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Local Level Fuckery and Corruption sh.itjust.works

Heritage Foundation Crazy Board sh.itjust.works

Workout Music sh.itjust.works

Basic Glitch @sh.itjust.works 4d ago

The prosthetic allowed her jaw to move again, but probably with a lot of pain, the researchers noted. Needless to say, that likely curtailed the woman’s contributions to her community, which arguably made her a burden in the already harsh conditions the Pazyryk had to weather. Yet, the archaeological record clearly demonstrates she was properly treated and later buried in a proper coffin of wood—a valuable resource for the region.

“We don’t know what her personal value to society consisted of,” Polosmak mused. “In this society, everyone was valued in life simply for their existence and honored after death."

Hard to imagine a society where life was so respected, all available resources were generously provided in an attempt to restore somebody's health, regardless of what they could do in return for those resources. Must have been nice.

5d ago

Footage Contradicts DHS Claim That It Dropped Blind Rohingya Refugee at 'Safe Location' in Buffalo

•Since 1975, nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Basic Glitch @sh.itjust.works 5d ago

I've spent a lot of time researching and asking that same question, and I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of the answer: Corporate propaganda created in direct response to the civil rights movement which portrayed corporations as the victims of democracy, in order to frame their future attacks on democracy as defensive and justified actions.

SCOTUS deciding faceless and unaccountable corporations were people via Citizens United then helped turbo charge that shit into the dystopia we see before us today.

•Perhaps the most important influence on the Koch brothers and their political activities has been a confidential memorandum submitted to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Lewis F. Powell Jr. in 1971, before he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the memo presents the argument that a minority of college and university liberal faculty members and students, among others in society, were undermining the system of free enterprise. Supporters of free enterprise, Powell argued, must organize themselves to counter the influence of left-wing and liberal faculty members and students.

•The Heritage Foundation is a right-of-center policy think tank founded in 1973 that researches and recommends policies such as free markets, limited government, a strong national defense, and courts that adhere to the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. The idea conceived in 1971 was presented to Coors Brewing Company president and right-of-center donor Joseph Coors in 1972, and Coors wrote out a $250,000 donation as the seed money for what became the Heritage Foundation (nearly $1.6 million in 2021 dollars). Feulner later said, “There wouldn’t be a Heritage Foundation without Joe Coors.”

While Feulner was focused on economic conservativism, the co-creator of Heritage, (Paul Weyrich, architect of the new right who coined the term "Moral Majority"), was obsessed with social conservativism. Weyrich used a similar strategy to create the social movement that convinces poor people vote against their own interests, and hand control to corporations and elite pedophiles with the promise of an eventual return of American society to a utopia that never actually existed:

•The radical aims of the New Christian Right have been obscured by the way they cultivated a shared identity of victimhood and manipulated the discourse about backlash to create a nostalgic idea of the past that they then leveraged to justify their right-wing policy goals. The Catholic-Protestant alliance constructed an imagined past that they projected into the future as their ideal vision of society. Ebin calls this strategy “prefigurative traditionalism”—a paradoxical prefiguring of a manufactured past. Using this tactic, the New Christian Right coalition disguised the radicality of its politics by framing their aims as reactionary and defensive rather than proactive and offensive.

Even before the civil rights movement, it's important to remember that democracy in America has been under constant attack by Oligarchs since the very beginning.

•America's Unending Struggle Between Oligarchy and Democracy: This is the argument presented in Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, How the South Won the Civil War. Throughout American history, she contends, the forces of oligarchy and democracy have been involved in a mortal struggle for the nation’s future, and she wants to show how the visions of oligarchy have often won out—how, in other words, we got from the era of emancipation and Confederate defeat to the presidency of Donald Trump.

Those who have always relied on propaganda to distract from their own injustices by placing the blame for the problems they create, on people attempting to disturb what they view as a "natural order" that places them at the top of a heirarchy, resting on the shoulders of everyone else (mudsill theory).

•Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon. The term derives from a mudsill, the lowest threshold that supports the foundation for a building. Mudsill theory and similar rhetoric has been dubbed "the Marxism of the Master-Class" which fought for the rights of the propertied elite against what were perceived as threats from the abolitionists, lower classes and non-whites to gain higher standards of living.

When conservatives argue that the Constitution should be interpreted by its "original meaning," they are referring to an interpretation that favors this "natural heirarchy."

