Notices by simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp), page 7
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 23:01:05 JST 
simsa03
The only thing that astonishes me about Epstein is that even Noam Chomsky met with him. What is Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! going to do about it? Keep or disavow her favourite elder lefttist interview partner? https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/7a4e816ae52f7fcffe6f89698c6038c9794c16f1f9c6529849a6576b999b28aa/view -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 06-Feb-2026 03:46:20 JST
simsa03
Reinterpreting Rakugo from a Woman's Perspective: Hayashiya Tsuruko / Rakugo Storyteller https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/2105237/
I admire her expressive and at the same time nuanced story telling. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 05-Feb-2026 08:07:18 JST
simsa03
Mafia organisations are not "families" because they instill and live by Omertà, they have Omertà because they are family-like.
You break the Omertà, and you're banned from the family. It's a basic principle in the dynamics of every natural family.
Which is why familiy members keep consenting to the silence about family problems or are gaslighted. Not in order to protect the family but prevent them from falling off the family.
A major factor in keeping the Omertà of families intact and to make the gaslighting reasonable to all but the apostate is what may be called "compassion as subjugating tool": "You do force us to gaslight you because we are worried about you."
The concern, the anxiety, is indeed about the apostate, but not that he's revealing some uncomforting truths but that the very possibility of apostasy endangers everyone.
Familiy members want truth, cannot accept what is not to their liking, and so the messenger must be insane AND, because of being a family member, still being cared for.
This can only work as long as the apostate returns to the flock and bows to the family scripture. Otherwise, if the apostate can no longer bear the cognitive dissonance he's experiencing, he is step by step nudged out of the family.
The panic and sadness of leaving (or having to leave) the family cloud (the "We cloud") is not due to some specific biographical reasons in the life of the apostate but because his truth and the truth uphold and secured by the Omertà make cohabitation and co-existence impossible. The Omertà secures the very "We-ness" of the "We cloud" called family. That's its function, and that includes ritualized and thus recurring sacrifice.
The religious language is no coincidence.
In fact, in a sense family IS Omertà, inasmuch as what is shared is what is not talked about, and that differences in opinions presuppose a vast majority of beliefs already shared. Otherwise, there would be not differences in opinion but incomprehension.
Omertà is precise. On the one hand, it prevents the shared attitudes and beliefs from ever being verbalised, mentioned, or spoken of. On the other hand, it is a fine-tuned system that very accurately signals when lines are crossed or taboos come into focus.
Omertà is like squinting. You see very accurately what you are not supposed to see. Because to see leads to name which leads to speak and thus to break the silence. You see the absence. You see a negative. You see a difference as its own quality.
Family is a flock of birds circling around, and by circling creating a centre of nothingness. It is a "We cloud" in which all particles move but in a way that none becomes a substance. Because that could be named.
Silence is the main feature of families, irrespective of their noisy pell-mell. Omertà is ubiquitous, because it is what families are made up from. Families are systems of parts that are all, in fact, strangely, missing pieces. Don't dig for gold where there's no ore deposit.
I should mention that Omertà is also the source of fun and joy in families. That aspect shouldn't be ignored as it is one area where Omertà draws its compelling force from. We LOVE to join that.
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Wednesday, 04-Feb-2026 01:47:36 JST
simsa03
There is a baffling connection between moral integrity and sexual orgasm: Both produce a very similiar, if not identical, sense of being truly oneself.
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Feb-2026 06:09:27 JST
simsa03
Now that was an awful family gathering... -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 01-Feb-2026 05:29:39 JST
simsa03
Re-Watching "Taking Chance" (2004) and remembering why this is one of the best films about dying. (The other is "Barking Water" (2009).) -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 31-Jan-2026 16:18:11 JST
simsa03
Watching of MSNBC / MCN Now a lot lately to keep track of how the U.S. turns into an Italian fascist society. What I still keep missing reported more widely is the impact of the firing of the three Judge Advocates General of the U.S. military last year.
Taking control of the military by replacing the top generals and the JAGs, going after lawyers, journalists, protesters, using masked thugs to terrorize in the streets under false pretext to get voting registrations and ballots of the last presidential election ... well, I told you as back as 2016.
But you didn't listen. You never seem to. Instead, you embraced Bernie Sanders in 2016, accepted his equating of Hillary Clinton and Trump as being from "the same oligarchical class", ignoring how by that he paved Trump's way to the White House and hurt Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, you never accepted the parallels of the U.S. and Germany of 1932, when the Communists under Ernst Thälmann deemed the Social Democrats worse than the Nazis ("Social Fasicist"), refused a unity front against the latter until in 1933 they went to prison and concentration camps in droves.
It was this moment that I first started to bid farewell to Leftist positions. I recognized how people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, socialized in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where so caught by their orthodoxies that they weren't able to understand the times.
Later in the first Trump presidency, I learnt to be suspicious of leftist organisations like the "Democratic Socialists of America" with their AOCs and Rashida Thlaibs. I saw the sprawling anti-Semitism of the Left, ruminating and regurgiating the Leftist orthodoxy of "Anti-Zionism" as miraculously different from Anti-Semitism, a concept created and promoted by Soviet propaganda in the late 1950s in their "anti-imperialist" fight in the Middle East.
I saw how in 2020 Afro-American voters in South Carolina paved the way for the Biden presidency by shunning Bernie Sanders and his folks, because they saw him as a fraud, as a "movement politician" who had never come up with legislation that effectively helped the poor and the working class.
