PhilipTheBucket

joined 2 weeks ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 1 points 4 hours ago

The sh.itjust.works one was only active for a short time and stopped getting posts months ago, I mean maybe it is fine to do a sticky post transition but I feel like it's a little different from a non-RSS community where you'll have people showing up wanting to post or getting confused when they can't find something that used to be there or etc.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 9 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

You want irony? I was curious about the context of OP's post and went looking at dessalines's profile, and got distracted before I accomplished the mission because I immediately found:

Murderers don’t get pardoned because other people committed murder.

Dude... pardoning or outright supporting literal murderers because of what someone else did is the entirety of the .ml worldview as far as I can tell.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 7 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I had never heard this, do you have a place I can read more?

Stalin hated communism too, though, he is a world champion at executing communists. He probably executed more communists than anyone else in history (including German communists who fled from Hitler, and also helped Hitler find and execute German communists in Germany before the war even started for some reason). He basically just wanted to be in charge, as far as I can tell, he didn't really like the whole "workers control the means of production" thing and while I don't know much about his early thoughts on it I don't see a whole lot of economic justice in anything he did while he was in power. I'm not an expert but I feel like he and Hitler would have gotten along fine from his side.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 9 points 5 hours ago

Oh, yeah, you are completely correct in terms of it being sadly hilarious that he's trying so hard to tightly control the narrative on lemmy.ml as if that horse hasn't already left the barn, found a new barn to be a part of, met a lady horse, had some foals, and retired to a nice pleasant place beside a lake where he can look back on his life of service.

Guy: Everyone's been exposed to liberals at this point. The people who are susceptible to being convinced, have been, and the ones who are resistant to the libs are still around and probably planning to stay. You can relax and just go back to making nice non-political counterculture subs and periodically talking about how awesome North Korea is or spilling the beans that American cops are racist sometimes.

See also: https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 23 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (12 children)
  1. It is relevant that the USSR took a look at what the Nazis were doing and said, "All in brother, let's split Poland and shake hands in the middle," and only turned on them once the Nazis broke the alliance from their side.
  2. Is is hugely instructive to look at the differing responses of different levels and segments of "The West." US industry (and a lot of the press)? Sure let's genocide sounds good. Communist USSR leadership? Sure let's genocide sounds good (as mentioned). Most US people? Eh, who cares, it's not our problem. Faux-democratic racist US and British government? FUCK THAT LET'S MESS EM UP ARM THE BOMBERS. Hitler was genuinely very surprised that Britain and the US at the highest levels didn't want to be friends with him, because he bought the same kind of simplistic thinking that the .ml people do, that the US is capitalist and corrupt and all they care about is money and their own safety and they're basically fascist at heart. Sure, that's true of some segments. Not all of them, though, and there are some important ones and important situations that matter where it is not.
  3. In fairness to dessalines and semi-agreeing with part of his point here, one of those segments which is okay with fascism is low- and mid-level law enforcement. There were massive fascist plots in the US which were more or less ignored by the feds, causing nothing even resembling a red scare, while they were scrutinizing imaginary communists for any trace of rebellion and ignoring obvious actual plans for armed rebellion by American Nazis. "Prequel" by Rachel Maddow talks about it.
[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 2 points 6 hours ago

What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?

When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 5 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Guy at work was obviously a piece of shit, he was some sort of management consultant. He went from walking in my office to tell me what the new deal was, to getting all outraged on my behalf that "they" would try to give me such a raw deal, said I was 100% right, it was bullshit, he was going to set it straight for me, don't worry.

Like dude... I heard what you said in the first half. I was here. It was literally like three minutes ago.

 

Russia conducted a large-scale strike on Ukraine on the night of 20-21 July using drones and cruise and ballistic missiles, causing fires in four Kyiv's districts. Early reports indicate that one person has been killed and two injured.

Source: Tymur Tkachenko, Head of Kyiv City Military Administration; Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko; Ukraine's Air Force

Quote: "The attack caused a fire on the roof of a non-residential building in the Darnytskyi district. Further information is being gathered."

Updated: As of 04:00, Tkachenko reported that fires had occurred on the roof of a high-rise building and a non-residential building in the Darnytskyi district. A supermarket also caught fire.

A residential building caught fire in the Shevchenkivskyi district. Balconies at another address are also burning.

