I cried. The pivotal moment felt remarkably salient.
They/them; PhD Student in History of Technology, Science, the Environment, Medicine and Empire; singer, writer, too many hobbies to count; anarcho-communist, but mellow about it; living in Washington, DC
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I cried. The pivotal moment felt remarkably salient.
It would help if hard work did in fact lead to economic gains.
You know what? Fine. He can go to Heaven. Just as long as he isn't here anymore.
Every day I open this app with the hope that the first thing I see will be "he died."
My only claim is that I don't have any reason to *assume* good intentions from individuals who are working for corrupted institutions. If they're unwilling to be there, fine, but I won't be assuming that is the default position.
Peter Theil's influence is going to need to be excised from every corner of US government, and burned away, root and stem. I would argue he's as much a danger to democracy as anyone directly attached to the regime.
Why should I apply a less broad brush than the people saying they're innocent and to be nice to them based on equally insufficient evidence? Why are kneejerk military apologetics acceptable, but not skepticism in the context of an authoritarian takeover and de facto martial law?
That's not the point. The point is that he gets away with this shit in part because our godawful media refuses to call illegal things illegal. Calling it an "overhaul" gives him tacit approval or at least creates a permission structure.
Few outlets have perfected the art of completely disconnected blithering like NYT.
feel like slim and fat chance should be a different amount of chance
Ol' Breadbags Herself is finally throwing in the towel, eh?
Sandía knows what you did. Sandía is judging you for it. Majestically.
Lol considering RFK Jr, you'd think those fuckers would have combined powers by now
Ever and always
I don't have any reason to think these men are being punished for refusing an order rather than just doing menial labor because they literally have nothing else to do. There are plenty of people who automatically think the best of everyone in uniform. Their egos can survive a little skepticism.
Cool, sure, but have you considered that these guys might not be the same as you? That a whole bunch of them are in fact fine with what's happening? I've met plenty of military vets and active service who are devoutly authoritarian MAGA. Why shouldn't I take them at their word?
Like, there's an open hole in the ground just *waiting* to be filled with Donald Trump's corpse and then a lot of *additional* human feces, and sometimes we just get excited that today could be the day.
Kind of living how much BlueSky is coalescing around the shared hope that Donald Trump is or is about to be dead. Just standing around his grave grinning at each other, rubbing our hands together, giggling
The people who think it will get worse fundamentally don't understand how these authoritarian regime holds together. Dictatorships seldom survive the death of the dictator, especially when there are such clear cracks and divisions between factions. But we will have a lot of work to do to make sure
I think you're giving these guys way too much credit and way too much benefit of the doubt.
I'm just saying the shitty pavement isn't the only thing that's cracked, tacky and cheap.
Truly this is the most relatable president in history (for a certain subset of hateful old people who fixate on stupid details to stop themselves from thinking about the fact that they're going to die soon).
Indirectly related, I hate paved over gardens and yards so much that it's a major plot point in the horror novel I'm writing. So even without all the fascism, I would still hate this tacky ass motherfucker.
This man is dying.
Susan Collins like to decorate her home with alarm bells and red flags, which make her feel festive in the winter months
America is saved! Park Services fired, and ICE arrested, all the landscapers so our brave troops can be paid tax dollars to perform menial tasks while heavily armed.
None of them are capable of making good decisions right now, because good decisions are contrary to the party brand.
Had anyone ever had this many people in the US simultaneously praying for their demise?
If money is speech, then Elon Musk has built the world largest megaphone, and he's mostly using it to tell everyone how pathetic he is.
Has any boring ass divorced straight man in history so thoroughly made his own midlife crisis everyone else's problem?
Joy is currently illegal in DC, particularly if you're black. Any attempts to have fun or relax in public will be met with extreme scrutiny and illegal search and seizure.
If Trump is the antichrist, RFK Jr is certainly vying for Pestilence, Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Everyone involved in ICE, in creating and running these concentration camps, in this entire administration, every one of them, needs to be tried for human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, and either hanged or sent to their own prisons.
This shit is why democrats lose. You can't present yourself as the party opposed to fascism while doing fascism.
That and he's an obsequious, sycophantic little worm who is baffled that other people somehow have the temerity not to be as servile and weak as he is.
Vance is obsessed with telling people to be grateful because he thinks white, cisgender, heterosexual American men built the world, and everyone else is just living in it on their sufferance. And there's an implicit threat that if you don't grovel enough they'll retract your permission to exist.
It's got to be so hard to be not Nazi enough for X but too centrist liberal to be happy on BlueSky. You could always try Threads. It's safely anodyne there and Zuck also doesn't think trans people should be allowed to fully participate in society. Y'all will get along great. It's very polite.
I keep seeing people arguing that this technology becoming ubiquitous and pervasive and intruding on our daily existence is inevitable and if so, I think so is our extinction, and it will be well earned. If we cede the territory of our selves, we render ourselves superfluous.
