#not even elon musk would do that

[songmingisthighs]

dear "creators" who depend on ai

how does it feel to be so absolutely lazy and useless as a human being ?? how does it feel to have a functioning brain but can't use it properly ?? how does it feel to be so absolutely incredibly dull and uncreative that you can't muster 200 words to convey your ideas ?? how does it feel to have to face the fact that you suck so damn bad and you have to live with it ??

[aqueerwindinthewillows]

thinking about how people were warning others online about the parallels between trump's election platform and project 2025 and the things he was saying in the lead up the inauguration to germany in the Bad Time and a lot of people said "oh that's different" or "he won't do [x, y, z]" but then on DAY ONE elon did the nazi salute twice on stage.

[viridescenttemple]

I SOMETIMES WONDER IF I SHOULD MAKE A TWITTER MAIN AGAIN TO POST MY ART IN, BUT EVERYTIME I THINK ABOUT IT A NEW UPDATE THAT FUCKS UP THE SITE HAPPENS AND MY DESIRE TO DO GOES BELOW 0 LMAO

[jofiah]

Actually, considering the shitshow that is twitter right now, I wonder if musk will even let whoever is left of the team make a pride logo for June

[marshmellowtea]

seen a small spike in headlines about zuckerberg which is making me wonder if he realizes that the only reason he generally doesn't draw as much ire as musk is because he isn't constantly in the goddamn media so i can just blissfully forget about his existence most of the time. not sure you want to be doing this bestie

[sapphoslibrary]

i genuinely cannot fathom being the richest person in the world and spending the bulk of my time harassing minorities on the internet. don’t you want to travel the world? solve world hunger? buy a bunch of animal shelters? donate to charities? house the homeless???

[phylomedusa]

free speech absolutist everyone

[horsesource]

Why do you say that subjectivity is becoming increasingly autistic? Also, have you ever read Homo Ludens?

Because people are increasingly socially exhausted. Since capitalism began to ravage communication, creative energy, etc, psychosis is no longer a limit to economic production and instead is itself a force of production (we are no longer compelled to repression, as we were during industrialization, but to hyperexpression)

If psychosis has been appropriated by economic processes, autism presents a new limit to capitalism (also, historically speaking, autism emerged out of psychosis)

This is because autism is neither repression nor hyperexpressivity, autistic subjectivity involves a turning away from the symbolic, or else a use of the symbolic for non-economic/non-communicative means. I have not read the book you mentioned but thanks for mentioning it.

[ineffably-human]

an entire episode that's just Dennis having a mental breakdown?

[thosemotivationalquotes]

I saw something in the news today that truly took my breath away. If you have been paying attention to U.S. politics over the past few days, you’ve most likely seen this woman:

This is Bishop Mariann Budde, and on Monday (Trump’s inauguration) she led an interfaith prayer for Trump and the incoming administration. During the service she asked him to have mercy for LGBTQ+ Americans and undocumented immigrants. This was badly received by the Trump administration (as expected).

After seeing headlines about this woman, I read something that I wanted to share. In 1998 a man named Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay. I’m not going to get into the details of his death on this post, but please be warned it is extremely triggering if you do choose to read more on your own. Matthew Shepard’s death caused a lot of change in the U.S. regarding how LGBTQ hate crimes are handled, and laws that were passed to protect LGBTQ+ people.

Now you’re probably wondering what Matthew Shepard has to do with an Episcopal bishop. For years after Matthew Shepard’s murder, his family had held onto his remains, too scared to lay him to rest in fear of his final resting place being vandalized. In 2018, Budde had his remains interred at the National Cathedral, which is also the place where the interfaith prayer for Trump and his administration took place. The impact of this really had an effect on me. Budde could have led a non confrontational prayer service, and chosen not to mention the harm that will come to the people Trump and his administration are going after. Instead she chose to call out hate and fear in front of some of the most powerful people on the planet, and at a place that has such a large historic meaning to the LGBTQ community.