A fire in a shopping arcade was recorded in the Dniprovskyi district and debris fell on the grounds of a kindergarten.

A non-residential building caught fire in the Solomianskyi district.

Klitschko said medical teams had been dispatched to the Darnytskyi, Solomianskyi and Dniprovskyi districts.

Updated: The entrance to the Lukianivska metro station was damaged in the Russian attack. People were using it as a shelter during the large-scale Russian strike. Early reports indicate that there were no casualties.

At 04:39, Tkachenko reported one fatality.

"A man has been hospitalised with multiple injuries in the Darnytskyi district," he added.

The city authorities urged residents not to leave shelters, as Russia continued its attack.

Updated: As of 05:30, the number of injured has increased to two.

"One person was injured in the Shevchenkivskyi district, where a fire broke out on the first and second floors of a residential building. Medical treatment was provided at the scene," Klitschko said.

Updated:

Ukraine's Air Force warned that several Tu-95 strategic bombers had taken off from Olenya air base in Russia's Murmansk Oblast.At 02:12 on 21 July, the Air Force reported that Kalibr cruise missiles had been launched from the Black Sea.Air-raid warnings were issued in all oblasts three times overnight due to the take-off of MiG-31K jets. They carry Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic aeroballistic missiles.On the evening of 20 July, an air-raid warning was issued in Kyiv and several oblasts due to a Russian drone attack. Air defence systems were responding to Russian targets.

Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 6 points 7 hours ago

Yeah bo

I know my share of history
How hard it is to be free
From wearing masks that turn to skin
Hiding what you could have been

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 11 points 7 hours ago

Isn't this literally illegal?

I know the rules are dead and nothing matters anymore, but I thought "prices clearly posted and customers charged the posted price" was one of those bedrock FTC things that even someone like Microsoft would get in trouble for flagrantly ignoring.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 38 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (3 children)

Man... it's so weird.

They want to have Friday beers in the office. They want to go to the game together. They want to organize little events after work that I'm semi-obligated to go to. I went to one, reluctantly, and one of the executives more or less made it clear to me that he had been against hiring me in the first place (for understandable reasons).

No I don't like you people, you're pod people, why the fuck do you do this with your lives

Edit: It wasn't just me, either. They all would get excited for sandwiches from this one place, and I went with them one time and they all clearly thought it was a treat, and the sandwich was foul. Just a big stinky wad of toppings and condiments. I never went again, and every so often with some fanfare they would go there again. I literally don't know what's wrong with them.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Next you'll be telling this mod isn't actually an unhinged alcoholic foot fetishist loser or whatever else they accused her of...

(I feel like asking for ideological consistency of the trolls is asking way too much, they're just not operating on that level even)

[–] PhilipTheBucket@quokk.au 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

You broke the code. The calories your body takes in on any given day are by definition like 99% balanced with the calories that go out, no matter what happens. Almost all of what happens to gain or lose weight comes down to what your body decides to do with it, whether to spend it right away and how much to spend at any given time and how much to save. Personally I think this is why intermittent fasting works well: It demonstrates to your body that the food source is 100% predictable on a very set schedule, which means it's probably organized and reliable, which means we don't need to hoard a bunch of extra energy in case one day there is no food.

If the amount going in swings up and down and strong hunger signals get ignored some of the time no matter what, then it's going to decide we're in crisis mode, and ramp way way down on how much energy goes to the organs, general maintenance, building stuff we need, running the brain so you can think and have energy, and instead it's going to just store it all so we can survive. And that's what most people who are trying to lose weight with a specific diet do, and that's why it doesn't work unless you push it all the way to the starvation barrier where your body physically can't expend any less calories, and starts burning the reserves and crossing its fingers. And then, of course, once you start eating again, you gain all the weight back because oh fuck what's going to happen next.

That's not to say you can eat a ton of ice cream every day and just have it be fine. Eating a normal amount of healthy food and exercising will do good for you. But in my opinion if you're trying to lose weight, strictly counting calories doesn't really work because your body can ramp down expenditure of calories way more easily than you can ramp down the intake.

Edit: Oh, also to answer the question: You're suspended in a roughly fart-density atmosphere all the time, so my guess is the weight you lose by farting will be cancelled out by the lower displacement of your new volume without the fart inside you. Basically it's like weighing a balloon: You only get the weight of the plastic, not the air, because the buoyancy of the whole thing cancels out all the weight of the air.

