Next you are going to tell me Hamas is a pathetic rag tag group of resistance fighters that could never even hope of fighting a “war” against Israel (like how, would they beat fighter jets and some of the most advanced main battle tanks in the world with some assault rifles, rpgs and maybeeeee some IEDs?).
🤪
It would be one thing if the resistance fighters had any amount of territory to hide in, but Gaza is essentially an open air prison that takes an f16 all of probably a minute and a half to fly over on afterburners, there is simply no way for Hamas to really even take the first step of fighting a traditional war with Israel since one must concentrate their troops to win a traditional war, and Hamas doing so in any numbers would lead to near instant and complete obliteration by the hands of Israel fighter bombers, artillery, or troops backed by main battle tanks.
This is not a war, this is a genocide of the Palestinian people.
I take this as a valid critique of myself and the way I write sentences like contestants on those shopping blitz game shows where you get a limited time but you can keep whatever fits in your cart if you make it back to the finish line in time.
The metaphor is imperfect because I (clearly) don’t have a timer.
Errrr…. you realize the US is one of richest nations that has ever existed and yet ~95% of people living in it are one or two crises away from collapsing?
There are homeless everywhere and if anything centrist democrats are giddy to criminalize the state of being without a home. Biden was an instrumental part of the crime bills that came to define some of the most vivid failures of neoliberalism. Kamala Harris has a similar history. Have these politicians evolved and changed? Yes of course but that isn’t my point.
My point is that is it really disputable at this point that modern centrist leftwing political groups in the US, UK and similar political environments are as associated with austerity policies as rightwing politicians? There are degrees of difference, but it is a contrast of magnitude not of ethics of attitude.
The neoliberal colonialist stranglehold world order is collapsing so fast it is making my head spin.
The centrist, austerity minded democrats who have enjoyed power in the US for the last couple of decades are absolutely self immolating, they look like utter absolute murderous clowns when they claim with a straight face that the Palestinian Genocide is not a Genocide.
Make no mistake this is a turning point, no matter what happens in this election, this kind of democrat who supports whatever Israel does because… well because… to the point of pretending an ongoing genocide being done with your weapons and fighter jets doesn’t exist is toast.
No matter what happens in this election, the kind of mainstream media that is towing the line Israel by giving them complete diplomatic and narrative immunity towards being the bad guys when Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians every day as we speak… it is detonating the strangehold of conservative, ideologically bereft centrist who have been trying to manage the global status quo without actually conceding to progressive changes to it.
The critical change here is that milquetoast democrats used to be globally regarded as at least somewhat rationale and ethically minded compared to the dumpster that is american conservatism, but this genocide is thoroughly proving to the world that most centrist democrats are just the good cop to the bad cop republicans, and if push comes to shove a good cop has no problem filling in for the role of bad cop when they perceive it will retain their violent power.
I really don’t think the rich and powerful who controlling basically everything in the US have any idea how deep a majority of US citizen’s revulsion over the pointlessness of the Iraq war has burrowed into their psyche. They really don’t get it, they think we are just going to roll over and accept US imperialism/military industrial complex as “just the way it is honey” like our parents did but we are FAR stronger and more politically aware than our parents were and FARRRRRRR more jaded in a way that makes us suspect of the basic legitimacy of the military industrial complex at every turn we have to interact with it.
I’ve always said the Pro-Palestine crowd and the MAGAs are basically the same people.
Why because you are an ideologically bankrupt centrist that finds it convenient to equate protestors desperately trying to stop a genocide with MAGA heads… who tried to violently overthrow the US government because it wasn’t hateful enough for them?
You aren’t welcome in the progressive coalition if you desire to ignore reality in favor of a “both sides” narrative to the degree you are doing. We are talking about a genocide here and you are saying the people trying to stop it are crazy, violent hateful extremists who are obsessed with hurting trans people for no reason, fucking over women and taking power away from everybody but white men.
