the word empathy is WIDELY misused, even in mental health spaces.
empathy:
is responding to a person’s emotions by experiencing the same emotion as them (i.e. feeling sad when something sad happens to that person, or happy when something happy happens to that person.)
is an automatic response that cannot be controlled
cannot be learned
sympathy:
is recognizing that another person is in pain, even if you do not experience that pain, and offering comfort to that person
is something a person must actively choose to do
can be learned
compassion:
is showcasing care and support via words and actions
is something a person must actively choose to do
can be learned
if you need an example of a person with no empathy who practices sympathy and compassion, look no further than data from star trek: the next generation. he doesn’t have emotions at all, but he’s still kind to people and wants to help them.
stop telling people that they’re evil because they don’t experience empathy. stop equating empathy with morality. stop equating empathy with caring. stop saying that cruel people “lack empathy.” stop throwing neurodivergent and mentally ill people under the bus.
[id. A twitter post by @/Bennieeexyz
Jury duty letter came addressed to my cat.
Not a mistake. "Felix Martinez" - that's his full name according to his vet records.
My last name. His first name. Somehow he's a registered voter now.
Called the county clerk.
Me: My cat got summoned for jury duty.
Clerk: Is the name correct on the summons?
Me: Yes, but he's a cat.
Clerk: Is Felix Martinez a legal resident of this county?
Me: He's a legal cat.
Clerk: Sir, if the name matches our records, he needs to appear or file an exemption.
Me: He can't file anything. He has paws.
Clerk: You can file on his behalf.
Me: Under what exemption? There's no box for "is a cat."
Clerk: (pause) Check "unable to serve due to medical reasons."
Me: What's the medical reason?
Clerk: He's a cat.
Me: That's not a medical condition.
Clerk: It is if it prevents him from serving.
Sent in the form. Got rejected two weeks later.
"Insufficient documentation. Please provide medical professional's statement."
Took the letter to my vet.
Me: I need you to write that my cat can't do jury duty.
Vet: Why is your cat summoned for jury duty?
Me: Excellent question. No good answer.
Vet: This is the weirdest request I've gotten.
Me: Can you just write that he's medically unfit to serve?
Vet: On what grounds?
Me: He's a cat.
Vet: (started typing) "Patient is unable to serve due to species-related limitations including inability to speak, read, or comprehend legal proceedings."
Me: Perfect.
Sent it in. Got another rejection.
"Summons is mandatory. Failure to appear will result in contempt of court."
My roommate thought this was hilarious.
Roommate: Felix is going to jail.
Me: This is serious.
Roommate: Bring him to court. See what happens.
Decided that was actually the only option left.
Day of jury duty, put Felix in his carrier. Brought the entire paper trail of rejection letters.
Checked in at the courthouse.
Clerk: Name?
Me: Felix Martinez.
Clerk: (looked at the cat carrier) Is that Felix?
Me: Yes.
Clerk: (long stare) He's a cat.
Me: I've been saying that for six weeks.
Clerk: Why didn't you file an exemption?
Me: I filed three. All rejected.
Showed her the letters. She read through them, expression shifting from confusion to disbelief.
Clerk: Someone rejected the veterinary documentation?
Me: Twice.
Clerk: (called her supervisor over) You need to see this.
Supervisor read everything. Looked at Felix. Looked at me.
Supervisor: How did a cat get registered to vote?
Me: You tell me.
Supervisor: This is a data error.
Me: Took you six weeks to figure that out.
They dismissed Felix immediately. Apologized for the inconvenience.
Supervisor: We'll remove him from the voter registry.
Me: Appreciate it.
Supervisor: (pause) Out of curiosity, how would he have voted?
Me: Probably whatever party supports universal treats.
Got a formal apology letter a week later and a voter registration card.
For me this time. Apparently I wasn't registered, but my cat was.
Roommate: Felix committed voter fraud.
Me: Felix committed nothing. He's innocent.
Roommate: That's what they all say.
Felix is sleeping on the jury summons now.
Fitting end to his legal career.
end id]
Is Tumblr aware of Count Binface, current hope for our nation?
Let me explain:
Grotesque fascist grifter, Nigel Farage, is the leader of Reform, the racist far right party he created because UKIP got what it wanted (Brexit) and it sucked.
Having tried and failed to be an MP many times (but somehow getting more screentime than any Liberal Democrat or Green politician), he finally succeeded in the last election because people were so overwhelmingly pissed off with the Conservatives, and many right-wing people saw Reform as the new Conservative Party; partly because it's full of rejects from the Conservative Party.
Speculation: he doesn't really want to be an MP, he wants to be a fascist grifter. He's annoyed by suggestions he do things like Be In His Constituency and Serve His Constituents.