If you were standing on the moon, and farted and then vented the fart out of your space suit, you would lose the weight of the fart, same as weighing a balloon on the moon and getting the weight of the air too because there's no buoyancy to cancel it out.

Edit 2: I guess a balloon is heavier than air, because the air inside it is pressurized and so denser than the air outside, but you get my point I hope.

 

Hey, there are some communities on sh.itjust.works that are supposed to be fed from RSS feeds:

Is it possible to get someone to un-restrict those and then make the !rss@ibbit.at bot a mod? Or else just delete them since they're not getting updated? I reached out to the human mod but I didn't hear anything back.

Also, this I think should be deleted, since it's moved to ibbit.at now:

 

Lead Belly, Wikipedia.

It was a warning — a spoken-word portent of the dangers lurking in plain sight. A call to vigilance. A whispered watchword passed between those who knew the system was not built for them. From churches to courtrooms, ballrooms to drinking fountains, every institution was wired against them.

“Liberty and justice for all” was a hollow mantra, a borrowed line from movie scripts, not a manifest reality. A promise that never crossed the color barrier. A refrain as empty as the bridge of a vapid pop song, sung past the millions it excluded. The very same who weren’t included in the declaration that claimed that all men were created equal and who were barred from the promised unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there [Alabama]—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

The word is short. It bursts from puckered lips and explodes in a dead-end consonant. It’s a four-letter epithet, one that its user might not even fully comprehend. Its deliberate morphosyntactic rebellion only adds to its iconoclastic aura. It refused to follow the rules and didn’t care whether it was misunderstood and today it challenges those that use it to grapple with its depth and true meaning.

It was in 1938, during the segregated black-and-white days of the American South, that this zeitgeist word was first recorded. Linguistic history was made by a man who carried a thousand songs in his memory from across generations and was himself a product of the nineteenth century. Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, the self-described “musicianer” (to avoid pigeonholing tags like bluesman or folk singer) was first recorded using the word in this context, warning his listeners to be vigilant against a system raised against them. He finishes his song with a warning, a stark reminder to northern blacks that the freedom they believed they possessed was fragile; in the segregationist South, those rights could vanish in an instant. He intones that they best stay ‘woke’.

The song preceding the warning is deceptively cheerful, the kind of tune that might get your foot tapping while your civil rights disappear. It jumps, it swings, it practically begs for a dance floor. You can picture Lead Belly smiling as he plays it, which only adds to its cunning. The genius lies in the bait: rhythm first, truth second. The listener is already halfway to the chorus before the full weight of the message sets in, this charming little ditty is a canary in the coal mine.

“Be careful. Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.” He wasn’t offering travel advice. He was sounding the alarm. The subject of the song? The Scottsboro Boys: nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women in what was, at the time, not so much a miscarriage of justice as it was standard operating procedure. The evidence was flimsy, the trials a farce, and the outrage, when it came at all, was years too late. But such was the legal pageantry of the Jim Crow South, robes, gavels, and a healthy disdain for anything resembling due process. The case would go on to help ignite the civil rights movement and loosely inspire To Kill A Mockingbird, a work of fiction that, ironically, became more widely taught in American schools than the real event ever was. Until, of course, it too was deemed dangerous and became one of the most banned books in America.

Lead Belly, born around 1888, a mere 23 years after slavery was technically abolished, though its spirit hung around like a houseguest who wouldn’t take the hint, became a voice for the voiceless. His music carried the bruises of a people told they were free while being worked, watched, and whipped by other means. He lived a wandering life, not out of whimsy, but because opportunity had a habit of walking right past Black men with guitars. He learned songs the old way, by ear, by heart, by necessity, preserving the history of a people the country had tried very hard to keep illiterate, and thus, conveniently forgettable, without history.

His oeuvre is a pillar of that noble cry from the depths of the Black experience, of knowing that you have to be conscious of the politics of race, class, systemic racism, and the ways that society is stratified and not equal. It was carved from the lived experience of being on the wrong side of every American promise. It was a clarion call for awareness of the steaming pile of racial injustice that the West has been drowning in since the first slave ship hit their shores.

“Woke” was never meant to be a fashion statement, nor a punchline for late-night pundits. It was forged in fire — a warning against complacency, a code of survival in a hostile world, a whispered truth passed hand to hand in places where speaking too loudly could cost you your job, your freedom, your life. And now? It’s been defanged, ridiculed, and repurposed as a laughable tool for the establishment to twist and use as a weapon against the very people who coined it. A tool turned trap.

