Yea. It exists and is a terrible idea. Like it's a creepy ideology that rears its head in too many places.

Selective breeding of humans is not and never was a good idea. It comes with forced sterilisation, marriage bans, stigmatisation of characteristics contributing to naturally occuring diversity, supremacist thinking and fascist pseudo-scientific tendencies.

the feeling of not being spied on 24-7

Someone recently told me this anecdote:

I overheard on the train home two middle aged ladies talking about their kids mobilephones.

One was saying how they dragged their teen and their mobile phone to the iphone store so they could setup the location tracker and "quiet mode" (parent phone can completly disable the teens phone), and how their child was upset but they are glad it was done.

The other lady was asking how she to can do the same.

Learn a trade

Bella Ciao

15yo me gets an angry phone call from the dad where I'd scored a weekly long-term babysitting gig after the first or second night: don't think for a second that you're coming back! (I'm paraphrasing here).

I give a one-word reply and he hangs up.

All I did was leave after getting paid without saying bye while they were checking on the kids. (They were asleep). Because I didn't want to be coerced to get a ride like last time.

Took me years to realise they were in the wrong.

My question is: are 2020's kids even gonna be upset?

Qantas used to have a 'u' in it, but they changed their name so now you don't even know!

Twitter is a celebrities' and public persons' playground. As well as organisations. Anyone else is on there either to gain prominence or to follow the prominent accounts. Until there's a suitable fediverse platform that appears as an advantage to those big names, nothing's gonna change on that front. In spite of all the censorship and cancellations.

Instead, it’s thrown out any time an act of war appears to be particularly unfair or evil, often without full context or detail.

I often see news reports being quite careful and describing what appears in detailed evidence documenting murder by the military as 'apparent' war crimes.

I would argue that the credible accusation of war crimes, that is, with evidence available, requires a full investigation and trial full stop. If no trial occurs, and nobody sues for defamation, the papers can say whatever they feel confident enough to say. Except WikiLeaks...

In Australia there was the interesting defamation case recently with a civil court finding that the soldier who brought the defamation case had no case and did in fact commit war crimes in Afghanistan. He has not been charged with a crime. What does this say about impunity for war criminals? In contrast, Australian military whistleblower David McBride had to plead guilty last month for releasing evidence of war crimes and their cover-up by military leadership to a journalist with the state-broadcaster, the ABC. In both cases though, the news organisations publishing the news articles are seen to be in the right by the government and courts. (Although the ABC did get raided just a couple of months after Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, the journalist was not charged.)

Look I'm not saying you're wrong in your assessment of global affairs, but believe me when I say that there is more to life than that. I'd advise you to spend some time each day looking at the world at a different scale than that, for example the life of insects, or the world of classical music or mathematics. Perhaps pick up an interest from your childhood. We're not dead yet! It may also be advisable to see a doctor and tell them about your wanting to spend all your time in bed and your panic attacks while smoking. Hope you feel better.

I'm sorry but no. Using gender-neutral language does not describe gender; using 'they' isn't to misgender, it just leaves the gender unspecified.

You can correctly use 'they' for anyone. If they'd said 'he', now that would've been different...

(Edit: typo)

Lol, what? Australia is a US lackee more than anywhere else. And the CIA was definitely involved in the Whitlam sacking.

Oh yes definitely The Little Prince is a must-read.

That only works for non-newtonian fluids

(edit: spelling)

Ok Marx

😂

I'm not familiar with Bluesky so I don't know the answer to that. But I don't think any entity can just 'take all the celebs & public figures'. They are unlikely to move unless they think it's an advantage to themselves or their organisation.

is your friend alive?

yep.

I am angry at the politicians in the US etc for their continued support of the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

I'm also angry at the Israeli head of state and political machine, who controls the IDF. When I say 'the IDF' I mean of course the military arm of the state of Israel. The Likud charta explicitly states the aim of one Israel 'from the sea to the river' - oh, the irony!

What Hamas has done on Oct 7, even if all stories are to be believed, pales in comparison to what Israel has done to innocent Palestinians - schools, universities, hospitals, aid workers, journalists, etc -before and since. And it was clearly provoked by years of being occupied in an open-air prison. So I'm sorry if I'm not interested in the 'we're only defending our own' shtick.

