TIL, my grandparents were white.
TIL, my grandparents were white.
I heard Reza Pahlavi is wildly popular in Iran right now and Iranian locals are enthusiastic about seeing the Shah returned to power. Is this true?
What’s the lie about Ukraine?
Yaroslav Hunka scandal leaps to mind. But farther than that, it was the same old “it’s not going to be a quagmire”, “it’s not just about propping up the US arms industry”, “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” line we’ve been hearing in every international theater.
Even the bit about Trump being “Putin’s Puppet” falls apart on any amount of historical interrogation. Trump was selling anti-tank missiles to Kiev as far back as 2018, three years before the Donbas invasion. He’d laid a bunch of sanctions on the country the first year he took office.
Then, as soon as Biden took office, he’s the one weak on Ukraine, according to the GOP.
Both parties egged their own supporters on by insisting the other party wasn’t Pro-Ukraine enough. Both parties insisted the other faction was “Communist”. Both insisted the other was a fifth column, trying to disarm the US from within. It was always and forever bullshit.


The two options always seem to be:
Option 1: Do the thing that expands the hyper-surveillance police state.
Option 2: Do nothing and wait for the problem to get worse, until you’re compelling to accept Option 1.


Strapping a lead albatross to your space program is certainly a choice


I wish these were proper failures. They’re such an entrenched monopoly, a whole lot would have to change before a $3.2T company sees any kind of tangible penalties.


I’ve had more luck with Mint, thanks to its Windows-adjacent GUI and user-friendly on ramp. Still encountered a few issues (a couple of peripherals that didn’t support Linux drivers). But on the whole, it’s improved system performance over Win10 and synced smoothly with my workstation.


Windows will continue to degrade as Microsoft fires more of its professional staff and turns to “Vibes Coding” for increasingly delicate systems development. They’ll keep pushing out the OS as a vector for unwanted third-party advertisements. They’ll keep ratcheting user control of the OS away from the hardware owners. And they’ll keep injecting bloatware into their applications and services.
This isn’t the end of enshitification. It is a brief retreat and regrouping by a company that has invested tens of billions of dollars into the AI sunk cost.


If you can tell me how to un-fuck this nation in a way that will actually wake people up
People are already Woke Up. They’re still powerless.


Whatcha gonna do about them?
It’s not like I invite any of them over to smoke a joint. They exist and I can’t do much about it


A healthy chuck of CEOs have a humanities degree. It’s a common undergrad before moving to B and J-School.


Wasn’t that deemed illegal back in 2021 by the Chinese Courts?
And didn’t it kick off a wave of labor protests? The lie flat movement?


China is not communist in any form anymore
Just a planned economy governed by it’s native population with a public policy centered on general social welfare.
Nothing Communist about this at all, no sir.
And before someone says “but they execute billionaires”, they only execute billionaires that get in the way of other billionaires’ profits
That’s certainly the American spin. It’s actually double-plus capitalism when you prosecute plutocrats. Because a rules based national order promoted domestic growth. And that’s… bad?
Anyway, don’t ask about their social housing, public education, public health care, and public mass transit. That’s Not Real Communism!


Idk who “they” is. But from what I’ve seen, the administrators of Wikipedia tend to bias intake of new power-users and mods to people who have been with the project from inception (or, at least, the earlier the better). You get all sorts of justifications for why they’ve adopted this policy. But the bottom line is that Millennials and GenX make up the overwhelming majority of ranking users. And as they age out, they aren’t being replaced with people who were their age when they started using the platform.
This traditionalist base has done a lot to calcify how Wikipedia functions, even as variant communities have improved on the model.
The AI-summary shit is just the tip of the iceberg on the system’s problems. The website is filling up with dead links. The definition of a “trusted news source” is getting outrun by private sector buyouts of old media and unemployed journalists spinning up new media. A big chunk of the organizations’ resources have to deal with fending off legal threats and attacks on system vulnerabilities. The centralized hosting model is expensive to maintain. The rush to be “first to post” creates unnecessary drama among power users in popular niche fields. International language support is… meh (one area where AI would be a huge benefit, as LLMs really shine in this field).
This goes a lot farther than “they want to hurt my Wiki”. And if you bothered to read the whole article, you might see more of why. The Wiki Foundation has dragged its heels on automation and clustered around a handful of power-mods in a way that’s undermined its Open Editor model. Fighting over Simple Article Summaries is just the latest fumble by the leadership, a sizable commitment of resources that’s tossed in the dump almost as soon as its off the press.
Doing a backflip: enthusiastic applause
Doing a backflip on ice skates: eye-rolls, bored face, getting up to leave
The standard line was that racism was a Southern trait, while Northern and Western liberals had somehow expunged themselves of the habit. At the same time, you had liberals from the Carter era onward bemoaning failures within the African American and Latin American communities to integrate properly. It was always the minority’s fault for failing to conform. It was never racism among liberals that widened the divide.
You can run this all the way back to the LA Riots, easily enough. Nevermind the anti-Muslim racism of the post-9/11 era, the Obama-era backlash to civil rights movements during Occupy and then again during BLM. It’s always and forever the minority’s fault for objecting to oppression. People of Color are never sufficiently civil. They don’t respect the norms. They want special favors. They can’t be trusted to argue in good faith. They’ve got dual loyalties. They’re not real Americans.
Even when you have Obama or Harris on the fucking ballot, you need them or their proxies effectively apologizing for their blackness and denouncing anyone of color who doesn’t agree with their neoliberal politics.
I don’t think they’re uneducated. All too often, I’ve seen racism taught - implicitly or explicitly - as justification for the modern social order. They’re educated in bigotry. They’re trained to think like this.