Always remember that the EU did a study in 2013 about the effects of piracy on media publishers and found that there is no correlation between piracy and sales! (And then they tried to hide that study bc that's not the result they wanted)
So piracy is at worst not even a problem, and at best it's free advertisement.
Source: (the link to the actual study is in the article)
In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU
tumblr I swear to god if your ads on mobile keep opening popup webpages because my FINGER touched them while I was SCROLLING because they are SO BIG that they FILL THE SCREEN AS I SCROLL PAST THEM I am going to MANIFEST SNAKES IN YOUR WALLS
if the PAGE-FILLING ADS on your INFINITE SCROLLING MOBILE APP register FINGER MOVEMENT as ANYTHING OTHER THAN SCROLLING I am LEGALLY PERMITTED to HUNT YOU for SPORT
NFB (National Film Board of Canada//ONF in french) is also a great place to find free documentaries + lots of animation movies. Their youtube channel is here but they also have a website thats wayyy easier to use. They even have an app!
Watch quality Canadian documentary, animation and fiction films online
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Yesterday, I attended a workshop on systems thinking and political change, which included a presentation on the work of Donella Meadows, whose Thinking in Systems is a canonical work on the subject:
"Systems thinking" is an analytical framework that treats the world as a mesh of interconnected, nonlinear components and relationships that can't be easily understood or steered. A complex system isn't merely "complicated." A mechanical watch is complicated, in that it has many parts that work together in ways that require training and specialized knowledge to understand. But it isn't "complex" because each part has a specific function that can be understood and adjusted.
In a complex system – say, an ecosystem – the parts are meshed in a web of unobvious relationships that make it difficult to predict what effect will follow from a given perturbation. When a blight kills off a plant species, the soil stability declines, resulting in landslides during the rainy season, changing the mineral content of nearby waterways, which creates microbial blooms or fish die-offs in a distant, downstream lake.
But systems thinking isn't a counsel of despair that insists that you shouldn't do anything because you can never predict what will come of your actions. In Thinking in Systems, Meadows presents a hierarchy of leverage points for changing a system, ranked from least effective ("Constants, numbers, parameters") to most ("The power to shift paradigms to deal with new challenges"):
In all, Meadows theorizes 12 different "places to intervene in a system." The least effective of these – constants like taxes and standards, negative and positive feedback loops – are the sites of most of our political fights, and rightly so. They are the fine-tuning knobs of the system that adjust its margins. Once you have the rule of law ("the rules of the system"), you can drive change by amending, repealing or passing a law:
But when you're confronted with a system that is significantly, persistently dysfunctional, you will likely have to work at sites that are further up the hierarchy, such as "the distribution of power over the rules of the system" or "the goals of the system"; or the most profound of all, "the paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises."
Thinking about paradigms is a form of "meta-cognition," which is to say, "thinking about how you think." Your paradigm encompasses all your assumptions, including your assumptions about how to proceed from your other assumptions: "if x, then y" is a paradigm.
The workshop where we were discussing all of this is part of a group whose goal is reversing the antidemocratic movement in our society and the climate emergency that is its backdrop. But as I listened to the speaker and the ensuing discussion, it occurred to me that Meadows' theoretical work was a very good way of describing the successes of the fascist movement in the UK and around the world.
Fascists like Farage and Trump are, at their root, anti-democratic. Their pitch is that the people are incapable of self-determination (as Peter Thiel puts it, "democracy is incompatible with freedom"). They want us to think that all our neighbors are irrational and foolish, and that we, too, are irrational and foolish, and that our safety and prosperity can only be safeguarded if we seek out those few people who are born to rule and liberate them from the petty niceties and regulations that democracy and the rule of law demand.
In other words, the paradigm of democracy is that all of us are capable of both wise self-governance and self-rationalized misgovernance, and each of us has a useful perspective to contribute. The fascist paradigm is that we can't be trusted to rule ourselves, and only the people who are born with "good blood" are capable of directing our lives:
This is the theory behind "race realism" and "human diversity" and all the other polite names the modern fascist uses to obscure the fact that they're reviving eugenics. It explains the panic over DEI, a panic driven by the belief that lesser people are being elevated to positions of rule and authority that they are genetically incapable of carrying out.
That's why, whenever a disaster arises, fascists demand to know the gender, race and sexual orientation of the pilot, the ship's captain, or the official in charge. If the person who crashed the cargo ship into the bridge has brown skin, we can add another line to the ledger of costs associated with the doomed project to put people who were born to be bossed around in the boss's seat (of course, if the pilot turns out to be a white guy, that proves nothing, except that mistakes sometimes happen).