He's recently been caught having accepted a VERY large amount of money from some unsavory people that he insists was a totally legitimate 'donation' and not breaking any rules.
Only it did break the rules and it's very clear that it did and things are in motion to hold him to account.
To avoid this, he has resigned as an MP, saying this is a protest at his treatment by the 'establisment' (he is a rich fascist grifter, but he likes to cosplay as a Man of the People). This has triggered a by-election, in which he is standing, with the hope that the people of his constituency will either elect him in a resounding win, indicating they don't care that he's corrupt (having not heard everything the investigation is uncovering), or someone from Labour or the Conservatives will win and he can swan off to America, free to grift again because of what the 'establishment' did to him.
Only, all the major political parties have agreed not to stand, stating openly that this is an obvious stunt and they won't legitimise it. So if he doesn't win, he can't say it was because he was too much of a rebel and the Establishment went against him, he'll just be a loser, which doesn't play too well with the right-wingers he wants to grift. And if he does get back in the investigation will go forward without any kind of 'mandate' from his constituency buoying him up.
But. There is another option.
COUNT BINFACE IS RUNNING.
Count Binface is part of the grand British tradition of joke candidates who stand as a protest option. They usually don't get enough votes to get their deposit back (which is supposed to deter unserious people) but they don't care, because DEMOCRACY.
Of course, Count Binface has never won, but it is hilarious to see a completely serious pathetic fascist concede defeat while standing next to a man with a bin on his head to whom they are democratically equal.
But if nobody else is standing. And if enough people in Clacton-on-Sea are finally cheesed off enough with Farage not doing anything for them, there is just a chance that one of the funniest things to ever happen in politics will happen.
Imagine. Imagine for just a moment that the Grotesque Fascist not only loses, but loses to Count Binface.
When you try to talk about enshittification, it sounds like conspiracy theories. (I'm not crazy)
Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.
Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)
I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)
YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)
The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)
The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)
The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)
It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)
Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???
To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)
So I talk about enshittification (it sounds crazy), so people don't forget that things have been made worse on purpose (it's true), even though I sound crazy. (maybe I am)
It's called planned obsolescence and it was invented when lightbulbs could still run for 1000 years. Enshittification is the web-specific (and more specifically social media) version of that.
Eh, they're related concepts, but a lot of people clearly haven't read the original article that defined it, and it shows.
Enshittification isn't planned obsolescence, which is just making things shitter by putting a time limit on how long they function. It's a feature that serves the seller and the stock holders, not the customer. Enshittification is a process, not a feature.
The beginning part of enshittification is deliberately making a better product than the nearest competitors, and giving it to people for free.
An essential part of enshittification is not merely drawing you in with something good, but making you depend on it as a key underpinning of your life. The only way you communicate with many of your friends and family (Facebook). The only way to order most items you need, when you need them (Amazon). The only way to process online payments (PayPal). The only way to get up-to-the-minute news and send out emergency messages (Twitter).
The first version of the platform (and it is specifically a platform thing - a platform being something you use to accomplish your other projects) has to be so good that virtually no one goes anywhere else anymore.
That step is like the old Starbucks thing of opening a million locations, offering a quality product, undercutting the local competition until they go out of business and you can't go anywhere else, at which point the prices rise and the quality goes down. The standard monopoly playbook.
But enshittification is more insidious than that. It's about creating a (virtual) place that you need to use not simply to get one product, but to accomplish the important things in your life.
People don't stay on Facebook because it's the only way to socially interact online - it's not! People are trapped using Facebook even though they hate it because their elderly parents and high school friends use it and won't use anything else.
People don't leave Amazon because when you rely on deliveries (eg you are disabled, you live somewhere rural, you need a package your next day or your boss will kill you), with a Prime account, it's the only way to accomplish what you need. AND it's the only way to watch a lot of your favourite TV shows, or access Kindle Unlimited books etc. When I choose between, say, Disney+ and Prime, I reflect that both companies suck, but Prime gets me free and fast deliveries that include everything from groceries to medicines to compost. I am disabled. When I can I order from somewhere else. But relatively frequently I can't. So right now I have Prime and not Disney+.
Enshittification isn't just about eliminating the competition, it's about *trapping* you into using something that gets worse and worse while being the only way for you to get things that are genuinely important. They make you live your life through them by taking indirect ownership of intangible things, like vital pathways to maintain your friendships, and then once they have you, they count on the combination of inertia and the value you place on those intangible things to keep you there no matter how bad it gets.
So I, who have never liked Facebook, even right at the start when I had to sign up to accept a party invitation, am still there, despite everything, because a whole bunch of my friends, my publishing network contacts, and my family, will not go anywhere else. They just won't leave. So leaving Facebook, for me, means severing contact with hundreds of people, some of whom are extremely important to me.
