Existential Poser

Though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater. 21 // He, him

[24ozsteak]

thinking about that WoW epidemic

[24ozsteak]

[swampgallows]

i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

[wheel-skellington]

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

[the-jellyfish-galaxy]

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.

[adobe-outdesign]

[stiwfssr]

This porno didn’t fuck around

[practical---bitchcraft]

[yourdadsghoulfriend]

there’s… a lot to take in here…

[fineillsignup]

I was so flummoxed by this I had to learn more, so I took to Google, where I found this blog post by Dan Cardone, who was a grip on this film. Some highlights:

This was the first set I had been on that featured three directors, and hopefully the last. One director was there to primarily film the sex scenes, which he did effectively and economically. The other two directors handled what is called in porn-lingo ‘B-Roll’, i.e. everything non sexual. Which on this film was substantial. The plot for To The Last Man involves two ranches populated entirely by horny men who have random sex and feud over water, as they are in the middle of a crippling drought. Which is why we filmed in Arizona during thunderstorm season…

It’s amazing no one got killed, or seriously injured. There was horse riding, there were fight scenes of rocky escarpments, there were drownings. When the real guns and live ammunition came out for a scene I thought, “That’s it, I’m going back to the truck”.

Fortunately, one of the models was also a fully qualified nurse, so that saved money, time and also lives. Plus, he was sexy, so it was win/win.

[the-greentext-guy]

[violent-dharma-deactivated20210]

This is what Buddhists mean when we talk about the eternal cycle of suffering and reincarnation.

[kawuli]

This person is my new best friend

Farming systems need to fit into their natural and social environment. Sometimes we describe this as a socio-ecological niche.

[myjusticecake]

Dr. Taber knows her shit.

[notoriousmasc]

so apparently my city has a superhero. and a supervillain. who like, do activism. and. my mom. is dating the supervillain.

[notoriousmasc]

i live in norfolk virginia, and there’s this guy called the black widow who lives here

he does operate kind of like a real superhero, and he stops car break-ins and stuff like that! apparently he even stopped a case of domestic violence once. i don’t know if a lot of people know he exists, but he definitely seems like a nice dude, and he has a lot of articles centered around him

but. there’s also a supervillain?

this is Man Man, founder of “AdaManMantium inc.” He is both legally and occupationally a supervillain. that’s not even a joke he has actual paperwork designating himself as a supervillain. he even has a business card

Man Man is pretty obsessed with “testing” the black widow in a lot of different ways. like. man man threatened to give his (man man’s) cat to a kill shelter if the black widow didn’t solve a riddle he gave him (whether he actually did it or not i have no idea)

and he also got 35 people to donate blood once the black widow solved ANOTHER riddle which was cool, and there was also this time where he went to a gay bar and told people that if they bought drinks he’d send the equivalent of the money they spent to the westboro baptist church (but since they refused he sent them to a charity)

one of his more recent schemes included… going to the mayor of the city and trying to get him to outlaw masks.

the reason im telling this to you. is because

my mom is dating man man?

blocked out the private stuff but you can definitely see that its the same guy (and also him cosplaying as. Him.)

my mom has always had questionable taste in men (she had a crush on onision a while ago) but like. she’s dating an actual supervillain now which i think is fucking hysterical

so basically. tl;dr. my town has superheroes and supervillains in it and my mom has decided to date a supervillain

[notoriousmasc]

update: theyre engaged

[theawkwardvirgin]

Black Widow has a billboard and runs around with batons.

[captainlordauditor]

[davidmann95]

People shit on Tumblr - and I know I’m biased because it’s my blogging platform of choice - but where else on god’s earth do you get shit like this

[starfleetacademy]

My favorite catholic lore is that anyone can make holy water in a pinch but the church puts dumb restrictions on us like ‘do this only if someone needs their last rites’ like I WILL bless this McDonald’s sprite and I WILL enjoy the crispiness of our lord and savior

[subrosa-shit-deactivated2024091]

Another bit is that holy water cannot be diluted. When I went to the Vatican the tour guide was explaining this, if you put any amount of holy water into any amount of normal water, the whole bunch becomes holy. This is how they sell Pope Holy Water in the gift shop. This is how I’ve been drinking only holy water for two months now. I am immune to demons.