The revival of fascism in this century has been scarily effective, and at times it can feel unstoppable. Meadows' work on systems thinking provides an explanation for that efficacy – and suggests a theory of change for dispatching fascism back to the graveyard of history. Fascists have made changes to things like laws and feedback loops, rules and distribution of power, but this all stems from a more profound alteration to the system, at the level of the paradigm.
Which suggests that the real fight we have is over that paradigm: we have to convince our neighbors that they are smart enough to rule themselves, and so are we, and so is everyone else. We have to convince them that even the smartest and wisest person (including us, including them) is capable of folly and needs to have checks on their (our) authority.
We need to attack the theory of the "unitary executive" and every other autocratic ideology head on. We have to insist that these aren't just unconstitutional, but that they are ideologically catastrophic. "No kings," because even an omnibenevolent king isn't omniscient, and that means that omnipotence is always omnidestructive in the long run.
The fascist revival has been scarily effective and resilient – and systems thinking offers an explanation for both that efficacy and that resiliency.
Which suggests that the real fight we have is over that paradigm: we have to convince our neighbors that they are smart enough to rule themselves, and so are we, and so is everyone else. We have to convince them that even the smartest and wisest person (including us, including them) is capable of folly and needs to have checks on their (our) authority.
I have said this for decades now, and I still stand by it:
The single greatest danger to freedom has always been the people who want to be led.
Without them, no soi-disant "leader" has any power at all.
For anybody not caught up: Tennessee just passed a new map that pretty much makes it so black neighborhoods have no power in local votes. Two things about this. While protestors were chanting "No Jim Crow", white Tennessee lawmakers were caught laughing on video. On top of this, Representative Justin Pearson and his brother KeShaun Pearson were arrested for trying to give their takes on the matter (which is not only their legal right but literally his job). If you give a shit about black people, help fight this. We can't allow a return to Jim Crow.
A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:
The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.
Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.
Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.
They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.
Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.
Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.
And stomps the ashes.
KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.
KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.
Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.
Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.
The city most affected by the redistricting is Memphis, where locals are fighting against xAI's data center, which has been operating with very little oversight and is poisoning the people who live there. Here is a previous post on that with more information and more sources.
Okay,I just want to share the super cool fucking site I found
Ever wanted to exercise more, but didn’t know how/didn’t have a plan/were overwhelmed by the insane number of choices online/no money?
Look at darebee. All of their workout plans are FREE, come with timers and checkboxes right on the page, and even better, ARE OFTEN RPG THEMED so you can fucking role play while you exercise wtff (and yes, the story and the workout changes with your choices)
They have programs for if you only want to do seated exercises, programs if you don’t want to get on the floor, and programs for ALL levels of fitness, including injury recovery.
Plus, if like me, you get anxious about making sure you’re doing it right, they have a full free library of videos for each exercise.
Germany is becoming increasingly more right wing and we should be worried.
Current ruling Party CDU is gutting the social safety nets, fighting against established worker rights as well as getting more right Wing and anti-immigrant.
Meanwhile the AFD, our far right party which has been investigated for being a threat to democracy, is massively gaining popularity. some articles are linked below. Everybody please get more vocal.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took office a year ago vowing to revive the political centre, but the far-right AfD party has risen to the
After some difficulty, Friedrich Merz has become Germany's new chancellor. His personal popularity is low. Most Germans don't trust him, not
The AfD came second in Germany's February elections and has a record number of seats in the new parliament.
sorry if there happens to be any devout yet ethical christians following me but i do think you should not be able to raise children as christians like legally
of course the real issue at hand is authoritarian parenting but i just think we shouldnt tell kids they are being constantly surveilled and judged and will be punished for mistakes. And Fuck Santa Too
CeCe Rogers on Facebook writes: "Two Black Tennessee lawmakers were physically escorted out of chambers this week while Republicans quietly held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the state's only majority-Black congressional district.
No referendum. No special election. No public vote.
Because they know what happens when voters actually get a say — just look at Virginia, where the people spoke so loudly that Republicans had to drag the courts in to override them.
This isn't new. During Reconstruction, Black Americans held more congressional seats than at any point in the prior 90 years of American history. And white supremacists spent the next several decades tearing that down, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, and voter intimidation.
150 years later, the same tools. Different suits.
The audacity of escorting Black lawmakers out of their own chambers while dismantling Black political representation, and then telling us the courts aren't political, is breathtaking. These are the same courts they're counting on to make it stick.
This is a coordinated, multi-front assault on Black Americans. And we need to say it exactly that plainly."
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