That's enshittification. It's the process by which they make sure you don't leave when it gets shit.
And yeah, the only way to tackle this is to regulate the fucking tech companies. Tell your MP.
"drug seeking" as a patient label one of the most dogshit stupid concepts of all time. fuuuck everybody look out this guy came in here expecting medical treatment. better watch out in case he goes to a restaurant and starts food seeking
I go to the doctor each time with the hope i have an easily identifiable and clearly defined issue where there is a standard drug with limited side effects for that i need to take for just a short while. But maybe that is a sign of me being dangerous and deceitful.
And if that's not possible i hope there is an effective treatment that i can easily do without a lot of hassle or big restrictions i just have to live with. But maybe that's just my unhealthy lifestyle talking.
Doctors should really communicate whether they expect you to contribute or not. One day you walk into the appointment just a vague list of symptoms and the doctor asks you what you think is wrong. And all you can say is "I don´t know?? I did not go to medical school, you´re the professional, you tell me? Please?" and they write down unspecific viral infection and tell you to get some rest. And next time you do some research so you´re prepared to better describe your situation and you come in with a suspicion about what´s wrong that you ask them to confirm or rule out and suddenly you´re doctor google and overstepping? Please make up your mind.
Phrase everything as specific questions. Tell them how often each symptom occurs. Tell them you have a family history if you want them to run a specific test.
Happy 10 year anniversary to the 2016 declaration that you thought this shit was over. I can guarantee that Supernatural still appears in the top 10 tags any time Donald Trump does something.
your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep
laundromats at midnight
• any target
• churches in texas
• abandoned 7/11’s
• your bedroom at 5 am
• hospitals at midnight
• warehouses that smell like dust
• lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore
• empty parking lots
• ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods
• rooftops in the early morning
• inside a dark cabinet
A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.
The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease.
Listen I am very passionate about liminal spaces they are fascinating stuff or perhaps I am merely a nerd.
I get the playgrounds at night because I walk to one that’s near my house at night sometimes and hang out. I always feel like I’m being watched or followed, or rather something out of the ordinary is happening
I’ll never understand why anthropomorphic animal cartoons like Robin Hood and Zootopia will go to the trouble of creating character designs that are meant to be understood as “attractive” or even “sexy” to the human audience but explicitly avoid showing interspecies romances between anthropomorphic animals. Why is THAT weird but, like, trying to make rabbits recognizably sexy-coded to humans isn’t?
Sometimes, sure, but why was Maid Marian a fox in Robin Hood? There wasn’t anything particularly “foxlike” about her personality, and it would make more sense for her to be a lion. They made her a fox only because Robin was a fox and making her something else would be “weird”, but I don’t think the wolf cop or the chicken maid or the lion prince were actually meant to represent race.
The best inter species couple is Kermit and Miss Piggy as the Cratchits in A Muppet Christmas Carol, because all their sons are frogs and all their daughters are pigs, as God clearly intended.
In which Captain Amelia (left), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic cat, had hybrid babies with Doctor Doppler (middle), an extra terrestrial anthropomorphic dog, whom also gave birth to the babies
I always thought that in muppet movies like muppet Christmas Carol the characters are played by the muppets (so kermit is acting and playing the role of Bob rather than being him) so the kids in that film would just be other acting muppets right?
The UK is having a moment. In late July, new rules took effect that require all online services available in the UK to assess whether they h
The UK is having a moment. In late July, new rules took effect that require all online services available in the UK to assess whether they host content considered harmful to children, and if so, these services must introduce age checks to prevent children from accessing such content. Online services are also required to change their algorithms and moderation systems to ensure that content defined as harmful, like violent imagery, is not shown to young people.
During the four years that the legislation behind these changes—the Online Safety Act (OSA)—was debated in Parliament, and in the two years since while the UK’s independent, online regulator Ofcom devised the implementing regulations, experts from across civil society repeatedly flagged concerns about the impact of this law on both adults’ and children’s rights. Yet politicians in the UK pushed ahead and enacted one of the most contentious age verification mandates that we’ve seen.
The case of safety online is not solved through technology alone.
No one—no matter their age—should have to hand over their passport or driver’s license just to access legal information and speak freely. As we’ve been saying for many years now, the approach that UK politicians have taken with the Online Safety Act is reckless, short-sighted, and will introduce more harm to the children that it is trying to protect. Here are five reasons why:
Age Verification Systems Lead to Less Privacy
Mandatory age verification tools are surveillance systems that threaten everyone’s rights to speech and privacy. To keep children out of a website or away from certain content, online services need to confirm the ages of all their visitors, not just children—for example by asking for government-issued documentation or by using biometric data, such as face scans, that are shared with third-party services like Yoti or Persona to estimate that the age of the user is over 18. This means that adults and children must all share their most sensitive and personal information with online services to access a website.
