fifilamoura

AlisonCreekside, 4 months ago to random

Pillaged from BlueSky:
"20 years ago we were suing teenagers for millions of dollars because they were torrenting a single Metallica album and now billionaires are demanding the free right to every work in history, so that they can re-sell it.
The law only ever serves capital."

fifilamoura, 7 months ago to random

I just saw an article entitled "how millennials killed the guest room."

Can we please stop letting rich White people write articles or headlines? How about "how the real estate/rental industry is making it impossible to survive"

mekkaokereke, 3 months ago to random

🤡There's a non-zero percent of the US population that genuinely believes that The NFL, Joe Biden, "The Pentagon" and Taylor Swift, conspired to create a fake relationship and rig the NFL playoffs, so that Taylor Swift could pop out in the middle of the Superbowl halftime show and say "Vote for Biden!"

I wish I was kidding.

Like, not a small percentage either.

fifilamoura, 5 months ago to random

While I don't believe in wasting empathy on fascists, when I see people posting "fascists aren't people" stuff I feel sick to my stomach because this kind of dehumanization of people we hate (even if they hate us) is fascist thinking. Fascists are people, terrible people who wish or don't care if they do the rest of us harm, but still human beings. This doesn't mean we have to indulge them, it just means that when we dehumanize other people we are in the process of becoming fascists ourselves (no matter how loudly we yell "freedom"). Freedom comes with responsibilities if you're not a fascist and one of those responsibilities is to recognize that we're all human, even the people we don't like or who may want to kill us.

fifilamoura, 3 months ago to random

Really interesting new insight into autoimmunity...

"Such immune system disorders also disproportionately affect women. In the US, four in every five autoimmune patients are women.

New research has found this can be traced to an interaction between the two X chromosomes in people who've got a pair, predominantly cisgender women.

When there's two X chromosomes available, a cell can only use the information from one, or things get a bit messy."

https://www.sciencealert.com/4-out-of-5-autoimmune-patients-are-female-the-x-chromosome-could-explain-why

mekkaokereke, 2 months ago to random

The people that vote for the Oscars, don't look like the people that watch the films. The Academy is much older, whiter, and dude-ier*. Oscar winners, are the inevitable outcome of Oscar voters.

The question isn't "Has the Academy changed enough to where filmmakers from marginalized backgrounds have the same chance to win an Oscar yet?"

The question is "Will the Oscars have the same relevance to society 10 years from now, that they do today?"

(*In 2022, 81% white, 67% men.)

fifilamoura, 4 days ago to random

A fantastic piece prompt by man vs bear...

"Patriarchy has everything to do with men, but at the same time, nothing at all. In a male-centered society where maleness is associated with power, what’s really being centered is power itself. What’s suppressed is mutual relationality. Patriarchy is intertwined with colonialism, racism, and other oppressive social structures based on hierarchy. It is a fundamental fracturing of our human wholeness."

https://bikepacking.com/plog/man-or-bear-debate/

fifilamoura, 6 months ago to random

I keep seeing people try to blame the public for the media's failures regarding investigative journalism and it's all bullshit. Newsrooms were bought up and closed for political reasons not financial ones (even if they used that to disguise their political agenda). Subscribers flocked to the NYT but all they did was use that money to pay right wing op Ed writers to undermine democracy. It's not about the money, it's about the owners' politics.

fifilamoura, 9 months ago to random

Carbon credits are the contemporary equivalent of buying indulgences from the Vatican.

fifilamoura, 6 months ago to random

Likely unpopular opinion considering the demographics of the fediverse but I'm so sick of shiny happy necroconsumerism and necropop (aka the latest attempt to foist even more Beatles on us in the most recent episode of necropop, a genre that is less "discovered lost tapes by dead musician" and more "holograms of dead artists designed to continue making money for record labels that contributed to the death of said artist" etc.) it's all just another manifestation of an industry that sells product/content and doesn't support the making of art and real culture. It hollows out meaning to create zombie culture that's unresponsive to the living and even stifles the creation of nourishing culture that sustains living humans.

