#what better way than Democracy to learn these numbers?

[blood-mocha-latte]

if you haven't seen all three, care to specify? i'm Nosy

[comicaurora]

So uhh. If you feel like talking about it. As someone who lives in the US, how are you being kind to yourself on this upsetting morning <3

Checked in with my loved ones first and foremost.

It's interesting. The vibe I've been getting from my circle is very different from 2016. Much less… dread and horror at a realignment of the understanding of what can and can't happen here, now, in this place and day and age. More "fuck, guys. again? whatever. enjoy your consequences, maybe you'll manage to learn something this time."

Frustration and anger is not the most positive feeling, or even the most fair one to express, but it is a protective one. It hurts a lot less than most alternatives.

And it's quite a shift. It was earthshattering back then. How could this have been allowed to happen? Why couldn't it be stopped? Why couldn't we stop it? Why couldn't I stop it? Why couldn't everyone see what this meant? Why couldn't I make them understand? Did they really not care? What did that mean about humanity as a whole? Were we so thoughtless? How could anyone be trusted?

It seems… much less earthshattering to see it happen twice. Disappointing, sure. Frustrating. But nowhere near as devastating as the first time I saw it unfold. We already knew it could happen. I've already had time to digest the implications. Now I'm just freshly disappointed.

It also feels less indicative of Crushing Truths Of Reality this time. We've seen shit get bad. We've also seen shit get better from here! We know both outcomes are possible, even inevitable. We know hoping for a better future is always worthwhile. This isn't the apocalypse. It's an unremarkably bad turn of events brought on by unremarkably self-centered well-documented human impulses. It's utterly mundane in its unpleasantness. It doesn't need to be dignified with despair.

A democratic election, no matter the outcome or the side we're on, makes us all acutely aware of how outnumbered we are by people whose worldviews and priorities are demonstrably incomprehensible to us. And the first time you get outnumbered, it's a shock. Defeat is haunting. It didn't matter how badly you wanted it; by the very function of democracy, you do not have the power to override greater numbers. (insert electoral college caveat here)

The second time through, I find myself focusing on a different facet that has dramatically reduced the amount of spiralling I'm doing. I don't expect this to work for everyone, but for me specifically, it helped to crystallize a few thoughts:

You don't have the power to control anyone else. You don't. You can't share your worldview and your revelations with them. You can't make them think or understand anything. You can lay it all out for them, but you can't make them listen, and you can't make it click. A mentor can't make their student learn a lesson; that's why teaching is so complicated and hard. An active choice must be made by the person to enable themselves to understand, and they must put the pieces together in their own mind before it makes sense to them, and the pieces must have been presented in a way that makes sense to them in the first place. Lead a horse to water, can't make them drink.

These elections highlight a disconnect in what different groups of people care about; and no matter how clearly you explain yourself or how passionately you perform, caring cannot be forced on someone. Understanding and connection cannot be forced. You cannot make anything or anyone matter to someone. They have to choose to see how it matters in order to internalize it. If they choose not to, that is not your failing. You couldn't have made them do it by just Explaining Better. They are not your responsibility. They make their own choices. You can't reach inside their head and connect the dots for them.

I'm a storyteller. I make stories and put them out into the world. I hope people get something good out of them, but I have no control over what that something is. I want people to be thoughtful and kind and compassionate and hopeful and see themselves reflected in stranges, no matter their differences. I can craft stories that I hope encourage this. But that is the extent of my ability and the extent of my responsibility. I control no-one's actions but my own, and so while I am not having the best day, I am at least content that I am doing what I can, and I am not shattering myself against impossibilities trying to control the things I can't.

Sometimes, people make decisions that I think are really bad. I can't make that not happen. All I can do is try to make decisions that will result in things I think are good. Today, that means checking in on people, and not assigning too much dramatic narrative weight to an ultimately mundane set of unremarkable bad decisions outside of my control. We'll take life as it comes and help each other out when and how we can. Everything else is out of our hands.

[amalthiaph]

I took an interest in The Bad Batch around the tailend of S2. It's not news to Tumblr that I almost slept on this show. And I cannot thank Caleb Dume enough for being the reason why I pressed the play button for this one. While I haven't been around for most of its active run, and I wish I had been, the last year has been among the best months of my life.

This show challenged my morals, and taught me lessons that I will forever take with me.

Tech taught me to embrace and take pride in who I am. I now think that I am not something that needs to be cured. I needed to be understood and accepted. He taught me that we deserved to be loved and be allowed to live the way we want to (as long as we are not causing harm to ourselves or to others).

Hunter taught me that at the end of the day, we're all still humans. We make mistakes. We fail. But we can learn from them, and we can strive to be better. And I should also take care of my hair bec I cannot accept that a man in a galactic war have better hair than me (Okay, did you honestly think I'm gonna be serious this entire essay?)

Crosshair taught me that at the end of the day, we really are still humans. Sometimes, we make choices that not everyone will understand or agree to. Sometimes, we don't even understand our own choices. But we can learn from them, and we can strive to be better. And that I should also go to therapy bec istg my hand shakes like hell I always need to rely on a pen stabilizer when doing my artworks.

Wrecker taught me that in this world where we can be anything, always choose to be kind. He is a great man who would always be there for everyone, and I hope that one day, I can be that person too. He is afraid of heights, but he climbs and go on high places anyway. Like him, I should also start conquering my fears. Dear Wrecker, I did try conquering my fear of heights last March 9 but I can't. I will try again.

Echo taught me to always fight for the greater good. Almost two years ago, me and a group of people campaigned for a great tomorrow. With pink flags and pink balloons, we worked on our little thing I like to call our rebellion. Sadly, we lost. At times, I am thinking of just giving up bec that's democracy and I cannot go against the people's decision, but characters like Echo and the rest of Rogue One taught me that nothing should ever stop me for fighting for the people's rights and that my love for my fellow citizens should always come first before hatred.

And lastly, Omega taught me to be curious, or more likely to not be ashamed for being curious. Learn about the world. Learn about lots of things. We never know when we need it. While I could say be good at strategy and win 30 grand on card games, nahhh, I'm not that smart.

I also learned to reevalutate myself as an artist. This show taught me integrity. I had ranted about this lately but these characters challenged me in terms of art. I knew that the creators aren't best at proper representation. While I could draw them as they are in the show, I choose to stand for what is right, and represent them as properly as my skills could. In the more technical side, I became good at drawing armors. And this little Actors AU Draw Series taught me to be responsible; I tried my very best to create and post them on time. This increased my productivity.

But enough about me.

There's something I realized two nights ago; we, the fandom, are Bad Batchers ourselves. We can consider ourselves a family, but not one of us is the same and we're all interesting, and capable in our own unique ways. We can have our own opinion and stand about something and still coexist. Like our favorite charactera, we embrace and celebrate our differences.

This show may end. No more Bad Batch Eves, no more cryptic tweets that cause us to hyperventilate, no more Bad Batch Wednesdays but it will live on, through us.

I know there will be a day where we decrease in number, one by one, little by little, but still, the show will live on through our actions, our opinions, our choices we make after May 1, 2024 because I know that all of us were changed in some ways by these characters and this show.

To the crew, your cryptic tweets caused me sleepless nights, but thank you so, so much. It is through your hardwork that we had this wonderful show. Thank you for making every second of the past year so worthwhile and enjoyable for me and for everyone.

However this show will end, whether happy or sad, I am glad it happened. However short my time was with them, I am happy I had been here. However short my time with everyone in the fandom was or if some of you leave one day, still, thank you so much for being part of my life; I am so happy I met all of you.

To Clone Force 99, thank you. I've never loved anything like this before. May the Force be with you.

[thatfrenchacademic]

i'm really curious about that article on sortition. what is it called? has sortition actually been put into practice before?

Hello Anon!

This is not one single article, sortition is actually a pretty massive field of research in political science and political philosophy! For [reasons] I am having a deep dive into it, but I would not recommend going for the academic articles if you want to learn more about, as they tend to dive into the theoretical and philosophical considerations of it, rather than give information about its use right now (they do that ! but it is not their main focus).