A two-state solution is only possible if Israel withdraws, stops occupying Palestine and allows it to exercise full sovereignty of its borders, governancet, and defence.

yes.

The US tortures its dissidents. Just look at how they treated War on Terror whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Even the UN special rapporteur on torture spoke up about her treatment. She was driven to attempt suicide in prison multiple times. Including when she refused to cooperate with the secret Grand Jury investigating WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

Julian Assange is about to be buried in a US prison and get a taste of that same medicine. Where are the Guardian outrage-articles on that? Oh, wait, that's right. They threw him under the bus as soon as he'd given them access to the best scoops of the century (US diplomatic cables). The Guardian journos divulged the pass phrase to the unredacted cables in their book giving anyone who could locate the files online access. Cryptome published the unredacted cables before WL did while Assange called the State Department trying to warn them of the bad news. The Guardian then tried to make out like WL had acted irresponsibly in publishing the unredacted cables, when in reality the cat was already out of the bag and WL was doing harm-minimization. The Guardian's blame-shifting makes my blood boil.

The 'Guardian' has no ethics and can't be trusted on anything political imo.

I believe Twitter still has hundreds of millions monthly active users. That's tough competition.

good point, but how active are those 2 Million users on Bluesky counted? Even the daily active user count is said to be 2 orders of magnitude more than Bluesky. That's a lot of people with a very wide range of interests, political leanings and priorities. Most of them have never heard of federated networks and won't be interested unless their favourite celebrity, jounalist, politician or you name it moves to a platform that just so happens to be federated. By all means, build bridges, but I don't have the solutions.

How is that culturally insensitive?

That just seems petty. They both sound like generic German names to me. There even used to be a Kaiser named Fritz. Just recently I was asking someon "was your name James?" reply: "no, Jason". It was a non-issue

Note I would never call it "the free world". That is a cold-war era propaganda term.

As long as their corpse isn't outside your bedroom door you're probably fine.

This is what I would do.

yea, nah.

Edit: Using a word is not the same as refusing to use another word in its place.

Also, how do you even know her preferred pronouns in English? Did you ask her?

Yea, they seem to have a pretty short fuse...

again, gender-neutral wording like they/them don't say anything about gender or her own identity. 'They' does not refer to a third gender. I'm not demanding anything from her. You're the one who brought up using the correct pronouns. So I expect you to be familiar with English grammar.

I think your language-policing is ridiculous. You can't expect someone unfamiliar with a situation to be up-to-date with how to affirm someone's gender correctly. Gender-neutral language functions as a safe fall-back in such situations. You can rightfully expect people to not misgender people. You cannot be rightfully offended at people using gender-neutral language. The only person I'm making demands of currently is you, because you're making this discussion unnecessarily hostile.

You put the someone in a re-education camp

Funny story, I was mistaken for an Israeli patriot today, just because of my accent and what I was wearing. I was reassured, if you like, that the world is not going to ostracise Israel and Israel will keep existing. That was the gist of it anyhow. Of course I have no doubt israel will keep existing, what with all the support of the world's hegemons. What worries me is that Israel will keep existing in its current form: a fascist, genocidal ethnostate. Describing the only armed resistance against occupation permitted by Israel to take hold, as an 'army', creates a false sense of equivalence between Hamas's militants and the IDF with all its powerful tech. To describe what's been going on in Gaza for the past 10 months as a war between two armies simply defending their own people is, well stunning, when faced with all the evidence of the IDF's targeted mass killings of Palestinian civilian lives, as well as their callous disregard for Israeli lives (eg Hannibal directive).

Look it's hard to say if it saved lives in the overall ww2 tally, but surrender to save lives was the rationale of the Generals eg in The Netherlands. They looked at what the Luftwaffe had done to Rotterdam, looked at what weapons they had themselves, considered the prospect of what was going to happen to Utrecht next, and decided that further resistance was futile. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_in_World_War_II#German_occupation

and here I thought it was a parody...

Is it just me or does food taste better when you're hungry?

same.

I'm just saying you're making a big deal out of nothing. Have a good night now.