In the next few years there will be many challenges in protecting free speech, standing up against hate, and protecting those in our communities. But I would like to believe that for every Donald Trump and Elon Musk, there are people like Marianne Budde. There are those of us who can’t speak up for themselves, so it’s important for those of us who can to amplify our voices, even if it’s not the ‘popular’ thing to do.

“And he said you should apologize. Will you apologize?

I am not going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.” - Mariann Budde’s response in a Time interview

Link to articles: x x x

Link to the Matthew Shepard Foundation if you would like to donate

[tillandthebees]

Sometimes I want to invent immortality; our society just isn't ready for it ( and probably never will be)

[porter-pumpkim]

time to bring back the underground gay bars and riots everybody!

If they gonna repeat the worst parts of the Victorian era, industrial revolution, and atomic ages with none of the positives, we can bring back the retaliation used during those times, and improve on said past methods with our modern kniwladge on whats gonna be repeated next!

There is no king or emperor of America, the entire point was power to the people, people need to take that power back.

[the-corey-lynxx]

There is nothing like learning you are bad at something because you had to do it at school (looking at you, business management)

[the-crumbs-on-my-journal]

okay, sideblog for emo venting for maybe half a degree of anonymity, and like to not flood my main blog with this half coherent rambling.

i feel like i'm not good at being a person. i think immediately in the basic aristotelian terms i'm familiar with. what is a person's function? do i fulfill that function? but i dont mean in a moral sense. i think i am a pretty good person. i have a feeling most people think they are pretty good because they judge themselves by their own standards, and while that does apply to me because i am just another person and because of my awareness of my moral scrupulosity, i also think of how even the people around me emphasize to me the ways they think i am a good person. but i remind myself that i don't mean it in a moral sense. or maybe this is an extension of morality when interpreting aristotelian virtue ethics in this way. i guess i just have a reflex against that because of my established deconstruction against equating ability with morality. this is exactly my argument against my original thesis, for which i haven't even gotten around to explaining my justification, but i think maybe this whole chronologically backwards expository spells out enough of what that would look like, in a forensical way.

i'm not friendly-looking or inviting, i'm not even that comforting. i find it hard to say words of comfort to the people i care about. either i'm not sure i feel them strongly enough to mean anything to other people, or i can't find a way to say them without either miscommunication or making myself vulnerable to psychic attack. i am impatient, and i get snappy when i'm angry. i can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. i make a lot of mistakes even at work, and while i know it's their job to call me out, i feel so overwhelmed with shame after being recognized for my wrongdoings. i'm thinking i haven't fully deconstructed myself from catholicism.

that might be why i followed my thesis statement with evidence that disproves it--i actually believe the opposite, even if i forget that for a moment. my "being a good person" is not a trait that can be measured against criteria. because, which criteria? and why those, how do we know it is those, and not other criteria? and what does it even mean to reach or not reach those criteria? what happens to those people, or what do those people actually accomplish?

and if it is not something that can even be measured, then i don't think it is anything. i don't really buy into this idea of good people and bad people. i have the reflex that some liberal will say "what about hitler?" because in my experience that is the average american's kneejerk version of a litmus test for a moral imperative. but anyway, maybe in a way that actually reinforces this phenomenon rather than challenging or subverting it at all, i check for if i feel like my good faith response to that question would be "yes, this applies to hitler".

as is my nature my mind drags me back to a dreadful conversation in the elective debate club zoom call back in twenty-twenty-covid-nineteen, during which a classmate suggested her argument: hitler was a good leader. i and other classmates immediately tore into her use of "good" and its meaning. anyway, now i'm also thinking: if we all, as good liberal americans in the 21st century, can agree that hitler was a bad person (and i may really be taking this for granted), but apparently we're arguing whether or not he was a good leader, well that seems to mean that the qualities of the ideal leader are in conflict with the qualities of the ideal person. like in sims CAS, certain traits are definitionally opposite each other, so a sim cannot have both traits at the same time. the actual word is mutually exclusive, or a true dichotomy. if ideal leadership is exclusive to ideal personhood, then we must make a judgement as to which ideal to strive for, since, assuming we even are obligated to reaching ideals, and then i remember i actually pride myself on my aspiration toward mediocrity and contentment as opposed to flourishing, although now i'm not sure why exactly, we cannot reach two ideals which are mutually exclusive to each other at the same time, so we could never flourish. and then i'm realizing, i am the problem i need to solve. i need to change myself in order to be rid of my problem, which is things about myself which i can change.