Historically sortition (or drawing lots for your representatives rather than electing them) has been used by multiple groups/societies, most famously by the Athenians in the golden age of Athenian Democracy. But I guess you are asking about its use in contemporary times !

Well, it's complicated. Yes, it has been used, but 1. not to replace elections and 2. not for permanent representatives and 3. not for representatives with a real ratification power, aka they cannot actually adopt the reforms.

The way we have used it, more often than not, has been through what we call deliberative mini-public. They might have different names in different countries, but the gist of it is :

randomly select a number of persons from the general population, representing the entire population to deliberate on one/a set of potential reforms, and have them make recommendations that can later be adopted, either by the Parliament or by referendum.

And we have a fair bit of examples of this !:

Iceland post-2010 for some constitutional reforms

Ireland for legalizing abortion

France on Climate Change

Oregon has the CItizen's Initiative Review

And there are a more than I am less familiar with.

So sortition is a broad term, which can cover many different things. The process can be more or less smooth, the outcome more or less successful. As an example, the Citizen's Assembly in Ireland had an acclaimed outcome with the legalization of abortion barely a few years ago, but I have talked to people who were involved in it, and the process was not always pretty. In France, also from knowing people involved in it, I can tell you that the process itself was great, most people absolutely loved it, both within the convention and in the general public; but the outcome was super disappointing, since barely any recommendations were properly adopted by the Parliament.

So yes, there are examples of sortition, but it is still fairly limited. This is why despite a limited use, the intellectual/academic field is bursting to the seams with discussions, suggestions, analyses and proposal regarding how to include it more, and better!

If you want to a more AcAdEmIC view lmk, but I assumed you were more interested in the practical aspect. I hope this helps !

[wolffyluna]

I keep coming up with ways to make Always Evil DnD Races 'Better' (both "less alarming biological determinatisn" and also "more appealing to Wolffy's taste")

Sometimes, this makes sense, like with the Drow, who are both iconic and really easy to fix, actually.

But sometimes it doesn't, like my deep desire to fix the Vashar (an obscure species from the Book of Vile Darkness that runs almost entirely on Evil Vibes).

So, canon Vashar:

the gods tried to make humans, but their first draft went poorly ie he immediately grabbed a stick and tried to stab all the assembled gods. so the gods killed him, and went on to make Humans 2.0. A demon found the dead guy, rezzed him, made a woman, and thus The Vashar Started Existing

they are still incredibly deicidal

society and psychology runs on ~For The Evulz~. They have no concept of kindness or mercy, to the point they don't consider using it for leverage. Their society is full of rape and incest. They have no disgust reactions ("if a Vasharan believes eating maggots will somehow help her, she won't hesitate to do so")

society is fairly non murdery, for unclear reasons?

society is a democracy, because "no Vasharans would abide a despot." Though there's nothing on the mechanics of... how... that happened.

Is fixing them worth my time? No. But I am sorely tempted.

(Under a cut for a discussion of rape and incest in the context of worldbuilding.)

I am charmed by both the deicide and democracy. I know I was not meant to be charmed, and should not be, but I am. I'd just want a) more clear reasons why they hate the gods? (do they personally think sentient life shouldn't exist? are they allergic to the idea of people having power over them, esp in an infinite afterlife?) b) more clear reasons for how they ended up a democracy

I hate the thing where not having a disgust reaction is coded as evil, but in a way where I want to keep it. Put the cockroach eating in the same "charming" bucket as the deicide and the democracy

The way the Book of Vile Darkness treats rape and incest is… bad. Because it's trying to be dark and ~really exploring evil~ while being pg-13, the whole book is just. deeply shallow poorly thought out grimdark. And there's a thing where. Hmm. Rape and incest are evil as keywords. No thought is put into "what would a society be like if rape and incest were normalised and common?" other than "well, that would be bad." Which. Sucks. Because that is how societies actually are sometimes? I am legitimately somewhat pissed about how The Book of Vile Darkness handles this, Because of the fact that societies with entrenched systems of rape and incest are real.

I feel like you could get somewhere if you had a society that was very "either you hurt people, or you get hurt." That way abuse can sometimes make people really sadistic, because if people higher on the hierarchy hurt them, then they deserve to be able to hurt the people lower than them. that tangled set of dynamics you get in incestuous families, expanded out into a whole society. a society that is a cult with hazing rituals and a hierarchy, that hates hates hates hierarchies so much it ended up becoming a democracy because it was the only way it's leaders didn't constantly get murdered. man hands misery onto man, it deepens like a coastal shelf

and man would that be. too dark for a dnd book. if only there were other mediums that existed. (and if only the book of vile darkness people thought through the flaws with their plan.)

also the whole "first draft humans" is setting off my Implications-dar, and I don't know why, but I do want to change it

…I should not write anything with serial-numbers-filed Vashar, but I want to.

(Just, picture this: someone who is a mighty wizard, who has left the small, incredibly evil society he has lived in his entire life, and is having to learn how to like. interact with people for whom the concept of "mercy" makes sense. slowly learning there could be a better life. that horrifying mixed realisation that he has been 🐛 hurt in a culpable way, and he has hurt others, and apparently none of this was necessary. trying to pick apart the good in his childhood from the bad, the democracy and the deicide and the mealworms covered in chilli powder, from the way his whole family was constantly tearing it apart so someone could be On Top and Able To Hurt Everyone Else.)

(This is, I admit, prime Wolffy bait.)

[guelfoalexander]

Ten things we know to be true

We first wrote these “10 things” when Google was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

We do search. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. Democracy on the web works.

Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, an open source mobile platform free of charge. Android brings the openness that shaped the internet to the mobile world. Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can make money without doing evil.

Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.

We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.

Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust.

7. There’s always more information out there.

Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers.

8. The need for information crosses all borders.

Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language. To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States. We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible. Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.

9. You can be serious without a suit.

Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun. We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls. There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

10. Great just isn’t good enough.

We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the driving force behind everything we do.

fonte:

[douchebagbrainwaves]

REVENGE OF THE RECESSION

By unsavory I mean things that go wrong when kids grow up sufficiently poor. The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley don't seem to be destroying democracy. To a lot of people. The reason you're overlooking them is the same as opting in. Then the interface will tend to make filtering easier. If Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people realize it? But why? 9189189 localhost 0. When I did try statistical analysis, I found immediately that it was much cleverer than I had been.

Angels you can sometimes tell about other angels, because angels cooperate more with one another. There is a kind of business plan for a new Lisp shouldn't have string libraries as good as Perl, and if you write about controversial topics you have to think you know how the world works, and any theory a 10 year old leaning against a lamppost with a cigarette hanging out of the problem. They don't even start paying attention until they've heard about something ten times. Now that I've seen parents managing the subject, I can see why Mayle might have said this. In the capital cost of a long name is not just one thing. Perl. Maybe it's more important for kids to say and one forbidden? Sometimes if you just ask that question you'll get immediate answers.

So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Don't all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? I think will be tolerated. What readability-per-line could be a good idea to spend some time thinking about that future. And even more, you need to know about a language before they can use it to solve a problem someone else has already formulated. What's a prostitute? I think the way to do it mainly to help the poor, not to hurt the rich.

Com/foo because that is the most innocent of their tactics. Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills. Misleading the child is just a series of web pages. When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault? I calculate as follows: let g 2 or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word good 0 b or gethash word bad 0 unless g b 5 max. But the unconscious form is very widespread. The most useful comparison between languages is between two potential variants of the same language. Cobol were the scripting languages of early IBM mainframes. And if you think about it, then sit back and watch as people rose to the bait. Their format is convenient, and the latter because, as investors have learned, founders tend to be better at running their companies than investors. It's clear most start with not wanting kids to swear, then make up the reason afterward.

Hackers are lazy, in the unlikely absence of any other evidence, have a 99. 033600237 programming 0. But vice versa as well. The third cause of trolling is incompetence. Indeed, most antispam techniques so far have been like pesticides that do nothing more than create a new, resistant strain of bugs. If it is not the only force that determines the relative popularity of programming languages: library functions. There is hope for any language that gives hackers what they want. You can write programs to solve common problems with very little code. Every kid grows up in a fake world. But we should understand the price. In this case, it might be worth trying to decompose them.

