Ask Lucario

@lucario2012

A blog I made because why not.

41.9K posts

thejakeformerlyknownasprince

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Ficlet about Escape from L.A., from the Animorphs' point of view.

Reblogs were disabled by OP so I can't put the post here, but I am ENDLESSLY amused by all the people I have seen who are antizionist on the grounds of "opposing colonialism" who then go on to talk about how they want to convert to Judaism so that they can invade our spaces and change what our culture is all about.

Like... Incapable of shaking the colonizer urge, I see. You all make your shitty ancestors so proud. All these generations later, still demanding that Jews give you everything and enacting violence and colonizer bullshit on us when we refuse to give in.

philosopherking1887

They think it's impossible to colonize Judaism because it's somehow the ultimate Colonizer Thing. Which is really just their cultural Christian supercessionism in action: they feel completely entitled to everything Jewish as their rightful inheritance -- so much so that only they can do it Right while we are doing it Wrong!

me when i lie! me when i implicitly blame the climate crisis on jews even though that makes no fucking sense! me when i don’t know enough about the country i’m accusing of contributing to global catastrophe to know it’s the size of new jersey!

And not a single one of these people will ever mention the environmental damage caused by Russian invasion of Ukraine. You know, murder of animals in protected habitats, destruction of a whole dam, the continued deterioration of Crimean ecology, such stuff. Nor the conflicts in South-East Asia or Africa. Its a smallish country bombing a single city that is "significantly contributing to climate change" (don't even start on the topic of Israeli biologists and agriculturalists going out of their way to restore ecological conditions of pre-modern Levant. Its like they want their home to be thriving or something)

Funny how Jews Israel is magically capable of becoming the reason behind any cause these people proclaim support of. Its like its not about reality at all.

They also conveniently ignore the onslaught of tens of thousands of unprovoked rockets Israel can get from several Arab countries in the span of a year.

Maybe those rockets are more environmentally friendly? Lol

the-library-alcove

Of course they're more environmentally friendly! Remember how Calla Walsh described the Iranian missiles as "indigenous"? (I know what indigenously-made means in the context of military material, but I doubt that she does)

Redditor "Mags_Smash" recently complained about seeing McAfee pop-up ads on his PC despite never having installed the antivirus suite. He ev

Redditor "Mags_Smash" recently complained about seeing McAfee pop-up ads on his PC despite never having installed the antivirus suite. He eventually traced the ads back to another app that his new LG monitor had installed without his knowledge. After connecting one LG UltraGear 27GP83B monitor and two 27GN800s, Mags_Smash found that at least one of the panels had installed an "LG Monitor App Installer" via the Microsoft Store and Windows Update.

LG monitors are now installing unwanted ad-driven software via Microsoft Store & Microsoft Update. Basically, Windows auto-recognizes the new device then 'helpfully' installs drivers to make the thing work.

But the manufacturer is building ads into their stuff, which Microsoft blindly passes along. I bet if you read the LG TOS you "agree" to this behavior when you buy the monitor.

Note that it's not the monitor phoning home, it's a byproduct of how Windows self-updates its drivers. The monitor itself has no wifi or internet connection. There is nothing to block. It's also not Microsoft explicitly being dicks, as they're simply installing the manufacturer's recommended software.

Taken from Facebook with permission. Clarification of a point that I think needs to be clarified: there are Jewish actors who get leads. But they’re not VISIBLY Jewish. They don’t discuss their religion, or their culture.

If your character is announced as Jewish, you’re either a totally assimilated and undifferentiated white person with no shred of Jewish culture or observance ever (The Goldbergs, Seinfeld), or a double-dealing murderous spy (Quantico, Homeland, Munich), or it’s the Holocaust (this includes Magneto), or you’re there to be awkward, sex-obsessed, neurotic, and ugly.

fromchaostocosmos

jewish women where it is known they are jewish you’ve got nothing totally assimilated with comment here and there, but other then that totally white and hear nothing about anything related to jewishness (annie-community felicity-arrow), crazy sex-crazed slut who is super kinky, overbearing crazy mother who makes son crazy especially with germs and health related stuff, cold frigid fish in bed, or bitch who who is money and power hungry who has parasitic relationships with rich powerful men.

of course there are some that hit several of these types

phoukanamedpookie

Openly Jewish characters only come in three settings: victim, villain or joke.

Oh, wait! There’s also Blink And You Miss It.

littlegoythings

Jews in the media also serve as more subtle race-coding when whiteness wants to find a scapegoat that can fly under the radar as politically acceptable, but still palatable to a resentment-filled white audience. It’s a very weird liminal space - whiter than PoC, but not truly part of the club, and the first out the proverbial door whenever convenient for whiteness to reassert itself and its boundaries.

