Trees grow best beside the dead.

⁂

if i look back, i am lost
Peter Solarz
cherry valley forever

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
RMH
Game of Thrones Daily
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

pixel skylines
Cosimo Galluzzi
hello vonnie

Discoholic 🪩
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
styofa doing anything

#extradirty
Monterey Bay Aquarium
noise dept.
ojovivo

Love Begins

blake kathryn
seen from Japan

seen from United States

seen from Netherlands
seen from India

seen from Switzerland
seen from Netherlands

seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States

seen from France

seen from Netherlands
seen from Malaysia
seen from Indonesia

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seen from United States

seen from United States
@patchouli-wissenschaft
Trees grow best beside the dead.
like, obviously Paradox games are 'teaching tools' only in a narrow and specific sense, a lot of things are simplified and streamlined for the purposes of making an entertaining video game, but I'll never forget about how many times I read about the Investiture Controversy and tried to understand it, and I always thought "it's about 'secular versus spiritual authority?' it's all about who gets to give a special ring to bishops? Why was this such a big deal?"
and then I played CKIII and went "ugh, it sucks that the Pope gets to appoint my court chaplain. Council positions are so important for managing my large vassals and keeping them happy, and besides, I have so many capable and learned vassals who would be perfect for the job and the Pope keeps sticking me with these Italian midwits who don't even... OH SHIT THAT'S WHY"
I've rattled on about this before, but the notion that operational security is irrelevant for media piracy resources because if one gets taken down an identical replacement will be up and running by next week is really only true if the thing you're interested in pirating is, like, MCU movies. If you're into really niche shit, every takedown is a potential disaster, because at least half the time it turns out that of eight billion people on the planet there was precisely one who possessed exactly the right intersection of interests and technical know-how to provide that resource.
the bird fights its way out of the egg. awww. awwww. aw. the egg is the world So Cute. so so So cute.
“of course you should interact with it, harry— that’s what posts are for! do you really think i would waste valuable union time crafting some sort of… what, some sort of bait? do i seem like the sort of man who goes fishing, harry? like i go out in the wee hours of my very busy mornings to wait for who knows how long for some little fishies to come swimming along looking for a nibble? i mean, harry! here i thought you were a man of the left, but you won’t dunk on a single bad take!”
You are suddenly placed into the body of a professional in a high-risk field. Everyone around you fully believes you are qualified, and no one will question your decisions.
You must act immediately. You cannot delay or ask for help. You cannot do nothing and you cannot delegate to other people.
In both scenarios, you are the sole point of failure. Any safeguards, assistants, automated systems, or review processes will automatically accept your decisions as correct and will not catch or correct any mistakes.
You retain your own real-world knowledge, judgment, and skills. You do not gain the training or muscle memory of the professional whose body you are in.
You will not be blamed for the outcome, but you will be fully aware of whatever happens.
Option 1: Brain Surgery
You are in the middle of a complex, high-risk brain surgery. A patient is open on the table, and you must complete the procedure. A small mistake will likely result in their death or severe permanent damage.
Option 2: Rocket Science
You must calculate and finalize the launch and reentry trajectory for a spacecraft carrying five astronauts into orbit. A small error will result in their deaths.
Brain Surgery Or Rocket Science
Brain Surgery
Rocket Science
As major news outlets cut off the Wayback Machine, journalists and advocacy groups are rallying to protect the Internet Archive’s vast colle
Caporale says the tool has also been useful in their role as a union organizer. “I've also been using the Wayback Machine a ton in my union organizing work to find old job listings so we know what the company claimed to hire people for vs. what duties they actually assigned or to see how different positions have been retooled at different points,” Caporale says. “These posts also help us keep track of pay fluctuations across the organization over time.” Other publishers have justified their decision to block the Wayback Machine by pointing to concerns about how tech companies may use the Internet Archive’s data to train artificial intelligence models. New York Times spokesperson Graham James says that “the issue is that Times content on the Internet Archive is being used by AI companies in violation of copyright law to directly compete with us.” (The Times declined to clarify whether this was something that was actually happening or rather a hypothetical concern.)
If you enjoyed this book you should read every other book in the world for extra textual context. All things are intricately related to one another.
Transcription, because it is worth reading:
There’s a phenomenon I actually see extremely commonly when literature is used to teach history to middle school and high school students. Let’s call it “pajamafication.”
So a school district nixed Maus from their curriculum, to be replaced by something more “age-appropriate.” IIRC they didn’t cite a specific replacement title, but it will probably be something like John Boyne’s “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.”
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is tailor-made for classroom use. It’s taught at countless schools and it’s squeaky-clean of any of the parent-objectionable material you might find in Maus, Night, or any of the other first-person accounts of the Holocaust.
It’s also a terrible way to teach the Holocaust.
I’m not going to exhaustively enumerate the book’s flaws—others have done so—but I’ll summarize the points that are common to this phenomenon in various contexts.
First, obviously, the context shift. Maus, Night, et al are narrated by actual Jews who were in concentration camps. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is narrated by a German boy. The Jewish perspective is completely eliminated.
Second, the emphasis on historical innocence. Bruno isn’t antisemitic. He has no idea that anything bad is happening. He happily befriends a Jewish boy with absolutely no prejudice.
Thus we’re reassured that you too, gentle reader, are innocent. You too would have have a childlike lack of prejudice and you too would be such a sweet summer child that you would have no idea the place next door is a death camp.
In Maus, by contrast, the children are not innocent. They are perpetrators of injustice just like adults.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where children run away yelling “Help! Mommy! A Jew!! - the next panel says “The mothers always told so: ‘Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!’ …So the taught to their children.”]
