#oct 19 2022
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
cinematicnomad · 4 months ago
Text
i think???? i've finally finished giffing the terror.
142 notes · View notes
mikeywayarchive · 2 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
king_contraryman and shoot_thescreens: @shoot_thescreens really began when I took this second pic of @mikeyway @mychemicalromance in 2022.  It was his relentless bro support that made me think I could be a good photographer and it was him and @beemer138 & @rogergastman that convinced me to go off brand from “the dude that shoots bands on his phone” to something more — Here now is me with an actual honest to goodness camera.  I will never stop being grateful for my friends and pushing myself creatively. See you in the (photo) pit. 🤘 @danbassini for the help :)
THANK YOU @mychemicalromance @gerardway @mikeyway @raytoro @frankieromustdie 🖤
[Oct 30, 2024]
26 notes · View notes
vanserrass · 2 years ago
Text
when's it gonna be my turn to have a dark haired immortal tell me "you’re mine", and then fuck me senseless?
70 notes · View notes
roanofarc · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
chappell roan & gerard way stage outfit parallels
chappell looks:
vmas, sept 11 2024 / hinterland, august 4 2024 / bonnaroo, june 16 2024 / hangout fest, may 18 2024 / coachella, april 12 2024
gerard looks:
corona capital mexico, nov 18 2022 / london, nov 2005 / detroit, sept 13 2022 / los angeles, oct 11 2022 (but first worn in nashville, aug 23 2022) / sydney, march 19-20 2023
PART 1/2
21K notes · View notes
lvbrdz · 5 months ago
Text
ਕੱਲਾ (Lonewolf) English translation below
ਦੁਨੀਆ ਲਈ ਜੋ ਬਹੁਤਾ ਸਿਆਣਾ ਕਿਸੇ ਇਕ ਲਈ ਉਹ ਅੱਜ ਵੀ ਝੱਲਾ ਆ ਦਿਲ ਵਿਚ ਚਾਕੋ ਤਾਂ ਦੋ ਦਿਸਦੇ ਦੂਰੋਂ ਵੇਖੋ ਤਾਂ ਉਹ ਕੱਲਾ ਆ -lvbrdz
Klla
Duniya layi jo bahuta siayana Kise ik layi oh aj vi jhala aa Dil vich chako ta do disde Duro vekho ta oh klla aa -lvbrdz
Lonewolf
He maybe the inteligent one, for the whole world But for someone special, he is still a crazy head If you see in his heart, there are two living beings If you see from afar he is a lonewolf -lvbrdz
0 notes
videogamepoc · 4 months ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
REGISTER FOR LENVAL BROWN'S "VOICE OF THE NARRATOR" EVENT WITH WORKSHOPS4GAZA HERE
Saturday, Oct. 19 3-5pm EST
This workshop will feature voice actor and musician Lenval Brown, who narrated the widely popular role playing game Disco Elysium. Released in 2019, Disco Elysium is a video game whose surreal yet politically lucid narrative places the player in fictional post-revolutionary Martinaise, Revachol. Its 2021 update added full narrative voiceover work by Brown. Join Lenval for a benefit livestream where he will play the game and talk about his experience as a voice actor for Disco Elysium.
Lenval Brown is a voice actor known for his narration role in the award-winning RPG Disco Elysium. He also appeared as Sisyphus Prime in "Ultrakill" and narrated many of the episodes for the 2022 PC Gamer short documentary series "Tales From The Hard Drive." He is the lead singer of a South London 8 piece ska band called Maroon Town. He lives in London.
To register for “Voice of the Narrator,” donate to Dr. Alaa Abu Musa’s family (suggested donation $60 USD, please donate more if you can) then fill out the registration form.
14K notes · View notes
wd18 · 1 year ago
Text
Future House - TRACK 8 by J.H.S. 014 Shell Bank.
Your Link: https://www.youtube.com/@starbassthema2351
0 notes
liatkolink · 2 months ago
Text
For people still in denial whether Israel has committed war crimes, here is a comprehensive list of war crimes Israel has committed both before and after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the list being taken from the Wikipedia article of war crimes with some notable missing examples being the usage of chemical weapons, famine, disease and apartheid. The 7th of October attack did not occur in a vacuum, but is the product of decades of Israel not being held accountable for its war crimes.
