[FRIAM] OK. That's funny.

[Steve Smith]

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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