- cross-posted to:
- politics
- cross-posted to:
- politics
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, born on this day in 1918, was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary communist who served as President the African National Congress (ANC) from 1991 to 1997 and of South Africa itself from 1994 to 1999. He was the country's first black head of state and the first elected in an election in which South Africans of all races could participate.
While working as a clerk for a law firm as a young man, Mandela befriended two communists - Gaur Radebe, a Hlubi member of the ANC and Communist Party, and Nat Bregman, a Jewish communist who became his first white friend. Mandela attended Communist Party meetings and, while impressed that people of all races were able to meet as equals, he did not join the party because its atheism conflicted with his own Christianity, and because he saw the South African struggle as being based in race rather than class.
Mandela joined the ANC a few years later, quickly rising through its ranks. Although initially committed to non-violent protest, he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 and led a sabotage campaign against the apartheid government.
On August 5th, 1962, Mandela was captured by South African police, informed by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of his location. In the subsequent legal proceedings, known as the "Rivonia Trial", he was sentenced to life in prison.
Amid growing domestic and international pressure, and with fears of a racial civil war, President F. W. de Klerk released him in 1990 and began negotiating a peaceable end to apartheid with him. In 1994, he became the first legitimately elected President of South Africa.
Mandela saw national reconciliation as the primary task of his presidency, and hoped to avoid the damage other post-colonial African economies faced by the departure of white elites.
Mandela worked to reassure South Africa's white population that they were protected and represented in the so-called "the Rainbow Nation" and embraced liberal (rather than communist) reforms, drawing criticism from more his more militant supporters.
-- President Nelson Mandela Inauguration Speech May 10, 1994 :demsoc-rose:
-- Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation | Official Full Documentary :mandela:
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i've been at work over an hour and the only thing i've done on the clock so far is take a shit
Chad. I showed up 30 minutes late, watched a youtube video and accidentally overspent my free currency on dumb gatcha game
A spectre is haunting fidel...
Showlook out fidel it's right behind you!
gf requirements:
- has pulse
- is girl (optional)
- does not recognize the state of israel (dealbreaker)
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"Ice cream dates are childish". All dating is childish. Once you hit 30 you're only allowed to have affairs.
A real adult date is solemnly staring at each other and shaking your head in disapproval as you replay news coverage of 9/11
I arranged to go on a date to " La Michoacana" icecream parlour. Turns out there are like five different, unrelated ice cream shops with that name in my city, and it's a common name shared by like 15k icecream shops in Mexico and a bunch in the us. Apparently Michoacana state is associated with icecream to the point that it's been adopted by all these independent businesses, but no one is quite sure why.
The only acceptable date is a long walk with small snack.
In-N-Out sux https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/in-n-out-bans-employees-from-wearing-masks/?amp=1
saw my therapist in person for the first time yesterday. was kinda surreal but cool seeing this lady outside the box on my screen
We're still investigating and will revise our containment procedures accordingly
holy shit, guys
open up google and type in "boobs"
you can thank me later
holy shit, guys
open up google and type in "twinks"
you can thank me later
3 hours of sleep and hung over let's fucking go
I know this is a lil late but you gotta replenish those electrolytes comrade
I personally recommend sports drinks and bananas
Thanks, sadly i don't have sports drinks or bananas in my apartment and I'm not up for going out
I've been drinking lots of water but I still kind of feel like shit
Leafy greens and legumes are good too, if you got those
Otherwise, godspeed, sailor
Changed my pronouns on LinkedIn to they/they a few weeks ago and my inbox instantly dried up for a week
Changed it back to he/him and I'm back to my daily messages from crypto startups with 2-5 employees
Would it be possible for me as someone with no background in tech to scam these crypto start ups for a job and a few weeks of pay?
I'm not looking for a long con, I just want to get a two week paycheck and bounce
Definitely uninformed on the topic but I would guess you are more likely to get scammed out a few weeks of labour then actually getting to a point that they send pay.
Hey, but they'll give you thousands of their worthless cryptocurrency that you can only sell x amount of every y months because selling any meaningful amount will crash the price
Before crypto the scam was paying you with stock options that might never vest and required the company to actually be worth something at some point.