fifilamoura, 2 months ago to random

Of course they do, remakes and franchises are the GenX version of nostalgia fueled desires for things of our childhood and are a form of generational cultural oppression (being forced to endure endless Beatles nostalgia was what the Boomers did to my generation and most of us learned absolutely nothing from it).

https://www.thewrap.com/tubi-the-stream-2024-report/

fifilamoura, 1 year ago to random

So people do realize that automatically thinking Musk's new hire is being victimized and set up to be pushed off a glass cliff because she's a woman is also sexism, right? She's got agency, she's in pretty tight with Trump (worked on the Apprentice, was appointed to a government committee by him) and she's decided she'd love to work with Tucker Carlson and Musk to push right wing agendas and, no doubt, help Trump win via using Twitter to promote him and destroy democracy. Margaret Thatcher was nobody's pawn either. Women can be terrible people too, we're not innately better or less oppressive or exploitative people than men.

Tokenism works BECAUSE even lots of well meaning people who don't think they're sexist/racist/homophobic refuse to see people as individuals instead of their gender/race/sexuality. This is also why the anti-trans pseudo-feminist bullshit works on some people. Please, I beg of you, stop seeing people as categories (we may individually identify as parts of groups and join together to work towards common goals, we're all still individuals who are unique and our actions define who we are, not the categories we may belong to and identify with). Embrace a bit of complexity people!

fifilamoura, 4 months ago to random

The wife of Bill Ackman, the donor who went after Gay's head for plagiarism, is herself a rather big intellectual thief and liar. These people don't care about ideas, learning, art or academia. She was also connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

"In Oxman's dissertation, completed at MIT, she plagiarized a 1998 paper by two Israeli scholars, Steve Weiner and H. Daniel Wagner, a 2006 article published in the journal Nature by NYU historian Peder Anker, and a 1995 paper published in the proceedings of the Royal Society of London. She also lifted from a book published in 1998 by German physicist Claus Mattheck and, in a more classical mode of plagiarism, copied one paragraph from Mattheck without any quotation or attribution."

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-ackman-wife-neri-oxman-mit-dissertation-plagiarism-2024-1

fifilamoura, 5 months ago to random

Pretending Covid is over isn't just causing more people to get Long Covid or die from Covid, it's also harming funding for research we desperately need because Covid is unlikely to be the last novel virus we face as climate change and environmental destruction increase diseases among all living things and the ability for them to jump species.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/this-covid-study-has-been-tracking-immunity-for-3-years-now-it-s-running-out-of-money-1.7026913

fifilamoura, 7 months ago to random

I wish people would stop bragging about not getting Covid, it's really not just because of your superior skills or even precautions and, while it feels like a personal achievement, like many things associated with having privileges it's the privileges combined with your caution that have kept you untouched by the disease infecting the social body. It almost always requires A LOT of economic and social privilege to be able to isolate away from the mass of the social body.

fifilamoura, 10 months ago to random

It's weird and VERY Christian to look at evolution and think that nothing evolved and remained a human trait simply because it was pleasurable to do. This idea that evolution has to be purposeful and constantly striving towards some ideal state of functionality is really stupid and a reflection of our societal obsessions and not how nature functions. The fact that it's always centered around male reproduction seems to me to be an artifact of patriarchy. Maybe we masturbate because it's a pleasurable way to pass the time. It's a bit like how we tend to think animals in nature are in a constant life and death struggle or constantly searching for food when, in reality, a lot of animals spend a lot of their time fucking around and playing. This Social Darwinist idea of nature is more reflective of the horrors of hierarchical patriarchal societies than it is of the natural world (even ones where males seem to dominate*).