Once this information is shared to verify a user's age, there’s no way for people to know how it's going to be retained or used by that company, including whether it will be sold or shared with even more third parties like data brokers or law enforcement. The more information a website collects, the more chances there are for that information to get into the hands of a marketing company, a bad actor, or a state actor or someone who has filed a legal request for it. If a website, or one of the intermediaries it uses, misuses or mishandles the data, the visitor might never find out. There is also a risk that this data, once collected, can be linked to other unrelated web activity, creating an aggregated profile of the user that grows more valuable as each new data point is added.
As we argued extensively during the passage of the Online Safety Act, any attempt to protect children online should not include measures that require platforms to collect data or remove privacy protections around users’ identities. But with the Online Safety Act, users are being forced to trust that platforms (and whatever third-party verification services they choose to partner with) are guardrailing users’ most sensitive information—not selling it through the opaque supply chains that allow corporations and data brokers to make millions. The solution is not to come up with a more sophisticated technology, but to simply not collect the data in the first place.
This Isn’t Just About Safety—It’s Censorship
Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible. But under the Online Safety Act, the UK government—with Ofcom—are deciding what speech young people have access to, and are forcing platforms to remove any content considered harmful. As part of this, platforms are required to build “safer algorithms” to ensure that children do not encounter harmful content, and introduce effective content moderation systems to remove harmful content when platforms become aware of it.
Because the OSA threatens large fines or even jail time for any non-compliance, platforms are forced to over-censor content to ensure that they do not face any such liability. Reports are already showing the censorship of content that falls outside the parameters of the OSA, such as footage of police attacking pro-Palestinian protestors being blocked on X, the subreddit r/cider—yes, the beverage—asking users for photo ID, and smaller websites closing down entirely. UK-based organisation Open Rights Group are tracking this censorship with their tool, Blocked.
We know that the scope for so-called “harmful content” is subjective and arbitrary, but it also often sweeps up content like pro-LGBTQ+ speech. Policies like the OSA, that claim to “protect children” or keep sites “family-friendly,” often label LGBTQ+ content as “adult” or “harmful,” while similar content that doesn't involve the LGBTQ+ community is left untouched. Sometimes, this impact—the censorship of LGBTQ+ content—is implicit, and only becomes clear when the policies are actually implemented. Other times, this intended impact is explicitly spelled out in the text of the policies. But in all scenarios, legal content is being removed at the discretion of government agencies and online platforms, all under the guise of protecting children.
Children deserve a more intentional and holistic approach to protecting their safety and privacy online.
People Do Not Want This
Users in the UK have been clear in showing that they do not want this. Just days after age checks came into effect, VPN apps became the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the UK. The BBC reported that one app, Proton VPN, reported an 1,800% spike in UK daily sign-ups after the age check rules took effect. A similar spike in searches for VPNs was evident in January when Florida joined the ever growing list of U.S. states in implementing an age verification mandate on sites that host adult content, including pornography websites like Pornhub.
Whilst VPNs may be able to disguise the source of your internet activity, they are not foolproof or a solution to age verification laws. Ofcom has already started discouraging their use, and with time, it will become increasingly difficult for VPNs to effectively circumvent age verification requirements as enforcement of the OSA adapts and deepens. VPN providers will struggle to keep up with these constantly changing laws to ensure that users can bypass the restrictions, especially as more sophisticated detection systems are introduced to identify and block VPN traffic.
Some politicians in the Labour Party argued that a ban on VPNs will be essential to prevent users circumventing age verification checks. But banning VPNs, just like introducing age verification measures, will not achieve this goal. It will, however, function as an authoritarian control on accessing information in the UK. If you are navigating protecting your privacy or want to learn more about VPNs, EFF provides a comprehensive guide on using VPNs and protecting digital privacy—a valuable resource for anyone looking to use these tools.
Alongside increased VPN usage, a petition calling for the repeal of the Online Safety Act recently hit more than 400,000 signatures. In its official response to the petition, the UK government said that it “has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.” This is not good enough: the government must immediately treat the reasonable concerns of people in the UK with respect, not disdain, and revisit the OSA.
Users Will Be Exposed to Amplified Discrimination
To check users' ages, three types of systems are typically deployed: age verification, which requires a person to prove their age and identity; age assurance, whereby users are required to prove that they are of a certain age or age range, such as over 18; or age estimation, which typically describes the process or technology of estimating ages to a certain range. The OSA requires platforms to check ages through age assurance to prove that those accessing platforms are over 18, but leaves the specific tool for measuring this at the platforms’ discretion. This may therefore involve uploading a government-issued ID, or submitting a face scan to an app that will then use a third-party platform to “estimate” your age.
