Faine Greenwood: Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist. This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.

Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist. This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.

The damage this causes across generations (even if the regime is short lived!) is so hard to grasp if you haven’t lived with it. It touches every aspect of life. It makes trust impossible, and without some level of trust and a belief in the possibility of justice, *nothing in society works.*

I have spent a lot of my life anticipating one major disaster or another, and when Covid hit, I found it was a completely different kind of fear and dread than I had been expecting. Fear and dread becoming a kind of background radiation in my life, rather than constant panic.

Yes! It’s horrendous.

"war is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror" effect

It's a lot like being in a war zone.

I like horror because it lets me feel the fear when I am safe.

😔When Covid hit & we had to start social distancing by staying at home, it reminded me of when my family & I were stationed in Honduras & Guatemala. We didn't get to experience much of the culture cuz the crime rate was so bad our best bet was to isolate ourselves when we weren't at work or school.

Though there was also plenty of panic for the first few months!

More people need to play Papers Please

stg my report review speed went up at work when I was playing it regularly

The first time I saw it I seriously considered making a similar game for moderation using actual content (ie not the more abstract way Moderator Mayhem went with) to provoke the same understanding of how corrosive a force it is, but the fact it legally couldn't include the worst stuff would blunt it

yeah if it doesn’t realistically depict looking at thousands of ads for acai powder with slightly different wording, punctuated by the occasional teenage Brazilian girl posting CSAM to get Justin Bieber to notice her for some reason what’s the fucking point

Exactly! Just the subconscious pressure valve of knowing the game could never throw CSAM at you when you hit "next report in queue" would change the experience too much to really make the point, I concluded

I suppose you could include the type of stuff that was posted to "controversial reddit communities", but it's probably not quite the same

Not even a text file of "CSAM" in big red letters?

Yeah. I mean, we had a lot of conversations about this.

And I do think MM is a great game that gets its point across wonderfully! But that point is more about the difficulty of the problem (which is also a good point to convey, don't get me wrong) and less about the cost to the people who do it, which is really really hard to convey to people.

I almost do regret that "tricking people into seeing goatse or getting rickrolled" is less of a thing now, because when it was more common it was a good, though still imperfect, analogy for the level of hypervigilance the job instills in you

It seems from reading your posts that "legally couldn't include the worst stuff" stifles a lot of research/discussion on T&S (and then of course there's also the ethical issues)

On the whole, I think it's a very good thing that people can't post the worst examples of the content T&S has to deal with, even though it makes it hard to convey the experience. I do wish for better research exemptions, though.

Having participated in an FBI investigation into CSAM in the earlier days of the internet as a sysadmin made me never want to be involved in T&S but I have the utmost respect for those that can handle it. I was the one that found the material and reported it. I'll never forget.

Honestly, it was on my list until *gestures at everything, gives multiple middle fingers to the GOP*

It's an excellent illustration of how easy compliance is for so, so many reasons

Probably. Just hits a bit too close to home.

I guess people think it won’t affect them. Except, where does the “othering” stop?

I've talked to a lot of old East Germans who talked about how carefree their youth was, and then they'd mention offhandedly their acquaintance who got shot trying to cross the border, or the time someone disappeared for a few weeks, or the time the Stasi asked them about an album they owned

I once asked a Spanish friend, a priest, what it was like growing up under Franco. "Oh it was normal."

I visited the USSR as a teenager and I'm reasonably certain I spoke to a KGB agent assigned to our group to pay attention to young adults. And she clearly was so insanely bored with her job that she stepped in to translate for me and an Estonian woman when we were trying to get into the one disco.

we had a MSS (or something similar) minder at my workplace in china. it was extremely obvious, even the students made jokes about the spy. very nice guy, spoke near native english. office conversation sure dried up real quick after he was "hired"

Yeah, her English was idiomatic — we were sneaking them+a guy named Alex back into our hotel to listen to music and hang out and talk, and we asked her if she knew what yeah meant, to say to the hotel security, and she listed about 10 synonyms like that. Super pretty too. Just no way she wasn't.

at least your spy was hot. ours was just a generic dumpy uncle. disappointing

The next day, I, the Estonian woman, and the KGB woman went to a cafe for a drink and one of the older people on the tour realized what the heck was going on and decided to go along with me. lol.

me, a teenager looking at 60 year old guy coming along with us, going in my head, "what? no!" and saying "i guess..."

Part of what people forget about 1984 is how much of the first act is just Winston going to work and being bored.

Anyone notice that the MAGA shit conveniently took hold after these people’s WWII vet grandads were dead and couldn’t tell them off?

Yup. In the UK, poppy jingoism exploded when the last Great War veterans died, and now we're seeing what happens as we lose the last WWII vets and Holocaust survivors. There's a paradigm shift when an event passes from living memory.

it's weird kind of seeing how twitter was a sort of play microcosm of what happens when a king comes in and ruins everything thinking that he's infallible. it's technically still serviceable, but a lot of it is so much worse

when I was ten my mom took me to Brasilia to watch some protests there, and she was fighting tears as she told me this wouldn't have been possible in previous years. As I was ten, I didn't understand at all, but I remember it, and when I was older I learned how bad the dictatorship was.

And you can hardly ever get a straight answer from anyone. Everyone's 24/7 subconsciously wary of breaking an unwritten rule.

For me this has been exemplified by living in a world after Sandy Hook and having to send a kid to school. Every drop off is routine and boring and every day there's that gnawing background fear. I'm sure I am totally fine and normal. 🥲

Reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about growing up in post war Austria, how hollowed out all the men seemed

Time to reread Kundera?

Maybe time for antifascist Americans to get their heads out of their arses, stop civility politics and tone policing and fucking stop fascism. You can read books later.

I think ot was in the Book How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley where he talks about the things that fend it off. We may be too late for that, but he mentioned the importance of normal, nonpolitical social groups to maintain ties. You know, bird watching whatever...

That authoritarianism needs to destroy these normal social bonds and replace them with only the state, so idk. Start some knitting groups or some shit now maybe.

Talk to your neighbours. Have a block party.

Our future? NPR 1 July 2034 case study: Hong Kong Five years later, Hong Kong residents reflect on massive government protests. : State of the World from NPR www.npr.org/2024/07/01/1...

Three Tales of Tempered Expectations in Hong Kong : State of the World from NPRwww.npr.org Five years after mass protests rocked Hong Kong, and were crushed by the government, people who took part are downsizing their dreams and ambitions — but keeping a small flame of hope alive.

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