Anomander

I normally hate turning to Youtube when there’s a text resource available, but I’ve definitely found there are some situations where explaining a trick or a location in text is massively harder than just watching someone do it in a video.

my family can euthanize me even if I object?

No.

There’s no law that allows killing of the unwilling; even a living will addressing assisted suicide or euthanization due to incapability assumes that you would still consent at the later date, but lack either physical or intellectual ability to communicate that. If you can clearly communicate that you’ve changed your mind, they have to respect that, even if that changed mind has reduced capability due to dementia.

Your best hope would be to go with assisted suicide while you still have enough faculties to make the decision and execute on your portions of the act.

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on ‘rival’ platforms.

UPS is being UPS here.

They’re abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn’t pay.

The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the ‘debt’, or the new packages that keep showing up.

Whole lot of people here have cut off other people, but no one’s yet shared a story about what got them cut off. This one’s mine.

I was unceremoniously removed from The List by a group of folks I was close with for years, after clashing with a couple of new additions to the group for a few months. We collectively ran a bit of a sketchy party scene and had been hosting stuff out of the weird end of town for a year or two when it all blew up - we weren’t quite on the scale of underground warehouse raves, but we were like the training-wheels version. We’d get a lead on a place that was slated to be vacant for a month or a commercial building gone dark, arrange a couple bands and an escape plan, and pull a couple hundred bucks each in entry charge and dodgy beer.

They were great friends in addition to being sort-of in business together, and we had some absolutely great times.

Except one couple who’d been with us from the start and were OG team members met a new crowd of people. They wanted to bring their friends, we said sure, and … shit started going downhill. The couple weren’t bad. Their friends weren’t bad. Their friends’ friends were awful. I didn’t like the new crowd’s vibe, I didn’t like who they were bringing in, what they were up to, and I didn’t get along with the initial connections in the slightest. I thought they were assholes, they thought I was an asshole, and in hindsight we were both correct.

As much as each new member of our little scene was more money at the end of an event, I didn’t want them there. I spent a lot of time and everyone’s patience arguing why I felt these specific new people needed to be shown a door and firmly told to be on the other side of it, and I definitely went out of my way to cut them out of anything I had control over. My friends were frustrated, I was frustrated, and everyone was on edge - I was convinced these people were going absolutely ruin what we’d built, my friends were frustrated I wouldn’t drop the grudge and didn’t see the problem I was focused on.

In my defense, the new people were bringing in their crowd, and their crowd was bad news. It was like they were the scene where all the people other parties didn’t want wound up congregating. There was the sketchy “why are you here?” old dudes, there were the people who did too much of many drugs even for our standards, there was the massive collection of edgy at-risk middleschoolers, there were the aggro bros and the dealers with Connections … to me, inviting those people in the door was a massive heat score and absolutely ruining the vibe for the kind of people we wanted to attract. That said, in my friends’ defense - we had agreed we’d make decisions as a team, and I was outvoted but unwilling to let it go; and we didn’t have a problem with drugs or kids or even weird old dudes in general - half of us started in that community young and most absolutely dabbled in chemicals. We all were those kids a few years prior. My concerns read as hypocritical or gatekeep-y, rather than genuine, because I’d never been concerned about that shit prior.

The last straw? I paid a guy I knew from the other side of town to drive his dad’s charger slowly past our venue a couple times, for several different events, so that people thought we might be about to get raided. Because the people I didn’t care for were pretty dodgy, they fucked off at the faintest hint of trouble.

The other people in our crew found out, and I was excised from that group.

In hindsight, we were both right. I was petty and sabotaged the group to get my way - and those new people did absolutely ruin shit for that scene within a couple years. I’ve connected individually with a few members of that group over the many years since, but am very formally persona non grata at shit they do as a group - I don’t think any of the people I still talk to even admit to the rest that they see me sometimes.

I don’t want this to read like I was booted for taking some moral highground. I absolutely wasn’t. I took the low road and went behind my friends’ backs to undermine what we were doing, all because I wanted a specific group of people gone from our scene. As much as an adult’s perspective would make it easy to spin this as if I had moral objections to bringing hard drugs and hard druggies and middleschoolers into the same place for underground parties - I wasn’t concerned about those things, morally. Having middleschoolers get wasted at parties wasn’t a problem to me, or even having creepy dudes trying to pick them up, or people shooting hard shit in the living room … I just didn’t like how there was more of “them” than “us” and our events were slowly becoming that scene, instead of just having a little bit of it off in one corner.