And the whole reason white or white-passing Jews even occupy this liminal rung is because of how easy it is to pass - a privilege that visible PoC do not have access to, and yet paradoxically, exactly what racists fear from Jews. Racists are obsessed with “sneaky” Jews “polluting the white race” because the existence of this (diverse, widespread) ethnic minority, many of whom look just like everybody else (and who that “everyone else” is often depends on your geographic locale, but in the case of white bigots, this is “mostly white and olive-ish skin tones in European countries or colonies thereof”) proves that race as a social construct is complete bullshit. Racists feel threatened in their identity as white people (and therefore superior) when they can’t easily pinpoint the Jewish interloper. That’s why “Jewish features” ie common phenotypes in our ethnic group are so racialized.

And have you noticed that single Jewish characters only ever connect romantically with NON-JEWISH characters? :(

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

"Why can't Trump be impeached" because the democrats don't control the house or the senate. "Why doesn't the Supreme Court stop him" well the lower courts are stopping him but he stacked the Supreme Court in his first time. "Why can't they do the 25th amendment" because that requires the president to be basically unconscious. "When will congress do something" probably in January when the new congress comes in if the democrats pick up a lot of seats in the midterms

#they could do something if they really wanted to but they dont#dems rn are pretty bad at their job and super flimsy ngl#repubs have had the minority up until now and they kicked a huge fuss any time anything happened#so much so that they could lock things up and prevent things from moving forward even though they were the minority#the same is here but dems wont do jack#pretty disappointed ngl

I don't know how else to explain to you that when Republicans did that they controlled the Senate and sometimes the House. Or that when the dems "controlled" the senate for two years in 2020-22 they did so with a 50-50 vote and one of those votes was Joe Manchin and the other was Kierstyn Sinema, who mucked things up as much as they could, and they STILL got a bunch of shit through.

Right now the Republicans control ALL THREE BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT. The executive branch, both houses of congress, AND the Supreme Court. The Democrats have not had that in my lifetime.

To act like the dems have the same bargaining power the GOP did during the last 6 years of Obama's presidency or all of Biden's presidency is to fundamentally misunderstand how math works

a-krogan-skald-and-bearsark

The Dems haven't even had enough of a majority to force through the appointments THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO MAKE in decades.

The reason the Republicans control the Supreme Court is because every time for like, 20 years, that the Democrats have been in a position where they've been required to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, the Republicans have dragged their heels on confirming the appointment until they have a patsy back in office in the White House.

The fact that Obama managed to appoint 2 SC justices in of itself is kinda amazing (but this was that brief window when the Dems had almost 60 senators), like that was a miracle

syssilvester-blog

lord please take all the Palestinian people’s pain and suffering away and give them to these scam bots pretending to be them and robbing donation money from them

To the heads and willing participants in those organizations. And may those trafficked into being those scammers be freed, and may there be peace in our lifetimes.

Amen v'amen.

shetheyshenanigans

of course it is deeply racist for right-wingers and conservatives to say that European football teams are "full of Africans" because they are perpetuating the myth of the Great Replacement and demonising Black Europeans as invaders coming to take the "rightful place" of White Europeans on teams, I would never argue that. Conservatives and right-wingers have been awfully racist towards Black football players, and something More needs to change within FIFA and the various football confederations bc not nearly enough is being done to combat racism against Black players.

But it is also racist to say something like "coloniser teams need African players to win!" Which is a sentiment I have seen regarding France and Belgium in particular. Yes, both teams have many Black players on them, yes this is due to colonisation and the often forced movement of people, plus the historical links between coloniser and colonised countries mean that citizens of the latter are more inclined to move to the former than a different country. If you were gonna move from say, Algeria to a European country, it's a smart move to go to France, where they speak the same language as you do.

That doesn't mean Black players on European teams aren't European! Many of them are the children of immigrants, and have lived their whole lives in the country they're representing. Kylian Mbappé is French. He has spoken about it before, saying (this is a direct quote about representing France internationally)

"It’s because I was born in France, I’m French. I did everything in France, I had French culture, with origins that are Cameroonian and Algerian. But I grew up with French culture. It comes from the heart.”

When you say something like colonising countries need African players to win matches, you are firstly perpetuating the idea that Black people cannot be European. This is ridiculously false.

Secondly, you are perpetuating the idea that Black bodies are somehow built for labour and athleticism in a way that white bodies aren't. This is a racist idea that comes from slavery, when Black people were enslaved and dehumanised, with white enslavers saying that they were uniquely suited to hard labour, bc Black people are stronger than white people and don't feel pain etc etc. The idea of European teams somehow "importing" African players for their teams is racist!