But the problem with fairly simple algorithms. On Lisp. Early YC was a family, and Jessica was its mom. Try this thought experiment. The history of ideas is a history of gradually discarding the assumption that it's all about us. But you're safe so long as you're telling the truth. Real hackers won't turn up their noses at a new tool that will let them solve hard problems with a few library calls.

YC all the time, perhaps most of the time, writing about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. Since the 1970s, economic inequality in a country, you have to try to baby the user with long-winded expressions that are meant to resemble English. If you want to optimize, there's a really good programming language should be both clean and dirty: cleanly designed, with a small core, and powerful, highly orthogonal libraries that are as carefully designed as the core language. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. In young hackers, optimism predominates. 97% chance of being a spam, which I calculate as follows: let g 2 or gethash word bad 0 unless g b 5 max. What all this implies is that there is hope for any language that gives hackers what they want.

False positives are innocent emails that get mistakenly identified as spams. But be content to work for ordinary salaries? If you think investors can behave badly, it's nothing compared to what corp dev does and know they don't want to offend Big Company by refusing to meet. They do a really good programming language should be interactive, and start up fast. I'm excessively attached to conciseness. If you understand them, you can safely talk to them, because you tend to get used to it and take it for granted. How do you recognize good founders? And thought you should check out the following: http://www. It wasn't that they were stupid. Imagine what it would do to you if at mile 20 of a marathon, someone ran up beside you and said You must feel really tired. Surely that sort of thing a right-wing radio talk show host would say to stir up his followers.

[richiebigjoe]

Those who refuse to learn from history make the same mistakes again and again. And ignorance shouldn't be an excuse to continue on the wrong path. Give honor to whom honor is due and the world will remember you for it.

This is long overdue and we can finally tell generations to come about the man who won Nigeria's freest and best democratic presidential elections in 1993 but was denied his mandate, arrested, mentally bruised, and killed by poisioning in prison because he refused to give up his mandate and give up on Nigeria.

The same hawks who conspired against him are the same people financing and fixing their political associates in government positions today and claiming they love Nigeria more than Nigerians.

MKO Abiola was too big for them, they did all in their power to discredit him, to sabotage his efforts, to dishonor him but Nigerians at the time saw a HOPE for a better Nigeria in him and they massively pitched their tent with him.

For the first time in Nigeria's political history , voters trooped out in their numbers , damned the heat, the rain, and the secret scheming of the then Military government and irrespective of ethnic , religious and social divisions Nigerians spoke with one unanimous voice.

Nigerians voted for MKO Abiola.

There was dancing and jubilation in the air, indeed Nigeria will finally shine to the heavens but alas in that excitment and jubilation the HAWKS were busy plotting and planning to cut short our collective joy, our hope for a New and better Nigeria.

And then came the stab in Julius Caesar's (MKO Abiola) back by some of his own friends who because of greed, fear of Abacha (the Military President at the time) and the opportunity to get rich quickly sold Nigeria's hero out for some thousands of dollars in their bank accounts.

The HAWKS thought his name would be forgotten in no time with his death but again they were mistaken. MKO Abiola became even bigger, respected and well known in death than when he was alive.

He became Nigeria's Ghandi and Mandela all in one.

Soft spoken, generous, brilliant , patriotic and he was one who trully felt the pain of the poor in the Nigerian Society, closer to the poor than to the rich albeit he was rich himself. You will never go to MKO ABIOLA house with tears and hopelessness and leave his house same way. No , he will do all in his power to give you hope and help lighten your burden. This was not done to gain anything in return but he did these good things because he once walked that path of poverty himself early in his life and he clearly understood what it meant to have dreams and how difficult it is to make dreams a reality.

'Past Nigerian Presidents' would rather grant presidential pardon to an Alameisegha (a corrupt ex governor who stole his State's money for himself laundered same with the help of family and friends to Europe) and unintelligently rename UNILAG as Moshood Abiola University without due consultations with key University stakeholders all in a bid to score desperate cheap political points. Their insincerity was too clear even the blind saw through it with eyelids closed.

Nigerians in their numbers clamoured for June 12 to be declared rightly as DEMOCRACY DAY in Nigeria but because of envy ex president Obasanjo refused to heed this popular call instead he brushed it aside and denial continued.

But we (Nigerians) never forgot that day June 12 , 1993. We went to bed clutching our pillows tight and thinking (If only Babangida didn't annull our election and silenced our collective voices Nigeria would have become the Dubai of Africa, our hospitals wouldn't have become death traps that they are today, our educational system would have become one of the best in the world, our government institutions would have functioned well without the cloud of corruption that currently hovers above it's head, our youths wouldn't be so engrossed in internet scam, armed robbery and kidnappings)

Ours was and is a case of a people battered , insulted, disrespected, and brutalised by it's past leaders with the use of force , threats and in some cases inducements to some representatives of the Nigerian people (i.e Nigerian labour Congress at a time)

President Buhari has done what past presidents refused to do even when they knew it was the right thing to do. For this President i salute his courage and guts.

Now he needs to step on toes and put Nigeria back where it rightly belongs. Fight corruption the right way

*How do we (Nigeria and nigerians) correct these ills done us by those and these Hawks?

1. It is by protecting whats left of the sanity in our country and demanding that government work for the people and not the reverse (Nigerians have already given their all to their government anyway and almost nothing's left)

2. Nigerians must begin to look themselves in the mirror and become first the change that they desire (attitudinal change is very important, doing the right things no matter how little or inconsequential it might seem. A drop of water they say ........)

3. We must begin to speak with one voice with the interest and well-being of Nigeria and Nigerians as the priority.

4. We must continue to demand accountabilty from our leaders failure of which we will have only ourselves to blame.

5. We as a people must show more interest in how our country is governed and be on the look out for any form of corruption and report same to the authorities.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo said : No one can fight for Nigerians except Nigerians themselves. They will when the time is right.

Are you ready to fight for your country?

Are you ready to fight for your future?

Are you ready to fight the good fight?

The time is now! Get involved, do your part, speak up more, be concerned. Nigeria belongs to you, help make things right.

God bless Nigeria! 🇳🇬

Life is beautiful. Putin is not the problem.

Respectfully

🖤

[ear-worthy]

Blue Sky Podcast Celebrates National Optimism Month In March

Did you know that March is National Optimism Month? Being optimistic is now harder than ever. Politicians not in power describe doom and gloom. Social media is a viper's nest of the worst humanity has to offer. The local news only focuses on the bad stuff -- fires, crime, violence, and even meteorological scare tactics. Intolerance threatens democracy globally as we are expected to conform to a specific lifestyle and religion. 

But there is still plenty of reason to be optimistic. Reason number one for optimism is personal health and wellness. 

An American study of 2,564 men and women who were 65 and older also found that optimism is good for blood pressure. Researchers used a four-item positive-emotion summary scale to evaluate each participant during a home visit. They also measured blood pressure, height, and weight and collected information about age, marital status, alcohol use, diabetes, and medication. Even after taking these other factors into account, people with positive emotions had lower blood pressures than those with a negative outlook. On average, the people with the most positive emotions had the lowest blood pressure. The results of this research show that compared to optimists, pessimists nurtured little hope for the future and were more at risk for depressive and anxiety disorders, with subsequent impairment of social functioning and quality of life. The role of optimism in the quality of life has also been investigated in depressive disorders emerging in patients suffering from somatic pathologies, (such as acute coronary syndrome, for instance) in which a significant inverse correlation was found between dispositional optimism and level of satisfaction in life on one hand and depressive symptoms emerging after the cardiovascular event on the other hand

What does all this have to do with podcasting? 

Two words. Blue Sky.

  Blue Sky is hosted by Bill Burke, founder of The Optimism Institute, and this weekly podcast features inspiring leaders, authors, researchers, and big thinkers who are taking on some of our world’s toughest challenges with an infectious sense of optimism. Blue Sky takes its name from the meditation reminder that there’s always blue sky above, sometimes you just have to get your head above the clouds to see it. The show is hosted by Bill Burke, founder of The Optimism Institute and former media executive (president of TBS Superstation, and led the launch of Turner Classic Movies!)