Killing civilians:
Israel/Palestine: Unlawful Israeli Airstrikes Kill Civilians by Human Rights Watch on 15/Jul/2014
‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza – The Guardian on 2/Apr/2024
Israeli attack on Rafah tent camp kills 45, prompts international outcry by Reuters on 27/May/2024
Intentionally killing PoWs:
Israel’s Hush-Up Machine in Action: Denying Story Israel Executed Egyptian Prisoners by Washington Report on Middle East Affairs on 8/Apr/2010
Torture:
Israeli government report admits systematic torture of Palestinians by The Guardian on 10/Feb/2000
Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests by Amnesty International on 8/Nov/2023
Israel: Palestinian Healthcare Workers Tortured by Human Rights Watch on 26/Aug/2024
Taking hostages:
Infographic: How many Palestinians are imprisoned by Israel? by AlJazeera on 17/Apr/2022
The thousands of Palestinians Israel arrests, tortures, holds even in death by AlJazeera on 17/Apr/2024
UN report: Palestinian detainees held arbitrarily and secretly, subjected to torture and mistreatment by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 31/Jul/2024
Unnecessarily destroying civilian property:
Israel destroys Gaza tower housing AP and Al Jazeera offices by Reuters on 15/May/2021
Israel targets infrastructure in Gaza to ramp up civilian pressure on Hamas, report claims by PBS News on 11/Dec/2023
Widespread destruction by Israeli Defence Forces of civilian infrastructure in Gaza by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 8/Feb/2024
Deception by perfidy:
Israeli soldier gives 74-year-old Palestinian woman water then shoots her in the head by Middle East Monitor on 20/Jan/2015
Israeli special forces disguised as doctors kill three militants at West Bank hospital by The Guardian on 30/Jan/2024
NBC News investigation reveals Israel strikes on Gaza areas it said were safe by NBC News on 26/Apr/2024
Wartime sexual violence:
Stripped, beaten and blindfolded: new research reveals ongoing violence and abuse of Palestinian children detained by Israeli military by Save the Children on 10/Jul/2023
Israel/oPt: UN experts appalled by reported human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 19/Feb/2024
‘Everything is legitimate’: Israeli leaders defend soldiers accused of rape by AlJazeera on 9/Aug/2024
Pillaging:
The Biblical Pseudo-Archeologists Pillaging the West Bank by The Atlantic on 28/Feb/2013
Jewish Soldiers and Civilians Looted Arab Neighbors' Property en Masse in '48. The Authorities Turned a Blind Eye by Haaretz on 3/Oct/2020
Israeli soldiers boast about looting from Gaza by AlJazeera on 14/Feb/2024
Any individual that is part of the command structure who orders any attempt to committing mass killings:
Netanyahu incites violence by casting protesters as clear and present danger by Middle East Eye on 30/Jul/2020
Israeli minister's call to 'erase' Palestinian village an incitement to violence, US says by Reuters on 1/Mar/2023
Netanyahu cites 'Amalek' Theory to justify Gaza Killings by Times of India on 29/Oct/2023
Database exposes 500 instances of Israeli incitement to genocide in Gaza by TRT World 4/Jan/2024
Genocide:
The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective by Center for Constitutional Rights on 25/Aug/2016
Genocide Warning: Israel & Palestine by Genocide Watch on 21/May/2021
A top U.N. court says Gaza genocide is 'plausible' but does not order cease-fire by npr on 26/Jan/2024
‘Reasonable grounds’ to believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, UN rights expert says by CNN on 27/Mar/2024
Is Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza? New Report from BU School of Law’s International Human Rights Clinic Lays Out Case from Boston University Today on 5/Jun/2024
Ethnic cleansing:
UN Human Rights Council: ‘Israel engaging in ethnic cleansing’ by the European Union Parliament on 23/Mar/2011
Israel's ethnic cleansing in Palestine is not history - it's still happening by Middle East Eye on 22/May/2019
UN expert warns of new instance of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, calls for immediate ceasefire by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on 14/Oct/2023
‘Plan for ethnic cleansing’: Israel’s north Gaza siege sets off alarms by AlJazeera on 22/Oct/2024
Granting of no quarter despite surrender:
White Flag Deaths Killings of Palestinian Civilians during Operation Cast Lead by Human Rights Watch on 13/Aug/2009
Investigators: Israel fired on Gaza civilians carrying white flags by The Electronic Intifada on 28/Jan/2015
3 hostages killed by Israeli soldier in Gaza were waving a white flag, Israel says by npr on 16/Dec/2023
A group of Palestinian men waving a white flag is shot at, killing 1 by NBC News on 24/Jan/2024
She was fleeing with her grandson, who was holding a white flag. Then she was shot by CNN on 26/Jan/2024
Two brothers shot by Israeli forces in Khan Younis, white flag ignored by AlJazeera on 29/Jan/2024
Conscription of children in the military: First one where I couldn't find anything. Way to go, Israel!