[meglyman]

Homeopathic holy

[kaijutegu]

It’s not actually any amount of holy water- according to the Church, the water has to be more than half holy water by volume. So if you take a half gallon+a few drops of holy water and a half gallon of secular water, you get one gallon of holy water, plus a few drops. You can then add a gallon of secular water to that and then you have two gallons of holy water. We’ve got a couple jugs of Pope Water in the linen closet at my parents’ house, because my mom used the heck out of this loophole after a trip to Italy in 2008. It was more than a decade ago at this point and we still have Pope Water. We no longer have that Pope, but by god do we have his water.

[kaijutegu]

Here’s what a jug of Pope water looks like. Mom measured a fill line on them so that we never accidentally run out and just have old jugs of secular water lying around.

[corvidbone-deactivated20200223]

[gummybearattacktheworldofdespair]

[garbage-empress]

why did you tag this as #milf monday

[baeddel]

I know its a old point but it is really striking just how much of world history is reconceived in technological terms. Colonialism is often read as, as they put it in Civ 5, the triumph of “muskets over spears”, when really this was not how any of the involved generals perceived it at the time. Colonial wars were hard won, the natives were not crushed. During the invasion of (what we now call) South America, Cortez himself wrote about his fear and bewilderment at the Aztec’s weapons (which were made out of stone, despite their advanced metallurgy) for being remarkably effective against their cavalry. In 1899 John Ardagh, a British colonial administrator conducting a campaign in the Phillipines, turned up to the Hague on the day they ruled the use of expanding bullets a war crime to make a breathless argument that (get this) regular bullets don’t work on Phillipinos! (He was laughed out of the trial, nach.)

But people also extend it to the succession of the bronze age over the stone age, and the iron age over the bronze age - the bronze weapons just couldn’t compete with the iron ones, we tend to think. This is not true in any case, as far as I know. It would actually be quite late in the iron age that iron weapons would surpass bronze ones in terms of quality. The reasoning was a little more like the succession of LCD screens over CRT ones - ease of use and distribution, etc. In particular, bronze was greatly restricted by access to the ‘tin belt’, a slim region in South East asia which was the only part of the world where tin was available outside of the Americas. Countries closer to the tin belt were the first to enter the bronze age and typically the last to leave it.

[bigwordsandsharpedges]

Early iron weapons kinda sucked, actually. Soft iron is bendy, hard cast iron is brittle as glass. Some soft iron could be on par with bronze, but mostly on small blades like axes and spearheads. Sword blades were relatively long, so you could get enough leverage to really bend them badly.

Bronze offered the best combination of hardness and durability until some clever smiths in a couple locations figured out how to make iron into steel, which is basically perfect.

Steel is hard and tough and springy, but most of all, it’s controllable. Changing a few additives, or slightly altering the heat treatment, can give you the exact performance you ask for. Modern high-alloy supersteels are like magic.

Aluminum is good for stage props, but an aluminum sword has few benefits over bronze except light weight, and that only useful for some types of blade that depend on velocity to cut.

Titanium blades actually kinda suck. It’s extremely tough and durable, but that makes it extremely difficult to forge, or even grind. Ask any knifemmaker, titanium fucking eats abrasives.

Flint and obsidian are actually superb for making blades. The edge can be astoundingly thin and smooth at a microscopic level, and even good steel looks like a saw at that level. They make great surgical scalpels, they even cause less scarring.

That’s why the macuahuitl, a sort of wooden sword edged with obsidian, allegedly decapitated Spanish horses with a single blow. It was made with a special flaking method called prismatic flaking, which produced long, consistent, replaceable razor blades.

Cortez had a good reason to be afraid.

[ruinedchildhood]

[helloohart]

Caravaggio living paintings by Ludovica Rambelli Theater

[johnthestitcher]

This never ceases to amaze me, no matter how many times I’ve seen it.

