Illuminator of the Eternal Warfare

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
leviathan-supersystem
leviathan-supersystem

the thing is, there's an absolute abundance of extremely skilled representational artists today. you can't scroll two posts on tumblr without seeing a photo realistic drawing/painting/embroidery/block print. but strangely, when you scroll through the notes of those posts, you'll see plenty of picrew icon libs fawning over it, but few if any of the RETVRN trads who are supposedly so upset by a supposed lack of representational art in the present day. and of course you don't see them, if they acknowledged the existence of that art they'd have to admit their whole narrative about modern degeneracy is utter nonsense. and interestingly, when it comes to art scenes which *do* have a significant number of reactionaries in the audience, the things that come to mind are lo-fi black metal, power electronics/harsh noise, and NFTs. not exactly form's of art known for embodying classical beauty.

leviathan-supersystem

"oooh why is there so much ugly art in this degenerated modern world" well Derrick if you think that's such a big problem maybe tell your bros to stop making whitehouse and burzum knockoffs, that shit's been played out for decades now.

illuminator-of-eternal-warfare

I don’t think I have ever encountered anyone thinking Black Metal is degenerate, though.

I think it’s more about what is being considered art by the financial and political elites, not something that an art student/amateur with 1000 followers is producing.

weiszklee
turkish-delightful

How could you be against free college. Like if I think about student loans for more than a few minutes I think about jumping off a cliff have some pity damn

detached1026

Because hundreds of thousands of people have already paid for their tuition. Should they be reimbursed? It’s not fair to the people who have already paid/ are paying for college. That’s why.

turkish-delightful

Yeah I love thinking how my kids are gonna cry and have panic attacks because of the heavy student loans they’re gonna have just because they want to go to a good school. Yeah I really want them to suffer just like I did bc yknow I paid why should they have it any easier than me?? I don’t want America to be better than I found it. Fuck future generations.

ceruleancynic

Allow me to present to you the crab bucket

It’s not just this person, it’s a mindset that’s endemic in this entire country, a corollary to fuck you got mine: it states if I had to go through horribly unfair miserable experiences for no good reason, EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD TOO GODDAMNIT.

Nobody should get access to decent healthcare without going bankrupt because that’s not fair to the people who went bankrupt already. Nothing should ever be improved because it’s not fair to the generations who lived through a world that lacked those improvements. If I had to work three horrible demeaning exhausting benefit-free jobs to be able to eat and sleep indoors, so should everybody else. 

It’s the crab bucket. It’s poisonous. It’s always been poisonous. It’s behind the long-standing tradition of people voting for politicians whose stated aims are to ensure that their lives will continue to be unnecessarily difficult, full of suffering, and short.

quasi-normalcy

Also I mean, given that the cost of education has been increasing sharply for years, by tumblr user detached1026′s logic, shouldn’t we be forcing all past generations to cough up enormous amounts of money just to even-up the score?

illuminator-of-eternal-warfare

They should be reimbursed.

mostlysignssomeportents

Rent control works

mostlysignssomeportents

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This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

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David Roth memorably described the job of neoliberal economists as finding “new ways to say ‘actually, your boss is right.’” Not just your boss: for decades, economists have formed a bulwark against seemingly obvious responses to the most painful parts of our daily lives, from wages to education to health to shelter:

https://popula.com/2023/04/30/yakkin-about-chatgpt-with-david-roth/

How can we solve the student debt crisis? Well, we could cancel student debt and regulate the price of education, either directly or through free state college.

How can we solve America’s heath-debt crisis? We could cancel health debt and create Medicare For All.

How can we solve America’s homelessness crisis? We could build houses and let homeless people live in them.

How can we solve America’s wage-stagnation crisis? We could raise the minimum wage and/or create a federal jobs guarantee.

How can we solve America’s workplace abuse crisis? We could allow workers to unionize.

Keep reading

mostlysignssomeportents

Ireland’s privacy regulator is a gamekeeper-turned-poacher

mostlysignssomeportents

image

This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

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When the EU passed its landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it seemed like a privacy miracle. Despite the most aggressive lobbying Europe had ever seen, 500 million Europeans were now guaranteed a digital private life. Could this really be?