Flouting the legal distinctions of proportionality and military necessity:
Israel violates the principles of necessity, proportionality in its attacks on Gaza by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on 13/May/2023
Enough: Self-Defense and Proportionality in the Israel-Hamas Conflict by Just Security on 6/Nov/2023
War Crimes and Accountability: The Case Against Israel’s Military Operations in Gaza by JURIST News on 5/Jul/2024
450 notes · View notes
bsof-maarav · 4 months ago
Text
"[L]ate last month Rutgers required its RAs, whose job is to supervise students living in on-campus housing, to participate in a “bystander intervention” course aimed at training them to identify antisemitism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia. Several of the RAs, however, abruptly left the session after a Jewish speaker explained that Hamas’s antisemitism and desire to destroy the world’s only Jewish state precipitated the Oct. 7 massacre, which resulted in the largest loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust.
The paper added that the RAs took issue with the program’s citing a definition of antisemitism offered by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). After walking out, they reportedly contacted Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which proceeded to author, on the RAs’ behalf, a series of Instagram posts denouncing the antisemitism trainings as racist and upholding white supremacy.
"The mandated training program organized by the Office of Residence Life requires RAs to learn about DEI, restorative justice, community engagement, and more — all of these are inspired by Indigenous practices meant to unpack systems of white supremacy,” SJP said. “On the contrary, this specific session worked to perpetuate Zionism, racism, and white supremacy.”
SJP’s post included comments from the RAs who involved them in the controversy. One of them, who claimed to be Jewish, said, “I am tired of the word antisemitism being used to talk over genocide, I am tired of antisemitism being inflated.” The RA added, “I fear that when the Nazis and radicals come once again for the Jews that no one will believe us … it will be your fault.”
Another who took issue with the Israeli nationality of one of the course’s presenters said, “One of the facilitators even identified as ‘Israeli’ and made mention of this multiple times. He justified his authority on the topic by citing his 12 plus years spent in ’48 Palestine, going so far as to call ‘Israel’ [sic] a ‘beautiful land.'”
A milieu of extreme anti-Zionism at the school has resulted in at least one death threat against the life of a Jewish student since Oct. 7. In November, a local news outlet reported, freshman Matthew Skorny, 19, called for the murder of a fraternity member he identified as an Israeli, saying on the popular social media forum YikYak, “To all the pro-Palestinian ralliers [sic] … Go kill him.”
Similar incidents at Rutgers have occured frequently. In the past few years, the school’s AEPi fraternity house has been vandalized three times. In one incident, in April 2022, on the last day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a caravan of participants from a SJP rally drove there, shouting antisemitic slurs and spitting in the direction of fraternity members. Four days later, before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel, the house was egged during a 24-hour reading of the names of Holocaust victims.
In March, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce launched an investigation of Rutgers’ handling of antisemitism, responding to complaints that it has, for years, allowed an open season of hate against Jewish students."
322 notes · View notes
mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
Text
Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit
Tumblr media
Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.
Tumblr media
Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:
"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)
Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.
Take the metaverse.
Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.
Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.
But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.
Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter
This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.
All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."
For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash
This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.
Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?
Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft
Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy
Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).
As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.
"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.
Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.
What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital
Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.
But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."
Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.
Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.
The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.
In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.
Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon
Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.
The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.
The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.
Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.
Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.
Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.
But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech
Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/
This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.
The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.
For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge
In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/
For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).
But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.
To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."
And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.
Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising
There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/
Tumblr media
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law
Tumblr media
Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
1K notes · View notes
matan4il · 8 months ago
Text
On this Yom Ha'Zikaron Le'Chalalei Ma'rachot Yisrael (Memorial Day for Israel's Fallen Soldiers and Terror Victims), I figured it's important to remember that Israeli victims did not exist solely on Oct 7. We have lost loved ones before and since. Here's a list with just one random victim to represent each year. Please scroll down the list to see how far back it goes.
(part 1/5, all parts in the reblogs)
2024: On Jan 7, we lost 19 years old Shai Garmai
Tumblr media
2023: On Oct 7, we lost 28 years old Osama abu Madiam
Tumblr media
2022: On Nov 23, we lost 18 years old Tiran Faro
Tumblr media
2021: On May 12, we lost 5 years old Ido Avigal
Tumblr media
2020: On Aug 26, we lost 39 years old Shai Ochayon
Tumblr media
2019: On May 5, we lost 49 years old Zaid al-Chamamda
Tumblr media
2018: On Dec 12, we lost Amiad Israel Yish Ran, who was murdered in his mother's womb
Tumblr media
2017: On Nov 22, we lost 21 years old Hodaya Nechama Assoulin
Tumblr media
2016: On Oct 25, we lost 14 years old Rami Namer abu Amar
Tumblr media
2015: On Feb 17, we lost 4 years old Adelle Biton
Tumblr media
2014: On Oct 22, we lost 2.5 months old Chaya Zissel Brown
Tumblr media
2013: On Dec 24, we lost 22 years old Salech al-Din abu al-Atayef
Tumblr media
2012: On Jul 18, we lost 28 years old Yitzchak Idan Kolangi
Tumblr media
2011: On Apr 17, we lost 16 years old Daniel Aryeh Viplich
Tumblr media
2010: On Feb 26, we lost 52 years old Netta Blatt Sorek
Tumblr media
2009: On Apr 2, we lost 13 years old Shlomo Nativ
Tumblr media
2008: On Mar 6, we lost 26 years old Doron Trunach Mahareta
Tumblr media
2007: On Jun 17, we lost 85 years old Meir Cohen
Tumblr media
2006: On Aug 10, we lost 4 years old Fatchi Assdi
Tumblr media
2005: On Jul 12, we lost 16 years old Nofar Horvitz
Tumblr media
2004: On Sep 29, we lost 2 years old Dorit Massarat Binsan
Tumblr media
2003: On Sep 9, we lost 20 years old Naava Appelbom
Tumblr media
2002: On Nov 10, we lost 4 years old Noam Levi Ochayon
Tumblr media
2001: On Dec 12, we lost 42 years old Ester Avraham
Tumblr media
2000: On Nov 21, we lost 19 years old Itamar Yefet
Tumblr media
1999: On Jun 24, we lost 34 years old Tony Eliyahu Zanna
Tumblr media
1998: On Dec 2, we lost 41 years old Osama Moussa abu Aisha
Tumblr media
1997: On Mar 13, we lost 13 years old Natali Alkalai
Tumblr media
1996: On Feb 25, we lost 57 years old Yitzchak Elbaz
Tumblr media
1995: On Jul 24, we lost 60 years old Zehava Oren
Tumblr media
As Tumblr limits a post to 30 images... part 1/5 - the next parts will be posted in the reblogs momentarily. Please check out the full list.
(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)
275 notes · View notes
mikeywayarchive · 1 year ago
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Instagram story by king_contraryman
[Jul 19, 2023]
65 notes · View notes
mariacallous · 23 days ago
Text
For half a millennium until the Holocaust, the cosmopolitan city of Thessaloniki, Greece, had a unique claim to fame: it was Europe’s only major city with a Jewish majority. 
