#the white locus

[harbingersecho]

no one asked for this but i delivered it anyways

[hearthfire-heartfire]

let's talk about trump and the tea party.

for folks who are a bit younger, you may or may not remember that the response to obama's 2008 election from the right was to fracture: the tea party was a grassroots movement of right-wing folk who thought the GOP was too centrist and corrupt. they positioned themselves as defenders of the constitution and, essentially, a populist party composed of the scions of the founding fathers, hence the name 'the tea party' and the adoption of 18th century iconography like the 'don't tread on me' flag and tricorne hats. they won a bunch of seats in congress and having to capitulate to them in the name of diplomacy created a lot of the deadlock that obama ran up against when his administration tried to do anything following the 2010 mid-term elections. this became the blueprint for what constitutes 'normal' behavior in american politics.

trump became a media darling both because he was regularly on tv on 'the apprentice' (all the way until 2015 when he was fired by nbc over his remarks on mexican immigrants while campaigning) and because his tweets became really popular among tea party members. he was the one who really put fire in the rumor that obama was born in kenya by tweeting about it, he rallied people with cries of 'show us your birth certificate,' and his jabs at obama were taken very seriously by what would become his core base. this was how he launched his political career.

i do not think we would have q-anon without the tea party. project 2025 has been in the works thru a network established in the reagan era (side note: please sign up for sarah kendzior's substack. she was a political journalist specializing in covering autocracies before trump was elected and i've been following her since then), but their methods have become much less subtle the more the right is rewarded for their unhinged tactics and outright insurrection.

if trump goes away, the momentum behind his base is still a threat to the world. if he is defeated at the polls, his base is going to take that as proof of the vast conspiracy they have constructed around him. and the truth is that individuals within the democratic party are beholden to the network organizing project 2025 even if they don't agree with nor explicitly endorse their aims. the dnc is actively campaigning against their own members who are unfriendly to AIPAC, like jamal bowman, and biden is talking about how only god could make him step down at this point.

i don't blame people for being afraid, but i will blame folks who are choosing to point their fear at a strawman version of the left instead of recognizing that we have been hamstrung by our own. what should be a time to reinvest in our mutual values has become a frenzy of panic and regression. we can't go back to 2019. wear a mask and see if there a street medic training or a mask bloc or food distro near you.

[minespatch1]

[tetedurfarm]

dazzle camouflage is real (think zebra stripes or shiny silver fish) but a harlequin's stripes is not that. it is just a marking that humans have selectively bred for because it's pretty.

Dazzle camouflage is a family of rabbit camouflage that was used extensively by Harlequin rabbits, and to a lesser extent, other rabbit breeds throughout history. It consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colors interrupting and intersecting each other.

Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal, but to make it difficult to estimate a rabbit's range, speed, and heading.

[probablyasocialecologist]

And so it makes sense that these are now the places where fascism grows; that’s what these places were designed for. The suburbs were invented as a reactionary tool against the women’s liberation and civil rights movements. The US government, in concert with banks, landowners, and home builders, created a way to try and stop all that, by separating people into single homes, removing public spaces, and ensuring that every neighborhood was segregated via redlining. The suburbs would keep white women at home, and would keep white men at work to afford that home. These were explicit goals of the designers: “No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist,” said the creator of Levittown, the model suburb. “He has too much to do.” The reason Target has become the locus of today’s particular right-wing backlash is the same reason countless viral TikToks attempt to convince women that they’re at risk of being kidnapped every time they’re in a parking lot. It’s the reason why true crime is one of the most popular podcast genres in America, and why many refuse to travel without a gun by their side and shoot people if they set foot on their driveway.

[...]

It is of course true that these mass hysterias are part of an organized right-wing movement that is attacking human rights across the country—through legislation banning abortion, gender-affirming care, and books, and making it illegal for educators to teach American history accurately. But the shape this movement has taken is not coincidental; it is in fact the product of the unique shape of public life in America, or lack thereof. Suburbanites do not have town squares in which to protest. They do not have streets to march down. Target has become the closest thing many have to a public forum. We often hear that urban areas are more liberal and suburban ones more conservative, and we’re often told that this is because of race. That may be partly true, though cities are whiter than ever and suburbs more diverse than ever. Instead, it may be that suburbanism itself, as an ideology, breeds reactionary thinking and turns Americans into people constantly scared of a Big Bad Other. The suburban doctrine dictates that public space be limited, and conflict-free where it exists; that private space serve only as a place of commodity exchange; that surveillance, hyper-individualism, and constant vigilance are good and normal and keep people safe. It is an ideology that extends beyond the suburbs; it infects everything. Even cities, as Sarah Schulman writes in The Gentrification of the Mind, have become places where people expect convenience and calmness over culture and community. What is a life of living in a surveilled and amenity-filled high-rise and ordering all your food and objects from the Internet to your door if not a suburban life? To make matters worse, the people who have adopted this mindset do not see it as an ideology, but as the normal and right state of the world; they, as Schulman writes, “look in the mirror and think it’s a window.” So when anything, even a gay T-shirt, disrupts their view, they become scared.

