation…

Man is almost 70 and still jogging and shooting homeless people while filming it! Must have been a wild life.

Yes. As was nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eradicating fascism is a noble goal, but it’s still valid to criticise individual atrocities that people perpetrated to reach that goal.

You misread. They got scammed into paying 10$ shipping for a supposedly free product that will never arrive.

Prinzipiell hast du recht, Manipulation durch Gruppen wäre hier leichter möglich. Auch Posts von einer Person mit mehreren Accounts sind ein Problem.

Aber ehrlich gesagt glaube ich Lemmy ist einfach insgesamt sehr links, weil sich hier viele Leute sammeln die keinen Bock auf kommerzielle Social Media Seiten haben.

Viele der User hier sind in dem Glauben dass Kapitalismus ihre Lieblings-Socialmediaseite zerstört hat oder sind von Anfang an deswegen nie Teil der großen Netzwerke geworden.

Wenn sie jetzt hier Posts von rechts lesen kommt natürlich die Angst hoch dass es hier auch irgendwann so kommt, weshalb rechte Posts viele downvotes kassieren.

Kurz und knapp: auf einer Seite mit linken Usern braucht man sich nicht wundern wenn linke Themen beliebter sind als rechte.

That helmet looks like my man is carrying one of these knives to battle:

It‘s not one singular factor, like education or better mental health care or the group of people who own them. Sure, those are all important, but they only in part tackle the main underlying issue why people do these things. Young men (and nearly all mass shooters are young men) in american society are told that they are supposed to be achievers, they are supposed to get rich, be cool, have many friends, get a girl, get a house, get a fancy car and all the other status symbols. But most of them don’t see a way of achieving this, since it’s pretty unrealistic with how things are in capitalism. This tension between the life they want and some think deserve, and the life they actually lead is pretty tough to handle.

Most adjust their goals, or get into political activism, or hustle culture, or drugs or do whatever else to get over this perception of a stolen future. But a tiny group can’t get over it and they are angry at society for taking what they think is their rightful life from them. They usually find other people with similar resentments online, radicalise further, and at the end you have a tragedy. Guns aren’t even necessary, they just make it easier to hurt a lot of people in a short time span.

Now Switzerland isn’t socialist heaven, but there is in general a higher standard of living, better education, better mental health care and less demands for young men to become as rich as possible. There are also more strict checks when issuing guns than there are in some us states and strict rules about storage. So a 17 years old will be less likely to develop the toxic ideology needed to want to do something like a mass shooting, have a better safety net to deradicalise him and have a harder time getting the needed equipment.

This is obviously generalising a lot, so don’t take it as a universal answer, because there isn’t.

Kann man sich da irgendwo beschweren oder muss ich meinen Unmut in die unendlichen Weiten des Internets schreien? Was für eine schwachsinnige Wahl…