Maus also smashes the claim that people just didn’t know what was going on in the camps.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where a Nazi truck is arriving at Auschwitz guarded by men with sticks and a pointing, growling dog, the boxes say “And we came here to the concentration camp Auschwitz. And we knew that from here we will not come out anymore…” “We knew the stories that they will gas us and throw in the oves. This was 1944… we knew everything. And here we were.”]
Third, nonspecificity. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas turns a specific historical atrocity into a parable about all forms of bigotry and injustice. I’m sure Boyne thinks he’s being very profound. But the actual effect is to blunt and erase the atrocity.
There’s the too-cute-by-half way it avoids terminology: “Off-With,” “the Fury.” Harsh language becomes “He said a nasty word.”
Notice how “it’s a fable” ties in with the goal of eliminating anything parents might object to.
And that’s our fourth point. Bad things can happen, but only abstractly. Someone’s dad disappears. He’s just…gone. How? Who knows. People stand around looking hungry and unhappy and saying “It’s not very nice in here.”
The ending is sad, but it’s sad like a Lifetime movie. It’s sanitized, it’s quick, there are no details, it’s meant to poke that bit of your heart that loves crying.
Maus’s description of the gas chambers, meanwhile…
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the process of gassing and then taking out the bodies are described in detail as inmates are working. That it took 3 to 30 minutes to gas people. That the largest pile of bodies was by the door. The worker telling the story mentions “We pulled the bodies apart with hooks. Big piles, with the strongest on top, older ones and babies crushed below… often the skulls were smashed…” “Their fingers were broken from trying to climb up the walls… and sometimes their arms were wera as long as their bodies, pulled from the sockets.” Until the narrator says, “Enough!” “I didn’t want to more to hear, but anyway he told me.”]
A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn’t just do “bad things, generally,” they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.
Finally, fifth: Fiction.
However much poor little Bruno and Schmuel might rend your heartstrings, you can ultimately retreat into the knowledge that they aren’t real and they didn’t really die.
Now, I write historical fiction, and obviously I believe it has a place, in the classroom and out. But no Holocaust education can be complete without nonfiction that teaches about real people who genuinely did experience it.
One of the striking things about Maus is how big the cast is and how few of them survived.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where one character describes to another many other people who didn’t make it. Eventually covered over in lower panels by pictures of the dead.]
Because it’s a true story, Maus can also explore neglected aspects like the intergenerational trauma, which simply vanish in a pat fictional story that is just finished when you get to the end.
[ID: Picture of part of a page of Maus where the illustrator sits at the drawing desk above the pile of bodies. The artist says: “At least fifteen foreing editions are coming out. I’ve got 4 serious offers to turn my book into a TV special or movie. (I don’t wanna.) In May 1968 my mother killd herself. (She left no note.) Late’y I’ve been feeling depressed.” Someone calls from out of panel, “Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We’re ready to shoot!…”]
Thus, books like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas are not an age-appropriate equivalent way to teach the Holocaust, but a false construction of history.
This ends the first part of the thread. But there’s more…
The Maus incident is not an isolated case. It’s part of a broad trend of replacing the literature used to teach history with more kid-friendly, “appropriate” alternatives.
And outside of the Holocaust, it usually doesn’t meet with much controversy.
It might mean replacing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave with modern historical fiction, for example.
Wars, the Civil Rights movement, Apartheid: any “icky” part of history can be a target.
But it plays out along the same general lines: Primary sources replaced with modern fiction, victim perspectives replaced with perpetrators, specificity replaced with Star-Bellied Sneetch-style “Why can’t we all just get along?” metaphors.
Trump's warmongering is so aggressive that he has the pro-NATO Liberal government in Canada talking like they're about to join the Non-Aligned Movement
Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, 20 January 2026:
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the "rules-based international order." We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the "international rules-based order" was partially false— that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.
And this impulse is understandable. A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let's be clear eyed about where this leads.
A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty...
Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum. And the question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality – we must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.
DO NOT. Take inspiration from my art. Let it linger not in your mind for more than an instant, lest my intellectual property is stolen away by your greedy consciousness and my soon-to-be-successful business enterprise is thus killed in the womb. Let my art pass before your glazed eyes without so much as a stirring of emotion, a moment of reflection. See and feel nothing. Crawl through this world on your belly, sightless and thoughtless like a worm. Reblogs > Likes.
I can't stop thinking about this video I saw of this guy selling his music in what I think is a super cool physical format. Like. Look how cool this is
If you enjoyed this book you should read every other book in the world for extra textual context. All things are intricately related to one another.
DO NOT. Take inspiration from my art. Let it linger not in your mind for more than an instant, lest my intellectual property is stolen away by your greedy consciousness and my soon-to-be-successful business enterprise is thus killed in the womb. Let my art pass before your glazed eyes without so much as a stirring of emotion, a moment of reflection. See and feel nothing. Crawl through this world on your belly, sightless and thoughtless like a worm. Reblogs > Likes.
nimble, a border collie-papillon mix, wins the 12” class in the 2024 masters agility championship. the first time a mixed breed has won at westminster ever.
context explaining why the announcer is screaming, this is supposed to take a high level competitive agility dog 40 seconds
This video makes me cry every time it’s on my dash and I can’t even iterate why.
Like the dog doesn’t even know it’s a competition and she’s made history. She(?) just is happy and knows she made her owner happy too.
The face of a being with only a wind storm between their ears, moments before unleashing it unto the world