To be fair Louisiana can’t do much more than alternate between crying and sticking its head in the sand. Unfortunately it is the state where a whole lot of oil refineries and disgusting chemical plants have set up shop and that has just locked the state into a death spiral politically. Louisiana is absolutely FUCKED though from climate change and I think you have to see the batshit crazy behavior of people there from that context. Climate Change is going to demolish the lives of people who live in Louisiana (actually by the numbers it is going to somehow be FAR worse than Florida) and no matter how much denial you are in about Climate Change the fear will keep seeping into these people’s psyches no matter what, like rising flood waters slipping between the cracks of buildings…
It is useless to try to understand why the ideological contagions of religious fundamentalism and conservatism are so widespread in Louisiana outside the context of the state being a trashcan for the entire US oil and chemical industrial complex. This kind of suffering, ideological dissonance with basic aspects of reality and obsession with issues that are massive distractions from unfolding mass scale health catastrophes (like healthcare being an utterly failed system in the US or rent being completely unaffordable) are a fundamental requirement for petroleum and chemical companies to maintain their incredibly destructive existence, otherwise they would be shut down almost immediately by angry masses of citizens.
yawn the economics don’t matter, this about beginning the process of completing commodifying CGI work so conceptually anybody doing the labor of animation can constantly have the threat of AI replacing held over them.
In this sense, as I have said many times before, it doesn’t matter if AI works well in this capacity or not, it only matters that AI facilitates a permanent reduction in the leverage animators and computer graphics artists have to fight for a decent quality of life and living wage.
thoughts (no self harm talk, just sadness!)___ My society clearly hates me and doesn’t want me to exist, my parents bought the modern austerity riddled American dream hook line and sinker and so they believed they shouldn’t help me too much after I became an adult and basically they severed that deep link between parent and child for… some shitty neoliberal ideologies that are empty as fuck? I am a millenial and I exist, I don’t want to, even though I was given a lot of privilege when I was younger I am ADHD as fuck and life is honestly genuinely miserable. The world wasn’t designed for my brain, it was designed to shunt someone with my brain into jail or a death spiral of some kind of addiction (you ever looked up the percentage of prisoners in US prisons that likely have ADHD? It is shocking).
It would be one thing if things were getting better for ADHD people, but they are quickly accelerating towards being worse in every aspect, random ADHD med shortages because the FDA wants us to die, more and more executive function required for basic tasks (more paperwork, more scheduling, more consequences for not following rigid schedules perfectly), less and less energy and free time available left over after work, less and less tolerance for simple mistakes at work, more complex and brittle steps to get healthcare help that involve a million carefully designed give-up points custom designed to coax an ADHD person into never utilizing their healthcare because they can never get through the hoops to do it. The job application process of sending out resumes to online job after online job alone is catastrophic for my ADHD. I am not going to hurt myself, or by extension others around me, after all that is precisely what is making me sad in the first place. I have lost that flame inside me because I know I won’t be able to live a fulfilling life where I am genuinely happy in a way that I don’t always go to sleep at night wishing I could disappear painlessly and be forgotten by all…. unless I win the lottery either literally or get the rare job that doesn’t treat me like shit. (Then I am happy and am surrounded by a bunch of dying people like me that I have to try to ignore…?). It is hard because therapists are usually older adults and they just can’t understand this depression as a rational response from an entire chunk of a generation rather than an individual pathology. Focus on the positives! they say….and I think… I will eventually die of old age or health problems (hey can’t afford the doctor or dentist so that will speed it up :P ) and wont have to force myself to survive in a society with rules designed to put me in a constant state of suffering while constantly coding my desperate struggle to keep basic aspects of my life together as laziness, naiveness, lack of work ethic, lack of personal responsibility etc…
Literally nobody was confused by those grammatical mistakes, this is just a stupid grammatical rule designed to be a gotcha that grammar people can wield as proof that someone isn’t well educated.
Put the apostrophe wherever the hell you want, just write in a clear way that gives enough context that unless someone is a computer program incapable of tolerating slight grammatical mistakes they will understand fine.
Thank you so much, I deeply appreciate these kinds of posts that don’t attempt to fix me but just engage in solidarity :)
on a related note, I left christianity a year ago, and holy fuck has that been an adjustment. most of my optimism was always rooted in religion, and without that worldview, it’s suddenly on me to find new reasons to be even a little hopeful, even to want to be alive. I’m not suicidal, but for a while there I couldn’t say that I wasn’t. I do feel like I’m happy to be alive now, and that’s great, but holy crap this is not as easy as it was when I believed in an all-powerful benevolent god. ah well.
I think the least interesting question about religion is whether god exists or not. There are many things you can take away from yourself about christianity that don’t have anything to do with a bearded man in the sky existing or not. It is enough to appreciate the beauty of how a spiritual perspective on life and the beings around you can lead you into a happier, better life even if you that spiritual perspective is fundamentally not reflective of science or reality as we know it.
