uboat53

[uboat53]

I genuinely believe that some people could encounter a button that says “if you push this button everyone in the world has the opportunity to live a better life and your life remains exactly the same” and they would not push it.

They’d be like “well that button’s not fair to me, though,” even though there’s literally no other buttons around and nothing newly bad would happen to them if the button was pushed.

[uboat53]

I laughed so fucking hard at this

[uboat53]

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

[uboat53]

Well, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court figured out how they can get the results they want in the Trump immunity case. To quote Alito from oral arguments:

“I’m not, as I said, I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case.”

Source

#politics #us politics #trump #us supreme court #supreme court #samuel alito #trump trial

[uboat53]

So on my posts about racism or transmisogyny, I often see tags that basically say “I don’t understand this but I’m going to reblog it anyway.” If you see a “social justice” type post that you want to reblog but don’t understand?

Don’t.

I know this goes against everything you’re used to hearing on this website, but listen. Reblogging posts you don’t understand is basically the equivalent of blindly repeating whatever you’re told. Even if you’re right, if you don’t understand why you’re right, you could be spouting utter bullshit and you wouldn’t even know it.

When I see “I don’t know what this means but I’m gonna reblog it anyway” it sends a lot of messages. It says that you care more about seeming right than being right. It says that you want good ally credit without any of the work of being a good ally. It says you’re on my side because I can make a post sound good, not because you actually agree with me on anything beyond the surface level.

So instead of just reblogging that post, save it for later. Like it, draft it, bookmark it, whatever. Go to the op’s blog and skim through a couple of pages, see if you can find some context. If the post is old, you could try asking for context in a non-condescending way. “Is this post referring to something specific?” is a lot better than, say, “Does this even happen? I’ve never heard of this.”

If that doesn’t help, do some more research. Google, search tumblr tags for recent posts on a subject, ask people who have EXPLICITLY stated they are willing to educate. Maybe in the process you’ll find more posts with a similar message to the original, but in easier to understand language. Maybe someone else already added a reply that adds useful information onto the op.

And maybe all of that takes a long time. Maybe, by the time you finally understand what the post was talking about, it’s months old and no longer relevant. Maybe you don’t even want to reblog it anymore. Who cares, fuck that post. You learned and grew as a person. That’s more important than looking good on a blog.

[uboat53]

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

[uboat53]

Some useful commentary on AI that I found recently.

"Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern."

Source

"The realms AI is touted as transforming — such as health care, legal practice and education — are precisely the sorts of areas where generative AI's "mostly right but frequently wrong" accuracy rate could cause havoc."

Source

#ai #technology

[uboat53]

Anyone else notice that, for all the Republican complaining about how bad inflation is, their economic agenda is almost tailor made to supercharge it?

#politics #us politics #economics #trump #inflation

[uboat53]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

#science #science news #engineering #voyager probe #voyager 1

[uboat53]

Hey look, another right-wing figure crossed an invisible line after years of being openly racist and now other right-wingers are finally denouncing him as such. Any bets on how long it takes for the right-wing to get rid of a racist BEFORE they've had decades to spread racist ideas?

More importantly, are they actually upset about Carlson's long run of antisemitism or are they just mad that he criticized Israel?

#politics #us politics #racism #antisemitism #israel #tucker carlson #republicans

[uboat53]

On average, my assumption is that a woman or minority who made it through med school and residency and became a doctor (or any other difficult profession) is going to be better at it than a white man. There's certainly individual variability there, but if we're dealing in averages, it's probably the case; the mediocre ones don't make it while a lot of mediocre white men do.

And I say that as a white man.

