Like I said, people deserve to know what they’re signing up for, and there need to be well-established boundaries agreed to in advance. I wouldn’t recommend it personally, but different people may choose differently.

And yeah - if someone just isn’t safe to be around, even for reasons they didn’t choose, don’t want and can’t change, then that’s correct, they shouldn’t be around people. Yes, that’s horribly unfair, but existence just sucks. If you have no moral qualms concealing that danger so you can keep exposing people to it in secret… then you’ve just proved my point.

As for the absusers in my life, kindly go fuck yourself.

What I see online? I spent the first twenty years of my life as a target of cluster-B abuse, trust me I know firsthand.

My advice to all people in range is drop everything and fucking run. Things are replaceable. Jobs and friends are replaceable. Your wellbeing isn’t.

It sucks, you didn’t choose it, it’s not fair - I totally get that, believe me. I have ADHD, it’s a bitch, and it can suck for the people around me.

But the thing is, the fact that it’s not your fault doesn’t make you safe to be around. People can be a danger to others completely involuntarily, despite their greatest wish not to be. And yes, that’s completely fucking unfair.

NPD and BPD are both driven by a great sucking vortex of need-for-validation that can never be filled, and that tortures people if left unfed. NPD is when the vortex demands power or status, BPD is when it demands extravagant emotional connection, but they’re the same basic model underneath. It’s as vicious and relentless as any drug addiction, it doesn’t go away, and it will eventually overpower any amount of good intent. When the monkey’s on their back, all bets are off and the nearest available victim will be preyed upon.

I don’t think there’s a safe way to be in a relationship with that - though I suppose with extremely open communication and amazingly well-defined and enforced boundaries, it could be doable. But this is very much a case of informed consent - it would be supremely shitty not to let your partner know the deal.

Goodhart’s law strikes again.

They can’t tune their process for ‘win election’, because that’s only one sample every four years, and it’s a binary value.

So instead they tune it for ‘raise campaign funds’ as a proxy measure for ‘win election’, and that’s vastly more responsive; they can optimise the crap out of that.

This also means that a bunch of influential people are able to skim significant amounts off the top, so they’re not minded to change it. They’re stinking rich so they don’t have to care about the actual political outcome - and the more people are suffering, the more they’ll donate.

The trump win was a massive windfall for the next cycle of fundraising.

There’s also the point that he was continuing to kill thousands of people, on an ongoing basis.

Vigilante justice for someone who killed in the past, bad.

Someone taking down a killer mid-rampage? Hero.

I never used twitter, I tried to use mastodon about a year ago and hated it, I joined bluesky a few weeks back and love it.

Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween. I never found anyone I wanted to follow while sifting through screenfuls of firehose, so I didn’t bother.

Bluesky has nice UX, the posts on Discover are mostly engaging content, there’s a bunch of people i’ve heard of over there, tags are encouraged via feeds, the starter packs are nice and the blocklists are amazing.

Will it enshittify eventually? Sure.

But then you just move on to the next free trial.

It took me a week to find a bunch of lefties, journalists and shitposters on bluesky; whatever comes after it will doubtless be just as quick. They’re a fungible commodity - if I can’t find the same specific set of people on the next one, ehh.

It’s not the unusable firehose that mastodon is, and it’s a lot less fediverse-stanny. (it’s not actually federated yet).

I kind of like it, it feels like the right level of engagement, and there’s a culture of just block the assholes, grownups are talking.

It’s worth a few days to try it out. Nice place.

Amazingly, nobody’s happy that the dems decided to sacrifice the whole country rather than budge on exterminating the Palestinians.

Spoken like a person who isn’t forced to use JIRA

Yelling at voters doesn’t help, neither does educating them.

These things only affect individuals, and there’s hundred of millions of voters out there, in a constantly shifting cohort.

You may as well try to bail out the rising tide with a teacup. You can expend unlimited resources on the task, and you’ll achieve precisely dick.

It doesn’t matter how wrong people are, how stupid people are, or how fucked-up their reactions to things are. You cannot effectively change that at scale, except via constant, persistent social engineering over years or even decades.

If the opposition is offering free pizza, then it doesn’t matter how much healthier and better your free salad really is. Don’t waste your time on trying to convince people, don’t waste your energy on it, don’t waste your emotions on it. People are going to choose the pizza, and you damn well know it.

If you want them to take your offering instead, you need to come up with something that hundreds of millions of people will think is tastier than pizza.

Now sure, you can try and sell people the idea that the pizza guy doesn’t wash his hands after taking a shit. You can put up giant posters of the cockroaches crawling all over the stall, and sure you might make a dent.

But when the alternative looks like a bunch of dry bitter rabbit food to them, no matter how tasty it actually is, you’re fucked.

You need to address the actual concerns of the voters (no matter how stupid), and you need to show them that you’re addressing them, in a way they’ll actually notice and appreciate.

Not ‘ought to’. Will.

What it needs is some angry people who will get up on their hind legs and fight for the working classes. It needs people who are loudly and visibly sick of the status quo, tired of the bullshit and ready to rip the face off anyone who gets in their way.

Not the fucking charity-auction Moira Schitt ghouls schmoozing up to $LARGE_CORPORATION while laughing about the dirty poors, or smirking about how bombing Palestinian children is the only moral choice.

(Seriously, Trump ought to hire Matt Miller and Vedant Patel - they did more to undermine the Dem campaign than anyone else. The optics were an unmitigated disaster.)

“Am I out of touch? No, it’s the voters who are wrong”

M.A.S.H

If you spend the whole time sucking up to fascists, people are just going to cut out the middleman and elect one to run the place.

As a fellow Australian, I don’t understand why you’re surprised.

“Hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil” may be pragmatic, but it doesn’t get people emotionally engaged. It doesn’t get you infectious enthusiasm and passion. It gets you reluctant, dejected compliance, and that simply does not catch fire.

On the other side you have nothing but emotional engagement; god knows it’s not a rational or pragmatic choice there. Trump does nothing but pander to hatred and cruelty and fear and the power fantasies of gullible idiots, and it fucking works. Cheap shallow emotional satisfaction, no matter how stupid an idea it is. You know, like junk food and binge drinking and cigarettes and pokies; things that people know full well are ruining their lives, but they continue to seek them out regardless.

If the dems ever want to win, they will have to make the progressives fall in love with them, and you don’t get that by backing genocide unconditionally, you just don’t.

They didn’t get the oh-god-yes, just a not-no, and that does not equal consent.

Well, Democrats can rest easy knowing that Palestinian children will continue being murdered.

I hope it was worth it.

4k. Give me pixels.

Okay:

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.

Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.

Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).

Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.

Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.

It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.

In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.

Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.

In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.

The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.

Fuck Israel.

NVIDIA RIVA 128

Even when it’s the “most important election ever”, they don’t just pull out all the stops to ensure it’s a shoe-in - they try to finesse it down to a hair, and get away with 99% of the bastardry of the other guy.

Exactly the same thing here in Australia, every single fucking time. And 90% of the time, they lose.

it’s an effective meta for rich people.

being alive