All brown sodas are Coke. Sprite and it’s equivalents were separate at least where I grew up. you ask for a coke and the person taking your order asks “what kind?” and you clarify “Pepsi” or “root beer” or “coke coke”.

I’m not 100% sure if factorio was the first, but the devs at Wube certainly perfected the idea and now there’s a whole market for the “factory game” genre.

it’s a really well done piece. the mirror and sink being so small and crowded with hygiene products; the hand on the wall behind the mirror, making the framing tighter still. it creates a wild sense of claustrophobia on the right side. the left side is slightly more open, but draws our eyes to the picture of the young boy smiling and all the symbolic relevance of that simpler life is contrasted by the claustrophobic present. the expression of the man isn’t necessarily bleak or emotional, just the day to day expression we all wear.

I think we’re used to “man I’m older” pieces explicitly spelling out the thoughts and emotions the artist has with the concept and without that, it’s hard to tell how the man feels about it. that with the framing of everything is what gives that empty discomfort - at least for me.

And this statement makes even more sense when you realize that race isn’t a real, measurable thing, but a social construct to group people with similar physical characteristics into one easily reduced and stereotypical “enemy”. all races are nothing more than social statuses.

(I recognize that in our modern world, after centuries of propagating the social constructs of race, it has sort of become a real thing insofar that we can’t pretend the idea simply never existed. it is impossible to “solve” the issue of race and have a society where benign physical characteristics simply don’t matter in day to day life without addressing the historical oppression and modern inequities of these groupings)

https://youtu.be/FS52QdHNTh8?si=Cr5PW-7FQJimgHbI your post reminded me of this amazing documentary called “The Brainwashing of my Dad” in which the documentarian talks about how Rush Limbaugh and the greater right wing fox news propaganda machine turned a man he once respected and looked up to for his strong character and morals into a barely functioning hatemonger.

Libraries are safe spaces for minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. Books in general spread awareness and raise empathy and can also help struggling young people understand that they are not alone.

That quote isn’t saying people of these communities read or use a public library more than those who aren’t; it’s pointing out that the erasure of public safe spaces and resources affects groups that benefit from their existence more.

All of that doesn’t even mention the content that was likely present in those 500,000 books.

A split keyboard and a good chair improved my desk comfort more than anything else I’ve tried.

I thought the third one was Cookie Crisp

It still grinds my gears that Warner Bros. patented the Nemesis System they used in their shadow of war/Mordor games. I’d love a whole genre of those kinds of games with different settings and themes.

Several cultures throughout history have used base 12 for their numbering! You can count to 12 on one hand by counting the segments of your fingers (excluding the thumb).

Settler-colonizers; not immigrants. These guys did things hundreds of thousands of times worse than the absolute worst actual immigrants do.

I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the final one is the symbol for “five” and it takes 5 strokes to draw. it’d be like drawing a 5 one segment at a time in an eight segment number display as the tally marks.

Side eyes BLM protests, Free Palestine demonstrations and generally most left wing events that are definitely never unjustly broken up by police.

I’m no defender of AI and it just blatantly making up fake stories is ridiculous. However, in the long term, as long as it does eventually get better, I don’t see this period of low to no trust lasting.

Remember how bad autocorrect was when it first rolled out? people would always be complaining about it and cracking jokes about how dumb it is. then it slowly got better and better and now for the most part, everyone just trusts their phones to fix any spelling mistakes they make, as long as it’s close enough.

Madison, the victim, told her story online and was met with the vitriolic, violent hatred you’d expect from a woman pointing out the misogyny of the internet’s favorite tech boy. She shared her story mostly to warn other women what to expect from working there as well as a step in her own healing process.

She never wanted to sue them since they are much wealthier than her and she kind of just wanted to move past that part of her life. Linus Media Group isn’t going to sue her for defamation because even if they can win, as they claim (which I personally have my own doubts, but I’m an outside observer with no legal education), it’s still a very bad look.

Since no parties are bringing litigation to a court, the litigation happens in the court of public opinion.

well, their problem wasn’t exactly because of the color of the suit

I think they were pointing to the media trying to shift the focus to race. “You’re problem isn’t because you’re poor, it’s because of all those nasty people who are different to you”.

Anything to prevent class consciousness and organization.

This is becoming frustrating. We are on the same page that violence is the only answer; I’m only insisting that we understand that the violence has to be done against our fellow humans. It is a tragedy, but one that must be enacted because, as you say, there is no negotiation to be had here.

Denying their humanity weakens the claim of righteousness and, moreso than enabling room for their bad faith bullshit, directly feeds into their bad faith claims of antisemitism as dehumanizing them removes genocide from the argument and all your left with is killing animals/barbarians/evil monsters. I don’t know about you, but that argument is wholly unconvincing to me. You can certainly claim that because they’ve engaged in genocide, that’s why they’ve lost their humanity, but again, it’s an unnecessary mental step that gains us nothing and weakens the argument for deploying violence against them.

For the soldier / PTSD argument, I again disagree. Soldiers kill people. There should be no way around that fact. Dehumanization and making it easier for soldiers to mentally compartmentalize the taking of life is not a good thing and can easily be warped to make soldiers follow any order, regardless of the moral imperative. The soldiers can and should be made to understand that they are committing a traumatic amount of violence and death in order to stop an entire genocide. Violence is a tool and it must be wielded responsibly and with full understanding that the violence is both necessary and just.

Also chill with the faux philosophical ramblings of simulations and video game analogies. I don’t care what you believe outside of this context, but this is a serious issue and talking about “disabl[ing] PvP flags for the middle east” belies that this is the real world (simulated or not) with real, serious consequences. It damages your entire argument and makes you come across like you don’t see the actual human pain and suffering this massacre has caused.

Yeah, I agree with everything you just said, but make no mistake, the monsters committing genocide are still human beings. Denying that blurs the line of the purpose of violence done against them and makes it difficult to understand that we must constantly be vigilant against rhetoric and propaganda that advocates for genocide as it is scarily easy for people to fall into patterns of thinking that can justify genocide.

It is irresponsible to say that, because they are actively committing genocide against a population, they are no longer human beings and that is why they deserve violence. It’s an unnecessary extra step that opens the door for the very same genocidal thinking. They are people who have engaged in genocide with no signs of slowing down or stopping, and for that one reason alone, deserve violence until their threat is quashed. That is enough for me; I see no reason or benefit to dehumanize them to justify righteous violence.

No, they are people. Ignorant, hateful, and actively supporting a genocide, but people nonetheless. My comment was explicitly calling out and criticizing the impulse to dehumanize the “enemy”, real or imagined. Thinking of Zionist Israelis or Nazis as less than human not only perpetuates the mindset that allows these groups to carry out genocide, but at the same time denies how easy it is for average people to fall into such traps.

It leads to thought processes similar to “If you have to be less than human to support a genocide, then obviously what I support can’t be genocide because I am definitely a human.”

And I’m definitely not one of those “oh, we just have to talk to these hateful ignorant perpetuators of genocide because they simply don’t understand why they’re wrong”. I’m of the opinion that violence is absolutely necessary to uphold equality if the situation has been left to get as bad as it has. I’m mostly just railing against the idea that people who support genocide are somehow less human because of that hatred.