[uboat53]

"We usually talk right about racism = bad for people of color, or racism = good for White people. That’s one way to do it, but it’s also true that racism impoverishes our democracy and undercuts our social safety net. For most White people, unless you are Elon Musk, you or someone you love is going to need a social safety net. Maybe you are safe in your middle class position, but you’re going to know some young person that can’t afford higher education and ends up in a really bad spot. You’re going to know somebody who needs medical care they can’t afford, and they die because they can’t get it. That stuff happens all the time, and we act like it’s normal and it’s not. That hurts a lot of White people. When you start looking at racism not just as something that only gives or only takes but as something that does both things, then you can ask yourself if it’s worth being silent about it. I calculate $146,000 from my family that probably they had because of racism. I calculate $225,000 of money that I have had access to or equity I’ve gained probably because I was White. That’s almost $400,000. But I also lost my mother because we didn’t have public health care. And I had a really traumatic childhood because we didn’t have public health care. Most of that money from my family and most of those bonuses I’m talking about with housing, I wouldn’t need if we had affordable higher education. I wouldn’t need them if we had affordable housing for everybody. I think there are enough White people now who understand that this isn’t really working in our favor, but we don’t have language for it."

-- Tracie McMillan, author of "The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America"

It sounds like a good book and the whole interview is well worth the (~5 minute) read.

#politics #us politics #economics #racism

[uboat53]

Please don't forget Armenians

Today is Armenian genocide remembrance day. On april 24, 1915 started mass deportations of hundreds of Armenian intelectuals and community leaders, who were (most of the time) eventually killed. Armenian women and children were systematically r//ed and forcibly converted into islam. There were more than 2 milion Armenians in ottoman empire prior to ww1, 1,5 milion of them were viciously killed. Three millennia of Armenian civilaziation in eastern Anatolis was fully destroyed. Turkey today refuses to acknowledge genocides of christian minorities in early 20th century.

Do you know that mass ethnic cleansing of Armenians in ottoman empire inspired Lemkin to coin the term 'genocide'?

Last year in september azerbaijan allied with turkey initiated a war against Armenia. More that 5000 Armenians were murdered, thousands of Armenia families had to live their ancestrial land to not get murdered. There are hundreds of vids on internet where armenian p.o.w.s are tortured. Recently azerbaijan opened a "museum" displayind dead or dying Armenians and kids were allowed to visit it.

Please educate yourself on Armenian genocide. You can also donate here to help Armenia. Thanks for reading!!

#armenia #armenian genocide

[uboat53]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[uboat53]

This is probably one of the coolest interviews I've listened to in a while, it's awesome to hear what the Biden Administration is doing to finally try to reign in the monopolies and oligarchies in our economy!

#politics #us politics #antitrust #oligarchy #monopoly #economics #biden #jon stewart #the daily show with jon stewart #lina khan #Youtube

[uboat53]

Let's Talk About Missing Persons

So, I've seen this post circulating last week, and a few others like it in the past year. I think this probably needs to be discussed every few years, and it feels like time.

First, a few caveats: there are reports on the post that Abby has been located and is fine, so no need to reblog and also that's great news, I'm very happy she is safe. Second, I did not especially doubt the veracity of the post, so I'm not impugning the people who made and posted it, but I also declined to reblog it for reasons I'll get into. Third, I know that especially in marginalized communities it can be dangerous to involve the police, and that Missing White Woman Syndrome means it can be difficult to get media coverage. I understand why Abby's community may have chosen to search for her in the way they did.

However, for everyone's safety, I do not link any missing persons post that requires you to contact an individual to report the missing person's whereabouts. If the poster doesn't ask you to contact the police or a known missing persons organization, I won't do it.

This is for the safety of the missing person.

When you see a post with someone's photo, name, and last known whereabouts, and you are asked to contact an individual -- a family member, partner, friend, etc -- what you are being asked to do is report on the whereabouts of one person you don't know to another person you don't know. You don't know that the person you're talking to isn't an abusive partner or parent, a stalker, or a person who means them material harm. One of the Insta accounts in the missing image doesn't appear to exist, and another has no bio and very little captioning on their images. I couldn't verify that Abby even knew these people.

Again: when I looked at the image, it looked sincere to me. I didn't doubt those people were earnestly searching for a friend they were worried about. But also, an abuser doesn't look like an abuser until they do. So I don't make exceptions, because a missing person is missing but a victim outed to their abuser has strong odds of being murdered. The most dangerous time in the life of an abused person is when they are leaving their abuser. Even if a victim simply logs on to say "Hey, I'm fine, these people mean me harm" the abuser has now flushed them out of hiding, and manipulated them into making a public statement.