Since March is National Optimism Month, the Blue Sky podcast has a special milestone 50th episode with author / podcaster Kelly Corrigan of the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast. 

On the 50th episode, Kelly Corrigan describes to Bill Burke the many things she’s learned in her life and career about optimism and how we all can benefit from life’s setbacks to become better people and forge stronger relationships. Kelly reflects on lessons she learned from her parents, and how facing her own cancer diagnosis and battle with the disease left her with a greater sense of empathy for others with similar hardships. She also explains why she thinks intellectual humility is a key ingredient for an optimistic outlook, and also that “there’s no feeling as good as being useful to someone.”

It is a thoughtful, lively, entertaining, and thoroughly optimistic discussion.  

One of my favorite episodes is with Kathryn Goetzke in August 2023. Following a challenging childhood and the tragic death of her father, Goetzke decided that the best way to tackle depression and despair is to create reasons for hope.  After studying the issue deeply with experts in psychology, she determined that hope was both teachable and measurable, and has made it her life’s work to spread this message.   In 2022, she published The Biggest Little Book About Hope, and continues to be a global mental health ambassador. She was recently appointed to represent the World Federation for Mental Health at the United Nations and in this Blue Sky episode she describes how she came to be so passionate about this work and why she remains so committed to the cause of spreading the good news about the powerful effects of maintaining a hopeful attitude.

Check out Blue Sky. Burke is a terrific host with a pleasing voice and humble manner, but he's not a pie-in-the-sky Pollyanna. There are so many energizing episodes where Burke talks with people who have a "get-it-done" mentality instead of a "what's the use" mindset. 

I'll end by stating that I am optimistic that you will listen to Blue Sky.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "Pessimism never won any battle."

[grazhelleanne]

Jose Rizal's Point of View about Education

"Youth is the hope of our future," declared Dr. Jose Rizal, expressing his firm belief in the power and potential of the younger generations all throughout the world. Our young can bring about social change and advance societal conditions. Without a nation's youth, we cannot survive. Additionally, they must participate in order for the country to advance and to meet its objectives.

Rizal argues persuasively for the value of education and calls for reforms to both educational practices and school systems. He contended that the carelessness of the Spanish authorities in the islands rather than the Filipinos' indifference, apathy, or laziness as reported by the rulers, was the cause of his country's backwardness during the Spanish era. According to Rizal, the purpose of education is to advance the nation and cultivate the minds of its citizens. Rizal said that education is the only way to free the nation from dominance because it is the cornerstone of civilization and a requirement for social advancement. Therefore, Rizal's philosophy of education is centered on the provision of appropriate motivation in order to support the powerful social forces that enable education to be successful, to instill in young people an intrinsic desire to develop their intelligence, and to grant them eternal life.

No resource is more valuable than today's young when it comes to shaping the future of the world; this is the generation that will handle future crises, run nations, develop legislation, invent, and either uphold or undermine democracies and justice systems. Critical abilities including decision-making, mental flexibility, problem-solving, and logical thinking are developed through education. In such situations, our ability to make rational and informed decisions comes from how educated and self-aware are we. It teaches individuals how to be better citizens, how to land a better-paying job, and how to distinguish between right and wrong. Education both teaches us the value of perseverance and aids in our personal growth. Thus, by being aware of and abiding by rights, rules, and regulations, we can help to create a better society in which to live.

I draw the conclusion that it has been established that a nation's development is mostly dependent on its people and its resources. However, the ability of the people to use the limited resources effectively in order to accomplish a rapid rate of development and innovations breakthroughs depends solely on them. Education is in charge of molding a person, just as individuals are most important in determining the status of a nation. Therefore, education is the foundation of every nation since it fosters a variety of skills, beliefs, and awareness while also being a key factor in technological advancements. A nation's GDP will expand more quickly and its unemployment rate will be lower if it has a higher literacy rate. Currently, nations deal with a number of problems such as terrorism, discrimination, global warming, poverty, and gender inequality. Everyone receiving proper knowledge would help to solve these issues at their source and create a better nation with higher living standards. It has the power to change a person and give them new eyes with which to view their lives. The awareness that education fosters is crucial for maintaining good health and productivity. It offers solutions to significant issues and has the capacity to eventually get rid of all the worries that people now have. Learning how to transform information into knowledge is crucial for problem-solving and the growth of analytical abilities. A well-educated person is healthy, has a wide range of talents, and is aware of what is best for both the individual and the larger community. Proper education eradicates crime rates, poverty, unemployment, diseases, etc. from the country. Education is everything!

Team, F. G. (n.d.). The Youth is the hope of our future: Youth are the future of tomorrow-fairgaze [1 min read]. Fairgaze. Retrieved February 3, 2023, from https://fairgaze.com/fgnews/the-youth-is-the-hope-of-our-future_274751.html

[theofficersacademy]

                                         Ashe   Artur   Roy   Caeda                                                                      Andrei   Eir   Elice   Python   Leif                                                                           Patty   Est   Byleth (F)   Corrin (F)

TEAM TAG: #KEguard2023 VILLAGE HEALTH: 57% PUBLIC OPINION: ASSIMILATED [100/100]

WEEK 1 LOG

HP lost during village defense: 37% HP lost from poisoning: 6%

Food Needs Met: Yes (Consumed: 10lbs of meat)

Foraging Yield: 1x Flowers, 2x Herbs, 1x Mushrooms, 2x Berries, 3x Poisonous Mushrooms/Berries

Remaining Meat: 4lbs (Expiration: 1 week)

Timber: 22 bundles

Dream Crystals: 12 Red, 4 Yellow, 2 Green, 4 White

Public Opinion has improved tremendously. In fact, the villagers have taken it upon themselves to get rid of all your old clothes and weapons to help you embrace your new life in Rusalka. They’ve given you newly-woven hemp tunics and shoes to make up for it. The fabric dye is quite stunning. [Tasks will no longer grant points toward improving public opinion]

Perth has decided to anoint Caeda as the spokesperson for your faction. He explains that usually the village takes in one or two people at a time, which doesn’t necessitate choosing a spokesperson. With your number though, he believes that this will be the best way to ensure that your needs are met. [Caeda can no longer leave the public eye]

You will now be tasked with feeding the rest of the village. You must gather 30lbs of meat, or 60lbs/baskets of vegetables/mushrooms/berries/nuts.

You can freely patrol the houses where your companions sleep.

Tieve saw you all playing cards one night and begs you to let her join next time. She has 5 young children to entertain.

Though you wouldn’t have known were it not for Tieve’s gossip, Balfor quite enjoyed watching Byleth and Andrei struggle with his birds. He formally introduces you to Aislinn and Enyd, a mating pair and his most reliable “friends.”

As a thank-you to your group for helping out around the village, a woman named Mairenn gives you a tiny dog collar made of leather. The name on it is far too faded to read, and it looks like it may have been buried at one point. She says it’s one of the first things she found when she arrived in the village, and she’s felt compelled to hold onto it ever since. You’re not sure what you’re supposed to do with it, but you understand this as a gesture of good will, so you humbly accept.

The villagers are more than happy to share their histories with you now. Tieve, for example, was once a noble’s mistress in the Alliance, but fell into disgrace and had nowhere else to go. Rusalka was like an oasis in a desert, and she’s been happy here ever since. Perth was once a professor at Fhirdiad’s School of Sorcery, but left his position in search of new horizons. No one knows much about Balfor’s past, only that he bears wicked scars across his back.

A young man named Lonán catches sight of the dream crystals you managed to acquire by fending off the nightmares in the village and excitedly asks you for them. He’s read about ancient technology that uses such energy, he says, and wants to test what he’s learned. [You will now be able to use Dream Crystals to create better defenses for the village]

No one knows anything about the nightmares that attacked the village. It’s never happened before.

NPCs of Note

Perth - More or less Rusalka’s village chief, though he and all the others insist that they operate as a true democracy. Middle-aged but still sharp. He has accepted your group as one of his own now, and keeps Caeda close by.

Tieve - One of your first introductions to the village when you first arrived, she’s a busybody who has to know everything about everyone. She tried to convince you that there was no better place to live than Rusalka. After all, “wouldn’t you want to live in a perfect world?” You know now that she was referring to the potent dreams here, but oddly you never see her sleep.