•Peter Thiel has been equally explicit. In a now-infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, he declared that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” But he’d made the point in far greater detail in an earlier essay on Strauss, in which he argued that elites must use “esoteric” doublespeak to hide their true intentions from the masses who wouldn’t and shouldn’t understand the plans their natural-born leaders were making for them.

6d ago

US, Israel launch attack on Iran, explosions across Tehran

Basic Glitch @sh.itjust.works 6d ago

Two old narcissistic bastards who will destroy the world in a desperate attempt to cling to power and avoid accountability for all their other crimes .

6d ago

Apologies if I'm making an incorrect judgement, but does anybody else get dystopian propaganda vibes from the Working with Cancer Pledge?

Ad giant Publicis Health agrees to $350M settlement over claims it helped fuel opioid crisis

Basic Glitch @sh.itjust.works 6d ago

I'm definitely not arguing that workplaces shouldn't be more understanding of chronic conditions. Legal protections exist for people with disabilities and chronic conditions for a reason, but even with these protections we should be doing more to legally protect people and their jobs.

However, getting people to sign this pledge doesn't seem to really accomplish anything other than serve as an advertising campaign for this movement and help spread misleading propaganda that working after being diagnosed with cancer is in the best interest of the individual battling cancer.

In reality, people battling cancer or any chronic illness seem to have better outcomes if they continue to have a sense of purpose during treatment, but a sense of purpose is not inherently tied to working or employment.

Given that this is an advertisement company with a documented history of peddling harmful corporate propaganda (fueling the opioid crisis, whitewashing detention centers for children) as well as a reputation for mistreating their own employees, this really comes off as typical (for them) predatory corporate propaganda aimed at normalizing people being pushed to continue working until their bodies physically can't keep going, and claiming that doing so is actually beneficial to their recovery.

Almost like they saw opportunity in the crisis of rising cancer rates, increased public policy aimed at government deregulation, and workplace protections being stripped away from many individuals? Which given their history, doesn't really seem implausible.

Interesting but definitely not unrelated sidenote: States like W.V. and KY were hit especially hard by the opioid epidemic much earlier than the rest of the U.S. because pharmaceutical companies targeted coal mining areas with similar propaganda, and this is the company that helped them do it. They knew people there commonly suffered debilitating back injuries while working in the mines, and peddled prescription opiates as a solution that would allow people to continue working pain free even after being injured.

"For a decade, Publicis helped opioid manufacturers like Purdue Pharma convince doctors to overprescribe opioids, directly fueling the opioid crisis and causing the devastation of communities nationwide," said New York Attorney General Letitia James. "No amount of money can compensate for lives lost and addiction suffered, but with this agreement, Publicis will cease their illegal behavior and pay $350 million to help our communities rebuild."

Opioids and Appalachia

When Purdue Pharma began marketing OxyContin to physicians in 1996, Appalachia was among the first regions that the company’s drug representatives visited — in part because its physicians tended to be frequent, high-volume prescribers of opioids. On any given day, Purdue had eight to 10 OxyContin sales representatives working in West Virginia. They “descended like locusts,” said one journalist, exceeding the deployment in similarly sized markets.

7d ago

Trump advisers ‘would prefer if Israel bombs Iran first as the politics are better’

Probably the first time Trump has ever said "You go first, I insist." in his entire life.

7d ago

What’s a conspiracy theory you no longer call a theory?

????

Not sure what you mean by crude? The first season is narrated by a soft spoken broadcast journalist, and the second is narrated by his wife who is the investigator of the cases.

The entire podcast is just interviews with various witnesses and survivors. It's sometimes disturbing because these are disturbing cases, but I'm not sure what could be considered crude about it?

7d ago

Nearly blind refugee found dead in New York days after immigration agents dropped him at a coffee shop alone, officials say | CNN

True but evidence seems to indicate they just murdered him by dropping a blind man off outside of a closed coffee shop without any shoes on right before a blizzard was going to hit.

Wouldn't be surprised if nobody actually paid his bond. Maybe they just needed to make sure the elderly blind refugee didn't speak out about being detained in a detention center for a year for no reason.

7d ago

Nearly blind refugee found dead in New York days after immigration agents dropped him at a coffee shop alone, officials say | CNN

I wouldn't do that to an animal, let alone another human being no matter how much they definitely deserve it.

Put them on trial for murder and let them spend the rest of their lives in gen pop where everybody knows who they are.