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Keep reading

weiszklee
owlpellet

wishing people would understand (and advertisers would stop giving the impression) that herbal remedies don't actually work like fantasy potions where you have a Symptom and they magically target that Symptom specifically-- they work exactly like pharmaceutical medicines but at a less concentrated scale, and it can interact poorly with them if you are already using them.

ashwagandha doesn't "lower your anxiety", it reduces your cortisol levels, which can in turn lower your blood pressure and interact with other adrenal and BP meds. ginkgo doesn't "help you think", it dilates your blood vessels and is an anti-platelet, which increases cerebral bloodflow but can interact with other circulatory meds. grapefruit seed extract is an incredible antifungal but it will inhibit enzymes that break down many types of medication and lead to blood toxicity of those meds.

i've worked in this industry since before insta/tiktok was a major force in advertising for it and i've watched the swing from people generally being educated about this niche thing they have come in to buy to "i saw on tiktok that this will give me energy"

.... will it? have you had bloodwork done? are you adequately absorbing your nutrition? are you getting sunlight? stop being scammed by symptom-centric buzzwords. anything that promises it will give you energy or help you focus or whatever else hinges entirely on your body chemistry fitting very certain criteria and a lot of people end up disappointed when that cordyceps did nothing for them when it turns out they're low on stomach acid and not synthesizing their B vitamins correctly or something else that is way above my paygrade to determine.

the american healthcare system is a shitshow and people often have no choice but to take their treatments into their own hand, but "natural remedies" want your money just as bad as "big pharma" and it's up to the individual to do their epistemological due diligence when treating themselves. godbless.

alarajrogers
captainjonnitkessler

“Antitheism means advocating for genocide!!!” It doesn’t actually, because disapproving of something doesn’t mean that you are calling for that thing to be completely eradicated from existence. It just means you disapprove. And conflating criticism of or distaste for religion with literal genocide is an insane overreaction meant to shut down any discussion of the harm done by religion.

captainjonnitkessler

The people pushing this are always the same people who respond to any criticism of religion with “you’re just thinking of Christianity! Literally all other religions are just peaceful accepting communities filled with love and joy that have never harmed anyone uwu”. It’s exhausting, blatantly untrue on the surface, and it only serves to protect the feelings of religious people at the expense of the people religion has harmed.

jambeast

The more important point, I think, is that calling for people to voluntarily stop doing something by persuading into thinking an alternative is better doesn’t mean you are calling for people who do-that-thing to be rounded up into camps and systemically slaughtered.

It’s like saying you want to commit genocide against Climate Change Deniers by persuading them that Climate Change Exists - thereby Eradicating from Existence Climate Change Deniers.

Or that saying that the left is committing genocide against white people by being permissive of miscegenation, thereby reducing the amount of pure-blooded white people born in the future because some of them will be mixed race instead, and treating that the same as rounding them into death-camps.

zexreborn

But it’s also like, read the room and be aware of context. Given, you know… history, it’s completely understandable and culturally adaptive for Jewish people to be on hairpin alert for these sorts of things.

It’s not just reasonable, it’s logical. The average Jewish poster doesn’t know you from Hans and it’s not like the prior for ‘this random person is antisemitic’ is anywhere close to 0. Add a dollop of ‘antisemites often couch their bigotry in code or make liberal use of motte-bailey tactics to switch between blatant and subtle antisemitism all the time’ and why wouldn’t they conclude you’re an antisemite? I’m not saying that you are an antisemite, but you absolutely look like one and obviously people are more concerned with false negatives than false positives in these circumstances.

It’s like… I wish the theists in this discussion would do more reading the room and being aware of the context. I wish they were more curious about *why* being called culturally Christian rankles so much and is likely to trigger religious trauma in atheists. And I wish that, if I couldn’t convince them that their intellectual framework is wrong, I could at least convince them to change terminology and be less knowingly inflammatory, out of respect for interfaith comity and the necessity of allyship.