[midnightarcheress]

woke up wanting to write something with my pretty boy kyle and this was born.

cw: nsfw. f!reader. gaz obsessing over the pretty college girl by his side. implied future stalking ig? unedited. part one | part two

someone catches Kyle’s attention on the plane.

his legs are on the verge of cramping and his breath is ragged, running to board his connection flight at the last call. after falling off a helicopter twice in the last operations, he developed an uneasiness of flying, no matter the aircraft, preferring taking the train over being miles up in the air, even if it triples the travel. but this time, he just wanted to get home the fastest way possible for a much-needed night of sleep in his own bed, instead of the barely cushioned military-issued mattress.

he hopped on the plane and made his way through the corridor, gaze fixed on the numbers under the luggage rack, attentively looking for his spot. he stopped by row thirteen, eyes darting between the number and the woman on the window seat. i could’ve sworn i marked that one when i booked? Kyle checks the boarding ticket again – row 13, seat A. it’s the right seat, why is there someone on it? 

an annoyed sigh escapes his lips, gathering the energy to speak up and reclaim his rightfully bought seat. the problem is, he gets ultimately struck when the seat-thief notices him standing and turns to face him. wide eyes meet his brown ones, immediately softening at the sight of your tempting glossy lips and delicate fingers pushing a lock of hair behind your ear. pretty little thing.

“i’m sorry, is this your seat? it was empty on the first flight,” you say, an apologetic tone in your voice as you frantically close the book on your lap and shove it in a bag, “i’ll move back for you–”

“it’s alright, keep it.” he interrupts, throwing his carry-on in the rack and taking the empty middle spot beside you. he smirks at your appreciative nod and watches you settling again on the backrest, buckling the seatbelt at the shining signal hovering your heads and paying extra attention to the flight attendant announcements, even when no one around seems to care. sweet girl, so considerate to everyone.

the plane starts speeding on the runway, and from his peripheral he views your squeezed eyes and nearly white fingers gripping the armrest, breathing quickening during the gravity push of the take off. it takes a moment for you to release your tight grasp and exhale, making his hand twitch with an urge to soothe you, tell you that you’re safe.

he shakes the sensation and leans his head back, focusing on the one thing he can do to pass the time – sleep. but he can’t keep his gaze out of you, glancing to his left whenever you make a movement, no matter how small. the rapid keyboard tapping guides his irises to your laptop screen, catching a few words in a sea of what for him sounds like an alien language. DNA strand? allele? locus mutation?

he sneaks a look through your figure and his eyes land on the familiar blue logo on your hoodie, the same one he always sees on the walk from the market to his flat. uni a couple blocks from me. do you live on campus? or nearby? that neighborhood is awful at night, full of old blokes searching the pubs for a quick fuck with a naive college girl. but you seem smart, not the type to fall for their tricks, right?

the harder he tries to avoid your presence, the more you make yourself known, almost making him feel like it’s on purpose. the way your plump lips wrap on the water bottle, slight drop scaping on the corner and trailing down your neck, your flowery perfume filling his nostrils when you shift on your seat to remove the top layer of your clothing, exposing the low-cut blouse underneath and the soft roundness of your tits. is that for me, sweet girl? need a break from studying so hard? the sudden tightness of his trousers brings him back to his senses, stirring the thought out of his brain. 

keep it cool, Garrick, he repeats over and over in his mind, ignoring the tent forming on his lap and praying to whatever god is out there that you won’t see it, even while standing up and brushing your legs on his knees to get to the corridor due the cramped space. however, he doesn’t miss how the guy by his side shamelessly ogles your cleavage when you step past him, making his blood boil and his fists clench – like he wasn’t doing the same exact thing minutes before.

while you're away, he glances at your screen again, noticing the constant message notifications from the contact ‘Marcus - DO NOT ANSWER’. already looking bad for you, mate. curiosity takes hold of him and he starts reading the texts, silently chuckling at the guy’s pathetic attempts to get your attention. what did he do to earn a cold shoulder, sweetheart? did he hurt you? didn’t he pay enough attention to you? i bet he couldn’t even fuck you the way you deserve. 

he keeps skimming the messages until the grin tugging on the corners of his mouth fades into a frown when he reads ‘you’re gonna regret leaving me’. now, who’s this prick? think you’ll get away with threatening my girl?

his body stiffens when you come back, eyes darting back to the small telly in front of him when your hand brushes on his thigh while sitting once again. he hears your irritated huff when you skim through the messages, shutting the laptop with near violence. i can take care of him for you, love. you won’t have to deal with that by yourself anymore. 

