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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • “You see,” my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

    "Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

    "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

    "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

    "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

    Copyright notice: Excerpt from pages 166-73 of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer



  • Who are “they” and who says that that is valid advice?

    “Separate the artist…” is fairly accepted by any decent people I know as a way for selfish people to forgive themselves the burden of minor personal sacrifices related to their own consumer activities. The long form is literally, “Yes, Michael Jackson did horrible things to that little boy’s butthole, Woody Allen molested his daughter and married his adopted child and Bill Cosby drugged and raped women for decades, but let’s go buy their movie/album!” - you likely wouldn’t say the long form through, would you? You would hide and obfuscate behind, “sepatate the artist…” So you don’t have to say the bad things out loud.

    Nobody with any integrity buys into “separate the artist…”

    Also, to your point about this post, again it’s a similarly lazy way to forgive yourself the burden of trying to stay aware of these things and making little changes to how you vote with your wallet. You can absolutely do something like go shop at Costco this week instead of target - as one performatively eliminated diversity programs at their company while one preserved them as a stand. That’s where your opinion falls apart because yes, you can likely find something to hate Costco as well (because they are all garbage companies, but there are shades, they aren’t all equal. You have to participate to function, but you can do the slightest amount of work to shop more consciously. But that is the work you are trying to forgive yourself of.

    The point isn’t perfection, but to do enough for this week and try again next week. Before you know it, you’re shopping more consciously wherever you go.





  • “I am the pupil of Meng Tian’s History. Further innovate and meaningful change.”

    Yes. Very “we” and very “us”, exact sentiment and phrase choices. It’s exactly like I’m speaking to an exact, accurate American person, just like me.

    Sorry to inform, but you’re not doing great at the whole undercover thing here… I hope your supervisor doesn’t review this specific thread to evaluate your ability. Not really hitting the mark here… fellow American, typing on a Canadian keyboard.

    With such accurate and compelling work though, you could probably write copy for product packaging in Chinese manufacturing facilities exporting low prices goods to the US? Or maybe you could design those t-shirts Chinese teens will wear with American phrases, that don’t quite pass the test - Further innovative!!!







  • Spreading for awareness, I’ve been posting this in relevant threads for a week - This is all theater.

    trump was always going to “save” tik tok after starting the initial push to ban it (for the wrong reasons) to pretend he did something for you. Worst part is that all of the no/low info voters and non voters will eat it up.

    It’s the equivalent of a person pushing you into the middle of the street and at the very last second, that same person tells the drivers to all stop. “Wow, I owe you my life!”

    And now, this adds two layers:

    1. You think trump and the Supreme Court are colluding? now they get to say, nah uh!!! Even though again, this is all convoluted.

    2. trump gets to look “stronger” than the “highest court in the land” to help delude the next generation of low info tiktok folks.

    P.s. The Chinese “protest” apps that were downloaded are going to mine the FUCK out of these millions of phones in the brief window they have them. Also, when the kids inevitably move back to tiktok, majority of them will still leave these other apps installed on their phones, dormant and collecting indefinitely in the background.