Glen - All video-game/bobblehead tangents aside, this was a fascinating complementary pair of links.
I didn't fully verify your Bulwark link, but my first impulse was to think it was an Onion <https://www.theonion.com/> or Borowitz <https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report> article. Fascinating that absurd things like this can go right past us in the torrent of nonsense that this administration has brought to us. Lost in the cacophany of dog-whistles, as it were? Interesting juxtaposition of Trump, Seagal, Depardieu (/Zherar Depardyo!) /and Snowden... among other things, both Seagal and Depardieu's movies have been put on a banned list in Ukraine <https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/02/19/ukraine-bans-movies-starring-zelenskiy-seagal-depardieu-over-national-security-a69342>, and I'd guess Trump is not a very welcome person there either. I don't know what they feel about Snowden... he's more likely to be a hero than antihero there, in spite Russia being his bolt-hole location? <https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/02/19/ukraine-bans-movies-starring-zelenskiy-seagal-depardieu-over-national-security-a69342> These links remind me of several of the other frayed threads here... you referenced yet another previous thread discussing "means of production" and whether I acquiesced openly to your grumbling about that at the time, it did set me on a different tangent internally. It also juxtaposes with the various lines of discussion around self-organization and hierarchical systems. Many of us think first of political power structures when we think hierarchy. To the extent that these systems maintain their own coherence through a certain amount of top-down control (i.e. exercise of authority) we tend to associate hierarchies as "top-down" systems, but I think that is somewhat of an illusion, or an edge case among the many examples of hierarchy in self-organized systems. Heterarchy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy> and holarchy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holarchy> come to mind, as does the generic poset <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partially_ordered_set>. Snowden's rhetoric, which I generally approve/agree-with, includes an "othering" of gub'mint and corporations that doesn't seem to overtly take into account that both of these are self-organized, emergent structures, even if from an oft-individual point of view they seem antithetical to the good of the individual. mumble, - Steve > Trump’s New Ad Is Amazing > https://thebulwark.com/trumps-new-ad-is-amazing/ > > We can only dream that Trump will be indicted and tried for treason. It's > interesting to speculate whether he'll seek asylum in Russia. Snowden seems > to be OK, but not thriving: > > https://www.wired.com/story/the-age-of-mass-surveillance-will-not-last-forever/ > > Steven Seagal and Gérard Depardieu are probably doing better. I can't help > but wonder how Trump would fare.
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