So the mainstream media and rethuglican party are merrily drumming up support to invade Iran, it looks like it’s working, and aside from a few memes on tumblr, I’m not getting a lot of reassurance that there are voices of sense out there. Anybody in the know have some odds, some thoughts for me? How likely are we to fuck up that badly? What are we looking at presently?
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As predicted, they convened a new grand jury just to toss her back in the clink, along with an unprecedented from of punitive extortion.
Chelsea E. Manning, @xychelsea, May 16:
** Today, Chelsea was not only put back in jail, but Judge Anthony Trenga ordered her to be fined $500 every day she is in custody after 30 days and $1,000 every day she is in custody after 60 days. This is unprecedented.
Linked article: https://www.sparrowmedia.net/2019/05/statement-from-chelsea-mannings-lawyers-regarding-chelsea-being-remanded-into-custody/
Like a champ she was streaming video games the night before the trial. I’d say the dirtbags doing this need a lesson in class, but they get one every time they’re in the room with her. Maybe that’s why they want her out of sight. Anyhow, storm every Bastille, smash the state, yadda yadda.
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Content Warning: Apocalypse Despair
Via Alex Wild, entomologist, six years ago:
Alex Wild @Myrmecos
“Being a naturalist in the 21st century is like being an art enthusiast in a world where an art museum burns to the ground every year.”
-12:20 PM – 22 Dec 2013
It’s an appropriately depressing way to phrase the problem. To that I would only say it’s more accurate if every drawing would take hundreds of thousands of years to complete and every painting millions. I see the value that investment of time represents in every species and it creeps me the hell out when I see them being smoked like cigarettes, by the dozens, the hundreds. Entire populations of organisms lost forever, many every single year.
Some people also see that value and the destruction gives them an erection. Some people would pay big money to personally kill the last rhinoceros. The same kind of people who destroy art, who blow up thousand year old statues. What can I even say about people that evil? Nothing. Whatever I say they’d enjoy it, wallow naked in it. I’m done.
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CNN has been caught deep in bald-faced lies about the situation in Venezuela, supporting Trump’s oil lust with very old school yellow journalism. If you work at CNN and have any principles left at all, you should resign. Take a stand against warhawking, or against false journalism, against propaganda, against lies at the very least.
That’s how I’d react in your shoes, but then, I’m pretty naive. Maybe this is more offensive to me than it should be, and capering like little dogs for the Shitbag in Chief is just de rigeur in your industry. How do you feel about it?
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Just in case anyone’s forgotten, Chelsea Manning is still in jail, and currently in solitary confinement. The legal defense link again. When does the world stop burning? We could use a rest.
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CW: Mass murder, islamophobia
Mass murder in New Zealand. I’m really glad there isn’t anyone on the blogroll here anymore in overt denial of the reality of islamophobia. I’d like to encourage any readers that still have any question about that in their head to really really interrogate themselves about it.
You don’t have to come as far as I have, to seeing the mainstream atheist movement as a major catalyst of it, but at least see. Look at the rhetoric about islam, the way people treat it as a unique and special force for violent extremism in the world. Look at the way that makes good old boys feel the need to weapon up and take it down to the mosque. Look at the body counts and the coordination of the newest attacks and just accept the evidence of your eyes.
Islamophobia is real and it’s really fucked up that a lot of people who think of themselves as progressives still don’t accept that. The government of New Zealand is far from perfect, but at least I think they might take this as the impetus to start tackling white terrorism, whereas that wouldn’t happen over a mountain of bodies here. But it’s still a fucking grim situation.
Also be careful what pictures and videos you’re exposed to on the internet for a while because one of these terrorist shitlords filmed and distributed video of his actions, and you know damn well channers and encyclopedia dramatica types are going to be planting that shit everywhere like rickrolls.
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Chelsea Manning is back in jail and I can’t link to an article about it. Why? Tons of them, including the top google results, are including images of her pre-transition. You know damn well they’re doing it to try and make her look like a criminal too. Fuck the media for its transmisogyny, its bias, its willingness to support fascism without any prodding from the state at all.
I don’t have anything definitive to say on the issue of Israel and Palestine for a good reason: It’s a complicated situation and I haven’t done the homework. Even saying that, someone will come in the comments and try to tell me it’s really totally simple. Yes, aspects of it are simple. Massacres and apartheid and terrorism are bad, specific incidents and blatantly evil systems and institutions can be unequivocally condemned.
But taking a side in this conflict can lure you into affirming and amplifying your prejudices. Right now, creepy officials in the US are trying to force people to pledge loyalty oaths to Israel. That’s bad for us, bad for peace. France’s Emmanuel Macron has sad that rejecting Israel’s political will is inherently antisemitic. Again, compelling people to mindlessly support a state’s right to oppress an ethnic group. That’s bad stuff.
But all you have to do is raise the issue to see the antisemites and islamophobes crawl out of the woodwork – and to see people you’re normally inclined to like and respect start showing shades of those character flaws. Look at the phrasing of the comments on the Pharyngula post about this. Sometimes it’s subtle, but it’s telling.
The antisemitically inclined will list bad adjectives, then the word “jewish” among them. Maybe they aren’t antisemitic, but the way they phrased their comment unintentionally equates being jewish with being a fascist. Or maybe the outsized influence of the Israel lobby in the US provokes latent antisemitic feelings in them, about how jews secretly control the world.