1w ago

Nearly blind refugee found dead in New York days after immigration agents dropped him at a coffee shop alone, officials say | CNN

“The Border Patrol officers had no protocol of what to do with a disabled man who doesn’t speak English, who is confused and lost. And you know what they did? They dropped him at a closed coffee shop. That’s why we do not cooperate with ICE, Homeland Security and Border Patrol,” Ryan said.

Fucking evil pieces of shit. Would not be surprised learn DHS's official stance is that having protocols in place to handle disabilities is "woke."

I'm over 1000 miles away, and even I knew NY was preparing for a catastrophic snow storm. Even border patrol can't be fucking stupid enough to believe this guy was going to just somehow find shelter or figure it out. They just had to release him that day? After holding him for a fucking year? Hard to believe they didn't intentionally murder this man.

Shah Alam, a refugee from Myanmar, had spent much of the previous year in custody awaiting trial on criminal charges that were ultimately resolved with a misdemeanor plea deal, Erie County District Attorney Michael J. Keane told CNN in a statement Thursday.

According to preliminary information, Shah Alam did not have shoes on, just orange booties from the detention center, when he was dropped off by agents, Ryan said.

Absolutely atrocious.

It’s unclear who posted bond for him or what changed to lead to his release.

It should be pretty fucking easy to figure out who posted it, or is all non surveillance record keeping "woke" too?

1w ago

Apologies if I'm making an incorrect judgement, but does anybody else get dystopian propaganda vibes from the Working with Cancer Pledge?

It seems that having a continued sense of purpose is helpful when it comes to suffering from any chronic illness.

It feels a bit disingenious to imply a sense of purpose has to be tied into your employment, and coming from an advertising agency with a shady history shifts it from disingenuous to dystopian.

I honestly enjoy my job sometimes, but it is very stressful and there have been many times (like right now) that I should have just taken paid leave that I have earned over the years and was entitled to take, but didn't. Even now I have to continue working for several complex reasons. Some of these reasons are just general long standing problems of the American work place, but many are hyper specific to America in 2025-2026 vs America in 2021-2024. One being the fact that if I just suddenly left in the middle of a project, it would place a financial burden and several downstream consequences on other people that could be catastrophic to them.

The stress of having to continue working while I should be on medical leave and avoiding stress, not only has taken an unnecessary toll on my health, it's made me really dread having to go to work. I've never been a gungho let me die for my employer type, but I've accepted the downsides to my current job because there are (or at least used to be) more positives than negatives, I'm good at it, and it's sometimes really interesting and exciting.

Being forced to continue to poorly perform a job i'm just physically not able to continue doing, at the moment, has made it a really miserable and stressful experience on top of the misery and stress of the chronic health issues that I have been trying to resolve.

I'm not even dealing with the burden of cancer, but if I was in my current situation while dealing with a cancer diagnosis, I would be even more outraged at the suggestion that channeling my resources and strength into forcing my body to continue going to work while it's under attack, instead of focusing on recovering and navigating the hellscape that is American healthcare, is somehow in my best interest. Frankly, it's insulting.

1w ago

What’s a conspiracy theory you no longer call a theory?

https://www.neworleansunsolved.com/

Listen to this podcast and let me know if you don't end up convinced Season 1 of True Detective was based on these crimes.

From the pedophile ring coming into town for Mardi Gras down to the mentally ill brother and sister who were products of inbreeding, and living in an abandoned plantation home with a cistern where victims were kept.

Warning it it covers extremely disturbing content and can be very difficult to listen to.

1w ago

NBC Interview abruptly ends after New Yorker blames private equity and landlords for the city's issues

This guy is my hero

1w ago

What’s a conspiracy theory you no longer call a theory?

Friendly Fascism is about the dangers of fascism, focusing primarily on the United States, but being aware that monopoly capitalism needs to be understood internationally since capitalism "is not a national mode of production".

it is now a mathematical certainty that they believe is already beyond their control.

Exactly, and this logic is at the heart of why they will always fail. Mathematical certainties are great predictors of a lot of things, including large scale human behavior. However, they're pretty notoriously shitty predictors of individual human behavior (spontaneity and the internal drive towards freedom), which then always carries with it a snowball effect.

rising fascism, a term coined by a man who said it might be more aptly named “corporatism” a system of governance where the wealthy corporatists control the government, and on their behalf, they control the population.