The Black players on European teams are European. They are immensely talented players, that have put in just as much, if not more work, than their White teammates. Many Black players already face horrific racism from fans, especially when teams lose, and we do not need to be racist in a "liberal" way!

anyways. The World Cup is over now, (lowkey thank god bc idgaf about soccer and it's been Everywhere), but it's something to keep in mind bc a lot of people will have been introduced to football/soccer from the Cup and will start following teams.

freegazafromhamas

The Young Turks Before VS Today

"I guess when it's about the Jews, it's okay to throw all your values out. Got it."

Yeah. Basically.

Bro didnt even MENTION hullabaloo

Good news: if you’re currently laying around and not producing anything, you are a credit to your species.

willow-wanderings

It’s recently been found that even hive insects rest. Bees will play with colorful toys. Ants sleep for about 1 minute but they do it so frequently it amounts to a few hours per day. Even trees take breaks.

The only things that work without rest are machines; literally everything that lives requires rest.

EVERYTHING THAT LIVES REQUIRES REST. STOP JUDGING YOURSELF FOR NOT BEING A ROBOT.

robots require very frequent breaks! welding machines generally have it programmed in that they can’t run so long they melt themselves. ive overseen two different manufacturing robots now and each of them were fragile, finicky idiots that require constant maintenance and repair. they pause in between moves, in between jobs. you’re always keeping an eye on programming errors, on coolant levels, on heat. you’re always pulling bits of scrap out of joints, sweeping up debris, washing off nozzles and untangling hoses. and even then it snaps a chain and takes a whole morning’s vacation.

even robots need downtime.

derinthescarletpescatarian

I love youtube off-grid/homesteading videos because they're always like "living the simple life" and then depict a life ten times more complicated than mine

derinthescarletpescatarian

Like I'm sure it's way more rewarding to grow and can your own tomatoes and they're probably healthier or whatever but is it simpler than me giving Coles one dollar to bring a much more safely canned can of tomatoes to my house? No. No it is not.

spark1eheartemoji

growing your own tomatoes is a fuck load more simple than having a job and keeping a job plus paying all the fees of living in society.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Most homesteaders still need to have a job and keep a job and pay all the fees of living in a society. There seem to be a lucky handful who have reduced their costs by homesteading (usually due to the free labour of friends and family) but there were easier ways to reduce those cost. In the vast majority of cases, homesteading is a lot more expensive than not homesteading. And where people are saving money, the amount of labour per dollar works out to well below minimum wage in savings.

From what I've seen, successful homesteaders do it because they find it rewarding. Rewarding does NOT mean simple.

I can't speak to Australia, but at least in the US there is another group of homesteaders who are trying to live self-sufficiently off-grid because they expect the imminent total collapse of civilization, and they have fantasies of themselves living happily on home-grown produce while everyone else is killing each other for the last can of tomatoes at the store.

Another thing about this subset of homesteaders* is that they are insistent--proud, even!--of doing things that are unsafe, and encouraging others to also do those things.

One example is canning dairy products (milk, butter, cheese). They'll show up in a canning group and say something like, "Look how I canned all this milk that the store was getting rid of this milk for 50 cents a gallon because it's the last day!"

Sane and responsible members of the group will say things like, "Dairy isn't safe for home canning; if you have fresh milk that you need to save for later, you can freeze it or make cheese!" And, "If you need shelf-stable milk you can buy powdered milk," or "You can dehydrate it at home, but you need a really good dehydrator, plenty of trays, and it takes forever; you're usually better off just buying it."

And then the person who just canned 20 quarts of botulism will start frothing at the mouth about how when the shit hits the fan--

And yeah, I'll grant that if grocery stores cease to exist, and you are entirely reliant for your winter survival on what you can put up during times of plenty, the risk-benefit analysis would be different. But in the actual world that we currently live in, it's false economy at best, and at worst a stupid flex that could end up killing somebody.

Anyway, TL;DR, "simple" often refers to an imagined past when the problems of modernity did not exist--yet somehow, the problems of that era have been left behind--which in turn is often a racist dogwhistle.

(*Besides their substantial overlap with weapons stockpilers/"militia" types.)

derinthescarletpescatarian

The Can/Dehydrate Absolutely Everything people baffle me. Most homesteaders (sensibly) have personal solar panels, because they want to live off-grid and still have electricity. When Shit Hits The Fan, their solar panels will not stop working. Their freezers would work fine. Canning or dehydrating or salting is great for certain foods (especially if you want to ferment, pickle or flavour something) but for so much stuff the best thing you can do to preserve nutrients and preserve it safely is chuck it in the freezer.

