MagickGarlick

treating this like a combo between a diary and a public comedy performance except that I intend to give nothing about my identity and location away

[sickolib]

I don’t think “no no my idol only accidentally killed thirty to fifty million people! It was negligence not intentional!” Is the compelling defense of his ideology some people seem to think it is

[pedro-friedeberg]

Da context:

[frilledshark17]

That's a lot of people to kill without really meaning to.

[indecisiveavocado]

Allow me to present life expectancy during the Great Leap Forward (highlighted is that period):

Now, you may be thinking "Okay, that's not actually all that awful! I mean, it is, but like...that could be mostly accidental! It doesn't seem thaaat much bigger than COVID!"

Let me be extremely clear: That graph I showed you? Where life expectancy goes down by almost four years?

That is global life expectancy. That is the life expectancy of the entire freaking world, and the Great Leap Forward is still extremely visible.

This is the same time period, but for China only:

Fifteen years. Life expectancy was fifteen years lower.

Data source:

Life expectancy

An interactive visualization from Our World in Data.

[penrosesun]

Also, separately from how bad Mao actually was, I think the attempted downplaying of the whole category of “things that are ~technically~ better than literal Hitler” here is fucking weird! Like. Ok. Let’s say Mao was better than Hitler, sure! There’s a case for that! There’s even a pretty strong case for that! Even setting aside the extermination camps, WWII was a total war on a level the world had never seen before, and the calculated cruelty of the German Hunger Plan is almost unimaginable! With you so far!

This person seems to be arguing from that that ~because~ Mao was better than, again, literal actual Hitler, the accusations the he was a monster who committed genocide must be overblown. I’m sorry but… what?? When did “well at least he wasn’t Hitler” become any sort of defense???

Seeking desperate refuge in Godwin’s law is not the slam dunk that you think it is, my dude. If anyone is making a serious case that your guy is even theoretically in the running for being “as bad as Hitler” then I think we’ve long since passed the “defendability of a historical figure” event horizon.

[queer-scots-geordie-dyke]

No matter how progressive, compassionate or understanding you think you are, if you routinely dismiss an entire nation of people as bloodthirsty monsters, rejecting the complexity, interiority, and diversity of humanity you allow for yourself and your nation, you’re nothing more than a reactionary bigot, actually.

[thundergrace]

Oh my God! 😭 You dropped this queen 👑

[thundergrace]

To think I thought I knew what ethereal beauty was before now. Laughable.

[lymeandcoconut]

she’s so beautiful i had to include a few more photos

[happibeans]

Her instagram is @queennyakimofficial !

Support Black Women!!! Support Black Womens Art!!! Support Dark Skinned Black Women!!! Support Dark Skinned Black Womens Art!!!

🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤🤎🖤

[thesaltofcarthage]

I’ve reblogged her before, but really, you can’t have too many dark-skinned Black queens on your dash. 

[hilacopter]

I have to remind myself and you should too that the average palestinian or arab in general doesn't just knowingly lie about being indigenous for the sake of propaganda. I saw a video recently of a palestinian child in the west bank saying that school teaches them how the jews "lie about their temple being under the al-aqsa mosque". most arab countries have at least some level of antisemitic indoctrination from a very young age, these people not only believe they're genuinely indigenous to the region but also religious extremism just teaches them that the whole "allah promised us these lands" rhetoric is true to a fault. from they're perspective they're not lying or perpetrating dangerous propaganda, they genuinely believe in antisemitism because they think it's right. pretty much any form of antisemitism is centered around trying to protect the world from the "threat" that is jews, no bigot hates just for the sake of hating something. basically I'm just saying here is that it's indoctrination, it's fruitless to try and hold this stuff against the average citizen. you just have to cut off the head that is the regimes and terrorist organizations indoctrinating the population of their countries in the first place.

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[kosher-salt]

Love how in progressive spaces a minority group can espouse discomfort, frustration, endorse discrimination, even explicit hostility against majority/oppressive groups, and it's acceptable because they've Been Through It and it's Understandable given what they experience at the hands of that group.

