@evan Occam's razor says Netanyahu is actually extending the war for reasons of internal Israeli politics (though it's a boon for his allies like Trump and probably Putin). Netanyahu is clinging to power, if he doesn't appease the religious fundamentalists who are keeping him in power he'll not only lose his job but likely end up in jail. All of these players are "me first" type of sociopaths. Sure they'll work with each other, and Bannon will try to make it look like he's powerbrokering for Trump and the Republicans will try to make this worse for Biden, but Netanyahu is making choices purely for Netanyahu. Ideology is simply window dressing, part of the con and their own self aggrandizement, for most sociopaths. Even if we concede that Biden is in a very difficult situation, he really is doing a lot of this to himself.
Today is the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA+ Peoples, also known as Red Dress Day. The name comes from the REDress project created by Métis artist Jamie Black in 2010. As part of an art installation, Jamie hung hundreds of empty red dresses in public spaces to remind people of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women and girls lost to gender-based violence. "Redress” means to remedy or set right. The REDdress project is a call to action. Though these conversations can be challenging with learners, it’s important to make them aware of this ongoing issue and discuss how they can take action.
@aral 100% this. I find it so weird that people treat it like some binary game. I'm sick of repeating that if I have to be on a team, it's team humanity and nature (war doesn't just destroy humans and grease intergenerational cycles of violence and trauma, it also poisons ecosystems for generations as well....).
@aral Right, only the state can unleash violence, which it did apparently with Biden's blessing. Can we talk a bit more about how the IDF and the NYCPD train together?
@aral The US is the world's biggest arms dealer. And one of your own presidents once warned about the dangers of the military industrial confessional complex. And it's been lying about what democracy is ever since.
On this here day of Trans Visibility I will be out protesting my stupid, paternalistic, right wing government's "committee of the wise" convened to weigh in on trans rights. Dear reader, they are not wise, they are all cisgender old White people full of prejudice. Needless to say, this committee is unwise, harmful and everyone and all organizations in the community were very clear it was unhelpful at best.
@tillshadeisgone Have you tried CBT so you can better conform to and be useful to the abusive system rather than recognizing the system is abusive and none of us should be abused and maybe we should change the system?
Me, literally having to explain to a CBT therapist that thinking things shouldn't be so hard for everyone and being tired because it's so hard isn't me being a clinical narcissist just because she feels frustrated by me and is projecting onto me. Also, dear reader, I was chronically fatigued and emotionally distraught because I had undiagnosed autoimmune hyperthyroidism, a biological disease that can heighten emotions and make it harder to concentrate.
Life was literally and objectively much harder for me at the time because of that, it wasn't just some error in my beliefs or attitude. And, in the most annoying instance of being right, I was correct when I kept telling various doctors and therapists that I thought my anxiety and extreme emotional distress had a biological underpinning and could we please run some tests to see what was going on.
@jdp23@rysiek@smallcircles@laurenshof@FediThing "the one true Fediverse" thing and attempt to claim that just seems conceptually hostile to the very concept of the Fediverse to me and like corporatist thinking about how there can only be one monopoly "winner." (If people want to build their own walled garden here, that's totally fine, trying to impose that on everyone else is highly problematic. I mean, apart from anything else, it's repeating Meta's mistakes while believing to be fighting them!)
@rysiek@jwildeboer@smallcircles@jdp23@laurenshof@FediThing The wikipedia explainer seems about right to me. This is what the Fediverse is. I think the problems start when people think only their own personal social network and experience of the Fediverse IS the Fediverse (ye Olde mistaking of subjectivity for objectivity). Social media by its very nature and design is inherently subjective (much like our social experiences in the physical world but even more so) because we get to choose who we see/connect with or block. The subjectivity is inbuilt but people keep trying to claim their subjectivity is objectivity. We all need to get better at dealing with multiplicity. Didn't anyone learn anything from Everything Everywhere All At Once? ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
Think I'm going to just block Feditips, it's a single cishet guy who is White Knighting to make himself seem important. I dislike how he passes himself off as being somehow official and not the self appointed morality police, I dislike how often they're ignorant about what the Fediverse actually is and functions (they literally often don't understand how it works) and I dislike how completely they ignore any pushback from any group they claim they're "protecting" (seen this more than once). It's frustrating to watch this sort of White Knighting and exploitation of the Other as a means to gain personal power combined with a complete inability to receive feedback or brook any critique about their behaviour at all even as the claim expertise and authority rather than just being here being a person.
Behind the Bastards Steve Jobs episodes are wild in how they expose just how much of a deluded (and stinky) hippy grifter cultist and sociopath Jobs was. And, yes, he literally ran Apple as a cult and using cult abuse dynamics. But the big reveal is really how bad Jobs was at even at aesthetics and making smart marketing choices.
But, also, can we talk about how often the superficial trappings of esoteric and exotic seeming religious bullshit gets wrapped up in politics and tech because sociopaths literally operate by imposing their narrative (reality) on others and convincing people they are enlightened/gods. It's the god-king of yore and a lot of people are still incapable of calling out the emperor's nakedness (partly because it will expose the lies they too have garbed themselves in and live to perpetuate).
Of course they do, remakes and franchises are the GenX version of nostalgia fueled desires for things of our childhood and are a form of generational cultural oppression (being forced to endure endless Beatles nostalgia was what the Boomers did to my generation and most of us learned absolutely nothing from it).
Not sure what they're doing for Dune 2 promo elsewhere but in Quebec they've got a big cutout that also features Villeneuve himself because he's as much of a star in Quebec as anyone else in the film, if not bigger.
@aral This is even more extreme gaslighting than the Covid response in how it twists neglect and harm as being virtuous and a "cleansing" of "undesirables." Using the Holocaust to justify genocide is just so extremely cynical and dishonest....all while queer people, disabled people, Brown people and women are being oppressed by the far right and religious extremists at home.
My own shock does allow me to understand the denial a bit (and I experienced shock at the slow and fast horrors unfolding too, even if I'm not entirely surprised and so don't need to reflexively go into denial because I have a community that also sees reality even if we sometimes have different perspectives and opinions). I try to have some compassion for people who have less tools to manage and incorporate the reality of what is actually going on, if only to be able to collect them into constructive action and mutual aid at some point as things get even worse.
@aral Thank goodness Oxfam and others are calling this out as the bullshit attempt to whitewash complicity that it very clearly is. Also, Biden is simply copying Trudeau's lead here I suspect so it's an even more desperate play by Biden even than it appears (Trudeau announced this bullshit measure to try to placate Canadians quite a few days before Biden floated the idea).
"In his victory speech, Mr Galloway, leader of the Workers Party of Britain, described Sir Keir and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as "two cheeks of the same backside and they both got well and truly spanked tonight here in Rochdale."
Mr Galloway has long campaigned on causes related to the Middle East, including for Palestinian rights and said his victory was "for Gaza".
@aral "go around Israel" Good grief. Refund the damn UNWRA and vote for a ceasefire not against it. It's not fucking rocket science. Also, Canada announced this bullshit idea days ago and it was just as much a "we're pretending to do something so we don't look as bad" move then by Canada as it is now by the US.
I write and think about culture (for fun and to pay my rent). My obsessive interest is people and how we work, individually and collectively, which makes me interested in most things, with a particularly keen interest in cogsci and psychology (I grew up around medical science). I studied painting and drawing at uni and I used to play in bands and work in the music industry. Maybe I'll switch to using my real name here eventually.Photo description: White woman with black hair and saxophone