i am in conflict with myself. do i have an obligation to resolve it? well, the conflict is that in one instance i seem to be in support of flourishing--of making a judgement about either pursuing ideal personhood or ideal leadership. in another instance, i seem to be in support of mediocrity--of failing to be convinced that judgements have any meaning or ought to have any impact on actions, when previously i argued vehemently against judging someone as a leader instead of as a person. i think that's it. wait, did i say that i don't think judgements mean anything? that doesn't seem like me, but i think this whole thing started because i don't even know me.

okay, i might be avoiding the question by ruminating in this way, but i don't know for sure because i don't want to spend another second on it. was i ever really ruminating?

it just matters that i want to be here. i can't deny someone else the right to be here if they do or don't measure up to some criteria. criteria i cannot spend enough time deliberating on. criteria that, even if i were passionate about them, wouldn't really mean anything because i alone can't enforce them on others, not that i have an interest in enforcing things upon other people anyway. so i think the whole idea of criteria falls completely apart here. i can't figure them out, and at no cost do i wanna figure them out. so why have them if you spend more time figuring them out than abiding by them? it just matters that i want to be here, so i'm gonna do what it takes to be here even if it gets hard. that's one way to argue myself out of misguided nihilism.

[sexhaver]

kind of getting sick of this (honestly kind of masturbatorial at this point) insistence that STEM students are bad at [analyzing the news/undertsanding history/thinking about the consequences of their actions/INSERT YOUR OWN CRITIQUE HERE!] because they Didn't Pay Attention In English Class. come on now. i know plenty of people who paid attention during the class reading of Lord of the Flies and 1984 and Catcher in the Rye and still came out the other end repping crypto and Elon Musk, and i know even more people who didn't and didn't, respectively. stop idolizing 10th-grade-level literacy and accept that "smart" people do dumb shit on the reg or your worldview is going to get increasingly warped until you do something totally off the wall like imply that "knowing about the existence of unreliable narrators" would stop people voting republican

[labelleizzy]

It's important to know what is going on.

Written by US Senator Chris Murphy (D - CT)

Report from the Senate Floor:

Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted.

In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that.

Now, we knew that Republicans would largely unanimously oppose them, but we had two objectives here. One, Republicans were forced to put their opinion on record — many for the first time — on the most corrupt parts of Trump and Musk’s agenda. Two, as I’ve been saying, I am going to make every process and procedure as slow and painful as possible for as long as my colleagues choose to ignore the constitutional crisis happening before our eyes.

So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here.

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice.

Thanks to your pressure and support, many of my Democratic colleagues have joined my effort to do everything we can to make sure they cannot destroy democracy and steal your money in the dark of the night. We are being loud about what is happening. I’m going to continue to grind the gears of Congress down as much as possible to make it that much harder and slower to get away with this corruption. That’s why the votes lasted until nearly 5 AM.

This is a five-alarm fire. I don’t think we have two years to plan and fight back. I think we have months. It’s still in our power to stop the destruction of our democracy with mass mobilization and effective opposition from elected officials. So we can’t miss any opportunity to take advantage of opportunities to put Republicans on the record and shine a light on what is happening.

And you have a role to play in this as well. I need you to amplify what’s happening, support the leaders who are fighting for you to make sure they can continue speaking truth to power against Musk and Trump’s billionaire cronies, and show up at rallies and town halls. Use every tool at your disposal to send a message loud and clear about how you expect my colleagues to lead and fight in this moment.

Every best wish,

US Senator Chris Murphy (D - CT)