the pilot’s muffled voice coming through the speakers and announcing the landing shortens his daydreams about getting rid of Marcus. it would be a great way to keep himself busy while on leave, making sure to do it fast and secretly, of course, just to protect his sweet little thing. poor guy wouldn’t even know what hit him.

the pressure change on his ear is the telltale sign of the aircraft lowering its altitude, landing gear out to hit the lane and brake the machine. he turns to the side, watching again your knitted eyebrows and how your nails dig into the seat. this time he doesn’t contain himself and his hand gently lingers over yours, the softness of it sending lightning strikes over his body and almost making him cum instantly. 

your glinting eyes find his face with a grateful gaze, lips mouthing a sugary thank you when the plane finally stops. he helps you take your handbag out of the rack with ease, using the situation to flaunt his muscles. i can even pick you up, darling. would love to feel your pretty thighs around my waist. you wouldn’t have to walk a day in your life. 

his eyes follow the sway of your hips through the airport, heart almost bursting when you wave goodbye and flash him a timid smile. you think that’s the last time you’ll see him, he thinks this is just the beginning. a name and university? he’s used to finding people with even less information. see you soon, sweet girl.

[crimson-and-clover-1717]

Can we talk about Taika’s acting here?

The reaction to Izzy’s line… The slight move backwards in an instinctive act of self-preservation; the eyebrows raised in shock and confusion, then lowered into a furrow; Ed registering the full weight and implication of the words. Eyes wide; mouth going from relaxed to taut, the top lip rising ever-so slightly by the emotional jolt; shoulders rising slightly also at the small intake of breath.

Taika shows Ed processing myriad things in this moment. That he’s not safe to be the soft person he’s always hidden away. That a white man believes he has ownership over his life and death. That agency is an illusion. That he has no locus of control around his destiny. That everything’s gone full circle. Stede’s gone, and he’s back to being who he had to be in 103 and before to survive. Trapped in a phantasmagorical nightmare in which his self and identity is distorted, manipulated and controlled by another.

And Taika conveys all this with a backwards-lean and a few muscles in his face. It’s god-tier.

[room-surprise]

Kabru from Dungeon Meshi's Ethnic origin

(Masterpost of evidence available here now!)

I've seen folks talking about this, which makes me SOOOOO happy. I've been trying to tell people that Kabru is *some kind* of fantasy version of Indian since at least March of 2023, which is when I finished reading what was available of Dungeon Meshi at the time. You may have seen my post in the Kabru tag about his name suggesting that he's of Nepali origin! I'll go into this in a LOT more detail when I finally publish my big Dungeon Meshi research paper (soon, I promise, I hope), but this is such a wonderful win for Kabru fans that I wanted to make a post about it! So many helpful fans were able to identify the sweet Kabru's trying to talk about is rasgulla, which means I didn't have to actually do any research to figure it out like I normally would have. Though since I know Kabru's meant to be from someplace like India, it wouldn't have been hard to search for "Indian dessert white ball" and figure it out.

Rasgulla (literally "syrup filled ball") is a dessert popular in the eastern part of South Asia. It is made from ball-shaped dumplings of chhena dough, cooked in light sugar syrup. This is done until the syrup permeates the dumplings.

While it is near-universally agreed upon that the dessert originated in the eastern Indian subcontinent, the exact locus of origin is disputed between locations such as West Bengal, Bangladesh, and Odisha. The name rasgulla is derived from the words ras ("juice") and gulla ("ball"), and other names for the dish include rasagulla, rossogolla, roshogolla, rasagola, rasagolla, and rasbhari or rasbari. Rasbari is the name of it in Nepal, so I think that's probably what Kabru would have called it if Milsiril hadn't interrupted him.

[grison-in-space]

Dude. That Great Dane is not even red/liver/brown. It's a sable/fawn dog. The basset hound is the same, and both of them are base black--AKA not even holding the same gene OP is talking about. It's harder to tell on the cocker but I think that one is also based black ee yellow; either way, it's a yellow dog, not a brown one. (If it's bb ee brown, it's still a yellow dog, just like a Bb ee dog is still a yellow dog.)

It's not confusing if OP refers only to names that are specific to bb liver/chocolate/brown and completely bypasses the godawful morass of "red" and "tan" and "fawn" and "sable". And yes, all the rest of those dogs are brown.

My thoughts on dog colors

[harbingersecho]

"... we'll photoshop it."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Microsoft pinky swears that THIS TIME they’ll make security a priority

One June 20, I'm live onstage in LOS ANGELES for a recording of the GO FACT YOURSELF podcast. On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

As the old saying goes, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you." That goes double for Microsoft, especially when it comes to security promises.

Microsoft is, was, always has been, and always will be a rotten company. At every turn, throughout their history, they have learned the wrong lessons, over and over again.