Also, is this from Friendly Fascism? If not, definitely another highly recommended book that seemed to predict much of America circa 2026 back in the 80s.

Even back then, the author saw the problems we would be facing but he also knew the obvious solution. It's exactly what the oligarchs fear most: regulations and consequences for corporations and reinforcing democracy to remove power from the faceless corporations run by oligarchs.

I don't disagree with you at all on how the elites view this. I also agree that society will definitely be shifting, but I don't believe that shift will be going according to their plan.

The internet is actually a perfect example of human spontaneity interfering with the intended outcomes of the elite. Even if you consider it a weakness of humanity and a technological tool meant to spy on people (which it definitely does quite successfully), it's also become a technological tool used by society to subvert authority and work together to find ways around the roadblocks authorities put up to control the masses.

The entire reason I'm talking to you on Lemmy is because I left Reddit. The elites buy up all forms of popular social media and communications with the belief that once they control a monopoly, people will have no other choice but to use whatever they offer (elimination of competition).

But this strategy also assumes all competition will be relying on the same incentives that drive their own decision making. However, if even a slightly better alternative becomes available, people will flock to it. That's how a free market is supposed to work, and how it would work if not for oligarchs. This is also why oligarchs hate competition and love heirarchies that protect their monopolies and oligopolies from competition.

Over time, the spontaneity of humans and their drive to be free, makes the technology the elite are dependent on for maintaining their control, essentially obsolete. They will then attempt to purchase and control whatever new technology has replaced the old technology (they're investors, not inventors) but the drive to be free will always lead to some other work around. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The elite's dependency on algorithms to predict human behavior is definitely useful for their own ends in terms of wealth hoarding, but eventually the one track mindedness of the elites traps them in their own endless cycle of digging a new hole to fill an old one. Without regulations and reform to rein them in, we're all stuck living in this endless cycle with them.

This is certainly unsustainable, but again, the blame for the unsustainability lies entirely with the paranoia and pathological drive of the elites who attempt to alleviate their own anxieties by trying to control everyone else.

Life really doesn't have to be this way, but oligarchs are so isolated from the rest of society, they believe this is normal. They're also narcissistic enough to believe that they were born with almost supernatural abilities and traits that destined them to rule over everyone else. Rather than viewing their own privileges and circumstances as providing them with an unbalanced advantage due to social inequality, they convince themselves it's evidence of genetic superiority.

The pathology that they view as a positive attribute, is essentially a form of self destruction. As long as society allows them to keep repeating the same (regulation and consequence free) behavior, they will eventually destroy the entire planet (including themselves) in their never ending cycle of digging new holes, rather than just taking a breath and giving therapy a go.

The genocide in Gaza is a great example of the intention of the oligarchs to control. They have successfully controlled the narrative for some time, and by buying up most major news outlets, they continue to have a very unbalanced advantage. However, even that control has begun to slip due to work arounds in communication, and push back from the masses.

No matter how many atrocities they commit, it never makes them look stronger, it just makes them look less human. They will eventually face backlash and a weakening of their grip on power because despite their alleged obsession with natural order, they fail to see that what they want to create is at odds with the nature of humanity.

They blame this backlash on democracy rather than a fault with themselves, because they're only capable of understanding internally motivated predictions, and completely incapable of any self reflection of their place within a larger world that they cannot control.

You should definitely check out Ellul's Technological Society if you get a chance. He actually touches on corporations too and Marx. Mainly in terms of Marx's predictions that automation of technology would be a helpful benefit to the working class. That wasn't necessarily an incorrect prediction, however, clearly when it's exploited by the wealthy and viewed as simply a replacement for workers, it just becomes a new hole.

1w ago

What’s a conspiracy theory you no longer call a theory?

•Although he officially sanctioned the operation, President Harry Truman forbade the agency from recruiting any Nazi members or active Nazi supporters. Nevertheless, officials within the JIOA and Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner to the CIA—bypassed this directive by eliminating or whitewashing incriminating evidence of possible war crimes from the scientists’ records, believing their intelligence to be crucial to the country’s postwar efforts.

International trafficking and pedophile rings existed long before Epstein ever became involved in the 80s, and it's very naive to believe it just suddenly ended when he was "suicided" in his jail cell. Many of the most infamous busts that occured before his involvement can actually be connected via archived news articles from the 1970s and 80s: Eye of the Chickenhawk (2023)
Conspiracies about the "dangers" of a "one world government"/U.N. new world order/Greta Thunberg is the "antichrist" have always mainly been fueled by propaganda campaigns of wealthy conservatives around the globe who want to destroy the existence of international law in order to avoid prosecution for their crimes.