Probably not unfortunately, my experience interviewing with tiny tech startups, especially crypto is that they're actually much harder and thorough than at big corporations
They're super picky because adding a single person will be adding 10% more employees vs a large corporation adding 0.0001% to their workforce
crypto startups
Sounds like you're getting better results listed with they\them
Elderly zoomer on their deatbed: "nurse, please tell me there time for one last zoom..."
Hospice maxxing to mortality mogg on gen alpha
to the incomprehensible ways social media leads people to flex
Shoutouts to my friend that name drops Marx all the time and says the word "communism" in sentences a lot but thinks big tech is good, gentrification is good, and supports the US military
Meeting the people in this country has made my expectations of Americans' understanding of the world to levels so deep the OceanGate "submersible" would collapse before reaching even 10% of its depth
Every person I've ever met who does political canvasing has said that Americans have completely incoherent, utterly incomprehensible political beliefs. The profound absence of any political education is astonishing.
The motion trackers in the Aliens franchise are such an amazing narrative device. They really take "Nothing is scarier" to the next level. Knowing it's there, but not being able to see it ratchets up so much tension in key scenes. One of the video games has an escape sequence where you start out running from a few contacts on the motion sensor, but as you progress more and more rush in. They're behind you, they're on both sides, and unless you absolutely haul ass they're going to get in front of you and cut you off. I think you see some of them jumping along ledges once in a while, but for the most part the game just uses the motion tracker to keep you moving as fast as you can. plus, it's a very elegant use of resources. It's an old, old game, computers only had so much oomph to work with back then, so it allowed them to imply a massive horde of aliens without having to pay to render them all at once.
Also, first.
I also like that the aliens are consistently like "Newton can eat my entire ass I am going to generate so much mass and energy out of nowhere. Yeah I'm room temperature. Yeah I can leap forty feet, sprint, run up walls, all without producing any recognizable metabolic heat. What are you going to do about? Cry? Are you going to cry you big baby?"
I also like how wildly inconsistent the alien's toughness is. In the movies and some games the pulse rifles will absolute fucking shred them with giblets flying all over the place, bodies exploding, acid just spraying in all directions. In other media they're almost totally invincible, shrugging off point blank gunfire like it's nothing and tearing metal apart with their claws. And it's all down to the needs of the narrative at that exact moment.
Personally I prefer the pre-Engineer narrative where the aliens were just horrific, inexplicable things that crawled right out of Giger's nightmares. The whole Prometheus narrative with David creating them 1.) Doesn't fit, because how the hell did the Space Jockey in Alien get hold of them if David made them? and 2.) takes away all the mystery. The aliens don't need an origin or explanation, and it hurts their mystique and horror when they have one. As long as they're just this god awful nightmare out of deep space you can never really feel safe. They could show up anywhere unexpectedly. The alien eggs on the jockey's ship weren't from LV-421/Hadley's hope. It found them somewhere, it transported them, and it was killed by them. It's last message was a desperate warning; "Don't come here. It's not safe."
I do think the franchise has been unnecessarily constrained by insisting on sticking to the "The Company wants the aliens for bioweapons research" plot. There's a lot of other things you could do.
Make a pandemic movie with guns, where public health officials are trying to model and track the spread of the aliens to try to get ahead of them before they overrun the whole planet.
Do a detective story where the alien outbreak is the background to a cop trying to hunt down a serial killer.
Have a political thriller where the aliens are already weaponized and the government unleashes them on the revolutionaries to try to crush the revolution, leading to a three way battle ala that one Biohazard/Resident Evil movie set in Eastern Europe.
Do a movie where a ship goes down on an alien infested world with the president's daughter on it or something and they send in David Hayter and a crack team of mercenaries to rescue her.
Do a medical thriller where an outbreak has already been crushed in the prologue, but now the remaining medical personnel have hundreds of infected people contained in hypersleep and they're in a race to figure out how to surgically remove the alien embryos from the victims before the town's power goes out and the hypersleep caskets fail. Instead of being about fighting the alien adults it's about trying to essentially find a cure for the impregnation before everything goes to hell and they have to euthanize almost all the survivors. Maybe the protagonist is a medical researcher or surgeon who has an alien inside them already. They're the only one skilled enough to perform the surgery, so they were unfrozen, knowing the alien would probably kill them, and they're racing to program a surgical robot to do the necessary extraction surgery on the infected people before they're killed by the alien inside them.