That starts from the very earliest days, when the company was still called "Micro-Soft." Young Bill Gates was given a sweetheart deal to supply the operating system for IBM's PC, thanks to his mother's connection. The nepo-baby enlisted his pal, Paul Allen (whom he'd later rip off for billions) and together, they bought someone else's OS (and took credit for creating it – AKA, the "Musk gambit").

Microsoft then proceeded to make a fortune by monopolizing the OS market through illegal, collusive arrangements with the PC clone industry – an industry that only existed because they could source third-party PC ROMs from Phoenix:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/ibm-pc-compatible-how-adversarial-interoperability-saved-pcs-monopolization

Bill Gates didn't become one of the richest people on earth simply by emerging from a lucky orifice; he also owed his success to vigorous antitrust enforcement. The IBM PC was the company's first major initiative after it was targeted by the DOJ for a 12-year antitrust enforcement action. IBM tapped its vast monopoly profits to fight the DOJ, spending more on outside counsel to fight the DOJ antitrust division than the DOJ spent on all its antitrust lawyers, every year, for 12 years.

IBM's delaying tactic paid off. When Reagan took the White House, he let IBM off the hook. But the company was still seriously scarred by its ordeal, and when the PC project kicked off, the company kept the OS separate from the hardware (one of the DOJ's major issues with IBM's previous behavior was its vertical monopoly on hardware and software). IBM didn't hire Gates and Allen to provide it with DOS because it was incapable of writing a PC operating system: they did it to keep the DOJ from kicking down their door again.

The post-antitrust, gunshy IBM kept delivering dividends for Microsoft. When IBM turned a blind eye to the cloned PC-ROM and allowed companies like Compaq, Dell and Gateway to compete directly with Big Blue, this produced a whole cohort of customers for Microsoft – customers Microsoft could play off on each other, ensuring that every PC sold generated income for Microsoft, creating a wide moat around the OS business that kept other OS vendors out of the market. Why invest in making an OS when every hardware company already had an exclusive arrangement with Microsoft?

The IBM PC story teaches us two things: stronger antitrust enforcement spurs innovation and opens markets for scrappy startups to grow to big, important firms; as do weaker IP protections.

Microsoft learned the opposite: monopolies are wildly profitable; expansive IP protects monopolies; you can violate antitrust laws so long as you have enough monopoly profits rolling in to outspend the government until a Republican bootlicker takes the White House (Microsoft's antitrust ordeal ended after GW Bush stole the 2000 election and dropped the charges against them). Microsoft embodies the idea that you either die a rebel hero or live long enough to become the evil emperor you dethroned.

From the first, Microsoft has pursued three goals:

Get too big to fail;

Get too big to jail;

Get too big to care.

It has succeeded on all three counts. Much of Microsoft's enduring power comes from succeeded IBM as the company that mediocre IT managers can safely buy from without being blamed for the poor quality of Microsoft's products: "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" is 2024's answer to "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Microsoft's secret sauce is impunity. The PC companies that bundle Windows with their hardware are held blameless for the glaring defects in Windows. The IT managers who buy company-wide Windows licenses are likewise insulated from the rage of the workers who have to use Windows and other Microsoft products.

Microsoft doesn't have to care if you hate it because, for the most part, it's not selling to you. It's selling to a few decision-makers who can be wined and dined and flattered. And since we all have to use its products, developers have to target its platform if they want to sell us their software.

This rarified position has afforded Microsoft enormous freedom to roll out harebrained "features" that made things briefly attractive for some group of developers it was hoping to tempt into its sticky-trap. Remember when it put a Turing-complete scripting environment into Microsoft Office and unleashed a plague of macro viruses that wiped out years worth of work for entire businesses?

https://web.archive.org/web/20060325224147/http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/newsinfo/collateral.aspx?cid=33338

It wasn't just Office; Microsoft's operating systems have harbored festering swamps of godawful defects that were weaponized by trolls, script kiddies, and nation-states:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue

Microsoft blamed everyone except themselves for these defects, claiming that their poor code quality was no worse than others, insisting that the bulging arsenal of Windows-specific malware was the result of being the juiciest target and thus the subject of the most malicious attention.

Even if you take them at their word here, that's still no excuse. Microsoft didn't slip and accidentally become an operating system monopolist. They relentlessly, deliberately, illegally pursued the goal of extinguishing every OS except their own. It's completely foreseeable that this dominance would make their products the subject of continuous attacks.

There's an implicit bargain that every monopolist makes: allow me to dominate my market and I will be a benevolent dictator who spends his windfall profits on maintaining product quality and security. Indeed, if we permit "wasteful competition" to erode the margins of operating system vendors, who will have a surplus sufficient to meet the security investment demands of the digital world?

