Notices by John (johnzajac@dice.camp)

Repatriation of stolen art and artifacts to the people from which they were stolen seems like such an uncontroversial thing to me. But to many (white colonialists) it feels like some kind of unreasonable, almost offensive, suggestion.

I imagine this is because in the West there has always been this idea that, if they're caught, the thief can't keep his ill-gotten gains. But if he manages to transfer all that wealth a mere generation into the future, it's cleansed of its history, entirely.

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Dear Liberals,

If you keep electing "moderates" who are fond of panopticon police states (as long as the "right" people are in charge!), extrajudicial executions (as long as the right people are executed!), who take huge bribes from the oligarchs (as long as process is followed!) and who love to use police to shut down political speech (as long as it's leftist speech), this Trump shit will keep happening.

You are hitting yourselves. Stop it.

Best,
Me

I wish some of the people being like "oh my God these billionaires are stealing money" and "it's so scary that *one man*, Elon Musk, controls so much of our space infrastructure!" would let themselves realize that private property is NOT sacrosanct and that Elon Musk exists *at the pleasure of the people around him*. He owns things, indeed, *has money at all*, because *we haven't decided to take it from him*.

There's no Divine Right protecting him and his "ownership" or his "wealth".

If you really don't like the vibe of US reality television (I don't like its vibe at all) I'd encourage you to try out Korean (specifically the huge competition series on Netflix like Culinary Class Wars or The Devil's Plan), Japanese (The Boyfriend, Terrace House on Netflix) reality shows.

It's "cutthroat" but in a completely theatrical way, and for the most part even the "betrayals" are treated by both parties like momentary lapses.

It will make you realize how poisonous US culture is, too.

@skinnylatte

This is why we have a NAS with 4x10TB blades in it full of movies and TV shows we love. Home media server FTW!

The danger from what people ironically call "AI" was never going to be "superintelligence killing us all" 🤡

It was always going to be what it has turned out to be: the total destruction/corruption of all human knowledge on the Internet and the cognitive evisceration of people who use it.

Don't get me wrong: that is, in and of itself, *catastrophic*. We're going to have to basically reset the Internet when all of this is done, and those people will need years of rehab to rejoin society.

Watching US Liberals work through why they think the BLM protests were "useless" and "counterproductive" but the No Kings protests are "inspiring" and "could change everything", without really knowing that's what they're working through, has been a real trip.

Indeed, in the thread on Bluesky the OP (not Bouie) brings AIDS into the picture, and claims that he can't imagine only having "safe sex".

What he actually can't imagine is watching all of his friends die in a 10-year period of a disease that causes their bodies and brains to collapse in real time.

But with COVID, he may soon be able to imagine it, because it will be all around him.

We don't know what COVID does to a body at 7, 10, and 15 years.

But back to Universal Masking, the moral panic of Liberals Who Just Want To Forget So They Can Enjoy Brunch Again.

Did you know that most experts agree that if we ventilated schools, required NAAT testing, and installed HEPA, and everyone was required to mask in public govt offices and healthcare facilities, the R0 of SARS2 would go below 1?

That's right: it's likely that COVID would disappear or be relegated to minor outbreaks if we did minimal shit to prevent it.

Did you know that the US govt spent *tens of millions of dollars* installing next-gen upper UV, 222, HEPA, and ventilation systems in every Congressional and White House building in DC?

I mean, if you've ever wondered by so few of our political class seem to be getting COVID, even when *everyone in your friend group seems sick right now*.

It would cost pennies to upgrade schools against the cost of the mass sickness and absenteeism Kids have experienced

@tankgrrl

Let's disambiguate for a second.

LLMs and image algos are truly useless in every way - I agree if we shut them down nothing bad would happen worth mentioning. Some billionaires would become millionaires [yawn]

But ML and other AI tech has been revolutionizing science, material development, and medicine for a decade.

The Altmans of the world purposefully elide and collapse these revolutionary applications of the tech into their own garbage versions for the PR benefit.

Also, if your goal is to be a durable fascist dictator don't get your entire military leadership together, call them and their troops chubby, demand they groom themselves differently, encourage them to resign, insult 20% of their soldiers, and then casually suggest that in order to serve you as Commander In Chief they gotta get comfortable becoming oathbreakers to slaughter their own neighbors and fellow citizens against every principle they've ever learned.

@kims

Fair enough. Maybe we can just leave it at "Fetterman is a real piece of shit", huh.

Man, Fetterman is a real piece of shit.

Dude is either a legitimately talented liar, or his brains got scrambled by that stroke, because Senator Fetterman and Candidate Fetterman are completely different people.

The fact that the *only* solution to widespread leftwing protests that liberals can come up with is "arresting protesters", not "figuring out how to fix what's causing the unrest", is some legitimately bad faith shit on their part.

@akamran @Sobieck @skinnylatte

On a related note, I'm truly baffled by people who can't tell the difference between people who are literally wasting away and people who have simply changed size due to lifestyle or exercise adjustments.

I feel like there's gotta be some kind of acculturated blindness going on; a self-reinforcing body dysmorphia that warps one's perception.

To me the difference is obvious, both aesthetically and behaviorally.

@skinnylatte

white people gonna be white, I guess?

@skinnylatte

I literally cannot imagine being so completely ignorant of nutrition science that you still think dietary fat is causal to vascular and heart disease.

The most profound irony of this age is that antisemitic fascists are using the pride and vanity of Zionists to turn the Jewish people against themselves and render them extremely vulnerable, by both eviscerating the meaning of the word "antisemitism" and using false accusations of "antisemitism" to destroy Jews' only real allies in the world: the people who know that "Never Again" means "Never Again For Anyone".

In Christian mythology, the Antichrist is dangerous because it purports to represent Christ, but actually represents the Devil. In Revelations, it bamboozles Christians into doing extraordinary evil in God's name, which, along with the Jews retaking their Holy Land of Israel, begins Armageddon. Which is Heralded by plague, war, famine, and death.

Note that immigrants, gays, communists, and trans people *do not appear as characters*. But heretics who corrupt Christ's teachings? Everywhere.