Why bother risking a social faux pas when you can let the machine produce all the right responses for you? Don't bother reading for yourself; let us remove all that pesky nuance and complexity so you can go about doing nothing with your day. Let the machine be productive while you rot into soft goo
These people are extreme functionalists, bordering on nihilism. From their perspective, human interaction is no more meaningful than a plant growing toward sunlight. Their grand vision of the future is eschatological. Life without life. Humans optional - only prompts and responses remain.
You can see the absolute disdain for human interaction and social structure, for human creativity and agency. They treat everyday communication as pointless. There's no self-respecting way to use it because doing so cedes that your presence is always ancillary and optional.
There's an extreme cynicism in the companies pushing this software, which you can see in the uses they suggest. Would you like the llm to read your email for you? Would you like it to respond for you? Would you like it to replace you in your own day to day life because you don't respect yourself?
At the heart of it, the only way you can think of chatgpt and its ilk as "intelligent" is if you devalue human consciousness and agency. It wouldn't matter if these programs had access to the sum total of all human knowledge - they still wouldn't be intelligent in any meaningful way.
Randi isn't a bad person. I'm just extremely skeptical of any "partnership" with these predatory, for-profit companies, forcing this dubious technology into the classroom on the grounds that it is inevitable, and accepting a lot of patently false promises about its utility as an educational tool.
Yeah, I'm sure Amway would present you a similar award for shilling their products to students as well. We could also start a new academy for safely and effectively integrating multi-level-marketing gimmicks into the classroom. Maybe a seminar to help students explore Ponzi schemes ethically.
It's an uphill battle under a monsoon, but I hope it happens. But while we're hoping, I'm also hoping Trump drowns in his own toilet tomorrow, or even just has a good old fashion brain embolism and dies instantly.
Who is they and how will they do it? I'm not disagreeing with you. Just not sure what "they" are waiting for.
On the day this man dies, I'm going to celebrate so fucking hard.
Torres is yet another fucking sociopath.
They'll have troops scrubbing the floors and picking the crops pretty soon.
Four leftists - a journalist, a politician and a historian - walk into a bar. The comedian ducks.
JD VANCE AND PETE HEGSETH ARE BACK AT UNION STATION.
Very good article and thread about open alternatives to google scholar, which clearly will go away when its founder retires. The @barcelonadori.bsky.social movement is getting a lot if attention and OpenAlex.org a lot of support. The Lens currently looking for new home about.lens.org/expressions-...
The summer youth employment program in DC is one of the most successful crime reduction efforts in the city's history, but it doesn't involve dudes with guns terrorizing the black community so it's never going to gain real widespread support.
They could have used all the money they are spending on this to hire a bunch of teenagers and not embarrass the national guard. It would have been more effective. But fascists can't imagine any government action that isn't laced with implicit threats of state violence.
Lol that music 😭
Let's pray it's permanent
Somehow the potential feelings of their calculators are more unsettling than the atrocities being faced by actual, verifiable human beings across the planet on a daily basis.
From their perspective machines are people, but people aren't.
How is it pragmatic to blame millions of people for not ignoring the faults of one individual who is asking to be given power over them? Why is it realistic to think mildly corrupt politicians will hold more deeply corrupt politicians accountable instead of just becoming more corrupt themselves?
It's "unrealistic" to hold political figures to any standards whatsoever. However, blaming millions of voters for *their* moral failings in not supporting the immoral individual politician or political party is way more "realistic." But which is easier to change? One man or one million men?
I'm just saying that an awful lot of what passes for pragmatic realism is neither. It's an intellectual cul de sac paved with thought-terminating clichés about human nature and built around the blandest form of soft eschatology.
You know, it's really awesome how your approach to all of this is "we can't do anything." You can talk about the next election, but by your logic, there's nothing stopping that from being suspended or whatever. So what, just lie down and die? That's certainly realistic, if useless.
I hope this dude never gets laid again.
Tl;dr: you can't hang a man from a rotten beam.
What liberal democrats call "purity tests" is in fact political pragmatism on two levels: 1) They help us avoid being legitimately accused of hypocrisy. 2) they make it materially possible to combat fascism on the political front.
So yeah, it's my position that the Democrats have been unable to ever meaningfully address Trump's corruption head on because their own party leadership is unfortunately embroiled in the same corruption. They can't take him down without taking themselves down with him.
Was Hillary drinking the blood of children? No. But is there clear evidence of a cabal of rich and powerful people protecting each other from accountability for everything from insider trading to child sexual abuse, including leaders from both parties? Yes.
We can all make jokes about "buttery mails," but the reality is that the Clintons *are* corrupt, and that corruption has constantly provided cover for MAGA to hide behind. You can't hold Trump accountable and also protect Clinton and Biden.