That’s a two-way street, though, and if atheists want other religious minorities to take into account their unique history and religious trauma when interacting with them, we have to extend the same courtesy.

jambeast

“ I’m not saying that you are an anti-Semite, but you absolutely look like one “

Who does? Like this latest swing of the discourse started when someone said ‘religion is bad’ with absolutely no specific reference to Judaism.

Like maybe if the criteria here for ‘absolutely looking like an anti-Semite’ is ‘being accused of it on the internet’ then sure, but that gets a little circular as justification for the accusation.

alarajrogers

Saying “we should get rid of religion” makes perfect sense if your starting position is, you’re an atheist who grew up in, or surrounded by, a repressive religion that caused substantial human misery.

Saying “we should get rid of religion” sounds totally antisemitic if your starting position is, you are Jewish, and as such you belong to a religion that is inseparable from a culture, and people have been trying to kill you, your culture, or both, for 2000 years.

I think it makes more sense to say, religion is very old and is integrated with many cultural traditions and is not likely to go away, ever, but we can move toward an understanding that trying to impose your religious beliefs on people is disgusting – not just bad and wrong, but a lot like whipping out your dick and pissing in broad daylight, or eating vomit, or something else that’s absolutely nauseating. And tht your own children count as people, so you are abusing your kids if you force them to follow your religious beliefs (teaching them is fine, punishing them for not believing is not) or making permanent modifications to their bodies or denying them medical treatment.

If you eliminate the harm caused by forcing religion on other people, including children, then almost all the harm caused by religion goes away, but culture remains almost intact. There are some religions that could not survive losing the ability to force themselves on other people. Good riddance to those. Traditions that speak to heritage and community, and do not cause harm to nonconsenting people… those, hopefully, will remain with humanity for a good long time. Maybe someday we will have existed long enough to have forgotten everything we believe right now, but that would imply massive destruction of our history so I kind of hope that does not happen.

Saying “religion is bad” does look anti-Semitic to Jews, because Judaism is a religion that is intertwined with a culture that the rest of humanity has been trying to stomp out for years. Saying “religion forcing itself on children and non-believers is bad” isn’t anti-Semitic and covers most of the territory you want to cover by blasting religion.

illuminator-of-eternal-warfare

Ok, nationalist.

scrapironflotilla
kawaiite-mage

if I was in the army they'd kill me immediately for saying shit like "I'm such a mortarpilled trenchcel" when we're getting shelled in the trenches

gold-for-xp

I'd tell my co that I'm "maximmaxxing" when I clean the machine guns and he'd send me out to no-man's-land

pvt-tristan-bongo

telling my fellow soldiers that im in my silly tank arc. i see a steaming canister and i immediately go “ woah such a mustardcore gas vibe”

scrapironflotilla

military police asking if I have any last words before they execute me for cowardice: well?

me: chad deserter vs the virgin order follower

lol
abilitiesconsideredunnatural
genderkoolaid

i'm probably gonna add this in the revamped pin post im planning but i think an issue we have when discussing "misandry" is that people tend to interpret it as "the man version of misogyny." because we are under the false belief that if x is true for one gender, the inverse must be true for its "opposite"

i think its use comes from having a word to put to Genderism Based On Male Gender Roles. gender is a thing that impacts everyone and changes everyone's experiences. i want to be able to say "this person is using stereotypes about how men and people associated with manliness should or do think/behave to be hurtful" in a single word/phrase. ^ that does not require there to be an overarching system, controlled by another group, that oppresses all men. i came up with the term "antimasculism" to have a word that accomplishes this but doesn't have the baggage of "misandry" (maybe "anti-" isnt the best prefix, maybe "mal-masculism" wouldve been more accurate)

& its especially important because there is a pattern of behavior centering masculinity that is used constantly to hurt marginalized people. "men are aggressive and strong" becomes either a way to demonize men, people seen as men, or people seen as masculine, or a way to mock any of the above groups for failing that requirement. this hurts cis men, trans men, queer men of all kinds, masculine-presenting people, butches, trans women- not because they have some innate masculine quality but because people see them as masculine in some way, shape, or form, and attach certain expectations to them and read into their choices in certain ways. masculinity or association with manliness being punished in some people/situations does not mean that all manliness is punished. why would it? misogyny is about controlling women & others grouped in as resources to be controlled. men's gender roles are about constant competition with each other. under the patriarchy women are always objects while men are sometimes allies and sometimes enemies that need to be crushed or failures that need to be held up as an example of what will happen if you aren't good enough at the competition.