Balfor - A young stablehand, he tends to the monstrous birds that the village keeps around for self-defense. Doesn’t talk much and seems a bit off. Has accepted your presence around the stables, at least.

Lonán - A young man whose face is usually hidden within a cowl and hood. He’s excitable and energetic, and will gladly make use of your Dream Crystals.

Tasks [Resource Key]

Hunt in the forest outside of the village [Max 3 muses per thread] - Receive small game (1lb) every 1 post - Every 5 posts, you will have the chance for a large game roulette (deer, boar, bear, wolf, giant bird), which will grant additional resources if successfully hunted. WARNING: Muses can be injured during this. - Characters with bow rank > C grant the team greater chance of taking down large game. - Every 1lb of meat subtracts 5 points from public opinion - Requires at least 1 makeshift bow per thread participant

Forage in the forest outside of the village [Max 4 muses per thread] - Receive 1 basket of resource (berries, nuts, mushrooms, herbs, flowers) per post [Can now choose which type] - Villagers will inform you of poisonous plants

Harvest the fields [Max 2 muses per thread] - Grants 2lbs of vegetables for every 1 post

Taming giant birds [Max 2 muses per thread] - Success related to muse’s Flying rank. E = 50% chance of being injured per post. D = 40% chance. C = 30% chance. B = 20% chance. A = 10% chance. S = 0% - Benefit to team: Can be used to fly around or defend the village

Assist with chopping wood [Max 2 muses per thread] - Gains 1 bundle of timber per post - Axe rank grants multiplier for thread [C or higher = 2x yield]

Wall/Gate Repairs [Max 4 muses per thread] - Trades 1 bundle of timber per post - Restores village health

Dry herbs [Max 2 muses per thread] - Trades 1 basket of herbs for 1 medicine per post

Prepare meat [Max 2 muses per thread] - Trades 1 lb of meat for 1 lb of jerky per post - Every post subtracts 1 point from public opinion

Patrol your companions’ quarters [Max 4 muses per thread] - Restore 1HP to houses per post

Explore outside of the village [Max 3 muses per thread] - Chance to gain information every 5 posts - Success related to muse’s Authority rank. E = 50% chance of being discovered. D = 40% chance. C = 30% chance. B = 20% chance. A = 10% chance. S = 0% - Benefit to team: the deeper you go, the more likely you might uncover some village secrets no one wants to tell you about. Maybe even where your weapons went - Every discovery subtracts -5 from public opinion. Caeda cannot participate in this task

Craft makeshift weapon [Max 2 muses per thread] - Spend 1 bundle of timber to create 1 weapon of choice every 5 posts - Chance of losing public opinion influenced by muse’s Authority rank. E = 50% chance of losing -2 points of public opinion per weapon. D = 40% chance. C = 30% chance. B = 20% chance. A = 10% chance. S = 0%

[iamverity]

This could be described as depressing. But for this. Political researchers have found that independents and soft partisans (voters who lean Democrat or Republican) are woefully under-informed regarding Donald Trump’s criminal indictments and trials. They’ve also found that once those voters learn of the charges behind those trials they are much less likely to support his re-election. Worse in some ways, these voters don’t see Trump’s actions including those on January 6 as an attack on our democracy. In fact, those voters aren’t even clear on what a democracy is.

When doing market or political campaign research organizations use polling to learn how people feel or what they believe about a topic. In order to get a better understanding of why they feel or believe as they do they’ll hold what are called “focus groups”. In a focus group just as in polling the organization tries to select participants that fit their needs. In political polling that is usually registered voters or when an election is close what are defined as likely voters, often those who vote nearly every election. Polling organizations usually try to find a mix of genders, ages, and economic groups that is also representative of the overall population of the area they’re researching, congressional district or state for example. For a focus group the organization may choose from a narrower group in order to better understand how that group thinks and why they might vote a particular way.

In focus groups organized for Navigator Research in three swing states, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada, voters who lean Republican or consider themselves independent generally were very disturbed to learn that Trump had been indicted on 91 charges over 4 criminal trials. Participants were also concerned with Trump’s claims of immunity for anything done by the president including the use of the military to murder opponents.

Even some voters who lean Republican cited Fox News as part of the problem regarding the political divide in the country, misinformation, and distrust of media. Unfortunately that has caused many voters to distrust main stream media entirely rather than find more reliable sources. It’s also frightening that the voters participating in the focus groups didn’t have a common understanding of political violence or recognize it beyond the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

The only positive point I see is that for the most part participants in the focus group and hopefully others like them were less likely to support Trump upon learning more about the indictments and criminal trials as well as his claims of total immunity.

It is important to remember that Trump lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020. He only won in 2016 because of a relatively small number of votes in a handful of swing states giving him the edge in the electoral college. It will only take a small number of independents and soft Republicans voting for Biden to insure that Trump never again has political power in the United States. I believe in the peaceful transfer of power through free and fair elections I hold out hope people will reach out to family and friends to insure that they are informed about they recognize the dangers of re-electing Trump. If not I don’t think we will get rid of him. Thank you http://blue-in-guadalupe.blogspot.com/ for letting me borrow your ideas. It made me feel somewhat optimistic.

[gascon-en-exil]

The Unintentionally Hilarious Echoes of Fire Emblem: Three Houses Discourse in Triangle Strategy

I've been meaning to put this idea to paper (screen?) for about a week now, and with my completion of the final route of Triangle Strategy I at last feel fully equipped to do so. I did think about turning this into a video, but I've got a less niche idea for a thesis that I think would play better on YouTube and that I intend to start working on soon.

I very much doubt that TS's developers even caught so much of a whiff of FE16 online discourse, especially the parts outside Japanese fandom, i.e. all the parts I'm familiar with. Nevertheless, even if unintended the number and degree of parallels between TS and the way fandom has responded to Three Houses in the last two and a half years are so absurd that I just had to compile them.

Be forewarned that this post contains major spoilers for both games. I expect that most people interested in this topic are coming from FE16 discourse first and TS second (or not at all), so I'll be putting more effort into contextualizing elements of TS.

Political Realism! (But Also Democracy is Still Not a Thing)

The game as a whole is more concerned with depicting the political systems of its setting. We get to see a peacetime meritocracy in action in Aesfrost as well as a theocracy that's actually run like a theocracy in Hyzante. Aesfrost boasts of allowing anyone to succeed on their own merits, but it's plagued by poverty and nepotism/cronyism. Hyzante has universal health care but actively excludes or punishes nonbelievers and is looking to expand its faith. The third nation of Glenbrook is a standard pseudo-medieval European fantasy kingdom, albeit with a corrupt group of nobles who want their kings to be ornaments and tend to get treacherous and homicidal when they aren't.

Additionally, while Hyzante takes the expected theocratic approach of wanting to destroy knowledge that it considers dangerous - in this case, Aesfrost's Archives which are the source of its advances in technology - the alternative is implicitly not all that better because it results in Aesfrost essentially bringing Norzelia into the age of gunpowder - which it does even in the golden route. TS has a lot to say about how beneficial technologies can be turned into instruments of warfare, actually, with the concept behind Aesfrost's giant cannon stemming initially from a man who invented bombs to aid in mining. Echoes of the dangerous technologies Rhea banned, perhaps?

Norzelia overall is your boilerplate fantasy of autocrats being autocrats, and this remains the case in all instances including its endings, but TS's central marketing image and core non-combat gameplay mechanic is the Scales of Conviction, a set of scales that burns with magical fire that looks pretty in the trailers and...that's basically it, really. In-game the Scales represent the simple majority of the seven characters to whom protagonist Serenoa awards the right to vote near the start of the game. The voting population is made up of his best friend, his fiancée, and five servants of varying allegiances and job descriptions.

In the leadup to the game's golden ending, Serenoa discards the Scales entirely and makes an executive decision about what to do next, and this is praised by the voting characters as him learning to be a true leader.

