I have the distinct impression that we could use most American "sci-fi" TV series (which seem to have a kink for post-apocalyptical scenographies) as a diagnostic tool for the autism spectrum.
For a moment, let's leave aside the tons of right-wing propaganda "hidden" in plain sight, and their excessive reliance on boring & worn out tropes (religious & cultish bullshit, irrational lack of communication & excess of anti-social behaviour, all vs all, ultra-low-iq characters*, psychotic & irrationally treacherous characters*, ultra-inconsistent character development used to justify "unexpected" plot twists, rampant anti-intellectualism...).
What could be used as a diagnosis tool is the incredible amount of strong inconsistencies that we can find in them**. It throws me out of the story every single time; and I suspect that it takes a certain kind of "uncommon personality" to feel that way about it, because otherwise these series wouldn't be so popular without real widespread criticism beyond cliches like "too slow", "it loses steam towards the end of the season", etc.
Many of those plots start in a gold mine of potentially powerful ideas... yet they consistently provide us with dirt & clay instead, while side-lining the "good stuff" as if it was too complicated for the populace.
Do you feel strongly about it? Do you feel like you can't verbalize it without being criticised as "too negative", or "too picky", or an "unbearable snob"? Do you wonder why it seems like nobody around shares your discomfort with these stories?
* : I feel this is a bit like the chicken & egg problem. Has the media conditioned part of American society to behave like dumb psychopaths as if it was something "natural", or is the media reflecting what was already there? Also, could we use other societies as models for these stories... just for a change? Please?
** : Just a tiny example: a "brilliant" engineer who builds a bridge out of fence parts and who doesn't bother to perform the most basic tests before trying it in a real setting and suffer the consequences: the bridge failing and her falling into the void. Bonus points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.
Found an obscure hint that perhaps instead of authenticating through #Evolution I should instead authenticate through the #Gnome settings for attached accounts, so I tried that approach, this time it asks for far more permissions (8 in all) but, you guessed it, a classic Sam Beckett "No Answer" and the terse response, "timed out".
So the app doesn't matter. The browser doesn't matter. The account or any legacy cruft doesn't matter.
Does this leave as the only explanation that perhaps Google no longer provides OAuth2 tokens? Surely that would be all over the news if true, but I'm running out of local culprits. Also Emacs inability to authenticate Mastodon suggests its neither google nor Debian per se? Maybe I should spend my time more productively slamming a car door on my fingers?
I have a dread feeling wiping the laptop and carefully reinstalling from scratch will not work.
A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections,
Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States
and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.
While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senat…