Yeah. People said 100% the same thing about Hitler. He was a clown, he was the weird guy that came to fundraisers and scarfed all the food because he didn’t have any money, and scared away donors and political allies because he would get in their face yelling about Jews. Until, all of a sudden, his big opponents got sent to the camps or just killed, and it wasn’t funny.

They’re doing a great job at following the playbook so far. People are upset but no one’s really done that much to stop them, which means it will continue and get worse.

Only works if you have a billion dollars though. If you do it on a big scale, they’re just going to Aaron Swartz you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK16HXxQTO4

“This has been today’s lesson in talking about politics on Lemmy”

That Cyndi Lauper version is a mindfuck.

Edit: They muted her for the part where she talked bad about religion…

For those who don’t know

Which is probably a lot, they didn’t give this song a lot of airtime. For some reason.

Mine made it I think to the 230s, the only thing that killed it was rust in the frame. And, I had multiple moves where the entire back section was packed up with 100% of the move in one trip. It was a good vehicle.

I got one from column A and I thought it was the best. It survived for roughly 20 years with sometimes some very poor maintenance and generally did a wonderful job with anything I asked it to do.

It’s a popular car even now, you can find ones for sale for $10k+ even though it was discontinued well over a decade ago. People like 'em. I get it if someone who got a broken one would not feel that way though.

Don’t ask me for consistency, it’s Sunday

The Element is smaller than an average car, lengthwise, and has more storage capacity with the seats out than most vehicles twice its size. Which is one among some different reasons why it’s the best.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+long+is+a+car says average 14.7 feet, 13.9 for compact cars or up to 15.7 for a full size car.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+long+is+a+honda+element says 169 inches, which is 14.1 feet

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+long+is+an+suv says typically 15 to 17 feet

I rest my case, I don’t care what the manufacturer says. The Element is a little container of wonders, it is no car and no SUV.

(I think “SUV” used to have a different meaning which probably applied pretty well to what the Element is, but in the modern day in common parlance it means a massive mini-truck with an enclosed back section which certainly does not apply here, that was more my point.)

An Element is not an SUV, it’s an absolutely wonderful car.

You broke the code, yes

You might be right. I feel like I saw it on Lemmy a couple of days ago and just absorbed it uncritically, and I cannot find it any other place now.

A check in which the airplane and engines are taken apart, typically carried out every six to 12 years, can take months to complete and cost millions of dollars

This is for a normal plane. Every Air Force 1 (there are a couple) gets fully taken apart and rebuilt about every 6 months. And, the process of vetting and rebuilding this new dingus to become capable to be Air Force 1 will probably cost around a billion dollars. “Millions of dollars” is just the tip suggestion they’ll see on the screen when they go to pay for the absolutely monstrous amount of money this will cost the United States.

Someone else said it I think better than I could: Colin Kaepernick’s protest was not political, it was ethical.

You and I can disagree about the precise definition of “political” and whether it includes non-partisan activism that is dealing with pure issues of right and wrong. It is fine either way, I was just saying how I see the definition. I led off though by identifying explicitly political actions which are not “political,” by the propaganda definition. Surely we can agree that the “political” definition that doesn’t include those things is a bunch of shit.

This is the perfect way to say it.

“Ethics” is the word I was looking for, for what people are now calling “politics.” It’s why people don’t like Star Wars, Sesame Street, or Mr. Rogers: Because they are ethical.

Yeah, what could go wrong if we let propaganda, wild misunderstandings and distortions of reality, start to impact the public consciousness and affect people’s decisions or voting decisions or whatever?

I literally can’t think of a single downside.

Yeah, I get that. I do think that the way this particular word features in one particular type of propaganda structure makes it worthwhile to call out at length and talk about.

If you went back to the 1970s and told people you thought Star Wars was a political movie, they would think something was really wrong with your thought process. The themes, characters, and the basic structure of the story (the Hero’s Journey / monomyth) was old when the Greeks invented democracy. It certainly predates anything we could call politics, it predates almost everything about us. It is probably one of humanity’s oldest inventions that’s still in common use.

Bob Dylan was always political, by the definition I would use, because he talked about issues of public policy and society in his songs. A New Hope was never political and still isn’t. If a person wants to define the new and more inclusive Star Wars, and Sesame Street, as “political,” then fine, although I will probably want to probe their definition and probably will try to make the case that the way they’re defining this neologism is part of a toxic propaganda structure they’ve unintentionally absorbed.

I don’t usually like to get into extensive wrangling about what words mean what things, but this one I do think is important because of how it features in a particular type of propaganda structure which is good to call out.