[iknowuthink-blog]

Expanded Consciousness

[moniquill]

Growing food instead of laws is good, but can we PLEASE stop with the condescending bullshit that implies that people who choose to grow lawns must only being doing it for shallow ‘sheepish’ reasons?

Maybe instead of snidely saying ‘trying to impress your neighbors?’ give people instructions on how to work with and/or fight their home owner’s association, how to appeal to a landlord, how to address local ordinances, and how to grow stealth food crops as ornamental plants in areas where food gardening is banned. Seriously, they will come bulldoze your shit and then bill you for it.

We need more posts instructing people how to guerrilla garden and found community gardens, and fewer posts saying ‘You only have a lawn because you’re shallow and vain and stupid!’

[sheldenthegirl]

All of this plus information about growing low-maintenance native lawns (which I will add later). Not everyone wants to or can grow food, but there are lots of options for those who want to keep a “traditional” lawn while improving biodiversity and habitat space.

[screwyouandrew]

[getstickbuggedlol]

[uswarcrimes]

US CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY & GLOBAL TERRORISM

US Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction The indiscriminate use of bombs by the US, usually outside a declared war situation, for wanton destruction, for no military objectives, whose targets and victims are civilian populations, or what we now call “collateral damage.”

Japan (1945) 

China (1945-46) 

Korea & China (1950-53) 

Guatemala (1954, 1960, 1967-69) 

Indonesia (1958) 

Cuba (1959-61) 

Congo (1964) 

Peru (1965) 

Laos (1964-70) 

Vietnam (1961-1973) 

Cambodia (1969-70) 

Grenada (1983) 

Lebanon (1983-84) 

Libya (1986) 

El Salvador (1980s) 

Nicaragua (1980s) 

Iran (1987) 

Panama (1989) 

Iraq (1991-2000) 

Kuwait (1991) 

Somalia (1993) 

Bosnia (1994-95) 

Sudan (1998) 

Afghanistan (1998) 

Pakistan (1998) 

Yugoslavia (1999) 

Bulgaria (1999) 

Macedonia (1999)

US Use of Chemical & Biological Weapons The US has refused to sign Conventions against the development and use of chemical and biological weapons, and has either used or tested (without informing the civilian populations) these weapons in the following locations abroad:

Bahamas (late 1940s-mid-1950s) 

Canada (1953) 

China and Korea (1950-53) 

Korea (1967-69) 

Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (1961-1970) 

Panama (1940s-1990s) 

Cuba (1962, 69, 70, 71, 81, 96)

And the US has tested such weapons on US civilian populations, without their knowledge, in the following locations:

Watertown, NY and US Virgin Islands (1950) 

SF Bay Area (1950, 1957-67) 

Minneapolis (1953) 

St. Louis (1953) 

Washington, DC Area (1953, 1967) 

Florida (1955) 

Savannah GA/Avon Park, FL (1956-58) 

New York City (1956, 1966) 

Chicago (1960)

And the US has encouraged the use of such weapons, and provided the technology to develop such weapons in various nations abroad, including:

Egypt 

South Africa 

Iraq

US Political and Military Interventions since 1945 The US has launched a series of military and political interventions since 1945, often to install puppet regimes, or alternatively to engage in political actions such as smear campaigns, sponsoring or targeting opposition political groups (depending on how they served US interests), undermining political parties, sabotage and terror campaigns, and so forth. It has done so in nations such as

China (1945-51) 

South Africa (1960s-1980s)

France (1947) 

Bolivia (1964-75)

Marshall Islands (1946-58) 

Australia (1972-75)

Italy (1947-1975) 

Iraq (1972-75)

Greece (1947-49) 

Portugal (1974-76)

Philippines (1945-53) 

East Timor (1975-99)

Korea (1945-53) 

Ecuador (1975)

Albania (1949-53) 

Argentina (1976)

Eastern Europe (1948-56) 

Pakistan (1977)