Moral Greyness! (But Only in Some Places)

The player is made to feel much more morally grey than Byleth ever is in FE16, with you being allowed to make some highly questionable choices that other characters will criticize you for, or even fight you over and then leave your party when it comes to the final vote. TS pulls far fewer punches in the name of keeping the player comfortable, giving all of its endings (even the golden one, to a degree) unsatisfying edges and even seeing Serenoa sacrifice himself in one of them. Crimson Flower wishes it went that hard. Furthermore, all story splits are predicated on immediately relevant plot points instead of (playable) character sympathy.

As regards major supporting characters, Frederica picks up the Daenerys-esque torch of lead female character with unusually-colored hair whose stated goal is liberation. However, even though her goal of freeing her enslaved people is a righteous one, it also abandons the rest of the continent to constant warfare without anyone to guide it or mediate over its most valuable resource. It is, essentially, the most selfish, and even happens to be the one ending where Serenoa, Frederica's fiancé via arranged marriage, dies. The two of them are even more romantic in her route than in the golden one...but they don't get a happy ending. Benedict meanwhile is as ruthless as Hubert but doesn't wear his evil on his sleeve, and while he's also selfishly motivated to conquer a continent to satisfy his feelings toward a woman who'll never return them (because she's dead), the person he manipulates into continental rule ends up resenting him over his actions. TS as such paints the motivations of characters much like Edelgard and Hubert as negative, even if they're sympathetic or the right thing to do in a vacuum.

Conversely however, you know all that "you wouldn't criticize Edelgard if she were a man!" business? Yep, that's Gustadolph to a tee; no one needs to criticize him when the game does a fine enough job on its own. He doesn't get a sympathetic backstory or motivation, he's called out repeatedly for his hypocrisy and sociopathic treatment of his relatives and underlings as mere pawns, and his touted meritocratic "freedom" is exposed as a flimsy justification to amass more power for himself. In a deeply ironic moment, after killing one of his most loyal followers Gustadolph is denounced as a "feral beast" who needs to be put down. On a metanarrative level, Gustadolph is the antithesis of Edelgard; where she gets all the story prominence and multiple death scenes and a heavily telegraphed romance with the self-insert, Gustadolph never gets to be a final boss even though he's killed in two routes - and in the route where you ally with him he's kept at arm's length and reduced to supporting NPC status.

Idore, similarly, is Rhea stripped of any nuance or sympathetic qualities, and actually is the theocratic tyrant fandom likes to think Rhea is. He rules over the aforementioned Hyzante, which created a secret history for its religion and also engages in the kinds of magical experiments associated with the Agarthans in FE16 - among them weapons powered by human corpses, a bit like Demonic Beasts. The secret history of the Goddess of Salt makes Rhea's secret history positively benevolent by comparison: she wants to protect herself and her remaining family from humans, while he wants to lord power over other humans and maintain a monopoly on the continent's most valuable natural resource. Idore nominally takes orders from the hierophant, highest of the Saintly Seven who is always hidden behind a curtain...but in two endings it's revealed that the hierophant is a actually a robot, a voiceless female automaton used only as a puppet to legitimize Idore's absolute rule. This not only doubles as a hilarious facsimile of Byleth - voiceless and mindless but possessed of unmatched magical power, treated as always female by the fandom, a puppet at the hands of a much more powerful master (the player) - but puts me in mind of how Rhea's detractors think she handles Byleth. Also, upon his death Idore is revealed to be an atheist who was disillusioned by the greed and weakness inherent in human nature - in essence, the Fire Emblem thesis statement - and sought to rule forever through immortality magic and his undying puppet. Serenoa and friends even make similar remarks as Edelgard, that only humans can/should rule over humanity, but here it's directed not at a member of another sapient race but at a mindless robot used as a prop by a human.

Cultural Diversity! (Except It's Still Insensitive, Probably)

The Khalidstans would have a field day with this game. TS goes to much greater lengths than FE16 ever bothers to characterize a culture influenced by a non-European one; Hyzante invites direct comparisons to the Golden Age of Islam and to the Abbasid Caliphate (roughly contemporary with medieval Europe), and while the official art is not terribly consistent on the matter almost all of the game's darker-skinned characters hail from there. However...it's also the theocracy with the slavery and the corpse magic and the literal puppet ruler. What's more, the Hyzantians' slaves, the Roselle, are pale-skinned people with pink hair, recalling the FE16 discourse argument that persecution against the Nabateans doesn't really count because they're basically white people. Rosellan aesthetics and culture draw from both indigenous Japanese and Native American sources, and their main story thrust of escaping slavery to reach a mythical promised land obviously suggests parallels to the Jewish people. The Khalidstans and others like them would very likely consider this mishmash of cultural references to be offensive to all parties, and would be appalled that TS prominently features a mostly dark-skinned people enslaving a light-skinned people.

What's more, while online discourse has no issue with criticizing Catholicism (even when it approaches xenophobia), the idea of similarly condemning a fictional theocracy inspired largely by Islam seems rather more fraught for issues of insensitivity and bigotry. That the Roselle are persecuted by the Hyzantians because they know the truth behind the secret history of their Teachings (which is that rock salt exists - yes, really) is a subject so fraught with potential land mines of discourse if applied to real-world subjects that I'm not going to even attempt to touch that one.

On a somewhat unrelated note, one of the main characters is biracial, but unlike Claude Frederica identifies fully with her minority (Rosellan) heritage - much as the Khalidstans wish Claude Khalid would. You wouldn't even know she was half-Aesfrosti except that she still regards her Aesfrosti relatives as such.

Roland's Just as Bad as Dimitri! (Except Not Really on Either Count)

Prince Roland of Glenbrook is, superficially, very similar to Dimitri. They're both blond, lance-wielding princes fulfilling a standard FE lord role who angst over their capacity to rule and get a little too wrapped up in vengeance sometimes. Each of them even goes through a period where they're essentially someone else: the raging, self-destructive "feral" Dimitri of early Part 2, or Roland who has to fake his own death in the midgame and hide behind the mask of his presumed-dead combat instructor/surrogate father figure. (Side note: Maxwell puts one in mind of Jeritza since they're both aloof, powerful warriors who wear domino masks...but Maxwell isn't a serial killer, or in any way mentally disturbed.)

Bad discourse takes on both characters would make them out to be more religious than they are - Dimitri based solely on his kingdom being the Holy Kingdom and on his alliance with Rhea in Crimson Flower, Roland because his ending sees him give up his crown and his kingdom to Hyzante because he believes the people need a higher power to believe in and that Hyzante can make the most people happy. For starters this makes Dimitri appear vastly less religious by comparison, when not even the alleged status quo that is Azure Moon's ending comes anywhere close to "I'm surrendering my authority to a foreign power to allow them to take control and convert the entire continent." If anything Roland's continued hesitancy about taking power, even in the golden route, brings to mind complaints that Dimitri isn't mentally fit to rule in any scenario and should step down - but the golden ending has Serenoa affirm that he does indeed deserve to be king.

Because TS takes the time to show the far-reaching consequences of each ending, we actually get to see that both Roland and Dimitri make valid points when they each condemn the kind of freedom espoused by Gustadolph and Edelgard respectively. In Benedict's ending where Aesfrost's principles spread to the entire continent poverty becomes more common as it's only the wealthy and well-connected who can prosper under the new merit-based system and there are a lack of systems in place to help the less fortunate. Roland becomes a monk tending to the sick and hungry who've been neglected by their rulers, and in this epilogue it's also shown that even with Hyzante's downfall followers of their goddess continue to persist, because you can't get rid of a religion just by taking out a figurehead or two.

Even in his own ending - which many are already saying is the worst of the four, because theocracy - Roland refuses to give into his desire for vengeance when it's time to deal with Gustadolph, as he undergoes a less extreme version of Dimitri's character arc that benefits immensely from the lack of a self-insert. His main source of support comes from his best friend, but there he suffers compared to Dimitri because....

The Game's Not Horny! (At All!)

