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   a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Feb-2026 07:09:20 JST a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)

   It's funny, this story has started and ended in the course of a day but what can we possibly take at face value?

   https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/26/columbia-student-detained-federal-agents

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     a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Feb-2026 07:09:19 JST a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)

     in reply to

     This made me realize something about -- go with me on this journey -- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

     The film is set up to look like a parody and certainly every act is played for comedy and the film functions if interpreted as parody, but actually the scenario is not a parody -- the blanket denial stapled to the front is the same one a politician or political appointee would issue one way or another, maybe without even consulting the facts first

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     a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Feb-2026 07:09:19 JST a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)

     in reply to

     In that way it acts like a roman à clef -- where the key is that you have sufficiently great understanding the actual nature of organizations, or maybe sufficiently low gullibility towards the official line

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     a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Feb-2026 07:09:19 JST a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)

     in reply to

     I was thinking about my comment about the idea of nato as "team nuclear weapons" back in the before times, and about the idea of european countries recently pondering the french nuclear capability becoming a kind of umbrella for europe

     are we as a human civilization across the world in 2026 more predisposed to the mumbo jumbo that this actually does anything beyond being a persistent existential threat than we were 10 or 60 years ago?

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     a kilo of saucepans (rakslice) (rakslice@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 27-Feb-2026 07:09:20 JST a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)

     in reply to

     Earlier in the day when this literal news item was just a story reiterating a claim from a borough president about ICE impersonating NYPD and quoting a DHS spokesman's denial, I realized that that organization has a track record now of issuing false denials -- there is essentially no reason to believe a claim is false anymore just because that organization denies it