This would make excellent satire, but it’s pretty dismal journalism.

Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.

Speak for yourself, please.

Many millennials who ‘work on the internet’ have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.

You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.

And that’s still true - it’s just less and less likely to include someone’s twitter in that assessment.

I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.

Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called “change” occurred and it’s no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.

That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.

Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.

Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. […] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.

Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They’re doing it all over again; and in ten years we’ll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.

Yeah, I just learned about these folks’ existence from this post - but I’m saving their name for later for sure.

While googling trying to get a sense of who they are - they have a hour-long concert on youtube that’s really dope already.

Their official bio on their website doesn’t even directly acknowledge it, so it doesn’t seem like something they front-load per se.

Tumblr remains impressively Not Dead given its ownership and finance history.

Very much so.

If this coin’s math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor … it’ll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that’s explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.

I think maybe some of that is on me; I’ve been using “in power” somewhat colloquially and to me there’s a gap between ‘gaining power’ in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.

It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine.

Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they’ve held power long enough I don’t really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.

The neo-fascists’ I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn’t support their “real” goals directly.

Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.

Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.

Reading history … that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it’s ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism’s gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the ‘common’ population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.

The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it’s very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers’ seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.

So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.

I’m no GPT booster, but I think that the real problem with detectability here

It will almost always be detectable if you just read what is written. Especially for academic work.

is that it requires you to know the subject and content already, and to be giving the paper a relatively detailed reading. For a rube reading the paper, trying to learn from it - a lot of GPT content is easily mistaken as legitimate. And it’s getting better. We’re not safe simply assuming that AI today is as good as it will ever get and the clear errors we can detect cannot ever be addressed.

Penetrating academic writing, for academics, is probably one of the highest barriers of any writing task, AI or not.

But being dismissive of the threat of AI content because it’s not able to convincingly fake some of the hardest writing that real people do is maybe sidestepping a lot of much more casual writing - that still carries significance and consequence.

When ye olde Eternal September hit, many new users did not realize B1FF was satire, and thus chose to emulate the coolest dude on the internet.

So in similar fashion to what I had commented on related to Islam, this reads somewhat like you might be trying to present the broad issue under discussion as more complicated and more ambiguous than it genuinely is. I don’t think swapping “Christian” for “Muslim” makes the exact same questions any more complicated, but I do think doing so in order to sidestep what I had said and instead pose ‘new’ questions does give an impression that your goals here may not actually be discussing the specific things you bring up.

I also notice that you’ve gone ahead and filled in answers for me, and even responded to those answers - which does reinforce the impression that there’s motive in your rhetoricals, and does suggest some specific biases via what you assumed the answers would be.

Should “Jesus is gay” or “The Old Testament is the most horrific book ever” be illegal? Should we create a new word “christianophobia” for that?

So this gets effectively the exact same answer I already gave above, while discussing your example statements related to Islam. Neither “yes” or “no” in absolute sense - but depending on context and on patterns of behavior. I’m not sure why you expected anything different.

Pretty sure no one bats an eye when those things are said, as it should be of course.

I take it you’re unfamiliar with the American Bible Belt, who - among many heroic feats of absurd oversensitivity - at one point thought a red paper cup was “Satanic” and have felt profoundly oppressed and like their beliefs were under direct assult due to teenagers working in grocery stores not wishing them “merry christmas”. This is the same group of people who very genuinely believe that “gay people existing” is exactly identical to “genocide against Christians” and have seen cross-like shapes - “an X” for instance - interspersed with with effectively anything shaped like stars, sixes, the colour red, rainbows … fuck it, anything that isn’t “Jesus” to be subtle or overt disrespect of their faith and them personally.

So no. People of Christian persuasions will absolutely “bat eyes” at some of the most ridiculous shit imaginable, and those Christians are representative of all of Christianity as a whole in scale exactly parallel to the Muslims you were talking about prior representing all of Islam.

However, you wouldn’t have written your long prose if we replaced “islamophobia” with “christianophobia” and that’s what I find sad.

I think you’ve been reading evidence to the contrary in order to get to this sentence. That said, I’ll grant you - “christianophobia” is not nearly as loaded a term and bigotry against Christians is not a genuine societal problem that Christians face in the English-speaking world in the same way that Islamophobia is, so I would have been more likely to assume it was a bad-faith word-replacement than a genuine and sincere statement about Christians and their sensitivities.

I am a firm believer that all Abrahamic religions are harmful and among the most shameful ideologies humanity has come up with, and I believe in the sacred right to disrespect and ridicule those beliefs.

