AreaSIX

Former military person, fear mongers about magic evil of TikTok tech mining everything and sending it to the scary Chinese, says that FB does the same but also claims that somehow “we at least can keep tabs on what they’re doing with your private data” (lol), while also admitting to still being on FB and using Google’s services. Not at all suspicious and incoherent I’d say.

We discovered that the app embedded itself deep in your phone’s hardware, granted itself full administrative access to your phone, then started trickling all your data to servers in China

Ok bud, that doesn’t sound stupid AF at all. This random military IT sysadmin knows this but all other cyber security experts in the world have somehow missed this crucial bit of info. And for some reason, this info hasn’t travelled up the chain through the intelligence agencies. Remarkable.

Mentioning Tiananmen Square, an example of internal repression with a couple of hundreds to a couple of thousands estimated fatalities, in the same sentence as two cases of near complete genocides of other ethnicities is wild. Do you not see how distorted that is as a comparison? In that comparison, you’re either trying to minimize the genocides of the Nazis, the Americans and the Turks, or raise the level of a case of internal repression with limited casualties to be comparable to massive historical crimes against humanity. Neither makes you look great.

Kind of reminds me of this beautiful poem:

"…And I will leave. but the birds will stay, singing:

and my garden will stay, with its green tree,

and its white water well…

Many afternoons the skies will be calm and blue,

and the bells in the belfry will chime,

like they’re chiming this very afternoon.

The people who have loved me will die,

and the town will burst anew every year.

And in the corner of my green, flowering whitewashed garden,

my spirit will wander nostalgic from tree to well.

And I will leave,

and I’ll be lonely, without a home,

without a green tree, without a white water well,

without calm and blue skies…

And the birds will stay, singing."

-“El viaje definitivo”, Juan Ramón Jiménez

Going through the comments, it’s mostly Trump being an agent of China, of the Saudis, the Israelis, and mostly a Russian agent.

I unfortunately don’t think there’s a way out of this for the US population unless people start to accept that Trump is a very distinctly American character, the culmination of what the right wing in the US has been working towards forever. And that the problem the US has is an internal one. Trump is an inevitable consequence of the US political environment, and he or someone like him would’ve come to power sooner or later, even if Russia didn’t exist as an external factor. Unless people accept that, I don’t think there’s any coming back from this for the US population. It’s just going to get worse. And it unfortunately will also bring chunks of the rest of World down with it in the process.

Go through a list of the biggest festivals worldwide and check out all artists in their line up each year. The best festivals tend to have a solid and varied list of artists with current releases worth checking out. If you’re into a particular genre, there are reputable festivals for specific genres to check out.

But don’t forget that a lot of music is not new but new to you. I listen to a lot of stuff that’s new to me, but very little of it has been released more recently than the early eighties :⁠-⁠)