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From a 1940 collection of essays called Freedom: Its Meaning, here’s Bertrand Russell on how fascism begins:
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.
Tags: Bertrand Russell · politics
From Kyla Scanlon, a “brief comprehensive guide” about tariffs. “We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect; it protects the consumer very well against one thing. It protects the consumer against low prices. —Milton Friedman”
“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the gov’t because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Defector’s Sabrina Imbler is interviewing civil servants who have been fired/purged from their jobs at EPA, US Forest Service, USAID, NOAA, USDA, CDC, etc.
In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business:
I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around; now it’s coming back. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far-right in Europe, and his money comes from Tesla cars. Well, I’ve got this message for Mr Musk. We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
[This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2012.]
Tags: mesmerizing · Ralph Steiner · timeless posts · video
Some of the cardinals tasked with choosing a replacement for Pope Francis have watched the Hollywood movie Conclave in preparation for the real-life process. “So many of the conclave participants have little experience of Vatican politics and protocol.”
HuffPost gathered a diverse group of girls and women for this video on the sexist things that they hear throughout their lives that men don’t.
Don’t be so bossy. Why are you getting so emotional? You’d be much prettier if you smiled. I was just trying to give you a compliment.
See also 48 Things Men Hear In A Lifetime (That Are Bad For Everyone):
The invention of the transformer (and LLMs) has upended the field of natural language processing. John Pavlus interviewed NLP researchers about the breakthrough. “Look how absurd this is, but look how well it works.”
“When we think of love, we think of romance and happily-ever-after fairy tales. By telling this story, I want to invoke something different — the radical power of seeing, understanding, and showing up for another human.”