Germany (1950s) 

Angola (1975-1980s)

Iran (1953) 

Jamaica (1976)

Guatemala (1953-1990s) 

Honduras (1980s)

Costa Rica (mid-1950s, 1970-71) 

Nicaragua (1980s)

Middle East (1956-58) 

Philippines (1970s-90s)

Indonesia (1957-58) 

Seychelles (1979-81)

Haiti (1959) 

South Yemen (1979-84)

Western Europe (1950s-1960s) 

South Korea (1980)

Guyana (1953-64) 

Chad (1981-82)

Iraq (1958-63) 

Grenada (1979-83)

Vietnam (1945-53) 

Suriname (1982-84)

Cambodia (1955-73) 

Libya (1981-89)

Laos (1957-73) 

Fiji (1987)

Thailand (1965-73) 

Panama (1989)

Ecuador (1960-63) 

Afghanistan (1979-92)

Congo (1960-65, 1977-78) 

El Salvador (1980-92)

Algeria (1960s) 

Haiti (1987-94)

Brazil (1961-64) 

Bulgaria (1990-91)

Peru (1965) 

Albania (1991-92)

Dominican Republic (1963-65) 

Somalia (1993)

Cuba (1959-present) 

Iraq (1990s)

Indonesia (1965) 

Peru (1990-present)

Ghana (1966) 

Mexico (1990-present)

Uruguay (1969-72) 

Colombia (1990-present)

Chile (1964-73) 

Yugoslavia (1995-99)

Greece (1967-74)

US Perversions of Foreign Elections The US has specifically intervened to rig or distort the outcome of foreign elections, and sometimes engineered sham “demonstration” elections to ward off accusations of government repression in allied nations in the US sphere of influence. These sham elections have often installed or maintained in power repressive dictators who have victimized their populations. Such practices have occurred in nations such as:

Philippines (1950s) 

Italy (1948-1970s) 

Lebanon (1950s) 

Indonesia (1955) 

Vietnam (1955) 

Guyana (1953-64) 

Japan (1958-1970s) 

Nepal (1959) 

Laos (1960) 

Brazil (1962) 

Dominican Republic (1962) 

Guatemala (1963) 

Bolivia (1966) 

Chile (1964-70) 

Portugal (1974-75) 

Australia (1974-75) 

Jamaica (1976) 

El Salvador (1984) 

Panama (1984, 89) 

Nicaragua (1984, 90) 

Haiti (1987, 88) 

Bulgaria (1990-91) 

Albania (1991-92) 

Russia (1996) 

Mongolia (1996) 

Bosnia (1998)

US Versus World at the United Nations The US has repeatedly acted to undermine peace and human rights initiatives at the United Nations, routinely voting against hundreds of UN resolutions and treaties. The US easily has the worst record of any nation on not supporting UN treaties. In almost all of its hundreds of “no” votes, the US was the “sole” nation to vote no (among the 100-130 nations that usually vote), and among only 1 or 2 other nations voting no the rest of the time. Here’s a representative sample of US votes from 1978-1987:

US Is the Sole “No” Vote on Resolutions or Treaties

For aid to underdeveloped nations 

For the promotion of developing nation exports 

For UN promotion of human rights

For protecting developing nations in trade agreements

For New International Economic Order for underdeveloped nations

For development as a human right

Versus multinational corporate operations in South Africa

For cooperative models in developing nations

For right of nations to economic system of their choice

Versus chemical and biological weapons (at least 3 times)

Versus Namibian apartheid

For economic/standard of living rights as human rights

Versus apartheid South African aggression vs. neighboring states (2 times)

Versus foreign investments in apartheid South Africa

For world charter to protect ecology

For anti-apartheid convention

For anti-apartheid convention in international sports

For nuclear test ban treaty (at least 2 times)

For prevention of arms race in outer space

For UNESCO-sponsored new world information order (at least 2 times)