From what we know about systems that use face scanning in other contexts, such as face recognition technology used by law enforcement, even the best technology is susceptible to mistakes and misidentification. Just last year, a legal challenge was launched against the Met Police after a community worker was wrongly identified and detained following a misidentification by the Met’s live facial recognition system.
For age assurance purposes, we know that the technology at best has an error range of over a year, which means that users may risk being incorrectly blocked or locked out of content by erroneous estimations of their age—whether unintentionally or due to discriminatory algorithmic patterns that incorrectly determine people’s identities. These algorithms are not always reliable, and even if the technology somehow had 100% accuracy, it would still be an unacceptable tool of invasive surveillance that people should not have to be subject to just to access content that the government could consider harmful.
Not Everyone Has Access to an ID or Personal Device
Many advocates of the ‘digital transition’ introduce document-based verification requirements or device-based age verification systems on the assumption that every individual has access to a form of identification or their own smartphone. But this is not true. In the UK, millions of people don’t hold a form of identification or own a personal mobile device, instead sharing with family members or using public devices like those at a library or internet cafe. Yet because age checks under the OSA involve checking a user’s age through government-issued ID documents or face scans on a mobile device, millions of people will be left excluded from online speech and will lose access to much of the internet.
These are primarily lower-income or older people who are often already marginalized, and for whom the internet may be a critical part of life. We need to push back against age verification mandates like the Online Safety Act, not just because they make children less safe online, but because they risk undermining crucial access to digital services, eroding privacy and data protection, and limiting freedom of expression.
The Way Forward
The case of safety online is not solved through technology alone, and children deserve a more intentional and holistic approach to protecting their safety and privacy online—not this lazy strategy that causes more harm that it solves. Rather than weakening rights for already vulnerable communities online, politicians must acknowledge these shortcomings and explore less invasive approaches to protect all people from online harms. We encourage politicians in the UK to look into what is best, and not what is easy.
Many people like to (correctly) point out the hypocrisy of religious extremists claiming to "protect the children" by restricting their access to information. As has been proven time and again, knowledge protects children from harm, helps them to identify abuse, and teaches them ways to protect themselves proactively. An "innocent, pure" child is a euphemism for a child that is ignorant, kept in the dark about things that could harm them. No amount of distress brought on by learning disturbing information could endanger a child the way that information control can.
The issue with this criticism is that it misunderstands what conservatives mean by "protecting" children. They don't think of children as independent beings who deserve dignity and respect. They think of them as future investments, cultural tokens, and blank slates to pour their dogma into. A church wants to "protect" children from information that might make them leave the faith, even if that information could improve the child's life. A conservative parent wants to "protect" children from information about abuse, religious coercion, bodily autonomy... anything that could loosen the parent's power and control over the child. What these groups are really "protecting" is their investment. They see children as property that they are entitled to groom and manipulate to whatever purposes they see fit, and they attack anyone and anything that suggests otherwise.
[Image ID: Tweet from verified user Corrine (@/ OopsGuess) reading: The U.S. just accidentally admitted two things:
AI is for monitoring Americans.
AI is for building autonomous weapons.
Anthropic simply said "we won't help with that," and Washington reacted like someone exposed their entire playbook.
If this isn't panic, it's guilt speaking.
Picture of text reading:
Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using this systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans' movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person's life—automatically and at massive scale.
Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even full autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America's warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, full autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgement that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don't exist today. /End ID]
so, idk wtf i’m talking about when it comes to the back end of deals like this, but from what i can glean, this is not exactly something they are hiding or pretending is an oopsie. the government now says, “we will not work with anyone who uses anthropic products in any of their processes.” anthropic has been declared a supply chain risk. they are making a public example out of the business that dares to stonewall them on anything. no one who wants to get a contract with the US govt is allowed to use anthropic products even if it’s not involved in their contract work. they are blackballing a US company.
yes, it is very much about the use of our data and the ability to do more mass murder unchecked. bottom line, their ability to accelerate the cycle of violence is the end goal. they also get off on the power flex. they are putting out a neon sign that says “get on board or perish” to every business stakeholder and politician-for-sale in the imperial core. it’s a pretty blatant declaration of intent, i think, not something they are attempting to do behind closed doors. they highlighted that section of the TOS and held it up and beat their chests and said “WE ARE PLANNING ON DOING/CONTINUING TO DO EXACTLY THESE THINGS AND ANYONE WHO HAS A PROBLEM WITH THAT IS GETTING THE AXE”
there is no downside to voting for Count Binface. its not taking away from other candidates bcos they aren't any and the more votes he gets the stupider Farage looks.
Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.
Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:
(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)
Anyway, in brief:
Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances
He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election
He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion
His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.
the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.
and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.
I've seen some people saying he would have to give up his title but it would seem that is no longer the case as of 1999; so, no, he can keep his ceremonial bin if he wishes.
Important to note also that Count Binface is the alter ego of comedian & political satirist Jon Harvey who seems to be an intelligent individual with reasonable politics. As I said no real downside.
One of my hottest transfeminist takes that I have is regarding drag and ballroom actually. Read the whole thing in depth instead of skimming it then getting mad at me.
I think that the US transfemme desire to disown drag/ballroom is a symptom of both white culture’s destruction of ancestral ties and the importance of cultural continuity, and of the predominantly white ignorance of it as a gentrified Black art form similar to how whites treat other Black art. They want a destruction of it because they see the effects and results of the gentrified version and assume that’s all there is/was.
In particular it’s frustrating because while some drag queens are cis, a lot are trans women, non-binary, or otherwise transmisogynized and drag/ballroom and the tipping culture associated with it existed in part because the transmisogynized are so fucking unemployable and it provided/s a method beyond mutual aid for the redistribution of money, through the labor of performance.
In relation to trans women, I view drag queens as a pathway to transness similar to crossdressers, femboys, (unfortunately) sissies, and similar - where although the perception of them currently may cause harm to the perception of trans women at large due to the ways they compromise with predominantly white cishetero society to allow transfemmes to explore their gender, they are, in fact, still functionally people within the spectrum of transfemininity even if they haven’t fully accepted their gender expansiveness for themselves. Harm they cause to the perception of transfemmes does not lessen them from that societal assignment, any less than we can say Caitlyn Jenner, Blair White, or Kelly Cadigan are less trans women because of the harm they’ve done to the perception of trans women. They are all, in effect, varying levels of transmisogynized whether they realize it or not.
When I was in DC I knew a lot of drag kings/queens and literally 95% of them are trans and either came to drag/ballroom as a way to explore their gender through art and/or make money bc poor, or started it and it was a gateway to unlocking their gender. Not counting the cis performers elevated by stuff like RuPaul, who is explicitly transphobic, I think I can count on my hands how many cis performers I’ve met. Hell, even with RuPaul shit a number of drag artists who have been on his shows later come out as trans (such as Bosco, who I literally grew up with), in part because they suppressed their transness publicly to maintain their career until they reached a point the blowback of coming out wound impact them less. Pulling a F1NNSTER to keep cash flowing for survival, if you will.
Iunno like. The earliest Balls we have records of were literally 1880-90s, predominantly Black (the oldest drag/ballroom performer we have records of was a Black trans woman from DC), and was one of the only safe places for trans people to exist as themselves. So I find the idea of writing it off due to a much more recent gentrification and commercialization of it as ignorant as how people often treat other demonizes or commercialized Black art.
“I just don’t like the spectacle it makes of transness and harm it causes-“
Baby all Blackness is spectacle to crackers and An Amount of modern drag is white people doing minstrelsy of all Black women - not in the sense of gender at all but in the sense of race.
Like. A lot of Black culture in the US specifically is Big and Loud *because* of the repression of it we’ve faced and the force towards respectability politics, which has echoed to queer culture because queer culture in the US is made vast majority from Black culture. Our existence is a spectacle so why not make a show out of why they hate us and try to erase us so that they can’t get rid of even more.
Hating “the spectacle” of an actual performance art form is solidly rooted in white supremacy and white cultural notions of propriety/respectability. Many aspects of “spectacle” seen in drag are directly taken from Ballroom or adapted from it/vogueing.
In summary: traditions are meant to change with situational, cultural, and environmental need but still be sustained as part of a culture. Gentrification is a poison to this that makes it harder for those the culture belongs to to practice it as it should. White ancestral shame is a poison that makes them think they should nuke everything historic/cultural that makes them uncomfortable regardless of whether it’s theirs or whether it’s something they stole and gentrified. Also yeag like,,, it’s a job/gig income predominantly for societal “undesirables” to make money when they’re under/unemployed due to marginalization. And it’s also been gentrified to *gestures at RuPaul, et al.*
No matter what you think about drag or ballroom, poor predominantly racialized trans folks still gon be doing it because it is part of our culture no matter what tv shows and big names and people who have only seen those do to it, and it’s always going to be seen as one of the “disreputable” pathways to transness that makes other trans people look down on them because of the complicated ties to transmisogyny, because until someone publicly says the words “Im also a trans woman”, WE also view them as a personification of what we fear the world sees us as—a man in a dress—rather than an egg finding their way to gender in a way we deem unacceptable because it doesn’t align with how we think it “should” be done.