& even more: you can have antimasculist misogyny! you can have misogynistic antimasculism! if a woman (cis or trans) is alienated from her womanhood and treated like a threat for being seen as too masculine, is she being mistreated for being masc or being a woman? the answer is both. her failure to be appropriately feminine means her masculinity is a crime she needs to be punished for. same with a man & being seen as too masculine: he fails to be a man in the right way and his femininity needs to be punished. especially when it comes to queer people & anyone whose gender performance is seen as queer, there is very rarely only 1 form of genderism going on because queerness is fundamentally about blurring the lines of which genders can do what.

tl;dr there doesn't have to be an overarching systemic hatred for all masculinity/manhood for it to be useful to have a word to describe the way that genderism around male gender roles is used to hurt people, marginalized people most of all.

alarajrogers

"Misogyny" didn't start out as a word meaning the systemic oppression of women. It was a cognate to "misanthropy", the hatred of people.

As it happens, women are systemically oppressed, which led people to redefine "misogyny" as meaning systemic oppression of women. This was honestly a terrible idea. We have plenty of words describing the systemic oppression of women, such as patriarchy. And many patriarchal sexists don't hate women; they're just incredibly wrong about what is good for women. There's also bad stuff that's done to women by people who don't hate them and think they are being egalitarian, except that women and men aren't starting from the same baseline in our society, so treating them exactly the same where "exactly the same" means treat them all like men runs into serious problems.

I have been fighting for the word "misandry" and pushing back against this nonsensical "misogyny means the systematic hatred of women" nonsense for 15 years, now, and I never saw the "misogyny must be systemic to be misogyny" concept until people started trying to declare misandry a non-word. I feel that in fact misogyny got redefined precisely so that radfems could delegitimize misandry.

Imagine a boy is raised on a feminist commune with way too much radfem input, and they tell him that women should be in charge of everything because men are naturally violent, and women are better at social interaction, that's just a fact, and he should just accept that he will never be allowed to be in charge of anything. If he begins to hate and resent the women who are given more privilege than him in the local society that he doesn't know how to leave, how would we describe that except misogyny? This hypothetical boy doesn't know that, outside the commune, men run the world, because the information he's allowed to have is heavily censored. He's not hating women because he has a sense of entitlement and wants to dominate; he's hating women because they're oppressing him. Cool motive, still misogyny. It doesn't actually mean systemic oppression of women, it means hating women, full stop. There is so much hatred of women in the systemic oppression of women, it's easy to confuse the two, but they don't mean the same thing.

No one is systemically oppressing humanity, yet the word "misanthropy" for hatred of humans exists. Misanthropes are equally likely to particularly hate the powerful as they are to particularly hate the oppressed. In fact, a lot of misanthropy imputes the behavior of the powerful to "all humans" as a justification for hating us all. Since misanthropy comes from other humans, and not from, say, sentient walruses who hate us for causing global warming, it cannot be re-imagined to mean "systemic oppression"... and it is where the word misogyny comes from. Someone went back to the Greek roots that make "misanthropy" and reconstructed them to make "hatred of women" instead of "hatred of people".

I feel that misandry is an important word and we shouldn't let it go. Anti-masculism sounds like hatred of masculinity, which is probably a very valuable word in its own right, and not exactly the same thing as hatred of men. (Among other things, the anti-masculist would dislike butch women and would have no problems with femme men, if it meant hatred of masculinity rather than hatred of men.) I'm convinced that the campaign against misandry originates from the radfems, and that's why feminists now believe "misogyny" has to mean a systemic oppression. But there's nothing in the roots of the word to imply such a thing, and it's not very useful to take a word with a specific meaning and then make it mean something else we already had a word for.

illuminator-of-eternal-warfare

Wasn’t the “it only counts if it’s systematic” a part of the general justification of “woke” hate propaganda against arbitrary groups of people?