What's Up Fuckers??? It's Ya Boi

Young adult | Female

[headspace-hotel]

most damaging idea of the 21st century: the conviction of vast numbers of people that human history will end within our lifetimes

climate change represents world-altering tragedy if unchecked, but not even in the worst-case scenario does it mean “literally everyone dies”

yet so many people have jumped already to “it’s over, the world is going to end, we can do nothing about it” and are just paralyzingly cynical. How do I explain that the power to imagine a future is essential for creating it

[headspace-hotel]

you know the thing where trauma can cause you to just. not expect to live much longer so when you get to 30 you don’t know what to do because you thought you’d be dead by 25

That is happening to all of us right now on a society-wide scale

[headspace-hotel]

A lot of people are like. REALLY angry at me for suggesting that “be depressed and do nothing” isn’t necessarily the only response to climate change.

this, this, this, this, this, this, and like, 700 other sources will tell you that most of the effects of climate change will be reversible even if we pass the ‘threshold’ of a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in global temperature

BUT. Even if the worst happens, it will be important to be doing things other than wallowing in misery???

I’m not trying to be callous but for people living today it’s wildly unlikely for the results to be “literally immediate death.”

People will get displaced from their homes by rising sea levels. We have like, years, probably decades, before that happens. It seems so fucked up to decide that we should do nothing, because we’ve already decided they’re going to die anyway????

If a bunch of us are going to die, why not die trying to help each other? Why not try to make sure fewer people die? Why not do something that might reduce someone’s suffering or give them food or clean water or a place to sleep?

I don’t know how to explain to you that people need socks during the apocalypse

[elodieunderglass]

I keep recommending “The Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh because it is a very unflinching look at how culpable we are - not for having families, or forgetting to use the right spoons - but for consistently choosing the luxurious delusions of apocalypses. People can lovingly envision a thousand apocalypses, lavishly decorated by the pop culture we’ve gobbled down; but the reverse is not true, and we lack the imagination that is quite literally needed for the future. To the point where planning for the future is actively undermined by people at all levels, stating that it’s unrealistic. We are at a turning point of human history where people are watching each other knock holes in a shared lifeboat, because “everyone knows that lifeboats are predestined to sink.”

It’s considered unrealistic to imagine the prosperous and equitable future of the next generation, because it doesn’t match pop culture. We have actively given up our responsibilities of stewardship - literally the purpose of human existence - because Hollywood made it look hard. We are forgoing our natural bonds and our collective power because we agreed that our neighbours will probably turn on us, and when we look at the self-fulfilling prophecies and natural consequences of our behavior (pandemic, natural disasters) we claim it’s evidence that we can’t improve, instead of addressing the poor behavior.

Ghosh argues that one of the most radical and revolutionary things that we can do (and in the West, the foremost ETHICAL thing to do) is to task ourselves with reprogramming our imaginations to something functional. In this scenario, everyone can participate in the work; writers can literally take readers by the hand and heal them, people can lead and teach each other on social media, unions can include it in discussions, parents can teach their children, children can teach their parents, and everyone can correct each other. Oh, and people who like boycotts and clout can start a movement demanding more imagination in media. I agree with this, and it has underpinned my work and activism ever since.

[dancinbutterfly]

I tend towards the conviction the humanity will survive and people look at me like I’m nuts. But it’s easier to ge shit done with this belief and honesty humanity will likely be here even if we don’t like how it is. Why not work towards it being something we want?

[ahgoodthesea]

My mother keeps telling people she’s so relieved I’m not having children (I’m asexual and also just not inclined toward the care of very small younglings), and sure, it’s personally less stressful for her to not worry about her blood-related grandkids.

But what about everyone else’s kids and grandkids.

My mother thinks she gets to opt out of caring because I’m not having kids. But the world is not going to end just because I’m not having kids. And while she finds it admirable that I’m thinking about the next seven generations after me, she just…doesn’t care.

It’s not just a lack of imagination — it’s fear and it’s apathy.

We’ve romanticized disaster to the point that we’re numb to it. We find it to be such an inevitable outcome we’re just sort of vaguely relieved to avoid anticipated disasters. Our escapist fictions are disasters and capitalist mega series about disasters, our realities are disasters upon disasters with leaders who profit from disasters.

We’ve tricked ourselves out of dreaming better realities.

