Yeah we are at a weird moment where the future of social media is by far and away the most exciting it has ever been in terms of the potential and ease at which federated social networks outside the control of corporations can be set up and yet people have been so burned out from toxically designed corporate social media that most people (understandably) can’t muster up the energy to care.
Social media is transformative, problematic but undeniably transformative. We just have to build it in ways that are healthier for people.
I be he is sad about losing his bet with the Koch brothers that he could successfully complete the portal opening sequence to the gates of hell while he was Senate Majority Leader.
Also far right conservative men are given all the permission in the world to threaten violence whereas many groups of people on the left, and leftism in general are defined by conservatives as inherently dangerous which both makes it practically much more dangerous to own guns and carry them (because you will just got shot by a cop and the cop won't even get in trouble they can just say "they looked dangerous") and also makes a culture of responsible gun ownership way harder to grow because the societal conditions around it are aggressively hostile to leftwing people owning guns.
Listen to the way centrists talk about the threat of violence from the far left and far right in the US, of course there are shitty, dangerous people on the left, but to compare the two as if there were similar amounts of violence coming from both is a ridiculous misstatement of reality.
Horrifically, it is basically the same story with the US border as well. Biden has basically continued all of Trump’s border policies and utterly failed to counter “OMG INVASION AT THE BORDER” rightwing fear mongering with ANY effective narrative or policies.
Of course, Trump would be worse, but something about saying Biden would be better just comes off as really disingenuous to the truth even though it is technically true.
Yes, but you know the cruelest thing isn’t the bullets, the bombs or the artillery. It is setting up a population of over a million purposefully in an impossible situation with nowhere to go, no access to hospitals (because you specifically destroyed them one by one), and no access to electricity, clean water or food.
Imagine having a fish tank full of cool little fish and just deciding you didn’t want it anymore so you unplugged the lights and oxygenator and stuck the aquarium outside your window in the cold. Then you pulled up a comfy chair next to the window and just sat and watched as the fish slowly starved, suffocated and froze to death. This is what Israel is doing to Gaza, except Gaza is full of human beings not fish.
Actually maybe I am being unfair, in this metaphor the IDF would probably put a post it note on the fish tank that said “EVACUATE AREA” which if you think about it really gives the fish the choice to stay or leave.
“Are we the what??? I can’t hear you over the sound of me shooting into a crowd of innocent children with an assault rifle, you are going to have to hold on a sec until I finish then tell me”
So Rockstar workers are being asked to take a major pay cut, significant decrease in quality of life, massively increased chance of death (driving is the most dangerous thing we do by far), and a huge chunk of free time removed from every work day from commuting that could be time spent with family or loved ones….
The main thing holding us back from getting rid of bad cops is qualified immunity.
The main thing holding us back from getting rid of bad cops is refusing to recognize that the institutions of law enforcement in the US are rotten to their core and we’re designed explicitly in the wake of civil rights and labor movements to enforce socio-economic and racial disparities through violence.
Which isn’t to say that you aren’t making a great point about how qualified immunity is a really important part of the problem though.
Yeah I am getting real tired of centrists acting like the training is the solution not the problem.
The “training” is an indoctrination into an ideological system designed to uphold racial and socio-economic disparities through the use of violent force and to act otherwise is to blatantly ignore the history of policing in the United States.
The cop fired at the acorn because he was an idiot and probably wasn’t well trained, but more importantly the cop fired on the acorn because inside his rotten little mind are vivid images of dangerous black men threatening him at every corner and he was sure like a child walking through the dark that the monster was justttt about to jump out at him. This kind of ideology is fundamental to police culture in the US, it cannot be corrected with retraining because it is a basic worldview and causes an incredible amount of violence towards innocent people.
$2.9/trip? What are you spending it on? Luxury golden cars with solid gold toilet that arrive every 30 seconds?
Not solid gold no, just crummy normal urinals dressed up in blue and full of prejudice, looking to do violence preferably with their gun, and coasting on that sweeeet overtime.
NYC is so fucked with conservative money and austerity politics, it makes me sad given how many progressive people live there.
Gosh GIMP can really be obtuse and awkward at points, especially in past versions, but GIMP is like an old childhood blanket for me at this point. GIMP has always been there, a handful of keystrokes and clicks away from being installed on any computer I have ever used. Over the years growing up I would use it off and on, and now I just have this weird relationship with it that can’t be summed up easily, like the irrationally sentimental feelings one might have for a bit of tattered cloth.
Everybody tech savvy I know would always just steal photoshop but for me, idk, the fact that GIMP is just freely given out to the world magically transmutes its jank into a beauty that I cannot help but love. It just feels right to make a shitty meme in GIMP.
Also fuck Adobe and subscription models, I don’t even want to steal their shit because it still contributes to the idea that their raster image editing software is the only professional shit in town and everything else is a joke.
Gotta love that one of the most powerful cities on earth with empty luxury apartments rising into a speculative sky above homeless and the precariously homed (one rent raise away from eviction) is so full of rich miserly conservatives that the everybody has to pay to use one of the most efficient collective forms of transport on the planet. It is like charging people to use an escalator, but even dumber because making mass transit free supercharges commerce by putting a couple extra bucks in the pocket of everyone who uses it (to inevitably spend at the coffee shop, or grocery store, or restaurant… economy go brrrr).
Jump those turnstiles fam, the rich are stealing so much from you that you could jump turnstiles all day like an Olympic hurtle jumper and it wouldn’t even begin to settle the score, at this point no amount of money can.
Fun fact, the NYC metro moves more people daily than ALL flights in the entire continental US by a wide margin, I think it is close to twice the amount of people.
Imagine how much innovation and creativity could have come to mobile gaming if we didn’t let shitty exploitive business people turn it into slot machines and abusive drugs.
We had this entirely new type of device get put into every single person’s pocket on earth who could afford one and… it didn’t even meaningfully affect the future of gaming except for making it more toxic and predatory. It is a stunning failure if you take a step back and think about it. Surely even if the big players mucked it up, the narrative we constantly tell and retelll about capitalism is that smaller nimbler companies would step in to the void, make good mobile games and force the genre forward….
…..but nope it’s just a fucking void
There isn’t even really a reliable community of critics and curators to help point players to the best games, which is crazy when everybody with a smartphone is a potential new gamer.
Yeah we are at a weird moment where the future of social media is by far and away the most exciting it has ever been in terms of the potential and ease at which federated social networks outside the control of corporations can be set up and yet people have been so burned out from toxically designed corporate social media that most people (understandably) can’t muster up the energy to care.
Social media is transformative, problematic but undeniably transformative. We just have to build it in ways that are healthier for people.