Parents: please talk to your children about lean manufacturing before it is too late.

(Reading work email...) What the fuck is a Gemba Walk?

And with that, I return to Children of Dune. :theory_gary:

There are plenty of lessons to learn. Propaganda tactics on social media have become a lot more advanced over the past 10 years. But this shit - this shit is baby-brained. It is like people became aware of media literacy as a concept, but only on an extremely superficial level.

People pretend their political adversaries are fake. It is a convenient and self-reassuring story. That we can blow up a server farm somewhere on the other side of the world and all of our enemies will evaporate like the White Walkers after killing the Ice King. And then after that, everything will go back to the Obama years.

At the very least, we should be considering things in terms of The Propaganda Model described by Herman and Chomsky. That the main source of misinformation is not some Death Star we can send Luke Skywalker to blow up for us, but is actually the deeply embedded corporate interests which make up the skeleton and musculature of our entire system of government. The ones who pick our political candidates, who write our laws, write grants for our cops and counterinsurgency training centers, build our propaganda organs, and use them promote stories to justify them.

Another thing the Russian Bots narrative smuggles in is a paralyzing institutional epistemology.

Like the poor smol bean social media behemoths, we are supposed to look at our shameless hyper-consolidated for-profit warmongering media racket as the plucky Woodwards & Bernsteins, tasked with the social responsibility of bringing the regime to justice (conveniently, all we must do is observe from the sidelines and share links to their articles on social media). It is the story of David and Goliath, where the David in question is David Ellison.

We are told there is a "firehose of falsehood," and the only way to combat falsehood is to dutifully read the truth. Where do you read the truth? Well, the New York Times and the Washington Post, of course! The truth is tautologically uncontroversial, undisruptive. If it is printed under those august mastheads, it is true. The further away you get from their good graces, the less sure you can be. Better not risk it!

Elite journalism is a country club, and the thankless work of the muckrakers and skeptics rarely graces their pages. Under institutional epistemology, the whole tumor of critical journalism is cleanly excised. Likewise, anybody who actually gives a damn about concepts like justice or democracy can be omitted from the discussion, due to their prejudices in favor of justice.

This whole Russian Bots narrative is really tiring. It has been ten fucking years of this shit. It is a pervasive story because it is an incredibly useful propaganda tactic in deflecting blame from anybody in power who can actually be held accountable.

As Liberalism deteriorates under the weight of its contradictions (namely, trying to reconcile Capitalism with Democracy), all of our sins can be conveniently shunted to an external enemy. We can keep telling ourselves the lie that our system is fundamentally just, only we keep getting bamboozled by a foreign enemy.

Rather than confront the antisocial unity of the Republicans, Democrats, corporate media, finance capitalism, and rent-seeking monopolies, we are conditioned instead to circle our wagons around them. We are supposed to believe that this unholy alliance is actually democracy manifest, and that it is actually very fragile. That it is dangling by a thread, and how sorely we'll miss it when it's gone.

This facile mode of media analysis completely lacks any power analysis. We are to believe that the world's most valuable social media properties are powerless in the face of common cyber-criminals. As a countermeasure, we not only accept, but welcome increased surveillance and censorship, to the most privacy invading companies in the world, to make sure the people spreading the wrong politics can be swiftly eliminated from the body politic.

This is awfully convenient for the powers-that-be. Also, pay no mind to the fact that these platforms are an overflowing dumpster of reactionary sludge, despite all of this increased surveillance. It has literally never been worse.

This isn't the work of a foreign bot farm. This is the deliberate design of capitalist social media platforms. Bots - to the extent they factor into the equation - are only a drop in the bucket. A bug's corpse on the windshield of a home-grown propaganda machine which is driving straight towards fascism.

Without a People's Army, the people have nothing

If you are going to cry on TV about the loss of Charlie Kirk while paying no mind to the homeless being crushed to death in their tents by bulldozers, or the Venezuelan fishermen being vaporized by UAVs as a negotiation tactic, I don't think you take the issue of violence seriously at all. You are not shocked by the violence, only by the fact that it is finally beginning to spill outside the acceptable boundaries of the lumpenproletariat.

You betray your allegiance when you wring your hands about the lawlessness of the oppressed in such a profoundly lawless state.

If you truly believe that violence has no place in America, you must support the abolition of the United States.

Regarding Jimmy Kimmel, it seems awfully late in the game to be saying shit like "Violence has no place in America." I know Liberals love to pretend that the violence of the state is just an Act of God. Something that comes from nowhere and which nobody bears responsibility for. But that fantasy is wearing awfully thin after two years of live-streamed genocide and the intense retaliation against anyone who opposes it.

I have a mental picture in the grotesque style of an Eli Valley illustration of a slave-driver on horseback holding a whip and saying "Violence has no place in America."

Violence is the only reliable function of this decrepit state. It is the glue holding everything together.

Lean Manufacturing is a production methodology in which the operator rests ("leans") their ass or backside against the machinery at an incline (in addition to posting).

A lot of people seem to be confused here. This is not Trump's war. This is not happening because of incompetent leadership, sleazy corruption, or any kind of stupidity. This isn't happening because the poor old US bumbled it's way into another disaster.

This is the CONSENSUS across the entire political apparatus, Democrats and Republicans. This is the consensus of the entire US media apparatus. This is IMPERIALISM, the highest stage of Capitalism.

In moments like this, when the interests of the empire are on the line, you watch ALL of the dominoes fall. The noble "fourth estate" absolutely frothing at the mouth, salivating over the idea of bombing civilian nuclear infrastructure to turn the world's eyes away from the unlimited genocide they have been pursuing for 600 days. The most "left wing" politicians in our country mincing their hands NOT BECAUSE WE INITIATED AN UNPROVOKED WAR, but because the President didn't ask Congress first.

Harden your hearts folks. We have no allies in these bourgeois institutions.

Look. You might not remember this, but abolition was a big issue in 2020. It was the cornerstone of the largest public mobilization in this country's history. And what did the Democrats do when they returned to power? Nothing. They increased budgets for the police and border patrol. They continued building the cop cities. And then they ran for reelection on the pretense that they were the more competent border fascists.

The liberals have completely abandoned these people. They literally have no choice but to take community defense into their own hands, because nobody else is going to do it. It isn't a fucking campaign rally. They aren't doing this to make YOU feel good about yourself.

The liberals clutching their pearls about nonviolence, about "optics," about people not waving enough US flags at the *police riots* have no clue how DEEP they are in the back seat of history. They might as well be zip-tied in the trunk of history. They have never been less relevant.

"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding" - They Might Be Giants

screenshots of many racist comments

To be clear, I'm talking about Tim Walz.

Everybody is acting like this guy didn't mobilize the national guard and place Minneapolis under martial law four years ago.

I dislike how the media finally took a liking to the term "Blue MAGA" as a stand-in for Biden "cultists." The farce at the core of MAGA is the belief that we can turn back time, reverse entropy, and return to a golden age age when America wasn't woke and you could pay for medical school by mowing lawns. This was mirrored deeply in the psyche of post-Trump Liberals, who wished we could turn back time, reverse entropy, and return to a golden age when 'politics' was fundamentally about compromise, and our institutions dutifully and nobly carried out the missions stated in their charters.

The core, common critique here is that both are deeply nostalgic for an age which never existed. In their hands they hold a pile of ashes, and they are convinced that, with the grace of God, they can turn it back into a tree. And they keep getting upset when people try to tell them those ashes came from a garbage incinerator.