[ianwrighty]

I will say that not all of this is to do with apathy and is at least quite a bit to do with a) how climate change is presented and b) how impossibly huge in scale the effects of climate change are to actually imagine

for decades the technique for talking abt climate change is to attempt to terrify the public into taking action. it’s presented as this apocalypse, we see pictures of polar bears on tiny ice floats, cities underwater, the worst case scenario. ppl ask me all the time when we’re gonna see the effects of climate change and are shocked when I say right now, every single day. cities aren’t getting drowned under miles of water but ppl are already getting displaced from their homes bc of worse and worse flooding except it’s not the apocalyptic scenes we’ve been told to expect so even when we say ‘this is climate change’ it doesn’t quite click

but this is a problem of science communication. ppl don’t properly understand what climate change is or what they’re supposed to do abt it bc communication on this subject is led by environmental scientists who don’t understand the social/political/economic aspects and it’s not their fault like this is literally not their job in the same way I couldn’t tell u abt a lot of the more technical aspects. not to mention the millions of $ of funding fossil fuel companies put into encouraging this kind of education/communication/mindset (and not even to mention how capitalism pushes us towards apathy and destroys sense of community very much on purpose). this isn’t on individuals this is a massive systemic issue

and secondly yeah climate change is actually almost impossibly huge to conceptualise. all of the work we do right now to stop it? none of us will see those effects in our lifetimes, our kids or great grandkid’s lifetimes. we are literally charging forwards into a black void which is rlly difficult for humans to conceptualise, we don’t rlly have any ability to properly understand what 10,000 years into the future looks like. and now asking ppl to fundamentally change their entire societies for this? it’s a desperately impossible task that we all need to fight for

[teradrama-deactivated20260513]

"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book

[escuerzoresucitado]

[injuries-in-dust]

"They will smell your fear."

[corgiestnerd]

I may or may not be making her into a keychain later. I just need more Mu merch in my life, or else I'll shrivel up and die.

[pirateprincessjess]

It’s not being widely reported on yet, but there’s a massive rally in support of trans youth and in opposition to trumps trans youth care ban happening in new your right now

We aren’t alone y’all. These last few weeks have been hard and it took some time for people to start organizing a response, but people are standing up and fighting for us.

[warsofasoiaf]

I was watching a video on what German forces in ww2 thought of allied soldiers and apparently Americans were seen as sub par both individually being undisciplined and not too tactically skilled and only a threat due to material advantages. Now while that sounds like cope to me, how did Americans perform comparatively compared to their allies and enemies.

It depends on at what point during the war.

In the beginning, the US were not very skilled, as seen in battles like Kasserine Pass. The US didn't have much training, the reasons of which vary from tradition to the Great Depression. The same was true of the British, who despite pioneering close air support in World War I largely forgot the techniques in the interim, forcing them to relearn it all over again in the African theater.

But the US improved their training and became much more effective as the war went on (as did the British). By the end of the war, the US were among the most highly-trained and militarily-effective fighting forces of the Allies, capable of supporting multi-theater operations at fast tempo and accomplishing their objectives, easily the equal of the British or Germans and far more capable than the Soviets, who even very late in the war made severe operational mistakes (deploying armor in cities, accidentally bombing Stockholm, etc.)

Thanks for the question, Cat.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[regina-bithyniae]

From what I've read - US Army infantry were not particularly good on an individual level. Men with higher cognitive abilities were tracked to other jobs (air force, signalling, artillery), and as the Army ran into a manpower crisis in late 1944 and 1945 it tried to shift men in from other jobs, who lacked advanced infantry training or experience, which didn't help on average skill levels.

The WW2 US Army was critically a conscript army, not a professional army, meaning that plenty of men who were in the force were not naturally inclined to be soldiers and this had major implications for how physically fit and aggressively they were in combat. The reason airborne units performed so well was because it was a dangerous job which men had to volunteer for, which filtered in aggressive, self-directed and physically fit men.

There is also probably an effect from the US/UK traditionally not being "large standing army" countries, with both only introducing conscription because of WW2.

---

What the Western Allies did very well was their overwhelming airpower and artillery - focusing on these allowed them to limit the percentage of men directly exposed to combat and suffering losses far more than in WW1 or the contemporary German/Red armies.