And I think that’s on us honestly, not on them. If we say it can take as long or as quickly and as easily or messily for someone to sort out their gender as needed, this also has to be extended to the transmisogynized we view as “disreputable” regardless of if/when they reach a conclusion we deem acceptable or whether they die in the shell, never able to remove their masks fully.
Also as a clarification, I am not saying that you, personally, must enjoy/like/do drag or ballroom. Im saying that drag, crossies, sissies, femboys, etc. are all transmisogyny paradoxes because of the way they interface gender exploration with surviving doing so in a transmisogynistic system by compromising for safety or a degree of acceptance within spaces they’ve found accept it.
Like, as an example, I *hate* sissies because of the racism endemic to sissy culture, but I still recognize they’re transmisogynized regardless of the harm they do or the disgust I feel towards them.
I also had someone comment on it as a facet of US cultural imperialism, of which I do want to note - drag/ballroom based on Black origins was spreading outside the US back in the 1800s/early 1900s too, there’s photos from other countries of balls explicitly influenced by Black Balls mainly started by Black folks in said countries, an example being early 1900s photos from France of both transmasculine and transfeminine Black people. While modern gentrified drag is 100% exported as part of US cultural imperialism, its original spreads outside of the US were via Black diaspora in-culture. I honestly couldn’t tell you definitively where it stuck and where it didn’t from that original wave, but it’s important to know it existed that way.
I have some physical books on this I might see if I can add to the archive tbh, if I can I’ll reblog this again with links.
Girl do you have any idea how many white transfemmes got their starts as trans women through sissy kink and some *still* claim it even after years of hormones and multiple surgeries, not just for SW reasons either. Shit, a couple of the most prominent white dolls in DC still actively identify as sissies.
Is it uncomfy as hell to know this along with the horrific racism levels innate to sissy shit? Yup! Do a significant amount of trans women still start out as sissies? Sure do!
I need yall to sit and understand im talking about the *material realities* of how the transmisogynized are treated by society, not whether it makes us comfortable or happy to fucking know it. Your personal disgust or uncomfortability with being even peripherally associated with them because of them coming across their gender in a “disreputable” way does not change whether they are transmisogynized or not.
“They can take it off while we can’t! They’re all just men!” Ok so are boymoders not transmisogynized? Are those fully in the closet not transmisogynized? Are the very societal forces that drive them to access any hint of transfemininity they can through any method they can—whether it’s playing a girl in a video game, drag, sissification, crossdressing, or becoming a femboy—not intrinsic proof of their transmisigynization BECAUSE they feel they cannot directly access that transfemininity? Because I thought we had arrived at the conclusion that transmisogynization occurs even before someone comes fully and openly out as some type of transfemme, before they say the words “I am a trans woman”, when or *if* they ever publicly do.
We spend AGES looking at people, dead or alive, and going “oh, that’s a transfemme who hasn’t gotten/didn’t get to come out as one” - We are extremely hypocritical in how we allow or disallow transmisogynized people access to transfemininity based on how we feel they reflect on us as a community. Shit, Kurt Kobain was “just” a crossdresser—and a lot of the girls HATE interacting with crossies personally—but half of the dolls on this site (rightly) claim her as a transfemme who didn’t get to come out before she died. She’s provided that access because she makes us “look good”, “despite” being a crossdresser. In this way, we treat respectability as the bar by which we determine whether we let the “disreputable” transmisogynized be recognized for what they are or not.
Do they experience the full effects of transmisogynization full time? Of course not. But transmisogynization is a spectrum, as we’ve discussed in whether eggs/closeted girls are transmisogynized prior to coming out. The “disreputable” transmisogynized often (though not always) exist in life situations where they cannot safely access transfemininity through other methods or full time, so they do not suffer the same levels of constant transmisogyny as trans women do, but to pretend they aren’t transmisogynized at all flies directly in the face of our own theories and is supported solely by politics of disgust.
Im not saying you have to go out and adopt a sissy or some shit, but we HAVE to acknowledge this shit and incorporate it into our work if we want to have theory accurate to material reality and not just incorporating transmisogyny as a policy within transfeminism.
I think people often misunderstand my position on the Habsburg incest thing as "no, don't make fun of the royals I like!"
When really it is "I find it unnerving how fast people make fun of physical disability and equate it to moral goodness when you make it slightly ok to do so in context."
You wouldn't believe how many history books sound like they want to say slurs when they talk about Ferdinand I having hydrocephalus and epilepsy. Conditions, I must stress, can be caused by other things. Conditions other people have.