Still, gladly would I have accepted in 2024 a unity front of regular Democrats – the Amy Klobuchar Democrats, as I call them – and the fools of the "Democratic Socialists of America" and others from the Left. But that didn't happen. And Trump won not just the Electoral College but the popular vote.
In a sense, the catastrophe of the U.S. mimicks the catastrophe of climate change: The times you can still do something about it are exactly the times the evidence is so sporadic and wobbly that nobody believes in their capacity of announcing a trend. And when you finally come to act, the development is already too far advanced to be averted. And so goes the U.S. The institutional resistance, the protests in the streets – it's all nice but will no longer change the outcome. For now. You waited too long, you've made too many mistakes, but you're only partially to blame.
In the end, it is precisely because the U.S. has always been this violent society that I have a strong sense of hope.
Your nation was built on ethnic cleansing and treachery as well as on high-spirited political theory and enlightenment. You had Jim Crow, McCarthy, the Vietnam war, Guantanamo, you had so much blatant disregard for the rule of law, human rights, common decency. And still: You always fought these developments back, violently at times, with great casaulties most often. It is perhaps exactly this sense of temporary and transitional that makes you capable and willing to tear things down and build anew. Or rebuild, like after the tornados went through.
You do that. You kick ass, you will get rid of the Trump regime. Like you did with the Cheneys, Bushes, Rumsfelds, the Rush Limbaughs, Bill Kristols, Ayn Rands. Don't accept our European view that is soaked in bogged down political institutions and slow changes. You are not us.
You're far more mercurial – and thus: elusive. And that is why the Trump regime will not get a hold on you. You slip right through their fingers every time they aim to grab you. You return at different places, again and again, tiring down the Trump boots, the masked thugs.
I don't give up hope on you. I stand with Minnesota as I stand with your general decency, your good-heartedness, your outrage over what is done to you, your eagerness to resist, to change, to reclaim, to rebuild. The only thing I pity is the cost, the human tragedy this fight will cost.
So keep going! Don't despair! You are not only watched, you are seen. From all around. We are with you. Your fight is ours. And, to use an expression that sounds a bit over the top for a European but is a common one in the U.S. to express one's feelings: We are proud of you! -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 30-Jan-2026 15:01:02 JST
simsa03
Condoms https://youtube.com/shorts/jPbijS5AS78?si=Xbb6JyJ2phQs7IKE -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 30-Jan-2026 14:53:47 JST
simsa03
Again, it covers a lot more of general human communications: "You want points for not cheating on me" https://youtube.com/shorts/HM-rVgVIkmM?si=83vWuvCNf-RC93oo Lovely put! -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Friday, 30-Jan-2026 14:43:27 JST
simsa03
This covers pretty much two third of all human communications. (And proves that communications is pure magic. But Laing, not Watzlawick, already told us so.) https://youtube.com/shorts/BZmdG_e3xSc?si=REHo1PnN9ZHiUCC3 -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 29-Jan-2026 18:28:02 JST
simsa03
It is said that AI will greatly impact the jobs market. What I barely see mentioned yet is how AI will impact the economic divide between the Global South and the affluent industrialized societies. I guess it will increase sharply, plunging the Global South back to mere vendors of raw materials. Its economical catch-up will most probably be halted and reversed, which will lead to an increase in poverty, environmental degradation, and exodus thereof. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 29-Jan-2026 06:24:39 JST
simsa03
♪ Bruce Springsteen, "Streets Of Minneapolis" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWKSoxG1K7w
YES !
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 26-Jan-2026 22:35:45 JST
simsa03
Evil is not insanity.
forgottendistinctions
talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 26-Jan-2026 22:34:30 JST
simsa03
When asked how he was able to portray evil so effectively in Inglourious Basterds – an awful movie by the way –, Christoph Waltz said he rendered it merely matter-of-factly because evil never thinks it’s evil. And that is the point. Calling your side the right one is a sure way to all-out fratricide. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 26-Jan-2026 22:23:43 JST
simsa03
Apart from the problematic comparison with the NS genocide, does anyone really think such a collage being created if an Afro-American were the victim depicted on the right-hand side? https://gnusocial.jp/attachment/0114d526ee04d9e2efc82bddd8bba769ba33db6c86905ad9d925878bafdaa786/view -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 14:23:49 JST
simsa03
♪ Dolly Parton, "Light of a Clear Blue Morning" (ft. Lainey Wilson, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah, Reba) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McaD2PG8jOE
The lady turned 80 years on January 19. And she's the right person to exude what many don't yet see: We already reached #peakfascism and we're on our way.
!listening -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Sunday, 25-Jan-2026 14:01:37 JST
simsa03
youtube.com/watch?v=fYjv36sR3YI
This is a very hopeful assessment by Finland's President Stubb. In all the fears due to the various uncertainties, people shouldn't overlook Europe's successes under the pressures from East and West and the prospect of Ukraine's membership in the EU. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 22-Jan-2026 11:24:49 JST
simsa03
Twenty years. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 22-Jan-2026 06:58:53 JST
simsa03
Pretty exhausted by the current troubles in my family. Which is one of the reasons I posted little lately. My mind is stuck in events of past decades ago. -
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simsa03 (simsa03@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Thursday, 22-Jan-2026 06:43:12 JST
simsa03
In my memory it was 2006, and yes, we met there first. Also lnxwalt was there, David Marsden, andyc. And thx for the source pointer. I will look up the book.
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