Yeah, that’s my thought. People sign a petition and go ‘welp, I’ve done my part!’ when they’ve literally done nothing constructive whatsoever.

I have to ask, do you use Discord? Because I see Pepes and Peepos all over the place there and they aren’t especially likely to be associated with right-wingers at this point as far as I can tell.

Busloads of trans men showing up to use the bathroom would actually probably be a pretty effective means of activism for policies like these.

Is there any evidence that petitions are effective when they’re not legally binding and are coming from the opposition?

Americans do actually frequently use the metric system, though. We tend to use a mix, with many more precise measurements, such as medicine, being measured in metric. There’s some weirdness, to be sure; if you buy weed in the US you’ll see it being measured in both ounces and grams. Millimeters for small things are pretty common, even while still using feet or miles.

Basically, we do whatever is convenient at the moment.

Nowhere near as confusing as disagreeing on what a million or a billion is.

The difference here being that the swastika was used as the official symbol of a fascist government that conquered a substantial portion of Europe and perpetrated the holocaust. Outside of contexts where its religious significance overshadows this, it’s pretty universally associated with Nazis, and even in the places where its other uses are overshadowed it’s presented differently than the black, tilted swastika in the middle of a white circle on a red field. There are swastikas on the sign of a local Indian restaurant down the street from me, but nobody confuses them with the very clear nazi version. Pretty unambiguous.

Meanwhile Pepe, a relatively recent creation, was coopted by a handful of fascists who don’t use it as their primary symbol and haven’t done anything nearly as drastic or impactful with it, and has since become a widely used emoji character with a huge number of variations that’s used by all sorts of people. Have fascists made use of it? Yeah. But most of the people using these emojis in their discord posts have nothing to do with alt-right fascists and aren’t even especially likely to be right-wingers in any sense at all.

It simply doesn’t have the same connotation that the symbols it’s being compared to here do. It’s easy for people who aren’t versed in spaces where it’s used regularly and innocuously to assert that it is, but that doesn’t make it any more true.

What it does do is make those people seem incredibly out of touch to people who are accustomed to seeing cringespin and sleepypeepo and grabbyhands in their discord chats posted by literal queer leftists.

Omg this is such a helpful comment! Good job! <3

It may be worth trying to get to a state that’ll be likely to try to fight this nonsense if you’re not already in one. I’m sure that’s something you’ve already thought about, but… this just makes it more dire.

I have to hold out hope that we can protect people to some degree at the state level.

It looked like a landslide based on the first votes that were counted. Which is exactly what was expected. Even if Harris had had enough electoral votes to win, it would have looked a lot more red at first than what the end result would be, because Republicans are more likely to show up on election day to vote, while Democrats are more likely to mail in their ballots or vote early, both of which are counted after day-of votes in many states.

We knew this ahead of time and it also happened in 2020.

Get rid of actual fascist imagery and references? Yes please. That shit is rampant.

Get rid of fucking Pepe? …Are you kidding? Way to make yourself and your argument seem fully out of touch. Yeah, sure, there was a point when Pepe was being coopted by right-wingers, but at this point? Like… have you been on discord once ever? Everybody uses Peepo. Moreover, half my trans friends use D&D emojis derived directly from Peepo.

People pointing fingers at Pepe are literally taking the bait and making themselves look less credible, which was presumably the point of it being adopted by assholes to begin with. That fight is over and we won and took it back. Yeesh.

I imagine that Twitter being blocked in Europe might actually lead to some of those sources moving elsewhere to continue to reach their audience. I’m not a big fan of blocking websites either in a general sense, but a I can see why countries would want to avoid having what’s happening to the US be repeated within their own borders, and that seems to be a distinct danger with Twitter. There’s a pretty good argument to be made that that’s literally its purpose at this point.

Dismantling legitimate governments with disinformation seems like a pretty viable power grab strategy for billionaires trying to create a megacorp hellscape where they get to do whatever they want until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans some time after their own deaths.

So, step 1, substantially reduce agricultural migrant labor; step 2, create gulags for the neurodivergent to try to make up the difference? Lovely.

Honestly? Why should states that actually can get it together to take active measures to try to take care of their constituents have to be limited by what the most ignorant and backward parts of the country decide on? How many times do we have to see some court in Texas shoot down a measure that would help people before we land on no longer caring what Texas thinks about anything?

I get that there are people in these states who don’t want this stuff and they can’t all easily relocate, but we don’t want it either and we actually manage to organize and vote in accordance with that. Why should every state in the US be held back by every state in the US that just went out and voted to tear apart all the collective good that we have?

Maybe we’d be better off separating power down to the state level or just straight up breaking up the US. Funneling money into red payee states so they can have things like roads and health care clearly isn’t helping to drag them any further to the left, but maybe if they didn’t actually have access to those funds it might incentivize policies that don’t just hand everything to the worst people they can find. Or at the very least, maybe they couldn’t afford to fuck things up so badly.

They voted for this. We didn’t.

A few weeks back I got a parking ticket because I believed a google search result. Parking is free on Sundays and holidays, but the city’s website doesn’t specify which holidays. Google insisted that Halloween is a holiday and thus parking is free, but it isn’t actually federally recognized, which I found out the hard way.

I was watching a talk debate on consciousness yesterday where they briefly touched on this topic. One of the speakers was contending that attempting to create AI that is even convincing to humans is a terrible idea ethically.

On the one hand, if we do eventually accidentally create something with awareness, we have no idea what degree of suffering we’d be causing it; we could end up regularly creating and snuffing out terrified sentient beings just to monitor our toasters or perform web searches. On the other hand, though, and this was the concern he seemed to find more realistic, we may end up training ourselves to be less empathetic by learning to ignore the potential suffering of convincingly feeling ‘beings’ that aren’t actually aware of anything at all.

That second bit seems rather likely. We already personify completely inanimate objects all the time as a normal matter of course, without really trying to. What will happen to our empathy and consideration when we routinely interact with self-proclaimed sentient systems while callously using them to our own ends and then simply turning them off or erasing their memories?

Amazon Graveyard sounds like a subscription service for apps that have been discontinued. Not like, a service that lets you keep using them, but you just get to have defunct apps that don’t work and pay Amazon for the pleasure.

Only $14.99 per month! One IP per subscription!

Sometimes it’s hard to know whether it’d be better, as a blueberry bush, to be relocated from harm’s way or to hold out hope that the path of destructive changes will be routed around the ground they grow in. Those making the changes to the soil probably won’t prioritize them, even if those who are stewards of their particular patch of soil do.

Transplanting can be a shock, and it’s hard to know what the situation is beneath the surface before it’s time to put down roots and see how they grow. It’s probably a good strategy for many of these plants, but it leaves uncertainty for each individual patch.

It’s definitely a lot to think about. For blueberries.

I mean, it looks more like a Jeep or a Bronco if you ask me.

Yeah, maybe. I hope so. I feel like they could just have rat races, throw it on youtube, and make a bit of money for more funding if they really wanted to. I’d watch.

Interesting article! A bit weird that they felt the need to plug the ugliest vehicle ever created, but the findings are certainly interesting! It’s hard not to read enthusiasm into that little rat scooting along in its rat car!

It’s disheartening to think that at the end of the experiment they’ll just kill the poor thing, though. Like, I get not wanting to use the same rats from study to study so that you have a proper control, but there has to be a less heartless way of doing that.