In the Normandy campaign for example, German troops attempting to get into combat would get pounded by airpower for days to weeks before they could even reach the line, being forced to move on off-roads, in small units, entirely at night, which ruined their strategic maneuverability and badly disrupted them even before they got into battle. Some marches that would take hours by road or rail intead took days or even weeks, while constantly getting attacked.

@gpuzzle any takes?

[gpuzzle]

Oh this is gonna be a long one.

Gonna have to lay out some thoughts here on the nature of warfare as well.

The very first one, and crucially the most important one, is that your force is contextually only as good as its highest level of command, and its own ability to command its troops. And in that case, the US Army is heading into the fight with NCOs with very little training and fresh-faced Lieutenants learning on the job, so at the platoon scale, the Germans started out with a force that was very thoroughly trained, the Soviets were in the middle of a reorganization and ate shit for it, the Italians were spread far too thin if experienced, the Japanese were deeply militarized and battle-tested, and the British, while caught off-guard initially, have spent the last 3 years shaping themselves into a very passable force.

The end result is rather obvious - as the US is heading into Europe, they're basically completely green. Their soldiers know how to march and take care of themselves and all that, they know the basic soldierly duties of "taking a long ass hike" and "standing in a general area doing what's asked of you". But they don't know how to actually fight under fire. If you're a German soldier on the ground, you're being so much more decisive that you've a clear local advantage.

But the problem with that logic is that it reaches an inevitable bottleneck, and scaling back it runs into the fact that the most dangerous weapon an infantryman in the US forces had was the radio. Each platoon commander had a walkie-talkie back to the company commander which in turn had his own radio net back to the battalion commander. And these battalion commanders would be more experienced and trained men, as they are officers. The Germans only added Rifle Company Radios late in the war, and certainly did not have platoon radios. The bigger the force, the less agile it is by nature, but even with that the US had a distinct agility advantage.

A battalion is a significant number of men. It's around 600 soldiers. It's also somewhere in the realm of like 5000 times less than what the US sent as soldiers just to the European Theater. As you reach the bottleneck of command, the US was generally better led, better organized, and could coordinate fights much better and use its resources in a way that the Germans simply could not at that point in time. In that sense, while yes, the US soldier was a worse soldier on a one-to-one basis, as you went up the ranks that level reversed drastically in no small part because of the capabilities afforded to commanders.

And that's important because the US is overcoming with tech something that the Germans kept overcoming with doctrine and training, and unfortunately doctrine and training are things that takes years to raise and you hemorrhage in months; Napoleon's first-of-its-kind semi-professional army, which trained for the Invasion of England, won itself to death from the Danube to the Ebro. The Confederate States of America took the majority of the officer corps of the antebellum US and hemorrhaged officers and men until there were basically none left. And the Nazi officer cadre of 1940 that took France by surprise had been replaced at every level by someone with less experience by 1942.

The other one is that most of what you do as a soldier has very little to do with fighting, and it is mostly about putting the mechanism of large scale warfare into motion, and that's been the case since forever. Waging war is about taking long ass hikes and transporting enough necessities for a city on foot; from typewriters, pens and papers to being able to set up latrines and hospitals and everything that requires. The fighting is a sharp point that needs to be done, but ideally you minimize actual fighting. And the US soldier was not only perfectly capable of doing things like "washing himself" or "writing down the orders of his superior", he was probably the best at it. A not insignificant amount of the US soldiers in WW2 were ex-Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal-era program, and in that case they learned a lot about those basic things of soldiery, just as an example. So while they weren't the best fighters, they didn't need to be, they were good enough across the board to take advantage of the many things that were specific to the Armed Forces like "electromechanical computers" and "eating K2 rations".

[evenlyevi]

Goodnight.

[a-french-guardsman]

Incredibly niche discourse in the group Discord

[thegaymertrainer]

If you come in you don’t have to come out

[pinene]

the way this is like baaaaarely parody

[diane-nguyen-watches-cartoons-d]

bringing in a second actor towards the end of the video to deliver a single devastating punchline is brilliant writing

[ifyouknowmeirlgoaway]

#perfect description of what grindr is like

[calmingthoughtsinyourhead]

legally blonde from warner’s perspective is so funny

One day you’re dating this gorgeous but ditsy girl but your family pressures you to break up with her once you go to harvard so you do and it ends in tears but whatever.