But monopolists always violate this bargain. When faced with the decision to either invest in quality and security, or hand billions of dollars to their shareholders, they'll always take the latter. Why wouldn't they? Once they have a monopoly, they don't have to worry about losing customers to a competitor, so why invest in customer satisfaction? That's how Google can piss away $80b on a stock buyback and fire 12,000 technical employees at the same time as its flagship search product (with a 90% market-share) is turning into an unusable pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Microsoft reneged on this bargain from day one, and they never stopped. When the company moved Office to the cloud, it added an "analytics" suite that lets bosses spy on and stack-rank their employees ("Sorry, fella, Office365 says you're the slowest typist in the company, so you're fired"). Microsoft will also sell you internal data on the Office365 usage of your industry competitors (they'll sell your data to your competitors, too, natch). But most of all, Microsoft harvest, analyzes and sells this data for its own purposes:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Leave aside how creepy, gross and exploitative this is – it's also incredibly reckless. Microsoft is creating a two-way conduit into the majority of the world's businesses that insider threats, security services and hackers can exploit to spy on and wreck Microsoft's customers' business. You don't get more "too big to care" than this.

Or at least, not until now. Microsoft recently announced a product called "Recall" that would record every keystroke, click and screen element, nominally in the name of helping you figure out what you've done and either do it again, or go back and fix it. The problem here is that anyone who gains access to your system – your boss, a spy, a cop, a Microsoft insider, a stalker, an abusive partner or a hacker – now has access to everything, on a platter. Naturally, this system – which Microsoft billed as ultra-secure – was wildly insecure and after a series of blockbuster exploits, the company was forced to hit pause on the rollout:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/microsoft-delays-data-scraping-recall-feature-again-commits-to-public-beta-test/

For years, Microsoft waged a war on the single most important security practice in software development: transparency. This is the company that branded the GPL Free Software license a "virus" and called open source "a cancer." The company argued that allowing public scrutiny of code would be a disaster because bad guys would spot and weaponize defects.

This is "security through obscurity" and it's an idea that was discredited nearly 500 years ago with the advent of the scientific method. The crux of that method: we are so good at bullshiting ourselves into thinking that our experiment was successful that the only way to make sure we know anything is to tell our enemies what we think we've proved so they can try to tear us down.

Or, as Bruce Schneier puts it: "Anyone can design a security system that you yourself can't think of a way of breaking. That doesn't mean it works, it just means that it works against people stupider than you."

And yet, Microsoft – whose made more widely and consequentially exploited software than anyone else in the history of the human race – claimed that free and open code was insecure, and spent millions on deceptive PR campaigns intended to discredit the scientific method in favor of a kind of software alchemy, in which every coder toils in secret, assuring themselves that drinking mercury is the secret to eternal life.

Access to source code isn't sufficient to make software secure – nothing about access to code guarantees that anyone will review that code and repair its defects. Indeed, there've been some high profile examples of "supply chain attacks" in the free/open source software world:

https://www.securityweek.com/supply-chain-attack-major-linux-distributions-impacted-by-xz-utils-backdoor/

But there's no good argument that this code would have been more secure if it had been harder for the good guys to spot its bugs. When it comes to secure code, transparency is an essential, but it's not a sufficency.

The architects of that campaign are genuinely awful people, and yet they're revered as heroes by Microsoft's current leadership. There's Steve "Linux Is Cancer" Ballmer, star of Propublica's IRS Files, where he is shown to be the king of "tax loss harvesting":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/24/tax-loss-harvesting/#mego

And also the most prominent example of the disgusting tax cheats practiced by rich sports-team owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#economic-substance-doctrine

Microsoft may give lip service to open source these days (mostly through buying, stripmining and enclosing Github) but Ballmer's legacy lives on within the company, through its wildly illegal tax-evasion tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/13/pour-encoragez-les-autres/#micros-tilde-one

But Ballmer is an angel compared to his boss, Bill Gates, last seen some paragraphs above, stealing the credit for MS DOS from Tim Paterson and billions of dollars from his co-founder Paul Allen. Gates is an odious creep who made billions through corrupt tech industry practices, then used them to wield influence over the world's politics and policy. The Gates Foundation (and Gates personally) invented vaccine apartheid, helped kill access to AIDS vaccines in Sub-Saharan Africa, then repeated the trick to keep covid vaccines out of reach of the Global South:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation

The Gates Foundation wants us to think of it as malaria-fighting heroes, but they're also the leaders of the war against public education, and have been key to the replacement of public schools with charter schools, where the poorest kids in America serve as experimental subjects for the failed pet theories of billionaire dilettantes:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/millionaire-driven-education-reform-has-failed-heres-what-works

(On a personal level, Gates is also a serial sexual abuser who harassed multiple subordinates into having sexual affairs with him:)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/technology/microsoft-sexual-harassment-policy-review.html