*Even in chimp societies, the dominant males position is often actually undermined by social politics (females mate with plenty of other chimps of their choice on the sly, older non-dominant males get to remain in the troupe, etc). Alpha wolves don't exist in the way we've projected onto them and that kind of behaviour is aberrant and a result of being caged, traumatized and put in situations primed for conflict, etc....which tells us something about the behaviour and mental and emotional health of men who claim to be Alpha males).

fifilamoura, 6 months ago to random

Your friendly reminder not to automatically trust articles published in Politico anymore because they're owned by a far right publisher with an agenda who uses the media he owns for this agenda.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/axel-springer-politico-media-scandal-germany-bild/

fifilamoura, 7 months ago to random

The quintuple-lock of polarisation:

1. Moral asymmetry: "what we did is justified, what you did is not" - each side sees itself as the victim (or potential victim)

2. Belief asymmetry: "you may be spreading disinformation, but we know the truth" - trusting stuff that supports its view, distrusting what doesn't

3. Othering: "you are all the same" - perceiving all of them via a single archetype

4. Turning inwards: "our group supports each other, interaction with the others is painful" - so meaingful communication stops between groups

5. Anticipatory defensiveness: "I fear they will act against me, so I will act first to prevent it" - not only reacting to others' actions but to what we think they will do

fifilamoura, 9 months ago to random

All the enshittification of search and everything else by the people who sell advertising is ramping up because of the extreme desperation of late stage capitalism that needs to sell us the most useless of products, the most flimsy and scratchy simulacra of luxury, as the world burns around us. Real luxury is having the time to lie on the grass under a tree next to a lake as the dappled sunlight dances through the leaves...it's breathing fresh air, drinking clean water and eating delicious fresh food grown nearby.

fifilamoura, 3 months ago to random

Carbon capture and credits are really just plastic recycling all over again, a fantasy solution that allows industry and governments to avoid the necessary reductions in using petrochemicals. It's a fig leaf.

BlackAzizAnansi, 3 months ago to random

Is anyone else still traumatized from 2020?

fifilamoura, 1 month ago to random

The fact that only 3 spotted owls remain in the wild made me ponder how animals have cultural knowledge that they teach each other and wondering how much of that is lost when animals are kept in captivity...and thinking about cultural genocide across species and how limited our ideas about conservation actually are because they see animals as objects (and forget or deny that humans are animals too).

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/04/18/Canada-Last-Three-Wild-Spotted-Owls/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial

fifilamoura, 2 months ago to random

Behind the Bastards Steve Jobs episodes are wild in how they expose just how much of a deluded (and stinky) hippy grifter cultist and sociopath Jobs was. And, yes, he literally ran Apple as a cult and using cult abuse dynamics. But the big reveal is really how bad Jobs was at even at aesthetics and making smart marketing choices.

But, also, can we talk about how often the superficial trappings of esoteric and exotic seeming religious bullshit gets wrapped up in politics and tech because sociopaths literally operate by imposing their narrative (reality) on others and convincing people they are enlightened/gods. It's the god-king of yore and a lot of people are still incapable of calling out the emperor's nakedness (partly because it will expose the lies they too have garbed themselves in and live to perpetuate).

fifilamoura, 2 months ago to random

To be honest, I think we need an angry women's day not a happy one. Like we're being told to smile even today! scowls at the world of violence made by men (Yes, women can also be evil warmongers, thank you very much, but they're still operating in patriarchy. I'm down for seeing if a matriarchy would also be evil....or not, we'd probably just dress evil then make you tea and pull snacks out of our purses.)

fifilamoura, 2 months ago to random

Maybe I'm very late to this realization but I just realized a lot of being able to learn and do research is being able to bear being disappointed when the truth is not what we would have liked it to be. I'm driven by curiosity (and can make many things interesting to myself) but sometimes the answer to something is, well, just disappointing and you have to be able to accept that and not get the dopamine hit of being right or learning something new that's fun not depressing.

The "do your own research" people and those who aggressively cherry pick data aren't able to bear that disappointment of being wrong or something being upsetting or an unpleasant truth. They just want the dopamine hit of being right (extraordinarily right in fact!) and connecting some dots and then, like a gambler or addict, they need to escalate to keep getting that dopamine hit. I mean, most real research is lots of boring stuff with moments of discovery or excitement not some whizzing slot machine of discovery.