But here we are.

That once-powerful symbol of resistance has been seized by the very institutions that have spent centuries systematically grinding Black lives into the dirt. The term’s true meaning – an enlightened awareness of the raw, open wound that is America’s racial nightmare – has been hijacked, rebranded, and bastardized by the media, politicians, and every smarmy corporate entity looking to peddle their brand of faux-progressive vacuousness.

White power structures, always ready to neutralize any threat to their dominion, have managed to take “woke” and turn it into a bad word. What was once a rallying cry for justice has been twisted into a political cudgel used to mock and discredit any real attempt to rip the veil off the charade of equality. It’s not just a matter of words, it’s an all out war on language itself. These are the same tricks they’ve been pulling for centuries, using distorted definitions and reworked narratives to keep the oppressed on the back foot.

The message is clear: If you’re Black and you’ve got the audacity to say, “Enough is enough,” you better brace yourself for a full-throttle media blitz designed to slap you back into line. “Woke” isn’t just a word anymore; it’s a weapon in the arsenal of those who would rather keep things as they are. Keep the system in place. Maintain the lie.

The war on the word is real. One must admire Governor Ron DeSantis, a man of such moral fortitude and delicate constitution that he has taken it upon himself to wage battle not against poverty, corruption, or corporate greed, but against a single four-letter word. With all the thunderous pomp of a preacher chasing demons out of a tent revival, he stood tall, or as tall as his platform shoes would allow, and declared with Churchillian solemnity: “We will fight the woke in the legislature. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the businesses. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.”

One would think he was rallying troops at the Somme, not banning Dr. Seuss in suburban Florida. And then, with the air of a man who had just won a duel at dawn, he announced, “Our state is where woke goes to die.” Which is to say, Florida has bravely volunteered to become the final resting place of empathy, historical accuracy, and critical thought, a noble sacrifice indeed. If only all public servants had such vision, such valor, such tireless commitment to the extermination of adjectives. The republic would be saved in no time.

But perhaps the word isn’t dead. Perhaps it’s only been buried alive, waiting to be reclaimed. Not diluted. Not defanged. Reclaimed.

Woke should still mean what it always did — a refusal to sleep through injustice, a refusal to walk blind through a rigged world. But now, we must open our eyes even wider. Because the danger has spread. The systems of domination are no longer content to whisper their intentions, they’re marching proudly through parliaments and prime-time, saluting strongmen and silencing dissent. Expansion of its meaning doesn’t mean dilution. It means depth. Woke must grow to meet the scale of the threat, but never lose sight of its roots.

The cruelty has gone global. In Hungary, in India, in Israel, in Italy, in Turkey, in Russia, in El Salvador, in Argentina and in the United States authoritarians are in power, while in consolidated democracies like France, Germany and Spain they are waiting in the wings for their chance to dismantle decades of hard-fought freedoms. From refugee camps to pride bans, from book bans and even book burnings to surveillance states, the machinery of control is humming louder than ever. Fascism might be wearing a friendlier face, corporate-backed and algorithm-approved, but its boots are just as heavy. And they still land first on the necks of the most vulnerable who then get sent to concentration camps with merch-friendly, tourist-board names like Alligator Alcatraz, where malice is privatized, sanitized, and sold with a Cruella smile.

To be woke today is not to simply repost a tweet or correct someone’s pronouns at brunch. It is to see — really see — the gears turning beneath the spectacle. To understand how the attacks on feminism are connected to the attacks on teachers. How banning history books is connected to banning abortions. How denying Palestinians their humanity is connected to deporting migrants at sea. How billionaires cosplaying as victims is just a distraction from the suffering they bankroll.

Woke is vigilance. Woke is resistance. Woke is knowing the storm is already here and choosing to stand against it, not just for yourself, but for everyone in its path. Being woke isn’t about performative outrage or headline-chasing culture wars. It’s not about manufactured grievances or moral panic over pronouns, casting choices or Happy Holidays. These distractions are meant to trivialize the real fight: your right to vote, your right to exist in freedom, the survival of the planet itself.

While the right derides “wokeness” as someone putting oat milk in their coffee or casting a Black mermaid, real wokeness is about sounding the alarm when protestors are jailed, dissidents are disappeared, elections are rigged, or laws are passed to ban books and criminalize care.