The management culture of Microsoft started rotten and never improved. It's a company with corruption and monopoly in its blood, a firm that would always rather build market power to insulate itself from the consequences of making defective products than actually make good products. This is true of every division, from cloud computing:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/28/other-peoples-computers/#clouded-over

To gaming:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/27/convicted-monopolist/#microsquish

No one should ever trust Microsoft to do anything that benefits anyone except Microsoft. One of the low points in the otherwise wonderful surge of tech worker labor organizing was when the Communications Workers of America endorsed Microsoft's acquisition of Activision because Microsoft promised not to union-bust Activision employees. They lied:

https://80.lv/articles/qa-workers-contracted-by-microsoft-say-they-were-fired-for-trying-to-unionize/

Repeatedly:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/activision-fired-staff-using-strong-language-about-remote-work-policy-union-2023-03-01/

Why wouldn't they lie? They've never faced any consequences for lying in the past. Remember: the secret to Microsoft's billions is impunity.

Which brings me to Solarwinds. Solarwinds is an enterprise management tool that allows IT managers to see, patch and control the computers they oversee. Foreign spies hacked Solarwinds and accessed a variety of US federal agencies, including National Nuclear Security Administration (who oversee nuclear weapons stockpiles), the NIH, and the Treasury Department.

When the Solarwinds story broke, Microsoft strenuously denied that the Solarwinds hack relied on exploiting defects in Microsoft software. They said this to everyone: the press, the Pentagon, and Congress.

This was a lie. As Renee Dudley and Doris Burke reported for Propublica, the Solarwinds attack relied on defects in the SAML authentication system that Microsoft's own senior security staff had identified and repeatedly warned management about. Microsoft's leadership ignored these warnings, buried the research, prohibited anyone from warning Microsoft customers, and sidelined Andrew Harris, the researcher who discovered the defect:

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-golden-saml-data-breach-russian-hackers

The single most consequential cyberattack on the US government was only possible because Microsoft decided not to fix a profound and dangerous bug in its code, and declined to warn anyone who relied on this defective software.

Yesterday, Microsoft president Brad Smith testified about this to Congress, and promised that the company would henceforth prioritize security over gimmicks like AI:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/microsoft-in-damage-control-mode-says-it-will-prioritize-security-over-ai/

Despite all the reasons to mistrust this promise, the company is hoping Congress will believe it. More importantly, it's hoping that the Pentagon will believe it, because the Pentagon is about to award billions in free no-bid military contract profits to Microsoft:

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/17/pentagon-weighs-microsoft-licensing-upgrades

You know what? I bet they'll sell this lie. It won't be the first time they've convinced Serious People in charge of billions of dollars and/or lives to ignore that all-important maxim, "When someone tells you who they are and you get fooled again, shame on you."

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/2024/06/14/patch-tuesday/#fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again

[identifying-cat-phenotypes]

Are the aristocats coats possible? Could an all white cat (f) have a solid black (m), an orange (m) and a solid white(f) kittens?

(thanks and sorry english isn't my first or second language)

You could do a lot with them, that's for sure! Here are what the Aristocats family looks like, for those that don't know/can't remember.

Ignore O'Malley. This isn't about him.

It's possible, very possible actually, ESPECIALLY with the fact that we don't know the sire. That is a lot of creative freedom I can work with. I'll go into depth on each kitten's genetics below the cut :)

I want to have fun with this. If you know a bit about cat genetics, you'll quickly see how convoluted I make these answers because genetics are fun. Silly kitties with their silly genes and I will have FUN damnit!

Duchess's white is epistatic over everything. That means, we can really go crazy with what is under there. Eumelanin colors, red, tabby, solid, inhibitor, it can be whatever.

Therefor, I'm calling her a (technical) cryptic tortie. Below are the expressions I've decided to give her.

O/o, -/- W/w, l/l

I'll keep her black locus blank, as that will be affected by the sire. I'll be doing them last, so it'll be done last too.

Now, if you look at Berlioz, you'll notice something. He has a lighter gray stomach! That means I have to give him inhibitor at some point. You can also see this on Toulouse! However, since he is red, I'm passing it off as tabby. No inhibitor for him.

Marie is easy, so I'll just do her right now. The only note I have is that the sire HAS to be L/l in order for Marie to stay longhaired.

l/l, W/w

Onto the other kittens!

To stay as close to canon, Berlioz must have:

Black self (B/-)

Inhibitor (I/-) <- capital i

No white (w/w)

To stay as close to canon, Toulouse must have:

Red tabby (O/Y)

No white (w/w)

This means that we know EXACTLY what the sire has to have. It has to not have white, and have inhibitor. It's quite simple! However, I like to have fun.