Look, if you want to critique the politics of the Habsburgs and the idea of the empire and the whole structure of monarchy, go ham. I will help you in that endeavor if you want.
However, there's so much going on with that approach to it, so here are my thoughts in no particular order:
This idea presumes so much choice that just did not realistically exist for so many people. Archdukes and Archduchesses more often than not had no say in their marriage partner, because marriage wasn't about what they wanted. You, woman in this family, have to marry your cousin because it's what is best politically, and how you feel about the concept doesn't matter one way or another. This happens to men too, though less so, but off the top of my head you can look at Crown Prince Rudolph's marriage being more or less decided over his head. So, preference to marry a cousin you barely know really isn't factored in at all. You're lucky if your parent cares about you being happy in the marriage.
It's not about purity, it's about politics. The rule isn't that you had to marry a relative, it's that you had to marry a Catholic from a ruling dynasty. Add in the idea that this was chosen for you from a set of politically advantageous matches, because daughters and sons are assets to be used strategically, and you get a lot of marriages into the same set of families. As crass as it is, letting your children marry downward is wasting a bargaining tool. For the Habsburgs, the religious bar is also important and pretty constraining, especially when they aren't on good political terms with the other major Catholic powers (France and Spain) so you get Italian state and Bavarian marriages. If you keep reinforcing those alliances through marriage, that also means you're probably marrying a relative. Look at how quickly they leap at having new options when Belgium is established as a friendly Catholic state.
The above problem is complicated when someone in your family becomes Grandmother of Europe. Maria Theresa's extensive marriage politics means that a lot of the possible marriage candidates are almost certainly related. This is also, by the way, how we get Victoria's hemophilia being so widespread in the Courts her children married into, and everyone seemingly being cousins by World War I.
There is a lot of "might" going on with how disability works here. Ferdinand I's Wikipedia page ("citation needed" all over the place by the way) is littered with how his disabilities "might" be caused by heredity. But they could also be caused or compounded by many of the other things that caused birth complications or disability to be more common historically, like insufficient medical knowledge about prenatal care, insufficient maternal nutrition, or infections during pregnancy or after birth. Epilepsy certainly isn't constrained to just when your parents are related to each other.
Look me in the eyes and tell me that historians routinely acting like this man (who actually functioned pretty well in a world without anti-seizure medications) had no sentience because he had a disability from birth is schadenfreude.
Even if it was the product of their parents willfully having a preference to never marry the lower nobility or the bourgeoisie because they think they're gross commoners or something, do we really want to reinforce the idea that disability is a moral punishment?
you ever feel like your days are shorter than they used to be? Time dilation. They're smashing particles together trying to recreate conditions from the "big bang". Literally trying to go backwards in time.
I won't even mention the "fake" cult video outside of cern
Well, sort of, but they're messing with things they should not be messing with, let's say that to start.
To boil it down without getting too sciencey, they are studying decays in Matter vs. Antimatter. Differences in decay rates hint at why our universe is dominated by matter instead of antimatter.
They're messing with the opposite of our universe. "The Upside Down" if you will. Whatever is inside of a black hole. Not good. At all.
They're also using Heavy Quarks as Probes. Heavy particles provide insights into interactions within quark-gluon plasma.
They're sending atom sized nukes into each other to "see what happens I guess" and then study the nuclear ash fallout of whatever happens after that...
So best case? We figure out time travel. Worst Case? They open portals into the Upside Down Black Hole Antimatter universe. Black holes swallow entire stars btw. Light and time itself get eaten by black holes.
That's a very large answer. I could speak on that topic for many days. If it was just a science project why use 666 symbolism in the logo, right?
I will say this simply though, their main deeper goal is to manipulate this timeline to promote their species and subjugate and enslave humanity. They have a statue outside with the destroyer of the universe, it would appear they're trying to destroy humanity.
I mean we could stop CERN from manipulating time. We could rise up and reject the tyranny and oppression being enacted upon us by these occult groups.
How do we motivate people to defend humanity from assured destruction?
I think a good starting point would be to learn and teach others about these occult concepts and symbolism. We are all putting this puzzle together. People will reject most occult matters outright, it sounds too fantastical, but the truth is stranger than fiction.
I can't go to CERN by myself and start throwing molotovs at it. I can however, allow people to know their doomed worldview isn't necessary.
A better world is possible for humans and all beings on earth, but we must remove the Draconian influence. People may not believe us, but they haven't seen what we have seen. Those of us who have been playing attention, know this: There are entities in this realm that are not human.
These are the true enemies of humanity. These are the true oppressors of humanity. It has always been this way, across all cultures. We must cut the head off the snakes