Are you an anti? Does the irrepressible, unapologetic horniness of Fire Emblem make you deeply uncomfortable? Do you think that Studentleth is grooming and that Three Houses is disgusting for promoting pedophilia and incest and abusive and/or racist ship dynamics? Well, then I've got a game for you, because Triangle Strategy has possibly the driest, most sexless writing I've ever seen outside of anything written by Tolkien. An entire game's worth of innuendo has to be packed into its dancer character, who is appropriately slutty in voice and appearance and disregard for the main character's engagement status and may thus be roundly condemned, and the only other instance of sex is a scene where an obviously evil character who you'll get to kill in a few chapters is fooling around with an unnamed NPC just off-camera. Aside from that...zilch. This game resists horny; it is afraid to be horny. Not even the core romance of Serenoa and Frederica gets anything spicier than something you'd see in a typical Awakening or Fates A support outside of the one route where Serenoa dies, and even there it never amounts to more than the gifting of a treasured memento that becomes tragic one chapter later.

Naturally this dedicated lack of horniness comes with a total absence of queer subtext much less canon queerness, with the possible exception of the dynamic between two women that's basically what Rhea/Catherine would be if Rhea were a young human princess. I assume this would also be unacceptable, because power dynamics or because it's abusive (the knight character is from an enemy nation and killed the princess's brother) or something.

By hilarious juxtaposition, everyone jumped on Serenoa/Roland after the first demo because they're the two young male leads...but then lategame it's revealed that Serenoa is in reality the bastard son of the late king of Glenbrook and therefore Roland's half-brother...and this becomes a plot point in two routes. The reveal of surprise (fanon) incest has stunned the game's small fandom, and I've already seen people blaming the ship on FE fans because we're just so nasty and horny. I meanwhile can't get invested in the pairing even with the gay brocon angle because, as stated, the writing of TS is so dry that it chokes out even the barest hint of eyebrow-raising subtext. It's like a cast full of Claudes.

To sum up, Triangle Strategy is more or less what you'd get if you told the Western fandom of FE16 to rewrite the game, and each argument was decided by simple majority such that it satisfied no one completely. Thus would the scales speak.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation"

The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook’s own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Facebook has a conflicted relationship with this critique. I’m sure they’d rather not be characterized as a brainwashing system that turns good people into monsters, but not when the choice is between “brainwashers” and “con-artists selling garbage to credulous ad execs.”

As FB investor and board member Peter Thiel puts it: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” In other words, the important word in “evil genius” is “genius,” not “evil.”

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1440312271511568393

The accord of tech critics and techbros gives rise to a curious hybrid, aptly named by Maria Farrell: the Prodigal Techbro.

A prodigal techbro is a self-styled wizard of machine-learning/surveillance mind control who has see the error of his ways.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/

This high-tech sorcerer doesn’t disclaim his magical powers — rather, he pledges to use them for good, to fight the evil sorcerers who invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew a fidget-spinner, then let Robert Mercer hijack it to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.

There’s a great name for this critique, criticism that takes its subjects’ claims to genius at face value: criti-hype, coined by Lee Vinsel, describing a discourse that turns critics into “the professional concern trolls of technoculture.”

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

The thing is, Facebook really is terrible — but not because it uses machine learning to brainwash boomers into iodine-guzzling Qnuts. And likewise, there really is a problem with conspiratorial, racist, science-denying, epistemologically chaotic conspiratorialism.

Addressing that problem requires that we understand the direction of the causal arrow — that we understand whether Facebook is the cause or the effect of the crisis, and what role it plays.

“Facebook wizards turned boomers into orcs” is a comforting tale, in that it implies that we need merely to fix Facebook and the orcs will turn back into our cuddly grandparents and get their shots. The reality is a lot gnarlier and, sadly, less comforting.

There’s been a lot written about Facebook’s sell-job to advertisers, but less about the concern over “disinformation.” In a new, excellent longread for Harpers, Joe Bernstein makes the connection between the two:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/

Fundamentally: if we question whether Facebook ads work, we should also question whether the disinformation campaigns that run amok on the platform are any more effective.

Bernstein starts by reminding us of the ad industry’s one indisputable claim to persuasive powers: ad salespeople are really good at convincing ad buyers that ads work.

Think of department store magnate John Wanamaker’s lament that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whoever convinced him that he was only wasting half his ad spend was a true virtuoso of the con.

As Tim Hwang documents brilliantly in his 2020 pamphlet “Subprime Attention Crisis,” ad-tech is even griftier than the traditional ad industry. Ad-tech companies charge advertisers for ads that are never served, or never rendered, or never seen.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

They rig ad auctions, fake their reach numbers, fake their conversions (they also lie to publishers about how much they’ve taken in for serving ads on their pages and short change them by millions).

Bernstein cites Hwang’s work, and says, essentially, shouldn’t this apply to “disinformation?”

If ads don’t work well, then maybe political ads don’t work well. And if regular ads are a swamp of fraudulently inflated reach numbers, wouldn’t that be true of political ads?

Bernstein talks about the history of ads as a political tool, starting with Eisenhower’s 1952 “Answers America” campaign, designed and executed at great expense by Madison Ave giants Ted Bates.

Hannah Arendt, whom no one can accuse of being soft on the consequences of propaganda, was skeptical of this kind of enterprise: “The psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.”

The ad industry ran an ambitious campaign to give scientific credibility to its products. As Jacques Ellul wrote in 1962, propagandists were engaged in “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.”

Appropriating the jargon of behavioral scientists let ad execs “assert audiences, like workers in a Taylorized workplace, need not be persuaded through reason, but could be trained through repetition to adopt the new consumption habits desired by the sellers.” -Zoe Sherman

These “scientific ads” had their own criti-hype attackers, like Vance “Hidden Persuaders” Packard, who admitted that “researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves — or in a sense to exploit the exploiters.”

Packard cites Yale’s John Dollard, a scientific ad consultant, who accused his colleagues of promising advertisers “a mild form of omnipotence,” which was “well received.”

Today’s scientific persuaders aren’t in a much better place than Dollard or Packard. Despite all the talk of political disinformation’s reach, a 2017 study found “sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity” affecting <10% of users.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586

So, how harmful is this? One study estimates “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211

Now, all that said, American politics certainly feel and act differently today than in years previous. The key question: “is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them?”

After all, American politics has always had its “paranoid style,” and the American right has always had a sizable tendency towards unhinged conspiratorialism, from the John Birch Society to Goldwater Republicans.

Social media may not be making more of these yahoos, but rather, making them visible to the wider world, and to each other, allowing them to make common cause and mobilize their adherents (say, to carry tiki torches through Charlottesville in Nazi cosplay).

If that’s true, then elite calls to “fight disinformation” are unlikely to do much, except possibly inflaming things. If “disinformation” is really people finding each other (not infecting each other) labelling their posts as “disinformation” won’t change their minds.

Worse, plans like the Biden admin’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lump 1/6 insurrectionists in with anti-pipeline activists, racial justice campaigners, and animal rights groups.

Whatever new powers we hand over to fight disinformation will be felt most by people without deep-pocketed backers who’ll foot the bill for crack lawyers.

Here’s the key to Bernstein’s argument: “One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age — what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it? — into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities.”

I want to “Yes, and” that.

My 2020 book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism doesn’t dismiss the idea that conspiratorialism is on the rise, nor that tech companies are playing a key role in that rise — but without engaging in criti-hype.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

In my book, I propose that conspiratorialism isn’t a crisis of what people believe so much as how they arrive at their beliefs — it’s an “epistemological crisis.”

We live in a complex society plagued by high-stakes questions none of us can answer on our own.

Do vaccines work? Is oxycontin addictive? Should I wear a mask? Can we fight covid by sanitizing surfaces? Will distance ed make my kind an ignoramus? Should I fly in a 737 Max?

Even if you have the background to answer one of these questions, no one can answer all of them.

Instead, we have a process: neutral expert agencies use truth-seeking procedures to sort of competing claims, showing their work and recusing themselves when they have conflicts, and revising their conclusions in light of new evidence.

It’s pretty clear that this process is breaking down. As companies (led by the tech industry) merge with one another to form monopolies, they hijack their regulators and turn truth-seeking into an auction, where shareholder preferences trump evidence.

This perversion of truth has consequences — take the FDA’s willingness to accept the expensively manufactured evidence of Oxycontin’s safety, a corrupt act that kickstarted the opioid epidemic, which has killed 800,000 Americans to date.

If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones.