Simple Genetics:

Duchess: l/l, O/o, B/B, W/w, i/i longhaired white (black self tortie) Unnamed Sire: L/l, o/Y, B/B, w/w, I/i shorthaired Marie: l/l, O/o, B/B, W/w, I/i longhaired white (black smoke tortoiseshell) Berlioz: L/l, o/Y, B/B, w/w, I/i shirthaired black smoke Toulouse: L/l, O/Y, B/B, w/w, i/i shorthaired red false-tabby

Now, you may be saying, "Robin, what possibly could be next? You've done all their genetics!" This is true! I just did it, however, I like to have a LOT of fun here. Fictional cats (cough. Warriors. cough) are my puppets, and I make them dance to my own rhythm.

Lets have fun with epistatic traits. Lets make these cats as far away from canon (but still technically recognizable) as possible. The world is MY oyster.

Duchess is now a longhaired cinnamon (b1/b1) self (a/a) cryptic tortie. Color-pointed (cs/c) with full white. The sire is now a shorthaired (L/l) black-silver (B/b1, I/i) tabby (A/a) with high tabby-breakage (spotted tabby).

So... onto:

Mod Robin's Funplex Cat-Genetics Note: I'm having fun. This is not accurate to real life probabilities.

Duchess: l/l, o/o, b1/b1, a/a, cs/c, W/w, i/i longhaired white (cinnamon colorpoint, carrying albinism) Unnamed Sire: L/l, o/Y, B/b1, A/a, C/c, w/w, I/i shorthaired black-silver spotted tabby (carrying albinism) Marie: l/l, o/o, B/b1, A/a, c/c, W/w, I/i longhaired albino white (black-silver spotted tabby) Berlioz: L/l, o/Y, B/b1, a/a, cs/c, w/w, I/i shorthaired smoke sealpoint (carrying albinism) Toulouse: L/l, o/Y, b1/b1, A/a, C/cs, w/w, i/i shorthaired cinnamon spotted tabby (carrying pointing)

yay! kitties :) !!!! <3333

i wrote this at 3pm and a dream okay. please tell me about any mistakes, and dont get mad at me for probability. I WILL have fun in my kitty echochamber and I WILL like it :)

signed, mod robin

[drdemonprince]

i just FIND IT INTERESTING that the people who say transmisandry is a unique and real and important to discuss form of oppression dont ever talk about, say, misandrynoir or society's hatred of disabled men or fat men or any other intersections being "misandry" and the experiences of other oppressed groups.

It makes exactly 0% sense to treat "misandry" as a real locus of oppression that can intersect with other oppressions only in the context of talking about trans men, and never doing it with anything else.

Black men sure as fuck experience racism in a very particular way. but to date ive never heard someone attempt to call that the intersection between misandry and anti-Blackness, because misandry doesn't fucking exist.

either you believe misandry is a thing or your dont. if you dont think misandry is real, transmisandry as a concept is completely nonsensical. if you dont understand this please read about what intersectionality actually is and how it works and stop co-opting the scholarship of a Black woman legal scholar in order to complain about how there are more trans femme serial killers in movies than trans masc ones or whatever the hell you think youre being left out of.

most of the transmisandry posters are white trans men with a self-victimization complex who cant imagine they have both some very genuine experiences of oppression (transphobia or transmisia, whatever you wanna call it) and also significant privileges. its just so fucking transparent it makes me want to join my chinchilla in chewing the walls

[max1461]

The big thing that, imo, the local (to tumblr) online discourse seems to consistently leave out of discussions around indigenous rights here in Anglophone North America is like... a huge element of indigenous/Native/First Nations activism irl revolves around trying to get the colonial governments to honor their treaties with indigenous nations. This is an extremely big theme if you're even mildly plugged into this conversation, and reasonably so: the US and Canadian (and formerly British) governments initially had a nominal policy of dealing with indigenous nations as peers and entering into treaty agreements with them as they would with any other nation, but over the course of the colonial period a huge number of these treaties were either flatly ignored or were interpreted in very dubious ways in order to allow greater and greater colonial expansion. The call to "honor the treaties" seems to be one of the major, consistent rallying cries within indigenous activism here.

The disconnect wrt the online conversation is that, fundamentally, the call to honor contracts is a liberal principle. I'm not saying that leftists can't support these treaty rights (I'm a leftist and I certainly do), what I'm saying is that the orientation of the online conversation seems completely wrong to me, the way that these substantive demands have been parsed and translated into the world of online ideology shadowboxing seems deeply confused. I think this is part of a broader history in which "liberalism" has most often really meant "liberalism for whites only", and the extension of liberal principles to genuine universals has been slow and hotly contested. I've talked about this a number of times already in relation to (post-)Meiji Japan, who I see as one of the preeminent players in the 20th century shift towards a genuinely liberal international order. But another locus for this contestation, which sadly didn't move the needle as much but which seems just as conceptually important to me, has been the conversation around indigenous treaty rights (which now, very slowly, seems to be picking up at least a little bit of legal steam).

