Remember when we thought that the internet was going to be a wonderful thing for the advancement of human knowledge instead of the Library of Babel, with Hitler as the librarian?
I do sadly. And, in quiet moments, I interrogate my part, as a Principal Consultant for a very large international IT services company in the mid nineties, cheerleading for the fabulous future we were going to have with the sum of human knowledge freely on tap. I made the gross error of assuming people were good and kind and honest, like me.
@christineburns I see it like anything a tool, which reflects those that use it. Currently we have rich fascists who control parts of it. But they don’t control it all. Basically capitalism ruined a lot of it so I avoid those bits.
@SteveClough I think it depends on how you use it and who you depend on for the archiving of the knowledge / footage / art.
If all The Internet someone sees is Twitter and Instagram, then yeah, I can see why you would call it the Library of Babel with Hitler as the librarian.
But for those who are publishing their own blogs and sharing files so that art made for human entertainment remains preserved it can be a slightly different experience.
The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frank
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The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frankly, fascist sympathies are too heavily embedded within the ruling classes and security services of those countries, and removing them would involve a level of pain and commitment to principle that those in a position to actually do so are not willing to entertain.
What should be, at a bare minimum, in place is a commitment to uncovering and removing fascism from all levels of public life, backed by robust and mandatory civics education.
Western democracies are utterly incapable of doing this, and instead think that they can accommodate their own fascist undercurrents without them becoming overwhelming.
But with the dismantling of their own welfare states, they have nothing to fall back on, and so when economic shocks hit, the shit they have been hiding rapidly bubbles to the surface.
We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
“We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
@Idealistic Pragmatist :mstdn: It's somewhat notable that while the allies DID remove some of the most egregious fascists from what was left of German civil society after the war, I'm not sure how much the Soviet Union did, and the support for AfD is strongest by far in former East Germany.
It really blows my mind when a country explicit forbids fascist organizations in their constitution and then the constitutional court keeps approving the existence of multiple fascist parties, one of them very successful.
@Llwynog It has to be a continuous process, because if there's one thing that these bastards can do, it's play the long game.
But first, they need to root them out of their own parties.
Second, they need to fucking condemn shit which is currently being normalised or presented as "legitimate concerns".
Third, they need to divert significant resources into proper civics education to create a populace that is politically literate and able to spot and critically analyse their rhetoric and dog whistles.
And fourthly, there needs to be an understanding that it is an utterly illegitimate political stance, that is not to be tolerated in a society that values human rights. There need to be laws that proscribe fascist organisations. They need to be enforced, and the courts overseeing them need to kept free of the sort of creeping political influence that has caused institutional capture in the US.
the "western democracies" haven't taken fascism seriously because they were instrumental in its creation. they didn't try to lessen the influence of fascism after the second world war because they created it in the first place. they won't try to reduce it because fascism is essential to "western democracy".
John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of canada, inspired Hitler with his white supremacist screeds about "Aryan race".
the nation states who pretend to be a bolster against fascism did absolutely nothing to stop it when they had the chance. canada and USA gave no official support to the revolutionaries of the Spanish civil war. the Stalinists in Spain worked to prevent revolution, which fed dead antifascist bodies to Franco, who had Hitler's military support. the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade, which came from canada, an anti-fascist volunteer brigade which went to Spain to fight Franco, received no support. most of them didn't come back.
canada turned away thousands of Jewish refugees trying to escape Germany. canada had also put thousands of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps. nevermind the "residential schools" and what the reserve system for Indigenous people used to be. (guess who Hitler learned to use concentration camps from
the "welfare state" has always been a fascist idea. it was social democrats, read: reformers of capitalism, not socialists, who created things like welfare and universal healthcare which, while they seem like good ideas on their face, just look at what's happening now when the capitalists decide to dismantle these systems, which was bound to happen.
if you want to learn a quick history of "social democracy", find out who the Bolsheviks really were, and who had no problem with letting the NSDAP march in Germany.
it's not an accident that the ruling class is fascist. they invented this shit. it serves no purpose other than to uphold a white supremacist ruling status quo.
if you hate fascism, ask your doctor if tyrranicide is right for you!!
Another name for hydrochloric acid is muriatic acid. My Latin ears immediately pricked and wondered if this was squished down mice (mus, muris) or something to do with destroying a wall (murus, muri). But no, it's derived from the Latin muriaticus meaning "pickled", from muria "brine". Thus neatly connecting it to another name for hydrochoric acid: spirit of salt.
@wynke I have just looked up "offal" to see if this CW was in fact labelled strictly correctly, and I'm facepalming at not realising hitherto that it's cognate with _afval_ (and _Abfall_).