•Oil drives our Israel policy: New government documents reveal a very different history of America and the Middle East

•People should be more aware’: the business dynasties who benefited from Nazis

•Dark Money review: Nazi oil, the Koch brothers and a rightwing revolution

•American Business Consultants Inc., the Wackenhut Corporation, and Karl Baarslag. All of these creators had connections to the intelligence agencies of the United States government, kept detailed research files on individuals and organizations, and were part of a right-wing research and information network that monitored Communists and other perceived threats to their interpretation of the American way of life

•TIL current ICE contractor GEO Group, was originally Wackenhut Corrections, owned by hard right warlord and government contractor, George Wackenhut, who claimed to hold largest collection of files on suspected American dissidents

•Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race

•Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show

(Also, there (/s)hockingly seems to be quite a lot of overlap with these wealthy conservatives who oppose regulations at home and abroad, and members of the international pedophile ring who view other human beings as disposable objects.)

1w ago

What’s a conspiracy theory you no longer call a theory?

the elites of the world know that eventually society as we know it will collapse.

I'm curious why you believe it has to collapse?

I agree that they are attempting to make it collapse by making things as unsustainable as possible, but if they weren't interfering with and manipulating society and hoarding resources for themselves, what is it that would be driving the collapse?

They remind me of any other doomsday cult that's ever existed before them, but they've been given way too much power and control. They're always so convinced that they have all the answers, but they've also got a really bad track record of proving themselves right. Especially when it comes to tech capabilities developing at the speed they believe they will.

There's this really interesting book called the Technological Society that was written in the 50s by a French philosopher and sociologist named Jaques Ellul, but predicted much of the present day broligarchy in a scarily accurate way.

A lot of people mistakenly believe the book is supposed to be a sort of Luddite argument opposed to technology, but it's really just a warning of the inherent danger of placing the importance of technology above the importance of humans, with Ellul warning that the never ending drive towards "efficiency" as a means to an end, inevitably creates more inefficiencies that then have to be solved with other more "efficient" solutions.

Basically, life becomes nothing but a never ending series of "digging a new hole to fill an old one." This seems to be the current driving factor of a society on the brink of collapse.

He even predicts the eventual creation of something like "benevolent" concentration camps where elites will attempt to forcefully create their own versions of a controlled utopia. Honestly seems to align pretty closely with current broligarchy philosophies like SBF's ideas about utilitarianism whether society likes it or not, or Peter Thiel and his delusional beliefs that he (along with people like Jeffrey Epstein) are part of some elite set of leaders burdened/chosen by God or nature to control and save the masses from their own lowly desires. Thiel: elites must use “esoteric” doublespeak to hide their true intentions from the masses who wouldn’t and shouldn’t understand the plans their natural-born leaders were making for them.

Ellul predicts that a society where technology winds up controlling humans rather than ensuring humans remain in control of technology, inevitably lead to a loss of freedom and creation of controlled utopian environments. However, he also believes that ultimately, any attempt that relies on technology to maintain and hold that control will always eventually fail. This is because technology relies on predetermined predictions and efficiency as an end while humans are driven by a sort of chaotic spontaneity and a desire to remain free.

Even if you successfully created a "utopian" concentration camp where you presumably meet the needs of everyone in the camp as efficiently as possible, you will never be able to fulfill the desires that are ultimately driving humans, or be able to predict the spontaneity of human behavior on an individual scale.

In other words, even if you can brainwash the masses into obedience, Ellul believes there is something uniquely human that will forever lead to individual rebellion against the controlled and automated system, which then has its own chain reaction on others due to other innately human characteristics still retained by the masses.

For example, empathy shared with other humans might lead to unpredictable behavior on a massive scale. (A concrete example of this would be something like witnessing the murder of innocent protestors. The murder is carried out and meant to instill fear in others, but instead backfires and it winds up just driving more individuals to become angry at the injustice they witnessed and join the rebellion).

While the elites often attack human traits like empathy as "toxic," and try to present it as a weakness, we also see over and over again that it appears to be one of the biggest thorns in their sides when it comes to predicting and controlling the masses.

1w ago

Trigger warning - This Epstein stuff is making me sick...