But Jewish people must prioritize other bigotries above antisemitism, must cater to the groups that have and are targeting us, must assure them that we would never feel so much as distrust towards people chanting for our literal eradication. You feel the discomfort in your body reading that? The compulsion you're experiencing right now? Yeah, I feel it too writing this - I've toned it down twice. Why is that.

[mariacallous]

Saw this tweet from a tumblr post and ofc a few tankies got upset with the mention of the Soviet Union being raised as a parallel bad example

Yet these same people have no qualms comparing everything to the Nazi regime. Hmm

[akajustmerry]

truly one of the most demoralising things about being in the job market atm is "only successful applicants will be notified" is practically a universal standard. so you spend hours, sometimes days filling out applications, writing CVs and cover letters only to be ghosted as the only form of communication. Not even a "thank you but this time you've been unsuccessful" email. You're in a constant state of "did I not get it or have they not contacted me?" and you just have to eventually conclude you were unsuccessful without so much as courtesy, "sorry, but thank you for your application." A literal thankless cycle for months and months and months. You'd think with all the ways to automate these processes they would at least have the time, means and decency to acknowledge your submission and let you off the hook, but no. You're just in limbo in every possible way in the name of "efficiency". Solidarity with everyone going through this because it is truly dehumanising and demoralising to work so hard on putting yourself forward constantly without acknowledgement or useful communication of any sort for long periods of time, and most ppl simply will not have any compassion for what that's like.

[scribefindegil]

I'm still thinking about the guy who saw me realize my wheelchair wouldn't fit in the elevator because he (also a wheelchair user) was already inside it and immediately quipped, "This elevator ain't accessible enough for the both of us."

[astriiformes]

Since tumblr is rightfully loving this one, I feel obligated to mention that I ran into the same guy again on the last day of the convention and told him Scribe was really entertained by this, and he said that the night before he'd also really gotten one of the hotel waitresses, who informed him he could take a seat wherever and he replied "Oh, no thanks, I brought my own"

[berlynn-wohl]

What I love about ducks is that they really do quack. It’s not just hype.

[moran-with-a-g]

@agam-shel-barvadim

[agam-shel-barvadim]

true

and consistently so

[etchif]

I don't like it when people say "if you say you can't cook what you really can't do is read instructions" because that really does not apply to something like cooking where most recipes are filled with instructions like "add a pinch" "boil until done" "cook at medium heat", which are things that require experience to understand correctly

[twisted-rat-king]

told someone i'm schizophrenic and they ask "are you sure it's not just your mind playing tricks on you" bro what the fuck do you think schizophrenia is

[heavensickness]

Being a young adult is so strange. You enter a coffee shop. The 20 year old girl waiting behind you cried all night because she just came to a new city for university and she feels so alone. That 27 year old guy over there works a job he is overqualified for, he lives with his parents and wants to move out but doesn't know what to do about it. That one 24 year old dude already has a car, a house, and a job waiting for him once he graduates thanks to his dad's connections. The 26 year old barista couldn't complete his higher education because he has to work and take care of his family. The 28 year old girl sitting next to you has no friends to go out with so she is texting her mother. That couple (both 25 years old) are married and the girl is pregnant. The 29 year old writing something on her laptop has realized that she chose the wrong major so she is trying to start all over. We are not alone in this, but we are actually so alone. Do you feel me

[maswartz]

Don't leave this in the tags.

[awfulpunk]

this is insanely racist and I haven't even seen much about this online yet

[checkyourasianbias]

after Bad Bunny won they added a Latin song category and after Rosé got three nominations the grammys added a k-pop/c-pop/j-pop category they have always been afraid of well-performing artists of color challenging white artists in mainstream categories

[homunculus-argument]

Bringing a friend along to a doctor's appointment and explaining to the doctor that you like to have an eyewitness present to give an outsider account verifying how you were treated, and a doctor will nod and make a note on their papers "patient is actively hostile to all human life."

[thegenderdruid]

it's truly insane how much more functional society would be and how much happier everyone would be if every job was perpetually 10% overstaffed (and people who weren't needed could chill and rotate in when needed while still getting paid) instead of 10-50% understaffed but that wouldn't be 'efficient' (in the short term, for shareholders) so fuck everyone I guess

[milevenfcb]