Freezers just aren't homesteady enough I guess.

reikiajakoiranruohoja

The simplest, but also the most immature, answer is that solar panels are 'cheating.' These people base their doomsday images on Fallout and zombie apocalypse movies. But not even on them but this lone wolf stereotype of a stereotype. If you can just create electricity from the sun, then it means you can bypass the gritty survival of eating canned goods and just live like you used to. And that kills the fantasy.

derinthescarletpescatarian

I haven't seen that kind, all the ones I've seen get solar panels as soon as they can afford them because living off generator power is expensive and sucks (and, unlike solar panels, would not serve you well in an apocalypse because you need to keep buying petrol for them). I don't think I've ever seen these anti-solar-panel homesteaders that you deal with. Variety in every community I suppose.

ineffectualdemon

Whenever I hear homesteaders and trad wife people talk about how much better it is to do your own canning I remember my grandmother telling me about the canning days from her childhood and how she would help her grandmother can fresh fruit (we lived in orchard country) in a hot canning shed built for that purpose for days at a time in the middle of summer

Specifically about how it was hell on fucking earth and how her grandmother fucking hated every single second of it

The moment her grandmother could buy canned fruit easily in the supermarket? Never fucking canned a thing herself again and was so relieved and grateful that she would never have to again

Canning as a hobby in your kitchen? I can see that being fun

Canning because you have a fuck ton of fresh fruit coming off of your trees and if you don't can it all NOW you won't have any fruit for winter and it's all you do from sun up to sun down in the middle of summer?

That isn't a cute fun rewarding time. It's hard fucking labour

When all of us kids were finally grown and out of the house, my parents (finally) separated and sold their house, my mom used her half of the proceeds to rent a nice little apartment that is now filled with her diamond art and the other little things that make her happy.

(Tbh, I think she's the happiest she's ever been since I was born. She would probably agree.)

My dad, on the other hand, took his half and bought a tiny parcel of land with a rickety barn on it with the determination to do the homestead life. It's in the middle of nowhere and off the grid completely: no electricity, no sewage, and has a well to draw water from. It's been a little over a year since he moved onto it full time and he explains his life like this:

"It's simple — simply harder."

Every moment of his day, from the moment he gets up to the moment he goes to bed, there's something that needs built or repaired or prepped. Now that it's warmer, it's a race against the clock to grow and can his food and cut down enough wood for the winter because he lives on a mountain and that means snow comes in much earlier for him than everyone else. There's just not much downtime if he wants to be comfortable and, idk, alive, after the snowfall has blocked him in for weeks.

On top of that, something is always going wrong from the generator (decided to quit working in the dark in the middle of winter), to the barn he renovated to live in (mystery hole in roof discovered just as it starts to piss pour outside, along with a bat just chilling out and pissing off the cats). And it's not like he can just call a guy to come fix it because he's living quite a way from civilization, so dad has to do it all. He's always been the guy to call when you need something fixed, so it's whatever to him, but how many of these "preppers" have that kind of know-how?

Shit, my dad doesn't even have a mailbox bc the mail carrier says that putting one at the end of the little road to his property would be too dangerous, which it would be because it's located on a blind corner with no lights. And that road is nearly always foggy (from the low lying clouds) and driving it at night when you can't see far ahead and there's no street lighting is terrifying.

Despite everything, he likes his life and its inherent challenges, but all these internet personalities trying to sell it as something worth giving up all modern conveniences for because it's "simpler" make me uncomfortable because, no, it's not — and saying so is just downright stupid.

examples-of-antisemitism

In a full-page ad in Maine Sunday Telegram, ADL urges Democratic and Republican leaders to show the courage needed to fully reject antisemit

Antisemitism is no longer fringe. Extremists with antisemitic beliefs are on ballots, in primaries, winning party support, and getting appointments. And too many leaders in both parties are looking the other way. It's easy to call out hatred on the other side. What takes real courage is demanding your own party reject antisemitism, even when it's politically uncomfortable. Party leaders have the power to act. They can pull support, withhold endorsements, and make clear that antisemitism has no place in politics. Demand that Democratic and Republican party leaders show the courage to reject antisemitism in our politics, no matter which side of the aisle they're on.

At the link, you can send a message to party leaders. Use the prewritten one or edit it to use your own words.

lifeafterpsychiatry

"Not dating or having sex isn't even a source of discrimination in real life-" How many rights and benefits are tied up in marriage contracts though? How much of our economic and societal structure is built with the clear expectation that people couple up and support each other? Where's the security nets and affordable options for people who will never have a partner/spouse to take care of them? How many people save serious commitment only for people they have a romantic and sexual relationship with? How many people will unquestionably prioritize their sexual and romantic relationship above all other social connections in their lives? And where does that leave the people who don't want that at all, ever?

notaplaceofhonour

“SJP chapters are independent & autonomous”

And? So is the Klan.

notaplaceofhonour

The “autonomous cell” structure is in fact incredibly common among hate groups & extremist organizations for exactly this reason.

Neo-Nazis use it. Terrorist organizations use it. For the same reason White Supremacist violence usually takes the form of “Lone Wolf” attacks.

It’s an entirely intentional & incredibly effective tactic for vast radicalization networks to isolate and limit responsibility for the inevitable fallout of their rhetoric & actions.

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