Do a "Nature Documentary from Hell" where a bunch of synth camerasynths are dropped on to an alien infested planet (in a lot of stories aliens will ignore synths as long as they don't take any hostile actions and don't get in the way). Have the synths explore the hive, observe the aliens hunting in a wild environment, watch what their life cycle looks like without any screaming, terrified humans being involved, hang out with the queen and maybe have a scene where the queen does some scary intelligent things like carefully dissecting one of the synths to see what kind of creature it is, or 'tests' the synths by having drones mock-charge it, or trying to feed it to see if it eats, sort of experimenting with it the way we'd experiment with one of them. Have interviews with "experts" scattered throughout where the experts advance contradictory theories about how smart the aliens are, how they behave, how the propagate through space. Make it clear in the subtext that no one really knows what these things are or how they can be real. And of course the final scene is a TV host explaining that the documentary footage was tight-beamed home ahead of the documentary crew's ship, but the ship missed it's rendezvous and was never found, currently listed as MIA.
Do a court room thriller where Wey-Yu execs are finally being brought to task for all the horror they unleashed and the main conflict is between the prosecuting attorneys trying to nail Wey-Yu to the wall and Wey-Yus legal team and political allies who want to weasel out of the whole thing. The end is "Ultimately Wey-Yu refused to dissolve the corporation and launched a corporate insurrection against the current government. After years of fighting the remaining Wey-Yu forces agreed to a negotiated surrender where they would turn over all senior executives to the government for execution in exchange for amnesty and humanitarian aid for the surviving Wey-Yu employees. The actual fate of Wey-Yu's executives is classified and remains unclear, with some speculating that the government gave them new identities in the wake of the scandal". Definitely have some horrific testimony from survivors mixed in with sharks in suits making very slick presentations about "they new the risks, contracts were signed, death benefits were paid, it was all legal, blah blah blah". Have at least once "found footage" sequence were someone on an infested ship or colony knows they're fucked (maybe they're infected) and is trying to gather as much evidence against Wey-Yu as the can and transmit it before they die. Make the whole thing a metaphor for Bhopal and similar disasters, highlighting out corporate execs never face punishment for their crimes.
do a character study of a marine platoon as they fight an extended campaign against the aliens. Each 10-20 minute sequence would follow one marine, and between the segments you'd get 3-5 minutes of horrific combat footage (or a boring patrol where nothing happens). Each sequence would end with the marines in their drop ship or APC, with empty seats highlighting who didn't make it. Really lean in to the "Long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of absolute terror" trope.
Do a short from a perspective of a dog stuck in an alien infested city. Have a bunch of mundane scenes of foraging for food, growling at other dogs, chasing cats, mixed in with terrible stuff stuff - The dog approaching a human right before an alien grabs them, almost getting face hugged. In the end the dog gets rescued (maybe by Yautja/Predators for a twist?) but it's ambiguous if the dog is infected.
Have a sequence where a couple of humans are out hunting outside their compound on an exoplanet. Or maybe they're field biologists and their guides/bodyguards. They're trying to find some animal or something, but they're being hunted by an alien, and there's a yautja tracking both the team and the alien. The humans eventually realize the alien is tracking them and manage to subdue it using some clever tricks with minimal death and mayhem, and right when it looks the Yautja is about to attack and kill them it's revealed that the plasmacaster on it's shoulder is actually a documentary camera and it was merely observing the humans to see how they'd fair. Maybe documenting the hunting and survival practices of humans for the interest of Yautja viewers back home.
Do a horror movie where the aliens themselves are the villain protagonists. They're in the final stages of overwhelming a human colony when something starts killing them The no-dialogue film follows a drone, a soldier, and the queen as they try to figure out what is attacking the hive and how to stop it. I have no idea what the alien-eating super-predator would be, idk how you could make something that's frightening to aliens. Maybe it's the colony's synth custodians who were ignored during the alien attack and decided to take revenge, and the aliens can't figure it out because they don't recognize the mechanical synths as a threat. When the drone finally finds drops of synth lubricant fluid it realizes that the janitors they've been ignoring where quietly wiping them out with traps and accidents, the rushes to rescue the queen but it's too late. When it enters the egg champer everything is on fire and all the synths are standing around with improvised flamethrowers, having powered themselves down after achieving their revenge. The drone claws them apart in rage but it's ultimately pointless as the powered down synths don't react, leaving it to scream helplessly in the midst of it's slaughtered hive.
I've been playing Aliens: Dark Decent. Its pretty good.