But the golden age of Thessaloniki’s mostly Sephardic Ladino-speaking Jewish community came to a sudden end with the Nazi occupation of Greece in 1941 and turned cataclysmic with the deportation two years later to Auschwitz of nearly all the city’s Jews. By the end of World War II, some 65,000 Greek Jews — 87% of the total and 96% of those from Thessaloniki — had been killed, leaving barely 2,000 survivors in Thessaloniki (also known as Salonika).
Among them were the parents of Dr. Albert Bourla, a veterinarian who would go on to become the chairman and CEO of Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
In 2022, Bourla won the Genesis Prize — often described as the Jewish Nobel — for having led the development of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. Stan Polovets, co-founder and chairman of the Genesis Prize Foundation, said in announcing the reward, “Millions of people are alive and healthy because of what Dr. Bourla and his team at Pfizer have accomplished.”
Now, with global antisemitism at its worst levels since World War II, Bourla is about to realize another milestone: the long-awaited opening of a Holocaust Museum of Greece. 
Bourla donated the $1 million Genesis Prize money toward construction of the museum. The museum is also being funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and the governments of Greece and Germany. The management of the museum is currently trying to raise an additional $10 million.
“Those who know me know that in addition to being very proud of my Jewish heritage, I am equally proud of being Greek,” Bourla said in an emotional June 2022 speech in Jerusalem accepting the Genesis Prize. “My mother’s courage and optimism came from her experience of narrowly escaping death at the hands of the Nazis. In fact, both of my parents turned their experience surviving the Holocaust into something positive and life-affirming. This clearly shaped my worldview.”
The 9,000-square-foot museum occupying eight floors in an octagon-shaped structure will be located at the site of Thessaloniki’s Old Railway Station, where the first Nazi train carrying Jews to Auschwitz departed on March 15, 1943. 
But the museum, slated to open in 2026, won’t be just about the tragedy of the Holocaust. Exhibits and artifacts will tell the story of more than 2,300 years of Greek Jewish history in Thessaloniki and 38 other communities, beginning with the ancient Romaniote Jews who settled in Greece during the reign of Alexander the Great.
At an Oct. 29 groundbreaking ceremony in Thessaloniki, Polovets was joined by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, and local dignitaries and Holocaust survivors.
“I was honored to participate and was moved by the ceremony, during which President Steinmeier said he ‘felt shame’ and that the memory of what was done to the Jewish people on this site ‘cannot be erased.’ That is why this museum is so important,” Polovets said. “The memory of this once-vibrant Greek Jewish community and its near destruction by the Nazis —  especially during the current wave of rising global antisemitism — must never be erased.”
Only about 5,000 Jews remain in Greece: About 4,000 live in Athens, and the remainder live in Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Rhodes, Corfu and other communities. Meanwhile, Greece has not been immune to the wave of antisemitism sweeping Europe. Vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials is fairly commonplace.
A 2014 global survey of antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League found that 69% of Greeks harbor antisemitic views — the highest percentage of any country in the world outside the Middle East. While those findings are sometimes disputed, Greece continues to struggle with antisemitism. 
However, physical violence against Greek Jews is extremely rare, and the current Greek government, as well as the one that preceded it, are considered among the most pro-Israel in Europe. Greece observes International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and in 2014 the parliament outlawed Holocaust denial.
A big push for the Holocaust museum came from Thessaloniki’s former mayor, 82-year-old Yiannis Boutaris, who died on Nov. 4, less than a week after the Holocaust museum’s groundbreaking ceremony. Boutaris announced that his city would build the museum at a 2017 event attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other dignitaries.
“It will symbolize our shame,” Boutaris said at the time, “for what happened, for what we did, and mostly for what we could not or did not wish to do… during and after the war.”
In addition to Bourla, other famous Jews with roots in Thessaloniki include actor Hank Azaria, Israeli businessman and philanthropist Leon Recanati, his sister the philanthropist Jude Recanati, actress Lea Michele, former Nevada congresswoman Shelley Berkley and Belgian-born American fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg. 