Next thing you know, she’s at Harvard, dressed in entirely different clothes, saying its easy to get in and she’s pretending she forgot you go there. But you payed your way in and she’s rich too so you kind of assume she did the same thing and fine, so you have a stalker now.

There’s a mixer at the start of the school year. She shows up in a playboy. bunny. costume.

She tries to flirt with you while your fiance is in the next room. You tell her enough is enough and she gets like really angry at you.

Suddenly she is kicking ur ass in class, she steals opportunities away from you, she steals your girlfriend, she starts winning cases, she’s on the news now, she graduates as valedictorian

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

And you deserve it

[ollieofthebeholder]

The book from his perspective is even funnier.

You break up with the girl you actually really like because she's hot, but your family expects you to marry a girl who's rich and also smart enough to be a lawyer herself, so you string her along until just before graduation and then tell her so long and thanks for all the fish.

Then you show up at Stanford for orientation and, at the end of the long list of accolades and accomplishments the various students in your graduating class comes in with, the dean of students announces Stanford Law's first-ever beauty queen, and holy shit it's your ditzy ex.

You have already gotten engaged to the girl your parents expect you to marry. Your fiancee is actually in more of your ex's classes than you are, just because of how the schedules line up. There are quite a few people in your class who knew her before and they all mock her. Most of the other students get in on it. You stay out of it.

There's a Halloween party, she shows up dressed as a Playboy Bunny, and she outright tells you she came to Stanford to prove she's good enough for you. You laugh at her.

Your fiancee convinces you to send everything you ever got from your ex back to her. She does this right before first semester finals. You may possibly feel like a jerk, but you do it anyway.

You get your grades back for the first semester. Your fiancee is near the top of the class. You are at the bottom of the class. You are pissed off about this. You decide you need to do something about this situation. What you decide that you need to do is take your ex, who understands you and would never show you up with grades like that and knows how to make you feel like the biggest man in the world, out to dinner, order a meal that your fiancee has managed to convince you to stop eating for your health, declare to your ex that you are going to start making your own decisions again...and have therefore decided to start playing golf again, damn what your fiancee says. You are completely confused when your ex leaves the table in tears.

You may or may not find out that your ex took all her first semester classes pass/fail, which means she technically did better than you.

You apply for an internship with a lawyer who is working on a case involving a woman accused of murdering her elderly husband. You get it, along with your fiancee, a militant feminist, and your ex. The feminist gets the internship because she is an expert in women's rights and particularly as they relate to this case. Your fiancee gets it because she has insanely good research skills and the grades to back it up. Your ex gets it because she is passionate about the case and also has connections with a number of people involved in the case, including the defendant. You get it because your father went to law school with the lawyer in question.

Your ex gets to go along on depositions. Your fiancee also goes to depositions. You are struggling to keep up with the minimal workload you have been given.

The case gets to court. The lawyer is on the verge of losing. Your ex suddenly jumps up and asks to ask the key witness questions. She then manages to skewer the entire testimony based on her intimate knowledge of both beauty routines and sorority politics. She gets mobbed by the press immediately following the case and the lawyer goes on record as stating he is proud of her.

You are delighted. You present your ex with a detailed explanation of how you can now marry her, because your parents will accept her when your dad's old friend tells them how smart she is and you can have a hot wife too. Your ex informs you that she's not interested in you anymore and that she's realized she can do better, and then adds that incidentally your fiancee has been standing behind you this entire time hearing you talk about how she's ugly as a brick fence and you're only marrying her because your parents are making you.

Your fiancee gives you the ring back, skips class, and goes to the salon. Your exes have now unionized.

[ballgame]

oh hell yes

[ballgame]

But wait, there's more!!!

[bengustown]

happy birthday everyone

[bengustown]

Not what I meant.

[bengustown]

happy birthday my beautiful friend Calendar

[officialunitedstates]

this reminds me of the time in 2025 when someone pushed down the leaning tower of pisa and spacex donated $1.6 billion to fix it

[gonereducedtoatoms-deactivated2]

op are you a time traveler

[officialunitedstates]

ooops sorry ignore this post for a few years

[moringmark]

[moniquill]

[jewtea]

I'm appalled. they crushed that fucking baby appalled im now realizing this is more gorey than I anticipated. tw

[wyrmwizard]

[detectivehole]

hey i made a baby outta that

[m4gehand]

This is one if the funniest fucking things I've ever seen