IBM, 1979

Ad sponsored genocide

x x x

Every day I commute and witness the horrid machine. Why must we live in the future?

They actually made a fucking NYPD Dalek and put it in the subway station that's below time square.

Listening to Biden's press secretary repeatedly say that Israel HAS to "defend itself" makes me wonder if I can bring myself to vote for president.

Not voting for president, or voting for a 3rd party candidate in this electoral college system, goes against everything I believe, but if you don't draw the line at actively funding and supporting genocide, where do you draw it?

My view on the "lesser of two evils" question has always been that, of course, you want less evil.

But this is genocide.

TFW you realize the world has always been dystopian. Unsafe, full of greed and violence. Dystopian movies and books aren't about the future. They're about what is and always has been.

Hulu is now on Disney+. The entirety of Hulu. Everything that was on Hulu is now also available on Disney+.

This opens up the world to the terrifying prospect of opening Disney+ and going to watch Rick and Morty.

Fresh Air

like honestly i am just so goddamn sick of everybody trying to make money off of me. and they don't even fucking give me any of it.

Hm

twitter is apparently in its death spiral rn. doing the logout-refresh dance.

wonder if melon husk finally unplugged the load-bearing mac mini

Maybe it’s just because I’m an old man at heart, but there’s been a troubling trend over the last decade or so.

You can’t just say no to apps anymore.

They constantly pester you to turn on notifications and subscribe to thing, and you can’t say “no” there’s no option for that, just “not now”. Imgur constantly pops up asking me to change what images it’s allowed to access in my phone, apple constantly trying to get me to subscribe to whatever BS it’s got going on, and on my own phone too!

It’s the new salesman who, in this case, literally can’t take “no” for an answer. And I’m tired of dealing with that salesman. I’m tired of being advertised at. I’m tired of all of these companies trying to grab every scrap of engagement from me that I just don’t want to give.

Capitalism's narrative of eternal security

Sometimes I think about people who, in 2023, still make covid the main part of their politics. Like people who legitimately want full lockdowns to have been constant for the past three years. It feels like they're still stuck in 2020, like, looking at their posts, their weird shrinking subreddit, makes me feel strangely nostalgic. There's a point where it goes from a coherent ideology (because I think we understand by now that there's not going to be some magic event to make covid go away) to something closer to "the world is terrible and people suffer, so any happiness is morally wrong".

I feel like there's a deeply conservative trend to want to regulate the world into something completely safe. It goes back to 9/11, both in the very tangible things like the no-fly list, and the narrative people had around it. I don't know this for a fact because it predated my birth, but there were people who wanted to cancel Halloween that year, or asked if there would ever be comedy again, after the attack, which isn't logical, but is the type of thing that makes sense to a traumatized brain. This idea that society must be regulated by an overarching authority to keep everyone safe, the idea that everyone's ability to live their life is secondary to a vague idea of security.

Even the idea that a group is unsafe is the core emotion behind a lot of bigotry. It's a big reason why a lot of people want closed borders, it's why a lot of people want to regulate the rights of trans people, it's created a type of policing that disproportionately hurts poor people, poc, and the homeless, its why mentally ill people have basically no rights in this country. There's this idea that the freedom, and often even the life of marginalized people, is limited by standards of public safety. Even going back to covid, the idea that no harm done by covid was acceptable is based on the idea that harm and death from unemployment, abuse, and mental health issues are acceptable. So much of humanity is more confident that we can abolish nature then that we can abolish capitalism.

We always present safety like it's this trolly problem every society must grapple with, with no easy answer. But once you realize it's the freedom of the marginalized, and the safety (or often just the feeling of safety) of the privileged.

In a way the entire system of capitalism is just forcing people to give up their freedom for safety from things capitalism caused. And when people make fortunes off of making people sell their freedom for safety, they end up really hating when you want to abolish the danger they profit off of, rather than just passively "protecting people" from it.

I don't think I'm wording everything well. But I think it's something to think about. I feel like the prime emotion behind conservativism for the average person isn't hatred but fear. And fear isn't rational, it's why it's hard to use rational arguments for any of this. When someone says something like "we need to regulate trans healthcare to prevent any cis children from being harmed" it's hard to defeat that with pure numbers, statistics are only calming to people who want to be calmed by them, you could mention that it's harming trans people to regulate these, but that doesn't help because their fear narrative is about cishet children having their status as socially conforming taken from them, not about trans people being tangibly harmed. The only real way to refute this line of thinking (especially as it starts to infect our own communities on the left, and not just outside ones) is to break the narrative that there's some amount of nebulose harm that takes away our rights. There's a reason why deaths under capitalism aren't a concern for the type of people who say our society should prioritize safety, it's more about

An airport with strip searches would be safter from terrorism. A world where lockdown was a permanent policy for the rest of the foreseeable future would have less people harmed by illness. A world where people were chemically castrated until marriage would have almost no sexual assault. For the most part we reject these worlds, even if they're safer we've decided that there are reasons why we don't want this level of safety if it means being subject to certain conditions. And we can extend that to more radical things too, we can say that we don't care if the world is safter with cops, we still don't want cops to exist. We can say we don't care if the world is safter with borders, we still don't want borders to exist. We can reject more narratives of fear. And that includes ones we see popping up in our own communities.

God this post was long, and I didn't even mention ecofascists being a thing, or the leftist argument against gun control. Maybe next time.

Strike strike strike strikestrike strike strike strike strikestrike strike strike strike strikestrike strike EVERYBODYYYYYYYY!

When your system incentivizes villainy, you end up with supervillains.

Some more out of context quotes from Amy Poehler’s book, because it is dabomb.com:

“The school called us The Handcuff Girls, which will be my band’s name when I become a rockstar in my mid-sixties”.

“He offered to help and pulled ten loose pills out of his pocket before realizing none of them were painkillers”.

“I like to refer to the transition period of any new job as “finding out where the bathrooms are”.

“She put her hand on Maya’s shoulder and in a thick Spanish accent said, “don’t cry, sexy”.

“Horatio was sweet but fearless. He once walked through a sliding glass door on a dare”.

“No more movies about people’s mouths being sewn onto people’s butts”.

“We look out the windows and see the sky and are reminded of how amazing it is to get in a giant steel bird and not have to die on the trail like our forefathers”.

“Recent movies I have cried to include 21 Jump Street, That’s My Boy, The Taking of Pelham 123 and Jackass 2”.

“Jon Bon Jovi went into his own archives and got out the actual outfit he had worn twenty years before during the Slippery When Wet tour; it still fit. Jon Bon keeps it TIGHT”.

“Sometimes I would fantasize about answering the question “how do you do it?” With quick one word answers; ambivalence. Drugs. Robots”.