Polovets said Bourla’s donation aligns with the Genesis Prize Foundation’s values and mission of inspiring Jewish pride.
“With the rise of global antisemitism, education will be at the center of the museum’s activities, hosting permanent and temporary exhibitions and archives that will highlight the value of preserving the remembrance of the Holocaust, acceptance and respect for diversity, human rights, and freedom,” he said.
Polovets said he hopes the museum will inspire visitors to fight hatred from spreading today.
“Hatred in any form leads to denial, disrespect and destruction,” he said. “Democracy and respect for others are values that can never be taken for granted, and each of us has a responsibility to stand up to all forms of hatred.”
97 notes · View notes
sapchat · 7 months ago
Text
IDK if this has been done but I went through the 3 reboots and did a timeline of events so you wouldn't have to!
Side notes: sometimes I use the first initial for who it is! also some of MW3 has timestamps. I also apologize for spelling. Also, lots of this shit happens over like 7-12 days April 6, 2019 Makarov bombs Verdansk Price, Ghost and Soap know each other at this point, have NOT met Gaz
Start of MW1 Oct 24 2019 'Al Qatal' moves gas Oct. 25 2019 Piccadilly Square Oct. 25 2019 Price meets Gaz Oct 26 19 Alex & Farah blow Barkov's bombs Same day destroy one of B's bases Oct. 27 19 Price and Gaz go to Picc Safe house Oct 28 19A&F go to Urzstan hospital for "The Wolf" Oct 28 19 P&G meet up w/ A&F for the Wolf Oct 29 19 Plan ambush for Butcher & Wolf - Hadir uses the gas, learn Hadir stole the gas Oct 29 19 PGAF Go to kill W, & get H Oct 29 19 PGAF kill the wolf, H is 2 Russia Oct 31 19 PGN go 2 Russia, Capture Kill Butcher (and traumatize a family) Nov 1 19 Hadir is handed over to Russia Nov 3 19 Take down Barkov's gas production plant & K Price meets Kate @ Tea shop makes TF 141 w/ Ghost, Soap, & Gaz END of MW1 - May 22, 2022 Soap goes side questing, turns green (idk I didn't watch the trailer (I did but I just know there's like green gas)) Start of MW2 July 15 22 Ghost Blows AlMazrah base (Honestly didn't get the point of us seeing this) Oct 28 22 GS Kill/Cap Mission for Hassan -> Find American Missiles not Hassan Oct 28 22 PG in Amsterdam for Missile info (Think they used it as an excuse to swim) Oct 29 22 Capture a cartel mem 4 info Oct 29 22 Alej. Go for cartel jumping border Oct 30 22 GSAlej go 4 Hassan safehouse They capture Hassan (picnic in the desert omg!) Oct 31 22 PG in Spain for Hassan info Kate gets caught Shepherd tries to abandon her Nov 1 22 PG meet with F to get Kate (they get her and get juicy gos on Shep) Nov 1 22 Soap goes into Casa de Sin Nombre Nov 2 22 Gulf oil rig, blows up by G&S (philip was here too) Nov 3 22 Soap & Ghost are fighting Shadow co Nov 3 22 SG go for Alej w/ Rodolfo. PG meet up Nov 3 22 141 goes for Graves Nov 4 22 Go 2 Chicago 4 Hassan & missile kill both END of MW2 - Kate (& tech. Gaz) learn about Makarov
Start of MW3 Nov 10 23 Makarov is broken out of jail 2am Nov 10 23 Farah is ambushed Konni got missiles around 6am Nov 10 23 141 go for Nuc Power Plant, P get gased 9am Makarov has been out for 6 hours Nov 11 23 They go for Missiles in Urzikistan Nov 11 23 Kate is going 4 intel on Makarov meets Yuri @ 3pm Nov 11 23 Makarov crashes plane, blames Farah and Alex go there 7:30-9:30pm meet with Kate and Nikolai in hanger Nov 12 8am Nov 12 23 they go for Milena 7pm Nov 13 23 they get Makarovs right hand man Nolan 11am Nov 14 23 They find Shepherd swimming at some point 9:30 Nov 16 23 SG stop Verdansk dam bombing Same time PG are at airsti Nov 21 23 141 go after Makarov Hacker Nov 21 23 They stop Makarov bomb, Soap gets killed. Price kills Shepherd after spreading Soap's ashes.