For international law to protect economic rights

For Transport & Communications Decade in Africa

Versus manufacture of new types of weapons of mass destruction 

Versus naval arms race 

For Independent Commission on Disarmament & Security Issues 

For UN response mechanism for natural disasters 

For the Right to Food 

For Report of Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination 

For UN study on military development 

For Commemoration of 25th anniversary of Independence for Colonial Countries 

For Industrial Development Decade in Africa 

For interdependence of economic and political rights 

For improved UN response to human rights abuses 

For protection of rights of migrant workers 

For protection against products harmful to health and the environment 

For a Convention on the Rights of the Child 

For training journalists in the developing world 

For international cooperation on third world debt 

For a UN Conference on Trade & Development

US Is 1 of Only 2 “No” Votes on Resolutions or Treaties 

For Palestinian living conditions/rights (at least 8 times) 

Versus foreign intervention into other nations 

For a UN Conference on Women 

Versus nuclear test explosions (at least 2 times) 

For the non-use of nuclear weapons vs. non-nuclear states 

For a Middle East nuclear free zone 

Versus Israeli nuclear weapons (at least 2 times) 

For a new world international economic order 

For a trade union conference on sanctions vs. South Africa 

For the Law of the Sea Treaty 

For economic assistance to Palestinians 

For UN measures against fascist activities and groups 

For international cooperation on money/finance/debt/trade/development 

For a Zone of Peace in the South Atlantic 

For compliance with Intl Court of Justice decision for Nicaragua vs. US. 

**For a conference and measures to prevent international terrorism (including its underlying causes) 

For ending the trade embargo vs. Nicaragua

US Is 1 of Only 3 “No” Votes on Resolutions and Treaties 

Versus Israeli human rights abuses (at least 6 times) 

Versus South African apartheid (at least 4 times) 

Versus return of refugees to Israel 

For ending nuclear arms race (at least 2 times) 

For an embargo on apartheid South Africa 

For South African liberation from apartheid (at least 3 times) 

For the independence of colonial nations 

For the UN Decade for Women 

Versus harmful foreign economic practices in colonial territories 

For a Middle East Peace Conference 

For ending the embargo of Cuba (at least 10 times)

In addition, the US has: 

Repeatedly withheld its dues from the UN 

Twice left UNESCO because of its human rights initiatives 

Twice left the International Labor Organization for its workers rights initiatives 

Refused to renew the Antiballistic Missile Treaty 

Refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming 

Refused to back the World Health Organization’s ban on infant formula abuses 

Refused to sign the Anti-Biological Weapons Convention 

Refused to sign the Convention against the use of land mines 

Refused to participate in the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban 

Been one of the last nations in the world to sign the UN Covenant on 

Political & Civil Rights (30 years after its creation) 

Refused to sign the UN Covenant on Economic & Social Rights 

Opposed the emerging new UN Covenant on the Rights to Peace, Development & Environmental Protection

Sampling of Deaths >From US Military Interventions & Propping Up Corrupt Dictators (using the most conservative estimates)

Nicaragua – 30,000 dead

Brazil  – 100,000 dead

Korea – 4 million dead

Guatemala – 200,000 dead

Honduras – 20,000 dead

El Salvador – 63,000 dead

Argentina – 40,000 dead

Bolivia – 10,000 dead

Uruguay – 10,000 dead

Ecuador – 10,000 dead

Peru – 10,000 dead

Iraq – 1.3 million dead

Iran – 30,000 dead

Sudan – 8-10,000 dead

Colombia – 50,000 dead

Panama – 5,000 dead

Japan – 140,000 dead

Afghanistan – 10,000 dead

Somalia – 5000 dead

Philippines – 150,000 dead

Haiti – 100,000 dead

Dominican Republic – 10,000 dead

Libya – 500 dead

Macedonia – 1000 dead

South Africa – 10,000 dead

Pakistan – 10,000 dead

Palestine – 40,000 dead

Indonesia – 1 million dead

East Timor – 1/3-½ of total population

Greece – 10,000 dead

Laos – 600,000 dead

Cambodia – 1 million dead

Angola – 300,000 dead

Grenada – 500 dead

Congo  – 2 million dead

Egypt – 10,000 dead

Vietnam – 1.5 million dead

Chile – 50,000 dead

Other Lethal US Interventions CIA Terror Training Manuals Development and distribution of training manuals for foreign military personnel or foreign nationals, including instructions on assassination, subversion, sabotage, population control, torture, repression, psychological torture, death squads, etc.