If you can't verify positively that the person searching does not mean the missing person harm, you should not be circulating a post, full stop. At the very least, if the community doesn't wish for the help of the police (understandable) or can't get the help of an organization or community (frequent), the missing persons poster should advise you to speak to the missing person, not the searcher, and notify them they're being sought, as long as it's safe for both you and them to do so.

This isn't intuitive. We want to help, and search posters like that tug on the heartstrings. We know that when the police get involved even in something this innocuous, it can be perilous for everyone. But in situations where someone is so vulnerable, we have to concern ourselves first with harm reduction, which in this case means not spreading someone's photo with a stranger's contact information on it.

I'm glad Abby was found and is fine and that her searchers were in earnest. But that will not always be the case, and it's important to remember that.

[uboat53]

Well, I think it's fairly clear that you have no interest in having any kind of productive discussion, so I don't see any value in continuing to talk to you. Enjoy your echo chamber.

I had an exchange recently that revealed to me how fast Netanyahu's speedrun of the autocrat's playbook is going. Let's dive in for a LONG RANT (TM).

THE AUTOCRAT'S PLAYBOOK

What I'm calling the "autocrat's playbook" is a simple procedure that autocrats or would-be autocrats take when they feel that their domestic power is under some kind of threat. Specifically, it involves creating external conflict in order to rally domestic support. The steps are fairly simple: (1) start a conflict, (2) use the conflict to muzzle your opposition, (3) use a vague but patriotic excuse for war combined with aggressive tactics to push your military into committing atrocities, (4) use the international backlash to atrocities in order to buttress your own support.

Simply put, Netanyahu is doing this because his position is under threat by his unpopular attempt to destroy Israel's judiciary, his indictment on some pretty severe criminal charges, and his inability to do anything about Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel. By using the autocrat's playbook, he's hoping to hold onto his political position and put off both the collapse of his coalition and the criminal cases against him personally. In the last 6 months, he's already gotten well into Step 4 which may be a record for a leader who wasn't technically already a well-established autocrat. To see how he's doing this, let's start with Step 1.

CONFLICT

The first thing you need in order to distract from your domestic troubles is a foreign conflict. In Netanyahu's case, he already had a conflict after Hamas' attack, but it was a bad conflict because it made him look weak. The best case scenario is that he was a bumbling fool who failed to do anything to prevent Hamas from launching a major attack, the worst case scenario is that he deliberately weakened Israel's defenses against Hamas in order to aid his racist coalition partners in illegally seizing territory in the West Bank. No, that conflict wouldn't do, he needed a different one.

Bombing and invading Gaza is a much better conflict. He gets to appear the aggressor, strong and in command, which is exactly what you want to look like as an autocrat. This is his Step 1, attack Gaza. Now for Step 2.

THE WAR CABINET

Now, Netanyahu isn't an established autocrat yet, he's more of a wanna-be. Israeli news media still criticizes him, civil society still organizes against him, the judiciary still rules against him, and his opponents still have the possibility of ousting him in the Knesset, so he doesn't get to just shove all his opposition in jail on trumped up charges the way Vladimir Putin does. Instead, he's found a better way of muzzling his opposition, give them a title.

That's what the Israeli "war cabinet" is, it's how he muzzles his opposition. Now, I should be clear, a war cabinet isn't necessarily just a muzzle, sometimes it's a legitimate way to ensure support and input from across the nation for a war. But that's not what Netanyahu is using it for, and the way to tell is actually fairly simple. You see, in a true war cabinet, the leader gives up some control to his opposition in order to ensure that they're truly represented, but Netanyahu didn't do that.

You see, there are six members of the war cabinet, three full members and three observers. Of those six, four of them are either members of the Likud Party (Netanyahu's party), members of the Shas Party (one of his coalition members), or a close confidant of Netanyahu's (Ron Dermer). More importantly, only those members that are directly tied to Netanyahu have an actual portfolio (Defense for Likud member Yoav Gallant and Strategic Affairs for Dermer).

In other words, the opposition is in the cabinet, but has no ability to push policy and, even after policy is agreed upon, has no say in how it's carried out. However, as long as they're in the cabinet, they can't speak out publicly against the decisions made. Netanyahu has used the war cabinet to muzzle his opposition without giving them any actual power. Now, with competing voices largely silenced, we move on to Step 3.