That’s nice. It doesn’t read that way. The biases you showed here, the answers you filled in for me, do seem to treat Christians like they’re obviously the well-adjusted normal people, even as if they’re not “sensitive” and totally don’t ever get offended by utterly trivial nonsense - while your prior comment sure did make some pretty sweeping generalizations about what Muslems in general think or are saying as far as their responses to similarly trivial nonsense. I think the decision to represent Christians according to moderate and well-adjusted members of the faith, and Muslims according to the extremists is a bit of an interesting pattern across these two remarks, and adding the context that all of those remarks are made in defense of an apparent desire to say some specific shit about Islam and represent it as completely normal and good-faith …

Don’t get me wrong. You can say what you want. Other people can say what they think about that. Some spaces may decide they don’t want you in them. I don’t think you’re holding the moral highground you’d posture towards if you say some shit that sounds “islamophobic” and then act like they’re overreacting and oversensitive for calling it that - when it seems pretty clear you’re as sensitive, if not more so, to your own statements being labelled according to the broad category of speech that it most clearly resembles.

And in general - Christians ain’t immune either; but “I’ll be shitty to everyone” doesn’t mean that you’re not being shitty at all - or even that you’re not necessarily targeting one group and just taking potshots towards the others to obscure which was the intended target.

I don’t think that some misuse of a term means the term itself is terrible and invalid and should be opposed at all costs.

Because despite the misuses, islamaphobia doesn’t mean “blasphemy” or even that no one can ever say anything negative about Islam. What it does mean, and what it is used for, is as a general descriptor for the propagation of bigotry or hatred, when the propagation of hatred is often actively trying to masquerade as “legitimate criticism” or mere blasphemy.

If I say that the “prophet” Muhammad is a pedophile for raping a 9 year old girl or that the Quran is comparable to Mein Kampf, those offended should not have the ability to silence me with the bogus “islamophobia” excuse.

Depending on a lot more context than is provided here, that “islamophobia excuse” may or may not be particularly bogus.

If someone is going to insist that it is their absolute right to inject “Muhammud is a pedophile” into any and all discussions even vaguely touching on Islam, I’m going to question the motives of that behaviour pattern. I don’t think someone would be unreasonable to note that it sure seems like the goal is a lot more to either antagonize muslims or to slant perceptions of the faith, given how out of pocket the remarks are to the room, or how persistent the focus on spreading that exact take might be.

I think that comparing Quaran to Mein Kampf is … a little above and beyond. I personally wouldn’t have cited that as if it were a clearly innocuous remark I wanted community support towards legitimizing. I don’t think the fact that you chose Quaran instead of Bible or Torah makes it worse - I think it’s just being shitty and insensitive towards multiple groups of people all at once no matter what ‘sacred’ text you’re choosing. In that light, though, I don’t think another person would necessarily be wildly out of line to question the choice to target the Quaran specifically, and doubly so if - perhaps - the account making those remarks has a pattern of targeting Islam with provocative or negative behaviour.

Being a bigot against Muslims is one thing, but to try to infer that not respecting their beliefs is necessary being a bigot to them is laughable.

Worth pointing out - that’s not what “they” are saying. It’s not that anyone who doesn’t always respect their beliefs on their terms is a bigot.

What they are saying is actually the reverse: That many bigoted people act on their bigotry by disrespecting their beliefs - and most bigots won’t admit to their bigotry. A pattern of behavior that leans in one specific direction that happens to look a lot like the bigots and isn’t very worried about not looking like a bigot is generally just … actually a bigot.

So I’m assuming the duplicate communities are communities of the same exact name in different instances/server. Is anyone else finding this somewhat confusing?

Generally speaking, yes - but also, this is something that will likely fade over time as specific ones stand out. Currently, the plurality is a result of no developed community for that niche existing; as communities settle and grow, less of that sharding will take place unless there’s a crisis in the ‘main’ one.

lmao that is such a good descriptor of what’s going on there. Elon figured he could make money from racists wanting to be racist around normal people.

The thing there is that like … it’s not about consistency or values. The fact that he lied is meaningless to him, throwing it in his face is wasted effort. Communication is a tool to get what he wants, not a goal unto itself.

And no one is surprised.

Elon made it clear shortly after taking over that “free speech” was speech he happened to agree with, and he had no intentions of ethical consistency on ‘free speech’ when it came to speech that was critical of him or his platform. Twitter already went nuclear on links to Mastadon and similar alternative platforms earlier this year while their dumpster fire was raging.