It’s time to pull “woke” out of the mud it’s been dragged through. To scrub off the satire and the sneers and remind people that it was never a joke. It was a lifeline. A warning label. A survival guide written in code. At its core, staying woke means staying alert to the theft of your rights — the right to protest, to learn your history, to love who you love, to exist without fear.

So let the word expand.
Let it rise.
Let it mean Black. Brown. Queer. Poor. Disabled. Undocumented. Defiant.
Let it mean being vigilant against every form of violence that power cloaks in flags, logos, and prayers.
Let it mean choosing the side of the oppressed, even if you’re not one of them, because freedom is a chain that breaks at its weakest link.

Woke was never supposed to be comfortable. It was supposed to keep you up at night.

Lead Belly wasn’t singing about branding or buzzwords. He was warning us. And in this moment, with democracy gasping and the jackboots echoing louder each day, there’s never been a better time to hear his voice. His warning hasn’t changed. The dangers still lurk in plain sight. Best stay woke.

The post The Word That Wouldn’t Die: Awake in the Age of Forgetting appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

 

Operators of the 424th Svarog Battalion of the Unmanned Systems Forces have destroyed an experimental Russian KOP-2 electronic warfare (EW) system on one of the fronts [KOP stands for "Detection and Suppression Complex" in Russian – ed.].

Source: 424th Svarog Battalion

Details: Ukrainian troops stated that this rare and expensive EW system was Russia’s attempt to counter Ukrainian drones.

The KOP-2 scans the radio spectrum across a wide frequency range, detects the channels used by UAVs and attempts to jam them with powerful interference. It is typically deployed to protect high-value military assets, particularly air defence systems.

However, under real combat conditions, the system failed to withstand attacks from Ukrainian drones. The first strike damaged the equipment and the second one destroyed the Russian system completely.

Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!

 

Fark's title was "Women are smarter than men, and it's hurting their employment prospects"

 

Okay so here's what happened.

There is a mod of some AI-generated image forums who has been slinging out bans for "anti-AI trolling" to people who have never participated in their community, apparently more or less at random. Full disclosure, I am one of those people, and I'm confident I have never done any anti-AI trolling.

Apparently the justification for this is that other people are being aggressively hateful to this mod, coming in and being incredibly abusive, transphobic, insulting her for alleged alcoholism and making fake pictures of her and generally just being horrible. Conveniently, one of these people showed up in the thread where we were talking about it, on cue, and started slinging around horribleness which provided a convenient cover for people to say "And THAT's why we have to be really strict with the bans!" type of things. We never really got to the bottom of what the connection was between that and the random bans to other people who were longstanding accounts that didn't seem to be doing any of those things.

Anyway, now another abusive alt of the (now obviously bannned) abusive alt that originally stirred up trouble has made a pitch-perfect effort to inflame divisions and create a balkanization between the "pro AI" people, centered around dbzer0 and blahaj, and "anti AI" people, centered around everywhere else.

This is two identical posts, made to two separate communities which are guaranteed to have totally opposite takes on it based on their different levels of information about the issue, which will then lead everyone to assume that the other community is just being horrible about it on purpose when they draw different conclusions:

(Edit: The troll has now been banned, so I can't link to their posts anymore. Just imagine this post, except made by one of the trolls who are featured in the comments of that post, you can dig in the modlog or in spoiler text of some other comments to see some of what they were saying. Anyway, the troll posted the exact same complaint about being "unfairly" banned both to lemmy.world, where they got tons of sympathy and upvotes, and to dbzer0, where people who were aware of what they were up to gave them derision and downvotes.)

Like I said, if the goal is to create division and heated argument between two opposing "camps," this is pretty much as perfect as you can get it. I expect it to work, at least to a certain amount, to get people embittered towards one another and arguing about the issue impassioned that the other side is wrong and stupid.

I can't find the link right now, but there was someone on reddit who claimed that they used to do this professionally (trying to disrupt online communities so that organized shilling could succeed better there, because the previous coherence that they had had had been replaced by confusion and bickering, and then they could insert bullshit without it being pushed back on as strongly.) It's fascinating. What they described isn't exactly like this, but it definitely sort of rings similar to me. Just to throw that out there.

Also, UniversalMonk is involved, because of course he is.

Edit: Fun with grammar

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