It is like how I don’t necessarily believe we have souls (I mean whatever, but there is zero scientific evidence of souls or even suggestions that they exist), but the concept of a soul and how it can be affected by the world and other people is an incredibly useful way of looking at the human condition. It is a concept and word that does not derive its power from the fact that it exists, and you can appreciate that outside of believing there is something like a soul literally imbued into ourselves in some magic/spiritual way.
i’m sorry for the dreams that’ve been taken from you and the injustices you’ve experienced. you deserved better, and so did I, and so did most of us. thank you for being honest about it. 🫂
I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
I think you should talk about accessibility here, and everywhere else you visit on the fediverse. Especially here though. Accessibility isn’t just an ethical impetus to make community spaces accessible to everyone not just ~90% of people.
I am not dyslexic but I use the Open Dyslexic font all the time because it is easy to read when my brain’s word processing neurons are totally fried from a stressful day.
I am not color blind but I love color blind options in games for the UI since it often simplifies the AI’s color scheme down to a point that makes me feel more relaxed.
I am not deaf, but I love closed captions as they let me watch things at any volume, and allow me to process what people are saying better.
I am not a wheelchair user, but I can’t count the amount of times wheelchair ramps have been useful and helpful in my life (especially when moving big bulky things on wheels).
I am not someone who typically gets powerfully triggered by things that evoke a past trauma, but I find content warnings have massively improved my mental health when using social media because they bring agency into the microblogging/twitter form, an agency I never thought about not having, where I don’t get ambushed by real world, depressing news that I want to learn about but need to check in with myself before processing (especially if I went onto mastodon for cute cat pics, not to catch up on the latest shitty thing).
I am not queer, but every single fucking piece of accessibility accommodation that queer people and their allies have fought for has meaningfully made my life better. You know what drops the bottom out of toxic masculinity violently forcing men into super unhealthy and emotionally stunted existences? A bunch of queer and proud people drilling holes into the foundations of binary gender and blowing it the fuck up so toxic men are too busy panicking about trans people to keep building the widely accepted definition of masculinity towards even more toxic places.
I am ADHD and the world shits on actually accommodating me everyday, to the point that loved ones hurt me constantly even when they are trying to do the right thing because that hatred of ADHD people goes so deep down into the US protestant work ethic hellscape… that it is like a really bad trip that people don’t seem to be able to escape even if they wanted to.
I know what it is like to not be accommodated at a very deep level. It is violence.
I also know what it is like to be in a community that prioritizes accommodating the “edge cases” of humans (I mean that in a kind way), i.e. making sure the people most sensitive to overstimulation have a space they can retreat to and chill for a bit, or making sure the person in the wheelchair can access the building, or making sure that images have image descriptions for blind people. It is missing the point to lament “oh but these people are outliers from the dataset of humans, we shouldn’t waste too much time accommodating them”. Accommodation is HOW we innovate and evolve the Fediverse, and the barometer for how well we are doing can be almost directly translated into how well the Fediverse accommodates those with disabilities and specific needs (and also how suffocatingly white a space we make the Fediverse by tone policing black and brown people from life experience’s we don’t know shit about).
It is funny how people will readily agree that the challenges NASA has faced and overcome with putting a measly handful of spaceships and humans into space has had many indirect, but nonetheless MAJOR benefits to our society in the development of technologies that went on to be useful for entirely different contexts. The challenges of making the Fediverse (or any community space) accessible are no different except though they are far more diverse and far more vital.
I have unfortunately not been able to figure out how to load controller configurations that I have shared to steam into games that weren’t the original game I made that controller config in. I click on the controller layout and it fails to load and reverts back to the layout I already had selected....
There is always a future, we are just in denial about it because the foundation of our entire world views are reliant on an an intense alienation from futurity.
Things will not end, humanity probably won’t die out in the next couple of hundred years, humans and animals (and plants etc…) will have to subsist through an immense amount of suffering that we needlessly and knowingly caused. In some ways this is more awful than it all just ending in one big bang, which is why we are so culturally obsessed with apocalyptic visions that are immediate, complete and draw a clear demarcation between “before the apocalypse” and “after the apocalypse”. We know deep down that the scariest thing about living during this time is that apocalypses generally don’t work like that, they come in like tides, faster than you can imagine but also in cyclic pulses that recede and return with greater force… and all the time you are so exhausted from the struggle to maintain your shitty daily life that you don’t have the energy or willpower to save yourself or anyone else around you… so you have to keep going through the same awful grind you had to before the apocalypse (except now more stressful and worse) even while everything around you is comically collapsing into great heaps until one day you drop dead from the exhaustion of the daily grind or the tide sweeps in and takes you away.