@pseudomonas That one was pretty obvious to me, but then I'm Dutch so I learned 'afval' first. (And my brain really likes to find these connections between languages, although I miss many too.)
A good word in the lingo of the Olympics is "repechage" which is a sort of second chance to get through to the next stage of a competition. I assume it's from the French and means something like "fishing again"
I think most "communities" are like this, tbh, even the fluffy ones, once you get under their skin. The more I see of society, the more I like plants. It all seems to be fine, until there starts being a *thing* independent of the individual pairs of relationships. Then it falls apart.
TERFs having a normal one, destroying women’s sports because some of the cis competitors maybe remind them a bit of trans woman, none of whom ever qualify for anything anyway, even when allowed to compete.
@KateKarnage I always forget who said "my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit", but it seems really applicable here. (I know it from Flavia Dzodan but IIRC she's quoting someone else).
@Cyberspice Mm, I think I first encountered the term when @Sarah Brown was learning to SUP. No weirder than any other weird word in a specific context, like "squelch" when talking about radio.
Its a fudging device with a couple of buttons, a wheel and an optical sensor, why would you need updatable software when current os drivers can take care of the task fine! FFS! Down with capitalism and greedy bastards.
Cass deserves to go down alongside Wakefield in my opinion. This is a wholly biased piece of work, produced to order, and to suit an agenda, and that agenda is profoundly hostile to trans people. erininthemorning.com/p/british…
The British Medical Association, the professional organization representing doctors in the United Kingdom, has called for a public critique of the review and to bar its implementation.
Arrived on time, would have had plenty of time to make our connection of 15 min. But No. This was not bookable, only the one with 75 min layover. And thanks to the mandatory reservations, you can't just hop on the earlier train. Spain, wanna work on this or invest another billion on a new high speed line? Both saves one hour. Choose wisely. #Madrid Puerta de Atocha, #Castilla #España #TrainTravel #connection #Reservation
seriously! There are a lot of parts I'm sure I don't understand, but even just the experience of sexism my trans friends have told me about are so illuminating.
Why researchers aren't begging you all for your insights is beyond me.
and clearly since it is so unknowable, male and female must be complete opposites that could never possibly understand each other, live equitably, etc.
Speaking only for myself (a cis woman), I'd worry that it might seem like an impolite question to ask a trans person. I wouldn't ever ask such a thing, unless I knew the person quite well (and even then I might hesitate). I wouldn't want to make someone feel "othered" just to satisfy my own curiosity.
By its nature most dealings with estate agents tend to be one-offs, with not much repeat business in the short term. They've probably got a new marketing chap who hasn't realised that yet.
American Christians will tell everyone who isn’t them that we’re “special snowflakes” who need to toughen up, and in their next breath go utterly fucking nuclear on Facebook because the French dared to depict Bacchanalia.
TERFs be like, “biology is immutable” as they sit there converting grass seed to skeletal muscle after having replaced >90% of their body mass in the last few years, while being descended from literal fish that breathed water.
Just gonna preempt the “trans woman said ODD, that’s ableist, ha gotcha!” takes, I do in fact have ADHD with ODD so if you’re tempted, maybe just STFU instead?
The Paris 2024 Olympic Games kicked off on Friday night with a glitzy opening ceremony, and after organisers of the show decided to include a segment featuring drag queens, right-wingers are once again branding this type of self-expression and art as…
Literal grown ass adults thinking the devil is real, and complaining that he’s running the olympics or something. Fuck’s actual sake. Get a fucking grip.
hahaha I grew up Catholic in the 1980s and the satanic panic in the U.S. was very real. My mom and stepdad really believed the conspiracy theory that the company Procter & Gamble supported the Church of Satan and communicated diabolical messages with their old crescent-moon logo. Now, QAnon is basically the same thing—baby boomers giving each other the chilly willies with spooky stories.
I assume all those beautiful queer performers didn't go down well with them, either. I, on the other hand, had a constant grin on my face at how the organisers were rubbing it in their faces.
you can make pretty oxide colours on it, but a bit wasted down inside an implant. We do have a student looking at surface effects on implants for ossiointergration but I think they are more concerned with textures than colours.
France: Any journey shorter than 4 hours by train should not be allowed to be taken by plane.
Me, after using French railways for a couple of weeks: They’re running plane services for distances of only 100km?
I’m honestly shocked at how functionally useless French railways are. “Welcome to our interchange. Please wait 2 hours surrounded by screaming kids and chain smokers for your connection. No you can’t have a fucking coffee”
Dear the UK, you have it better than you could possibly believe.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ So my recent experience is Brittany, which has a couple of mainlines and a bunch of feeder lines. The feeder lines just ... do not link up with the mainline services. In Portugal, which also has this sort of arrangement on a massively shrunk network, the trains on feeders are timetabled to meet connections,. and the connections will be held if necessary. In the UK, connections are typically not held, but are frequent enough that it doesn't matter.
