fake idgafer i saw you defending his honor online

"farewell is not even a thing i would ever say jesus what am i a victorian poet" 21, paranoid as hell, probably a system. formally larvalcorpse

[ahorsesea]

sshhh im keeping this here cuz idk where else to put it

ok. ty.

[aestheticofstars]

[trunswicked]

Frozen Wastes

[ingridskogstad]

An icewing for Silver_Dargon ! First of the emergency slots when i accidentally broke my pc monitor while trying to wash my window panes :")

[velo-cats]

Hvitur

[cywofdesign]

Arctic

[noodibranch]

"This is my mother. Those are my full moons. This is my world now."

[celluzu]

it's a shame that bashing your head into hard surfaces will injure you badly because it looks SO fun and enriching

[catchymemes]

[fandomsandfeminism]

This may be the best Pride merch I've seen from a major corporation.

Levi's said yes, actually. Assless chaps and a biker vest. Happy Pride.

And the assless chaps sold out on June 1.

[aetherograph]

They also specifically contacted members of the leather community, used them as models iirc, and donated $100k to Outright International. They talked the talk and walked the walk and put their money on it too. I don't really care that I can't afford and don't want this merch, I love to see my community getting the respect it deserves. Levi's said, "We make jeans which gays wear lots of jeans? Oh leather daddies? Let's call them."

[fandomsandfeminism]

I think Levi's donates to Outreach International every year too, as well as sponsoring pride events and other community support. They were offering Same Sex domestic partner benefits to employees in the 90s, and have been very public about their support for pro-lgbt legislation all through the 2000s.

So, you know, a giant corporation that walks the walk pretty consistently.

[myjetpack]

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

[voroxpete]

To be clear, this isn't a bit. This is what they actually did. "Its too late" is the new "Climate change isn't real"... And its still a lie!

Every serious climate scientist agrees that there is no such as thing as too late, just as there is no such thing as too early. We should have done a lot more than we have to fight climate change, and the world will suffer for our inaction, but there is no point of no return. We can always work to reduce the amount of suffering that occurs, and eventually turn things around to the point where our planet is healing once again. Do not believe anyone who says it's "too late".

[darkfrog24]

You know how the passenger pigeon is extinct but the humpback whale isn't? It's like that. You know how the Great Barrier Reef is bleached and dead but not all reefs are and we could still take samples and re-coral some of the dead reefs if we get the acid and temperature under control? It's like that. Now that the ozone layer is no longer being depleted, it could grow back in under a century. Some things are gone forever but others are not. Some damage will take millions of years to fix, but some things will show results within a human lifetime.

[synjectivism]

some terms i've been thinking about

1. Charitable Blackmail: a form of social control in which genuinely helpful and necessary assistance is used to discourage criticism of the harmful systems, behaviors, and actors that make the assistance necessary in the first place.

This is when a person (or group of people) provides genuine and necessary assistance to a vulnerable person (or group), as a way of silencing criticism of their harmful behavior. The assistance they offer is genuinely helpful and necessary enough that it cannot be reasonably turned down, but never truly resolves the root issues, keeping the vulnerable dependent. The people offering the assistance use the perception of themselves as "charitable" to distract from exploitative and abusive practices, often arguing that those who criticism them are unreasonable and overlook their good deeds.

In traditional blackmail, the victim is silenced by the threat that they will be harmed. In charitable blackmail, the victim is silenced by the perceived selflessness of the perpetrator and their genuine need for the assistance, which is used to make any critique or resistance appear irrational and extreme.

Example: A country in the Global South had its agricultural systems wrecked by colonial violence. Post-independence, those colonial nations set up a "charitable" system of "donating" seeds from wealthy companies to native farmers, keeping them dependent on their former colonizers and suppressing native crops. When people attempt the critique this system, the backlash fixates on the fact that the program helps people and "is better than nothing," and accuses critics of themselves being privileged or ignorant of complexity.

2. Anti-nuance: the use of complexity, caveats, contextual details, or the performance of balanced thinking in ways that prevent genuine synthesis and aim towards simplistic conclusions or predetermined judgments.

This is when the genuine moral complexity of an issue or topic is appealed to in order to launder false dichotomies and black-and-white thinking. Nuance is a process by which we develop a "big picture" understanding of an issue by understanding all aspects and sides, with the goal of coming to a decision on what to do that takes everything into account rather than defaulting to sweeping conclusions.

In comparison, anti-nuance appeals to complexity with the goal of justifying sweeping conclusions. Details are presented selectively and without proper context, making the discussion appear nuanced without sharing the goals of true nuance. Nuance is always open to new critiques and expanding understanding, while anti-nuance will always resist critique and any complexities that cannot be used to support the desired conclusion. Nuance seeks out a diversity of facts and experiences in order to synthesize them and move forward, while anti-nuance typically stops at "there are a lot of different facts / perspectives," acknowledging complexity only to justify not engaging with it and returning to the status quo.

Example: The Israel/Palestine conflict is so complicated, because Jewish people have suffered so much over history, and taking hostages is never okay. So it's really both sides causing problems, and you can't get mad at the Israel for protecting itself!

Charitable blackmail and anti-nuance often play off each other. Those who criticize exploitative benefactors may be accused of "lacking nuance" under the assumption that acknowledging that real assistance is provided automatically means seeing the benefactors as "good people" who cannot be held accountable for contributing to harm. Charitable blackmail itself tends to keep the focus on the "small picture" of an issue and fairly black-and-white questions (is there aid being given or not?) and prevents "big picture" discussion (why is this happening at all? what forces perpetuate it? what are the long-term impacts?). Anti-nuance tends to create false equivalences, treating nuance as if it requires both sides to have equal amounts of criticism and praise, decontextualizing facts in order to create an artificial sense of balance. For example, treating the violence done by Hamas as equivalent to the violence done by Israel simply because both have been violent and engaged in immoral behaviors, while avoiding the massive difference in both military and international-political power, levels of destruction, levels of control over the other, etc.

My goal with coining these terms is to make it easier to identify and critique these behaviors and prevent necessary discussions from getting bogged down and distracted by them.

[tzikeh]

Maryland to Become First US State to Ban Surveillance Pricing That Charges More After Mining Personal Data

Maryland will become the first US state to ban surveillance pricing in retail stores, after passing Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

Jesus fucking christ that this exists in the first place

[boyslit]

I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore 😭

[eclipticasolaris]

Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the app…. Which requires your login information….. and also stores your card information so even if you didn’t use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.

[antisocialxconstruct]

I've seen some people in the notes express (very fair) concern that this is only going to inconvenience already under-paid laborers, and not have any impact on corporate. While I can't speak for every company or every store, I do work in a grocery store and I can tell you this is precisely the kind of thing that would have an impact, especially if people are doing it en masse. Stores absolutely track their shrink numbers, and they do draw distinctions between what gets stolen, damaged, or wasted for other reasons. If people are making it clear that the reason they're bringing things to the cashier is that the prices are not adequately represented on the displays, and rather than improving business it's wasting product, slowing down transactions, and causing confusion and mistrust in customers, that is a language that shareholders speak.

[eggfoto]

[oeing-oeing-clay]

wow dude jts so awesome that your car is loud as fuck and smells worse when it drives past. thags fucking epic man. i really like how it hurts to listen to you drive past and it scares people. thats awesome man. i really like your car that makes a loud as fuck fart sound. fucking epic dude

[cholvoq]

weight of the world.

[grendel-menz]

In the dark, the deer mistook my headlights for stars