The false pragmatism about "purity tests" we keep hearing from the liberal center is why the Democrats have never been able to muster the moral standing to actually do something about Trump. If we can't hold Democrats accountable, then they can't hold Republicans accountable.
Because Obama's limpid hand-wringing about appearances, Clinton and Biden's own respectively corrupt families preventing them from being able to disentangle Trump's sins from their own, and the DNC gerontocracy keeping anyone with a functioning spine from party leadership, all kept that fucker safe.
Yes, I do in fact blame the Democrats for failing miserably to do anything at all to stop any of this from happening, for literal decades. Including their failures to prosecute, their moral cowardice, their complicity, and their active support for the growing surveillance and police state.
People smugly asking "well, why didn't Biden release the Epstein files" as if we haven't spent the last decade *begging* the fucking Democrats to stop worrying about "appearing political" when it came to investigating and prosecuting Trump's obvious criminality.
He was. It just didn't matter because one part is loyal and the other is feckless.
Nah fuck that. I want him dead now. They can have their funeral and we'll all have a really fancy public urinal out of it.
Four words: Sic Semper Tyranus, motherfucker
And boy, oh boy, do you of all people know from spineless
"Normal human beings" apparently doesn't include trans or nonbinary people, homeless people, disabled people, people of color, or anyone in jail. It doesn't matter if you alienate any of these groups of people as long as you don't sound like you went to college.
Just want to note this use of "normal," as a moral signifier, and the causal comfort with the idea that attempts to use inclusive language are alienating for people who don't feel comfortable around people different from themselves, or who challenge their expectations in some way.
Got blocked so I don't remember which comment this is about. Guess they didn't like whatever I said
Cops are the most lawless gangs of criminal thugs in the country, bar none. Nobody commits crime as consistently.
Watch him try to argue that we need more money for police training and equipment and "reform."
Never going to forgive my country for what it has become.
How do you think that public opinion changed? It wasn't just some natural process. It was through decades of activism and the work of groups like GLAAD, PFLAG, ACT UP, and the HRC. Every major democratic presidential candidate was opposed to gay marriage in 2007. None of them led on this issue.
I'm just saying you can't talk about Islamic history without coming to grips with Christian and, yes, Jewish history. Without talking about how Europeans exploited and radicalized Muslims for trade advantages in south Asia and the Middle East, fostering resentment, drawing maps to create conflict...
Would you also like to discuss the ravages of the Crusades, the translation movement among Islamic and Jewish scholars who collaborate to create the European Renaissance, the golden age of science before the Europeans got there? The relative rights of women under Islamic vs Christian rule?
I know a bit about the history of Islam, the Early conquests under the Umayyad and Abassid Caliphates, the Ottomans, Pan-Arabism and the rise of the modern nation states in the Mid-East and North Africa in the 20th century. I'm not an expert, but I would say I have above average familiarity.
I literally spent the first two years of my BA learning about the history of the middle east. I don't tend to mention that unless for some reason my familiarity with the basic facts is called into question.
Yeah, you know why? Because we aren't *funding the genocide in Sudan*.
Pride parades don't justify genocide. Nothing justifies genocide. Israel is committing genocide. I don't care if they have the nicest people and the coolest parades. I'm still not going to support the mass murder.
I don't like it when we do it. I don't like when Germany does it. When it happens in Syria, China, Russia, whosoever commits genocide, I despise. Call me crazy, I just can't bring myself to justify war crimes and crimes against humanity.
No, just not a fan of genocide. That's the entirety of it for me. I don't like genocide no matter who is committing it, as it happens, and no Russians were needed in the production of this opinion.
Absolutely nobody actually would "vote blue no matter who." Not one. Every single one of us has lines we won't cross for anything. It's only a "purity test" if it's not *your* line you're talking about.
Alright we simply disagree about, well, everything related to Israel and Palestine. My question is this: would you vote for a Democrat who was opposed to Israel and unreservedly supported Palestine?
Oh, have you been speaking to many Gazans about that? I imagine it's hard to get a bead on what they believe since Israel keeps killing all the journalists in record numbers. And most of the Palestinian population is too young to have ever voted for Hamas, since the last election was 19 years ago.
The only reason Israel is different from any given Islamic state is that the ruling coalition hasn't quite got the political cache to overthrow lgbtq civil rights, but they're working on it - and they're generally the same parties interested in exterminating Palestinians.
No, they just bulldoze buildings with children still inside. I'm generally opposed to that. And several of the main parties currently in the right wing ruling coalition in Israel *do* want to cancel pride parades, criminalize being gay, and forcing women to live by extreme religious law.
The Democrats have to actually beat Trump by giving people something to support, not just by not being Trump. My evidence for this is that democrats have run on the "at least we aren't that guy" platform for over a decade and keep losing with it.
caramida (he/they) 