195 notes · View notes
adropofhumanity · 1 year ago
Text
the 10 crises the world must not look away from:
1. SUDAN
24.8 million people in need of humanitarian aid. a still-escalating war brings sudan to the top of the watchlist. fighting has more than doubled humanitarian needs in less than a year and displaced 6.6 million people- bringing the country to the brink of collapse. more people are internally displaced within sudan than in any other country on earth. in darfur, human rights groups have reported mass killings and forced displacement along ethnic lines.
2. PALESTINE
3.1 million people in need of humanitarian aid (gaza and the west bank). gaza enters 2024 as the deadliest place for civilians in the world. i*****i airstrikes and fighting have had a direct and devastating impact on civilians that will continue to grow as hostilities persist into early 2024, at least. with more than 18,700 palestinians killed, 85% of the population displaced, and over 60% of gaza's housing units destroyed, people living in gaza will struggle to recover and rebuild their lives long after the fighting ends.
3. SOUTH SUDAN
9 million people in need of humanitarian aid. the war across the border in sudan threatens to undermine south sudan's fragile economy and could add to political tensions in the run-up to the country's first-ever elections. meanwhile, an economic crisis and increased flooding have impacted families' ability to put food on the table. a predicted fifth year of flooding could also damage livelihoods and drive displacement.
4. BURKINA FASO
6.3 million people in need of humanitarian aid. as the burkinabè military struggles to contain armed groups, violence is rapidly growing and spreading across the country. roughly 50% of the country is now outside government control.
5. MYANMAR
18.6 million people in need of humanitarian aid. the conflict in myanmar has spread significantly since the military retook political power in 2021. 18.6 million people in myanmar are now in need of humanitarian assistance - nearly 19 times more than before the military takeover. myanmar has seen decades of conflict, but in oct. 2023, three major armed groups resumed clashes with the government. over 335,000 people have been newly displaced since the latest escalation began.
7. MALI
6.2 million people in need of humanitarian aid. dual security and economic crises are driving up civilian harm and humanitarian needs. conflict between the military government and armed groups will likely escalate.
8. SOMALIA
6.9 million people in need of humanitarian aid. somalia faces heightened conflict and climate risks after a record drought. more recently, widespread flooding has displaced more than 700,000 people and will likely continue into early 2024.
9. NIGER
4.5 million people in need of humanitarian aid. a coup in july 2023 triggered massive instability that risks a rapid worsening of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the country.
10. ETHIOPIA
20 million people in need of humanitarian aid. communities across the country are facing the twin threats of multiple conflicts and the likelihood of el niño-induced flooding. the nov. 2022 ceasefire between the government of ethiopia and the tigray people's liberation front (TPLF) continues to hold in northern ethiopia, but other conflicts, particularly in the central oromia region and in amhara in the northwest, are fueling humanitarian needs and raising the risk of a return to large-scale fighting.
11. DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
25.4 million people in need of humanitarian aid. weak state capacity has exposed many congolese to one of the world's most protracted crises, driven by conflict, economic pressures, climate shocks and persistent disease outbreaks. now, a resumed offensive by the M23 armed group is driving up conflict and humanitarian needs. the country enters 2024 with 25.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance - more than any other country on earth. the magnitude of the crisis has strained services, created high levels of food insecurity and fueled the spread of disease.