Anyway, I've probably said before that among ideology-enthusiasts, the ones who should be most aghast at colonialism in North America are the committed liberals, and it reflects very poorly on them that in general they are not.

[vindicated-truth]

Whenever I do an analysis of any character, I try my best to analyze them from a writing standpoint: whether or not they're well-written characters, regardless of their morality.

And even with regards to their actual morality, I try my best to not be too black and white about it, precisely because even in real life, every action has nuances and context that have to be taken into account.

It's why I can still write something good about characters like Do Haewon and Lee Changjin, both in terms of how complex they are as characters, and how despite their undeniable immorality, they have aspects to their characters that makes them more well-rounded, and not the caricature and flatness of textbook "evil". This can be seen with Haewon's love for Jeongje and her overall agency and power in the story, and the innocence Changjin has for both his ambition and for Jihwa, and his somewhat pitiful loyalty to Han Kihwan.

It's also why it cannot even be said that the so-called protagonists of the show are completely moral or good; every single character, from the main leads Lee Dongsik and Han Joowon, to every single person surrounding them—Kwon Hyeok, Oh Jihwa, Oh Jihoon, Yoo Jaeyi, Nam Sangbae, Cho Gilgu, Hwang Gwangyoung, Kwak Ohsub, Kang Minjeong, Lee Sangyeob—have consciously made decisions that aren't completely moral, or even legal, and have in varying degrees hurt other people because of their own actions.

One of Beyond Evil's greatest strengths is the portrayal of this remarkable depth and complexity to their characters.

Which is why fascinatingly, I cannot write anything good about Han Kihwan at all.

He does not have any redeeming qualities to him both in terms of his morality or the depth and well-roundedness of his character. Unlike Do Haewon or Lee Changjin, Han Kihwan isn't motivated by anything external of himself.

Even Kang Jinmook is motivated by an external locus, however completely immoral and inexcusable: his perception of women "belittling" him as his guise for his outright misogyny and inhumane brutality.

The same can be said even for Jung Cheolmun, as shallow as his external motivations are: his greed and shamelessness in manipulating everyone around him to forward his own career and wealth, regardless of the consequences.

But Han Kihwan, remarkably, is the flattest character of all.

He has no external motivation, which means he's not driven by anything outside of himself. He has no external motivation for love or loyalty (like Do Haewon or Lee Changjin) or even pure unabashed and unchecked hatred for someone else (like Kang Jinmook). He didn't do anything worthwhile himself, didn't take risks or initiatives—however stupid or unplanned, like Jung Cheolmun—to further his own goals.

He just—didn't do much of anything. He let other people do the work for him. And he's not even motivated by anything—whether out of love or hatred—other than himself.

And when you think about it—isn't that the point of Beyond Evil? That when you unmask the true monster behind the scenes, they're the most disappointing of all?

Because that's what our society is like. That's what the true monsters in our lives are like.

The truest evil can be found in people who are weak and cowardly, because a true monster is someone who cares for nothing and no one else other than their own self.

[gothhabiba]

Literary Africa—outside, notably, of the work of some white South African writers—was an inexhaustible playground for tourists and foreigners. In the novels and stories of Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, whether imbued with or struggling against conventional Western views of benighted Africa, their protagonists found the continent to be as empty as the collection plate—a vessel waiting for whatever copper and silver imagination was pleased to place there. Accommodatingly mute, conveniently blank, Africa could be made to serve a wide variety of literary and/or ideological requirements: it could stand back as scenery for any exploit, or leap forward and obsess itself with the woes of any foreigner; it could contort itself into frightening malignant shapes in which Westerners could contemplate evil, or it could kneel and accept elementary lessons from its betters.

For those who made either the literal or the imaginative voyage, contact with Africa, its penetration, offered thrilling opportunities to experience life in its inchoate, formative state, the consequence of which experience was knowledge—a wisdom that confirmed the benefits of European proprietorship and, more importantly, enabled a self-revelation free of the responsibility of gathering overly much actual intelligence about African cultures. So big-hearted was this literary Africa, its invitation to explore the inner life was never burdened by an impolite demand for reciprocal generosity. A little geography, lots of climate, a few customs and anecdotes became the canvas upon which a portrait of a wiser or sadder or fully reconciled self could be painted.

[...] Thus the literature resounded with the clash of metaphors. As the original locus of the human race, Africa was ancient; yet, being under colonial control, it was also infantile. Thus it became a kind of old fetus always waiting to be born but confounding all midwives. In novel after novel, short story after short story, Africa was simultaneously innocent and corrupting, savage and pure, irrational and wise. It was raw matter out of which the writer was free to forge a template to examine desire and improve character. But what Africa never was was its own subject, as America has been for European writers, or England, France, or Spain for their American counterparts.

—Toni Morrison, "On 'The Radiance of the King.'" The New York Review, 2001.