In France, neither of these appear to be true. You are left at a railway station and the next mainline train doesn't even stop there, despite it being an interchange with hundreds of people waiting on the platform. When one finally does stop, it's utterly rammed.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ I can't agree. The UK, even in places as remote as North Wales, actually tries to timetable branch line shuttles to connect to mainline services in less than ninety minutes.
In France, it doesn't even seem to occur to them that this is a thing they can do.
@TimWardCam GB Rail doesn't wait for stragglers if the two trains are run by different companies (previously, different sectors) but at least if you have to wait an hour for the next clockface-ish service, the company causing the delay repays some of the ticket price. If you can plan to arrive an hour earlier than needed, it usually works well. If less, then it can get stressful
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ These were very clearly not lines short of slots. The branches were literal shuttles where they had pretty much total freedom of scheduling. Train goes from one end to the other. Has dedicated platform at the mainline station. Massive amounts of dwell time. There is literally nothing else on the line.
@Alexa (She/Her) 🏳️⚧️ Closest equivalent I can think of in the UK that I’m familiar with is the Dengie Peninsula shuttle. Literally the only scheduling issue is that the train coming the other way needs to be in the passing loop to go past.
I’m fully aware of all the issues that you highlight. This wasn’t that. Connections just aren’t a thing, and it seemed systemic too. Get to the terminus of one of these branches and there’s a taxi rank. There are no taxis in it. Ever. There’s a piece of A4 with the numbers of a few minicab companies. The shuttle comes in 4 times a day. The idea that the people getting off it might want a taxi to the next town over, or a bus (because, surprise surprise, the buses do not attempt to link up with train times either), appears to be utterly alien.
@TimWardCam well, we do have some 1 #train per 2 hour services overdue for improvement like Peterborough-Ipswich and a few daily oddballs like Cambridge-Harwich, but in general, GB regional service frequency beats French. Slower and fewer high speed services in GB though. Lots of 180 and 160kph lines with little bits of 205.
Reading about the book that this Vance bloke wrote, and apparently it’s all, “I was poor growing up and struggled but saw people on benefits with phones and that’s not fair”.
And his conclusion seems to be that they shouldn’t have those things if he can’t.
I had a similar childhood, but reached a very different conclusion. I don’t want anyone to struggle. If someone else has something I don’t, I don’t actually care as long as I have what I need.
He seems to feel that what he wants is not for his own needs to be met per-se, but to be ahead of others. As long as he has the biggest slice of cake, it doesn’t matter how small the cake is.
I want enough cake, and I want the rest of the cake to have enough for everyone else.
same! I grew up in a declining industrial town, as the child of an unemployed single mother, growing our own food, couldn't afford a car, etc. I'm now a successful engineer and rich beyond my wildest childhood dreams (not a millionaire or anything, but still). And I want a UBI, and a free NHS with staff who get reasonable pay and work reasonable hours, and for kids to get free school meals, and nobody to be homeless or hungry. Can society afford that? Yes. Poverty costs us all.
I've never seen the alleged cyber truck, and until I do, and confirm it's realistically drivable, I will hold firm to the perception that it's nothing more than a very expensive joke by a very bored gamer.
Long form - on transphobia and trans women as basilisks
That thing transphobes do, where something trips in their brains and they end up doing nothing but obsessing about trans women, while probably in a darkened room with no clean underwear surrounded by empty pot noodles and bags of their own urine.
There is a pop-psychology concept amongst tech geeks of a "basilisk". This is something that, once you become aware of it, it breaks you. You cannot come back once you have experienced the basilisk. It's a one way ticket to, usually, madness, or perhaps total system shutdown. It's generalised from the idea from antiquity of the basilisk as a creature that turns you to stone.
There's a fun story called Blit - linked here, infinityplus.co.uk/stories/bli… about a visual basilisk. Another example is something called Roko's Basilisk which is basically Pascal's wager for atheists who spend too long in Silicon Valley (it's stupid, but some of the terrible people with more money than sense, like Musk and Thiel, actually appear
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That thing transphobes do, where something trips in their brains and they end up doing nothing but obsessing about trans women, while probably in a darkened room with no clean underwear surrounded by empty pot noodles and bags of their own urine.