Specific Torture Campaigns Creation and launching of direct US campaigns to support torture as an instrument of terror and social control for governments in Greece, Iran, Vietnam, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama

Supporting and Harboring Terrorists The promotion, protection, arming or equipping of terrorists such as:

Klaus Barbie and other German Nazis, and Italian and Japanese fascists, after WW II

Manual Noriega (Panama), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Osama bin Laden (Afghanistan), and others whose terrorism has come back to haunt us

Running the Higher War College (Brazil) and first School of the Americas (Panama), which gave US training to repressors, death squad members, and torturers (the second School of the Americas is still running at Ft. Benning GA)

Providing asylum for Cuban, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Haitian, Chilean, Argentinian, Iranian, South Vietnamese and other terrorists, dictators, and torturers

Assassinating World Leaders Using assassination as a tool of foreign policy, wherein the CIA has initiated assassination attempts against at least 40 foreign heads of state (some several times) in the last 50 years, a number of which have been successful, such as: Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dihn Diem (Vietnam) Salvador Allende (Chile)

Arms Trade & US Military Presence

The US is the world’s largest seller of weapons abroad, arming dictators, militaries, and terrorists that repress or victimize their populations, and fueling scores of violent conflicts around the globe

The US is the world’s largest provider of live land mines which, even in peacetime, kill or injure at least several people around the world each day

The US has military bases in at least 50 nations around the world, which have led to frequent victimization of local populations.

The US military has been bombing one Middle Eastern or Muslim nation or another almost continuously since 1983, including Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq (almost daily bombings since 1991)

This, then, is a sampling of American foreign policies over the last 50 years. The FBI uses the following definition for Terrorism: “The unlawful use of force or violence committed by a group or individual, who has some connection to a foreign power or whose activities transcend national boundaries, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” This sounds like the terrorism we just experienced. It also sounds a lot like the US policies and actions since 1945 that I’ve just described.

This is a version of an an original page atributed to Robert Elias, a US Professor of Political Science , a list which, like so many others,  has otherwise ‘disappered’

via https://web.archive.org/web/20161125052245/http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/whocares/popups/warcrimes.htm

[pungent-things]

@uswarcrimes Got deleted, presumably because this post started gaining traction and we can’t have people learning the truth.

[pungent-things]

@death2america

[pixelburied]

Now that the Terror Bill has been signed into law and will take effect in 15 days, a little reminder for my PH mutuals:

Set your social media to private

Do a clean up of your public posts

Block everyone of your friends who have voiced pro-government sentiments. You don’t know who will sell you out.

Do a check of your facebook groups. If you’re part of anti-admin groups, make sure it’s legit and not a fake group used to redtag.

Increase your email security

Stop signing petitions vs terror bill on change.org as this is what they’re using to redtag (remember the influx of fake accounts? Yeah)

Instead, send emails to your representatives using a vpn

Have your lawyer’s number on standby

Be aware of your rights (i will post a refresher here later on)

Look out for your friends and family

[postcitywave-deactivated2020070]

as a hker, I'd say, switch to protonmail, download signal (for personal msg) and telegram (for channels/large group chats), replace google with ducducgo, always use a vpn but switch to tor if its extra sensitive (or u can use both)

[clownboybeebop]

for anyone seeing this later: the original post was made on july 3rd, 2020. 15 days from now will be july 18th, 2020.

[penrosesun]

More people need to understand what we mean when we say that "Brooklyn 99 is pro-cop propaganda"

Are there worse tv shows, that depict more police brutality? Yes, obviously. But there’s a big difference between shows meant to rile up existing pro-cop sentiments, and shows meant to subtly convince people who are against police abuses that some police abuses are actually ok, and that cops can be just and good. NCIS and Blue Bloods might be worse, but Brooklyn 99 is more dangerous, precisely because Brooklyn 99 is so much more palatable to people who feel gross watching cops beat unarmed black men.