I think division is actually very important, younger generations face an existential need to sever themselves from the worldview and belief systems their parents raised them under (and return to value systems that have embodied humanity for literally the entire rest of our history) in order to save as much of humanity and nature as possible.
Inaction as well is possibly our most potent weapon against the coming mass experience of suffering that climate change will wrought upon us. We all have to stop doing, we need to grind the global economy to a halt and scare the shit out of capitalists to the point that bargaining with us is preferable to letting the scarier alternative happen.
I don’t think future generations will be bewildered at all, I think they will just be angry at us for sitting down and taking it because we were afraid to make things worse and collectively try anything else than let ideologically bankrupt centrists run the show with their strategy of slowly dialing back, in tinyyyyy increments, ongoing mass scale human rights atrocities and the astoundingly cataclysmic extinction of biodiversity and habitat.
I think future generations will be nauseatingly disgusted at how we laughed at environmental “extremists” who chained themselves to old growth trees, lit logging equipment on fire, blew up oil pipelines and fumbled around trying any desperate action they could to stop the incredible unfolding mass scale death, human and animal. They will look at the rest of us like condescending assholes on a sinking ship who spent the last few minutes of their life bullying the few weirdos who realized the ship was sinking and were trying to sound the alarm and distribute life vests while we sat in our deck chairs drinking with the captain, pointing and laughing at how stupid and useless the frantic passengers trying to save lives looked in their pathetic attempts to get everyone’s attention (who didn’t give a shit like us).
Future generations won’t be confused, they will just talk of the generations that were alive between the 1950-2030 as pariahs, as disgusting examples of how a generation of people can decide to en masse foreclose the future of their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren and so on… Societies all over the world for thousands of years will study how badly 1950s-2030s US culture fucked up (and also of course extending back into European colonialism) and people will rightfully use us as a punching bag when talking about how pathetic a group of powerful cowards can be.
Or is this a case of sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic?
No this is a case of technology sufficiently broken and enshittified to the point that you can’t ever trust it to work right, simply or even logically if it was made by a large tech company.
The last sentence is particularly confusing because it’s implying that most if not all company protocols are just as arbitrary and supernatural as attempting to summon a demon.
I am making the claim that no matter how much technical debt there is in a code, it is not remotely comparable to occultism and demons.
I mean I am all ears, convince me computers don’t have as much arbitrary bullshit and strict specific details to processes, beliefs and rituals that don’t correspond to any intuitive rationality?
Pentagon says none of the aid unloaded from US pier off coast of Gaza has been delivered to broader Palestinian population (edition.cnn.com)
Biden: What's happening in Gaza is not genocide (www.gmanetwork.com)
“What’s happening in Gaza is not genocide. We reject that,” Biden said at a Jewish American Heritage Month event at the White House....
EXCLUSIVE: ICC seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes over October 7 attack and Gaza war | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
Louisiana becomes 1st state to require the Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms (www.nola.com)
‘Not genocide’ says Biden after ICC warrants sought (www.google.com)
Major Pixar Layoffs, Underway In Restructuring - 14% of workforce cut, which is 175 of 1300 people, is part of Disney's cost-cutting measures. (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
The move, less than reported 20%, was delayed because of production schedules & studio not focusing on direct-to-streaming series but on its films.
Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates they've given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says (fortune.com)
For discussing Fediverse accessibility, where would you recommend me to go? Or stay here?
I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
An Easy Way To Copy A Controller Layout Configuration From One Game To Another
I have unfortunately not been able to figure out how to load controller configurations that I have shared to steam into games that weren’t the original game I made that controller config in. I click on the controller layout and it fails to load and reverts back to the layout I already had selected....
Stardew creator won't rush Haunted Chocolatier: "better to have a good delayed game than a bad game on time" (www.eurogamer.net)
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In Star Trek, Commander Data is socially awkward because he lacks training data. This might be because he was built and developed in isolation from the rest of society.
descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are
Unironically....