Yet, they have huge followings. There are plenty of dudes who happen to be men who serve better examples, but they just happen to identify as men or are assumed to be by default. The models they offer have little to do with their manhood.

As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.

In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.

Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.

FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.

Trust, but verify.

I used to be in the confident in my masculinity category. Then I realized it eas actually the gives no fucks about my masculinity category.

Then I noticed everything that was once manly is now just adult, Also our public officials and law enforcement don’t do any of it throwing their power about willy nilly.

(I grew up in the cold war. It was uncouth to throw power about willy nilly. ☢️)

Now our masculine examples are Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Joe Rogan…

Donald Trump…

A few years back I turned in my man card. I am no man. (Which may mean I could kill the Witch King of Angmar, or maybe MacBeth.)

I relinquish power as toxic. I’ve long deliberated my way to marxism, to naturalist philosophy, to community centered society, to liberty, and to grieving the imminent end of civilization, possibly of our species, due to our hubris.

Obama campaigned on getting past it. ( Hope amd Change ) but then he didn’t. Corporations got their bailouts. OWS was cleared violently with the cameras off. BLM notice law enforcement kill a lot of people. The disposition matrix was a thing. The IWOT went on and on. The mass surveillance state was a thing. The economy was better but 88% of households were in precarity, and a lot of people were homeless.

And then Trump won by the EC.

So Ive been waiting for things to get better for a long, long time. I’ve just stopped expecting the suck to ever reverse, or even ebb.

The Democratic Party are not friends to the people. They get rich being the opposition party and will only do the bare minimum necessary to get you to not vote the monsters back in, which is one of the reasons far-right parties are getting a draw world-wide when the alternative is neoliberalism.

We have to force radical change (the no brainer stuff like social safety nets, massive justice reform, and massive election reform).

The Sword of Damocles is twofold: the revolution of the people, and the wrath of rival dictators. And it’s not to be blunted, but to keep our officials serving the public rather than their own private interests.

🧵⚔

I just use LGBT+ since it was LGBT for a long time (it was GLBT but the Ls earned their place at the front during the AIDS crisis) then it became LGBTQ, then a bunch of other letters were added while the community was recognizing is profound variety before it turned into LGBTQ+

Q+ has a nice ring to it, but since I’m an unusual form of NB, I fit squarely into the catch-all variety of Q.

Welsh?

Wait until automated freight delivery services (from trains and trucks down to little carrier bots) kill about a third of the jobs that exist.

In ten years people would be working less than twelve hours a week, but rich and powerful people will not give up a jot or penny of wealth and power.

You’re thinking of garden hermits who often hang around follies.

And yes, most clerical offices and upper management dudes have them buzzing around them in swarms looking busy.

But having the time and resources to pursue all of them should fit into any lifestyle package.

Oh very nice! Thank you!

Big Phalanx, but yes.

Is that Scorpio superimposed there?

Moon dust being heavily toxic for human inhalation is a plot point in Portal 2.

That is a good assessment. Yes.

In fact, the race between capitalist interests to bypass safety and get operational AGI soonest is entirely about getting that power to be able to use it to hold everyone else hostage.

I remember this was very closely Trump’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. No, we’re fine. It’s not happening.

Then John Hopkins said The virus is infectious within the community

And Trump had a tantrum while Dr. Fauci said time to wear masks. Cloth ones if you don’t have an n95

And Trump ordered all the PPE seized to be given to his friends.

Does anyone else remember this?

My management tricks (which came from being managed) included calling for a 90 minute meeting if I needed 45 minutes, and bring snacks.

Oh and when someone finishes an all day job in half a day, let them goof off for the rest of the day.

But then I believed that whole happy workers are maximally productive workers thing that, well, every serious management study reports.

Courtesy of XKCD, long before we have to contend with unfriendly AI (we have committees of AI-techs working on this problem already) we’ll have to contend with someone like Musk or Bezos determined to own everything and capable of creating an AI-controlled army of killer robots.

We’re not sure how rogue AI is going to manifest. We are sure rogue power-seeking humans exist all the time, and positions of power are commonly filled by them. (That’s the primary argument for election by sortition, or by lottery.)

We’ve just shown in November that Americans can be made to elect a literal Hitler, knowing what he intends to do. And even though the Democrats made some mistakes, they did run a solid campaign. Their losses in the battleground states were by razor thin margins.

One factor is the giant far-right propaganda machine.

The other, as noted by the boring British economist guy (looking… Richard J. Murphy) is that too many people live in precarity for the status quo party (the neoliberal party in whatever country – Democrats here in US, Labor in UK) to draw voters. Essentially, when you’re going to starve under King Log, then King Heron starts looking good.

And we saw this in the elections near November 2024, far-right parties were advancing in the EU. They started going the other way after Trump and MAGA were in power in the US, mask-off and painting a ghastly picture of what a King Heron reign looks like.

The cure for the latter is to go way progressive (e.g. FDR’s New Deal). In this case, go far more progressive than the likes of AOC or Bernie Sanders are offering (the rest of the Democratic party doesn’t like them much).

But the cure for the former is unknown. Not known to me, anyway, and not discussed even on far left media (e.g. Breadtube) possibly because they don’t have answers either. Mind control does work, even if it’s not as beamy and instant as it is in sci-fi. And if we can’t counter it, we’ll have to discover through suffering and death why we don’t use it. And that assumes we have time before one of the other imminent great filters proves unnavigable.

As a kid I knew something was off (I didn’t have the language to call it something) because I couldn’t answer T/F and multiple choice questions honestly due to nuance. I often knew the answer the teacher was expecting but to answer it according to that assessment felt intellectually dishonest.