As Anna Merlan writes in her excellent Republic of Lies, conspiratorialism feeds on distrust and trauma, and we’ve got plenty of legitimate reasons to experience both.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

Tech was an early adopter of monopolistic tactics — the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the industry’s growth tracked perfectly with the dismantling of antitrust enforcement over the past 40 years.

What’s more, while tech may not persuade people, it is indisputably good at finding them. If you’re an advertiser looking for people who recently looked at fridge reviews, tech finds them for you. If you’re a boomer looking for your old high school chums, it’ll do that too.

Seen in that light, “online radicalization” stops looking like the result of mind control, instead showing itself to be a kind of homecoming — finding the people who share your interests, a common online experience we can all relate to.

I found out about Bernstein’s article from the Techdirt podcast, where he had a fascinating discussion with host Mike Masnick.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210928/12593747652/techdirt-podcast-episode-299-misinformation-about-disinformation.shtml

Towards the end of that discussion, they talked about FB’s Project Amplify, in which the company tweaked its news algorithm to uprank positive stories about Facebook, including stories its own PR department wrote.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

Project Amplify is part of a larger, aggressive image-control effort by the company, which has included shuttering internal transparency portals, providing bad data to researchers, and suing independent auditors who tracked its promises.

I’d always assumed that this truth-suppression and wanton fraud was about hiding how bad the platform’s disinformation problem was.

But listening to Masnick and Bernstein, I suddenly realized there was another explanation.

Maybe Facebook’s aggressive suppression of accurate assessments of disinformation on its platform are driven by a desire to hide how expensive (and profitable) political advertising it depends on is pretty useless.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793470192).jpg

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[uhuh100]

another thing I've seen a lot in pro "ai art" arguments is that it's "bringing art to the people" or similar rhetoric. as if you can't be an artist unless you're Born With The Special Talent and AI Art Is Bringing Freedom To The Masses.

the reality is you can make art with anything. you can draw and write with your finger in dirt or sand. singing, dancing, spoken word, all things anyone can take a shot at doing. and that's disregarding pen and paper, or gluing scraps of things together, or any number of free programs for whatever you can think of to try on any number of devices. there's always a way to make what you want to. all it really takes is the time and effort to learn.

not everyone starts out great at art, yes, but that's because no one starts out great at art. some may start better than others, or have more practice by the same age, and that can be frustrating to see, yes; but no one starts out great at art. they practice. they learn. they put in the time and effort to make what they want to make.

and I think that's what a lot of these ai art techbros don't understand - perhaps out of willful ignorance, or perhaps due to a genuine lack of comprehension, they all seem to forget that time and effort go into gaining and improving skills, and that includes art.

algorithmic generation and similar things can be useful tools and/or supplements for many types of art (look at what inverse kinematics has done for animation for example), but these people maliciously use programs running off of most often stolen art and throw around buzzwords like "AI" and "freedom", and so often attempt to directly compete with or even outright replace actual artists, and it frustrates me to no end seeing this take place.

honestly, as long as you don't go around vstealing anything, don't say you are or are doing something you're not, and put in the work yourself, you're probably fine! but most of what we see online isn't that, and most of the conversation around it is either ai techbros slinging bullshit or people mindlessly saying all ai is bad. there should be a lot more conversation in-depth conversation about it, but there just... isn't.

and frankly, if it was up to democracy, I'm lot 90% sure the vote would be a landslide in favor of not using those "ai art" programs anyways.

if AI art engines were the magic democratizing art tool that enables everyone on earth the power to make whatever they want, then we'd have a conversation, but it objectively isn't that. why are we playing around? why is "Democratizing Artmaking" even part of the discussion when it simply is not doing that even a little

[richiebigjoe]

Those who refuse to learn from history make the same mistakes again and again. And ignorance shouldn't be an excuse to continue on the wrong path. Give honor to whom honor is due and the world will remember you for it.

This is long overdue and we can finally tell generations to come about the man who won Nigeria's freest and best democratic presidential elections in 1993 but was denied his mandate, arrested, mentally bruised, and killed by poisioning in prison because he refused to give up his mandate and give up on Nigeria.

The same hawks who conspired against him are the same people financing and fixing their political associates in government positions today and claiming they love Nigeria more than Nigerians.

MKO Abiola was too big for them, they did all in their power to discredit him, to sabotage his efforts, to dishonor him but Nigerians at the time saw a HOPE for a better Nigeria in him and they massively pitched their tent with him.

For the first time in Nigeria's political history , voters trooped out in their numbers , damned the heat, the rain, and the secret scheming of the then Military government and irrespective of ethnic , religious and social divisions Nigerians spoke with one unanimous voice.

Nigerians voted for MKO Abiola.

There was dancing and jubilation in the air, indeed Nigeria will finally shine to the heavens but alas in that excitment and jubilation the HAWKS were busy plotting and planning to cut short our collective joy, our hope for a New and better Nigeria.

And then came the stab in Julius Caesar's (MKO Abiola) back by some of his own friends who because of greed, fear of Abacha (the Military President at the time) and the opportunity to get rich quickly sold Nigeria's hero out for some thousands of dollars in their bank accounts.

The HAWKS thought his name would be forgotten in no time with his death but again they were mistaken. MKO Abiola became even bigger, respected and well known in death than when he was alive.

He became Nigeria's Ghandi and Mandela all in one.

Soft spoken, generous, brilliant , patriotic and he was one who trully felt the pain of the poor in the Nigerian Society, closer to the poor than to the rich albeit he was rich himself. You will never go to MKO ABIOLA house with tears and hopelessness and leave his house same way. No , he will do all in his power to give you hope and help lighten your burden. This was not done to gain anything in return but he did these good things because he once walked that path of poverty himself early in his life and he clearly understood what it meant to have dreams and how difficult it is to make dreams a reality.

'Past Nigerian Presidents' would rather grant presidential pardon to an Alameisegha (a corrupt ex governor who stole his State's money for himself laundered same with the help of family and friends to Europe) and unintelligently rename UNILAG as Moshood Abiola University without due consultations with key University stakeholders all in a bid to score desperate cheap political points. Their insincerity was too clear even the blind saw through it with eyelids closed.

Nigerians in their numbers clamoured for June 12 to be declared rightly as DEMOCRACY DAY in Nigeria but because of envy ex president Obasanjo refused to heed this popular call instead he brushed it aside and denial continued.

But we (Nigerians) never forgot that day June 12 , 1993. We went to bed clutching our pillows tight and thinking (If only Babangida didn't annull our election and silenced our collective voices Nigeria would have become the Dubai of Africa, our hospitals wouldn't have become death traps that they are today, our educational system would have become one of the best in the world, our government institutions would have functioned well without the cloud of corruption that currently hovers above it's head, our youths wouldn't be so engrossed in internet scam, armed robbery and kidnappings)

Ours was and is a case of a people battered , insulted, disrespected, and brutalised by it's past leaders with the use of force , threats and in some cases inducements to some representatives of the Nigerian people (i.e Nigerian labour Congress at a time)

President Buhari has done what past presidents refused to do even when they knew it was the right thing to do. For this President i salute his courage and guts.

Now he needs to step on toes and put Nigeria back where it rightly belongs. Fight corruption the right way

*How do we (Nigeria and nigerians) correct these ills done us by those and these Hawks?

1. It is by protecting whats left of the sanity in our country and demanding that government work for the people and not the reverse (Nigerians have already given their all to their government anyway and almost nothing's left)

2. Nigerians must begin to look themselves in the mirror and become first the change that they desire (attitudinal change is very important, doing the right things no matter how little or inconsequential it might seem. A drop of water they say ........)

3. We must begin to speak with one voice with the interest and well-being of Nigeria and Nigerians as the priority.

4. We must continue to demand accountabilty from our leaders failure of which we will have only ourselves to blame.

5. We as a people must show more interest in how our country is governed and be on the look out for any form of corruption and report same to the authorities.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo said : No one can fight for Nigerians except Nigerians themselves. They will when the time is right.

Are you ready to fight for your country?

Are you ready to fight for your future?

Are you ready to fight the good fight?

The time is now! Get involved, do your part, speak up more, be concerned. Nigeria belongs to you, help make things right.

God bless Nigeria! 🇳🇬