HOW TO MAKE ATROCITIES HAPPEN

Atrocities used to be fairly common in warfare, even expected, but modern militaries actually have fairly good discipline, structure, and clear rules of operation that prevent them from doing this on any kind of large scale. In order to get a modern military to commit atrocities, you have to press it in a very specific way.

First, you have to give it an objective, preferably a vaguely defined but intensely patriotic one; bonus points if it's not practically possible. In Netanyahu's case, he ordered the military to destroy Hamas. This may be an achievable objective if Israel had spent years gathering detailed intelligence on the group and had a clear plan for how to separate Hamas fighters and leadership from the civilian population, but the ease with which Hamas carried out its 10/7 attack shows that even the first condition is not even close to being met. Destroying Hamas is an easy goal to defend in public debate, of course everyone wants to destroy Hamas, but it's not one that brings any specifics and it's certainly not something that the Israeli military can do without substantial support from both spies and diplomats even if the required preparations had actually been made.

The second step, though, is equally important; you press aggressively for results. A military given a vague mission that isn't really possible will go through the motions and not do all that much. In order to make atrocities happen, you have to push them to go hard. Bomb that building that may or may not relate to the objective, better to act than to delay! Shoot that person in the distance that may or may not be a Hamas fighter, better safe than sorry! The hospital might be a command post you say? Best to go in with full force!

By giving a vague and impossible mission and then insisting on rapid action, you can force any military to commit atrocities. Then you just wait to start Step 4.

RALLY AROUND THE FLAG

As soon as a country's military commits an atrocity, the international community will react with at least some sort of condemnation. This, at least, is as predictable as clockwork even if the consequences will vary widely. If you're an autocrat with a popularity problem, this is your moment; you're going to defend the troops with every ounce of breath in your body and, with your opposition muzzled, there will be no one to point out that the atrocity wasn't even their fault in the first place, it was yours.

And so, with one fell swoop, you identify the country as being under attack and yourself as its fervent defender, fulfilling the tactic described by Hermann Goering:

"…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

COMPLICATIONS

Of course, it's not necessarily so simple. There are always things that can trip you up and it takes a fairly deft hand to navigate those issues. For example, if you're not careful to distance yourself, it can become obvious that you're the one responsible for the atrocity, not the military. This is where other tactics can come into play.

The most obvious one is just to deny facts that are inconvenient. This is actually what led me to write this up, an exchange I had recently in which someone denied that Israel had, in fact, struck the Iranian embassy in Damascus with an air strike in order to frame Iran's response as unprovoked aggression. This kind of thing doesn't tend to happen (at least, not outside very fringe circles) unless all four of these steps have had a pretty reasonable amount of success which is why I've expressed surprise at how quickly Netanyahu has accomplished all of this.

Facts in general, though, are the most common type of complication. Finding ways to hide, deny, or otherwise elide the fact that you're the one responsible for the atrocity, that it's not just the soldiers making hard calls on an otherwise positive battlefield, are key to making this procedure work.

It's useful for those of us who are not interested in Netanyahu's party line to note that the Israeli military is already showing signs of breaking in the ways that the US military did in Vietnam when discipline and basic chain of command broke down. Simply looking at the sheer number of Israeli soldiers posting social media videos of themselves casually looting or blowing up the homes of Palestinian civilians or shooting people on the street is enough to demonstrate fairly clearly that even basic communications discipline is in rough shape.

So far, though, Netanyahu has been able to control the narrative in Israel, even if the international narrative is turning against him. It remains to be sees if he can continue to do this.

CONCLUSION

Netanyahu has followed a pretty standard 4-step autocratic procedure in order to position himself as the protector of the country and distract from the many, many things that were making him unpopular and threating to remove him from his position of power. In fact, if you look at Israel's strike on Iran's embassy in Damascus, it appears that he's actually starting the whole process over again as the Gaza offensive stalls and he needs further distraction from his other issues.

I should also note that none of this is actually making Israelis any safer, quite the opposite really. The only remaining question is how much of Israel's security and how many Israeli lives Netanyahu is willing to sacrifice for his own good.