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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I don’t support most of the crackdowns on the protests, but it’s silly to think that people are suddenly fascist for wanting state power to crack down on what they BELIEVE is antisemitism. If I believed that the protesters were doing it more out of weird racist shit than concern for Palestinians, I would want them out too. ESPECIALLY now.

    And before you say “well they should know better!” I mean sure, but not everyone has the luxury of spending tons of time analyzing every single piece of news, looking into multiple sources, reading the history of a middle east region the size of New Jersey, etc, etc. What makes it even harder is that Israel and Palestine are ultimately foreign countries, no matter how much of an alliance the U.S has with Isreal, it’s still a country in the middle East.

    Then there is the nuance, Hamas are still terrorists and Netanyahu even supported them until October 7th, Israelies were trying to actively get red of the guy until the 7th, the country was set up by the British have both sides fight and hate eachother forever, real antisemitism is rising all over the world and fascists are trying to take advantage of that and connect it to Israel-Palestine. Then Add media bias and how even video footage can be fake with AI and you have a basically completely out of control situation.



  • One thing I found really interesting and was talking about with someone recently about the Isreal-Palestine situation currently is that unlike with Apartheid South Africa people have a MUCH harder time boycotting corporations involved with Israel than they did during Apartheid, with Globalism many things (such as soap in the US) are basically owned by a few companies operating under multiple labels, so it’s extremely hard to tell if a product is linked to a Zionist company compared to the Apartheid protests where things were both more clearly labeled and also less monopolized.
    An example is: I’m pro-Ukraine. All my go-to soap brands are owned by Unilever, who are still active in Russia. I’m too poor to get handmade soaps from the farmers market, and I need to go scentless because of allergies and convenient because I can’t just spend all my time looking for guilt-free soap.
    So, in regards to Isreal. who does that leave for people to boycott? The US Government, which although tax evasion is a very harshly punished thing, is much more directly and obviously linked to Zionism.



  • Let me guess- if you are American you stopped hanging out with your right-wing neighbors/family? Because for some insane reason, I didn’t. This is 100% what they actually believe. They really think that anything left of Trump is part of the deep state conspiracy, homeschool their kids, think that bringing back “god” in school/state will fix everything, that Trump will save the country, etc, etc. Some of them already know about project 2025 and have greeted it with thunderous applause, the rest of the right will too.
    If you are not American, fuck off. You have no idea how bad the right-wingers really have become






  • You are right that the antivaxxers are just fucking around and finding out, but for scientists learning about how such people react to finding out will be really interesting when the disease inevitably sweeps through Florida schools. Also it’ll be a good model for the loss of herd immunity.
    I’m not opitimistic that Floridians will change, but what I’m really curious about is if their government will decide to do anything when the worst happens. It reminds me about how people were big into crypto and NFTs and stuff because they are unregulated, only to slowly learn that we have regulations for a reason. How many children (who would likely become their own constituents) are Florida republicans willing to sacrifice to earn some political points with crazy people?




  • After the SORA AI reveal today I’m starting to see that luddites have a point. I don’t think we’ll ever have terminator-style scenarios but the amount of damage misinformation and disinformation is doing to our society and now WILL do to our society is proof enough we need to start stepping back. I’ve seen the amazing benefits of AI first hand - new drugs, new treatments, more medical knowledge than ever before, gene sequencing of never before seen organisms. I’ve seen AI help with all those amazing beneficial things.

    But I feel like the bad actors are wining, and winning very hard. Basically everything is unregulated and corporations refuse to take even a modicum of responsibility for anything. The worst thing is knowing that our octogenerian overlords don’t even know how to use a phone. I don’t see why i should continue to be a tech optimist when we all know that things are only going to get worse from here on out. In a post-truth society all we can really do is regress.





  • Yes of course China covered up COVID, however I believe that this actually probably is M. Pneumoniae as it’s famous for spreading in schools amongst children as well as already resistant to many antibiotics because it has no cell wall.
    My one concern is that this could secretly be a human to human form of avian influenza, but there is absolutely no hiding a disease with a mortality rate on par with Ebola (30-50% or 18-30%- as much as Spanish Flu or the black death) for very long at all. COVID has around a 1% mortality rate and there were people posting videos of people dying in the streets on Chinese social media, if it’s avian flue than there will be mass graves on an unheard of scale.