Despite its claims of demonstrating good policing and idealized behavior, Brooklyn 99 regularly shows cops violating people’s constitutional rights. But whereas other more right-leaning shows highlight violations and are explicitly in favor of them, Brooklyn 99 glosses over them. And it does so to such a degree that a lot of people don’t even realize that what they are watching, despite being about “good” cops, still contains a ton of systemic police abuses of power in it.

Take the seventh episode of the very first season as an example.

In this episode, the main character arrests a man with no evidence whatsoever and detains him for 48 hours while his colleagues go on a mad hunt to find evidence of a crime.

Here’s the thing with that depiction:

The episode treats the main character’s behavior as though the problem is that he made work for his coworkers, not that he violated a suspect’s constitutional rights. It’s made very clear that his coworker’s date night is more important than a wrongfully arrested man being confined in a jail cell for two full days.

It is in fact illegal to go on a fish expedition like the one depicted after detaining a suspect. The “you have 48 hours” rule is meant to give the courts time to hold the required probable cause hearing even when there is a court backlog, not to give the cops a chance to gather evidence. In fact, the SCOTUS case which created the 48 hour hold rule even explicitly says: “This is not to say that the probable cause determination in a particular case passes constitutional muster simply because it is provided within 48 hours. Such a hearing may nonetheless violate Gerstein if the arrested individual can prove that his or her probable cause determination was delayed unreasonably. Examples of unreasonable delay are delays for the purpose of gathering additional evidence to justify the arrest, a delay motivated by ill will against the arrested individual, or delay for delay’s sake.” The main characters are breaking the law, and it’s clear that the policy within their precinct is to break the law.

When the suspect gets a lawyer who starts arguing for a civil suit on the basis of his unlawful detainment, this is treated as a horrible thing and the suspect is portrayed as smug and immoral for doing it. This is despite the fact that he is completely legally justified because the police have clearly violated his constitutional rights.

The suspect is eventually revealed to have committed the crime in question, by route of a plan which the main character admits to having not even considered when he arrested him. Police hunches are glorified; the assumption that former criminals are guilty is reinforced.

Ultimately, the suspect is unable to sue for the violation of his rights and his unlawful detention because there is evidence that he committed the underlying crime. In fact, this would have no bearing whatsoever on his standing to sue. Guilty people still have constitutional rights, and by the text of the episode, the precinct violated his rights regardless of his guilt or innocence. The show glosses over this, and strongly implies that guilty people (and he is treated as guilty despite not yet having been tried) are unable to legally take actions against police abuses.

Putting it all together, from it’s outset, Brooklyn 99 has justified non-violent but extremely illegal police abuses, eroded people’s belief that our constitutional rights are inalienable and apply even to the guilty, camouflaged the fact that people are legally allowed to sue over police abuses, and demonized the lawyers and suspects who try to go after those sorts of civil rights cases. I’m sorry, but that’s propaganda no matter how you slice it.

Police violence is not always physical brutality. Brooklyn 99 might not show cops beating Rodney King in the street, but it gleefully showcases violations which selectively target the disenfranchised in other ways, and then couches those violations as “what a good police station would be like, in an ideal world”.

The cops in Brooklyn 99? They’re bad cops, end of story. They all routinely commit this-should-be-an-instant-firing level of offenses against helpless individuals, and it’s portrayed as normal. And the fact that people will endless parrot the idea that Brooklyn 99 shows the way that police stations could be if they were manned by good police officers shows that not only is it propaganda, but it’s working. And that should terrify us all.

[insert garfield meme here]

[audhdspacewizard]

One Garfield meme coming right up. 

[fduiduv08448fuhufg-deactivated2]

I’m not kidding or trying to be funny I genuinely think she deserves at least 45 Oscars for this