The islamophobically inclined will say their feeling is that Israel will be more peacefully inclined and trustworthy than Palestine. They’ll remember the many instances of antisemitic rhetoric and actions being taken by Palestinians or people using them as a political cause, but forget all the islamophobic stew we’ve been swimming in since the damn 1960s.
If you are going to comment on the conflict in that region, do your homework first. That’s the reason I don’t comment on it – because I don’t have the time to take that step properly. And more than that, watch your heart. I’m inclined to trust the politically lefty to have the well-being of all people in their heart as they approach a situation, BUT I know damn well we are culturally cultivated to be antisemitic and many of us are just thoughtless enough to let that get out of control, get away from us.
All I want is for you to think before you speak, to search your feelings for prejudice. It may seem hypocritical of the guy with whose average post is tweet length, but bear with me. And good luck.
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CW: another grim /apocalyptic one, avoid as required
We’re clearly living in a cyberpunk era. Enough could be said on that to fill a book, but I’m more likely to turn it into a blog post, if anything. Marx and many others had ideas about the stages of history, the progress of civilization. I don’t know how well any of those hypotheses have played out, but from our vantage point now, the current and next stages of civilization are easy to see: Cyberpunk Dystopia, and collapse into Post Apocalypse. I just want to jot down this thought before I forget it, for future reference. One recurring theme of cyberpunk fiction was an inversion of what we’re going to see.
To thinkers back then, cyberspace was a sad fake realm of delusions that ultimately perpetuated human woe. While the internet has helped promote hate crimes and establish fascism in our time, that’s a case of a good thing being manipulated to evil ends. Much like how con artists exploit positive social instincts of trust and enthusiasm to rob people, I don’t think that reflects negatively on thing that was exploited.
Cyberspace is a good thing. We’re able to come together and make good things happen like never before, enrich each other’s lives, pool human knowledge and creativity and compassion. Selling out net neutrality, allowing monopolies for the mega-rich, these are killing the experience by tiny cuts.
And ultimately, it’s all going away. The infrastructure will collapse and we’ll lose this. For some people, that’s already the case. Rural areas in the USA already have garbage for service. Morpheus’s ideal – everyone walking away from the illusion to embrace the desert of the real? It’s not going to edify or elevate us in any way, but we’ll still have to experience it.
The collapse of the internet will be a good defining bound between the Cyberpunk and Post Apocalypse eras. And it’ll just be another signpost on the slide into extinction.
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Content Warning: Wearying Endless Hope-Destroying Fascist Evil, Apocalyptic Crapola. “wontbehere4long” don’t read this. You’re too high strung, kid.
Projection is a phenomenon in psychology whereby a person protects themselves from awareness of their own flaws by accusing someone else of having said flaws. I’m not the racist, that guy is! Sadly, this is so widespread among right wingers that one could make a serious case that it’s a defining feature of the motherfuckers.
Dave Futrelle at We Hunted The Mammoth has been facing a fucknado of fascist irony victims, defending their most transparent act of projection to date: the spreading of the “NPC meme.” Let me see if I can break down the background of this situation to a simple timeline:
In video games, non-player characters are the guys you interact with that have just a few pre-programmed things to say and never meaningfully change.
Random fucklord says he sees people he doesn’t like as NPCs, thoughtless and soulless.
Projecting fucklords who speak in “kek” and “cuck” notice that social justice advocates use some jargon and assume it’s the same sort of group-affirming dog barks that they use.
Projecting fucklords adopt random fucklord’s meme and promote it.
As they always fucking do, they form a massive wall of hive-minded tools bargling at decent people about how we’re mindles soulless conformists.
They do this kind of shit all the time. Any given anti-feminist argument, for one small example, is repeated VERBATIM by forty thousand fucklords who somehow feel like they came up with the idea.
The reason that it’s ironic this time? The projection is an accusation of conformity and mindlessness.
Now, despite this being a fresh incident with that minty taste of a new twist, why does this feel instantly wearying and soul crushing? I didn’t get it, but then I reflected. Right wingers always do this shit. Fucking always. “You want to take away our religious freedom!” “You want to control our lives!” “Atheism is the real dogma!” “You want to censor us!” “You hate freedom!”
This last couple of weeks has been hard as fuck. For me, the worse part of it was the newest report on climate change. Like the scientists sounding alarms since the fucking industrial era began, I’m feeling that Cassandra Complex. It’s worse now because we’re in the 11th hour and there actually is nothing anyone can do to stop the hell that’s coming. It’s about mitigation and we can’t even get the demons in power to do anything about that.
Humanity is so consistently foolish and venal that we’re destroying ourselves and taking down most of the biosphere with us, when we have the ability to do better. It’s just that grain of thoughtfulness and compassion is always overwhelmed by fear and loathing.
Because white right wing cattle vote with their spleen, we’re down to hoping we can shape the apocalypse instead of preventing it. Will it be Mad Max or 1984? A little of both, but an increasingly safe bet there’s no humans left on the other side of it.
And these chucklefucks are jeering and capering while the ship goes down. Thanks guys. You wanted to “pwn the libs”? You got me. I’m “pwn’d.” Not in the sense I’ve come to realize you are the super geniuses who were right all along. No, I’m owned in the sense that I understand you’ve won, and I feel bad about it. And the “I told you so” we’ll get as we all die? Doesn’t make me feel better about it.
Fuck, y’all are so pig ignorant and compulsively projecting, you’ll figure out how to blame us for that too.
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