There is a pop-psychology concept amongst tech geeks of a "basilisk". This is something that, once you become aware of it, it breaks you. You cannot come back once you have experienced the basilisk. It's a one way ticket to, usually, madness, or perhaps total system shutdown. It's generalised from the idea from antiquity of the basilisk as a creature that turns you to stone.
There's a fun story called Blit - linked here, infinityplus.co.uk/stories/bli… about a visual basilisk. Another example is something called Roko's Basilisk which is basically Pascal's wager for atheists who spend too long in Silicon Valley (it's stupid, but some of the terrible people with more money than sense, like Musk and Thiel, actually appear to believe it, and are therefore broken by it, and I reiterate, it's really, really stupid).
Anyway, in the latter case, Roko's Basilisk breaks you by becoming aware of it, BUT, here's the thing: it only works on certain people. They have to be susceptible, and in the case of Roko, the susceptibility lies around a particular weak spot in the ability of otherwise intelligent people to think critically and realise, "this is fucking stupid".
But, here's the thing, TO THOSE WHO ARE SUSCEPTIBLE, I've realised that trans women are a basilisk.
Look at people like Graham Lineman, J K Rowling, and a load of less famous people who have ended up in the same state. They all reached a point where SOMETHING relating to the fact that trans women exist tripped them into some downward doom spiral that has basically pushed their brain into a self-reinforcing state of insanity that they can't recover from.
There are probably several psychology PhDs for the taking on the subject of this.
But it seems I, and many women like me, are basilisks. This is a public post. Some of the people hate reading it have already passed the trigger condition. If you're one of them, you should probably empty some of those bags of your own wee and eat a fresh vegetable, if you can. Good luck!
Long form - on transphobia and trans women as basilisks
Sensitive content
transphobia rots the brain in a seemingly unique way. I've also been thinking for a while that there's a dearth of research on it.
One name that wasn't mentioned here: Notch. He was actually cool about trans people once upon a time, and then he became a billionaire and basically melted his mind on twitter becoming a transphobe. Bizarre how people will commit to being unlikable.
Oh, and for people who are not fluent in That Weird-looking European Language With Its Own Alphas and Betas, βασίλισσα ('basilissa') is the Greek word for 'queen'. Two alphas, a single beta, and a whopping three sigmas! What a mighty and beautiful word.
This reminds me of a video analysis of JKR's work (from Shaun..?) where they noticed how actions were seen as justified or cruel depending on what character did them. If a character was considered one of the good ones (like Harry, Ron and Hermione), barely anything they did to others would be portrayed as bad or cruel, and vice versa. If this is not just a book thing but how she genuinely believes the world to be, a bunch of good and evil people, not a world where everyone is capable of doing all kinds of actions.... It makes sense she feels like she is in the right, no matter what she does, and that every cruel action against trans people would be justified and wouldn't actually be considered cruel to begin with, because in her mind, she is inherently good and trans people are inherently bad. And nobody with a clear mind and also be one of the good ones would doubt her, so everyone speaking up against her is clearly rotten as well and pretending not to be, no matter if left or right.
@Tattie @geekylou Terrible people have a weird sort of solidarity. They recognize that growing social awareness threatens to destroy power structures they thrive in, so they can work together to some extent against the Woke Mob. This is the source of virtually all the "why I left the left" stuff. The right is full of terrible people who will extend their twisted version of solidarity to the former "leftist" so they can preserve the power structures they all depend on.
This is an interesting take, the basilisk framing makes sense! But I still don't get what the trigger is. What is the SOMETHING you refer to? Do you know?
I'd like to understand it, because I like to understand why people think the way they do, especially when I disagree with them. I can't fathom TERFs. It doesn't make sense, it is so irrational. With ordinary bigotry is possible to understand where it's coming from. Racism kind of makes sense, conservative transphobia and homophobia kind of makes sense, etc. The position that trans women is a threat to cis women is a complete mystery to me. It is, as you say, fucking stupid.
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It's so bloody infuriating. What's worst are those ignorants smoking at bus/tram stations... That was banned (and people respect it) even in my otherwise super backwards Czechia. Ugh.
In lieu of the whole "starter motor catching fire" incident, we have decided to end our voyage south for this year and leave the boat here in Quiberon. We Weill resume our journey south in the spring, after repairs and annual maintenance out of the water.
@Sarah Brown Don’t you mean in light of? While stopping the voyage here instead of the motor having caught fire is appealing it offers certain causality related technical difficulties
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I think it depends on how you use it and who you depend on for the archiving of the knowledge / footage / art.
If all The Internet someone sees is Twitter and Instagram, then yeah, I can see why you would call it the Library of Babel with Hitler as the librarian.
But for those who are publishing their own blogs and sharing files so that art made for human entertainment remains preserved it can be a slightly different experience.
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