— via my.linda__ on instagram
530 notes · View notes
jonasiegenthaler · 2 months ago
Note
What are the best games for a newbie hockey fan to watch to see that patented 1386 chemistry
ooh this was a fun one anon, thank you! this is more like, foundational (imo) games of the "this is nico's team now" era more than anything. but this did get. Very Long. so sorry about that lol
20 APR 2021 - NJD @ PIT: to me, really truly the start of a new era, couple games removed from moving zajac and palmieri at the deadline, in the middle of a 15-game (kinda, they had one win so like, is it really a win) losing streak. down 6-0 at the end of the second period they score 6 (!!!) goals in the third period and fall juuuust short of a comeback leading to this moment
29 APR 2021 - PHI @ NJD: the first of 3 games against philly because covid season was a fever dream individually great games from jack and nico but more importantly one of my favourite hughes to hischier power play goals of the season
19 OCT 2021 - SEA @ NJD: cursed jack shoulder injury game so like, maybe don’t watch it, BUT one of many captain games from nico, absolutely killing it once jack went down, played incredible defensively and kept the team afloat in jack’s absence
31 DEC 2021 - EDM @ NJD: honestly this game has everything (except defense)! jack goal! nico goal! dawson goal! jack ot goal! surprise hugs!
02 JAN 2022 - NJD @ WSH: the very first jack to nico overtime goal! against the caps! rejoice! (and sheldon keefe take notes)
22 JAN 2022 - CAR @ NJD: pride night game, jacknico(sevo) pp goal, post-win shenanigans, lots of them!
24 FEB 2022 - NJD @ PIT: 3 point games for both jack and nico, and 2 (!!!) power play goals, fun game, we love wins, we love pp goals, we love wins with pp goals
22 MAR 2022 - NYR @ NJD: of the ‘prom pose across the ice blown up into a mural at the prudential center where people now take couple photos’ fame. historic night for devils nation, and therefore the world. but also just. such a good game, made you believe in the team and the core (and then they lost 5 of the next 6 because they wouldn’t be the devils if they didn’t). top 3 hischier to hughes goals. the perfect game. obligatory fuck the rags.
28 OCT 2022 - COL @ NJD: second game of the 13 game win streak, we didn’t know what to expect and they gave us an absolute defensive masterclass from nico and a jack power play goal as a treat
disclaimer: not gonna put every game of the win streak here but like. you should watch all of them. just for the pure joy.
10 NOV 2022 - OTT @ NJD: another jacknico ot goal! i.e. things you love to see! truly bonkers overtime, if you don’t want to rewatch the full game just watch the overtime because akira subbed in with like 10 minutes left in the third, ice cold, held it down with ottawa pushing and played SO well in ot
17 NOV 2022 - NJD @ TOR: nico goal, jack ot heroics, and a little hurt/comfort, yknow, the good stuff
15 DEC 2022 - PHI @ NJD: my mind retconned this one as a win and turns out they did lose BUT it is a win solely for nico going after tk in jack’s honour, juicy narratives
07 JAN 2023 - NJD @ NYR: jack going nuclear, jacknico power play assists to jesper (big three goal!) +++ jacknico overtime goal which, okay, sevo scored the goal and neither of them got an assist on it but it’s the essence of it all. also burger king jerseys my beloved.
16–24 JAN 2023: the stretch from the sharks game to the vegas game where they were inexplicably red hot on the power play/6v5 and dougie’s shot was automatic and they put us through an absolute roller coaster. 
23 FEB 2023 - LAK @ NJD: hughes to hischier! with the net empty! with like 40 seconds to go in the third and then dawson gets the ot winner and it’s beautiful and life is wonderful and everything’s perfect.
25 FEB 2023 - PHI @ NJD: 2003 cup anniversary game! jack goal! nico goal! something something passing the torch, something something looking up at the rafters hoping that’ll be your name up there someday
Tumblr media
22 APR 2023 - NJD @ NYR - GAME 3: jack power play goal pulling them right back into the series what a game what a time <3
28 NOV 2023 - NYI @ NJD: hughes to hughes to hischier power play goal, that’s family baby! also of course “nico is a horse” game because why be normal about your captain when you can do whatever jack’s doing.
09 MAR 2024 - NJD @ CAR: first jack to nico 5v5 goal! put it in the history books! One of the few bright spots from last season that’s hopefully gonna carry forward this season, jack and nico finally starting to click at 5v5.
22 MAR 2024 - WPG @ NJD: unremarkable in the grand scheme of things but so many power play goals, therefore so many jacknico moments, bon appetit <3
108 notes · View notes