Look at this point if I see someone giving a trans/queer coded person shit/hurting them/threatening to hurt them I am going to assume my job is to get as many nearby people to notice and shut that shit down by sheer force of normal people crowding out the couple violent fascist assholes because they can’t do anything to a quickly growing crowd of angry normal people…

…so I am really not interested in judging queer people too hard on any reaction they have right now as a cisgender hetero white dude.

I am so mad, I think I could honestly convince most normal people to intervene with their bodies in a situation like that if there were enough people around, anti-trans beliefs aren’t that popular and most normal people are fucking tired of it and just want politicians to make their lives materially better and the more they hear about rightwing gender bullshit violence thinly veiled as pseudo-science the more creeped out they get about the weird obsessions of the rightwing that motivates these pathetic vessels of hate.

The problem of course, and what we are talking about, is when nobody but a queer coded person and a fascist are around, and I have no grounds to pass any judgement in how queer people choose to respond in that space.

Oh absolutely, and this isn’t a schadenfreude or even ethical thing, this is purely a public safety thing.

These people who have immense material but more importantly ideological power to resist fascism and authoritarianism and yet have been utter cowards need to be shamed and shunned out of places of power and respect in society, or else we will inveitably bring about another era of mass scale violence and suffering like the one we have just ushered in with the Palestinian Genocide and a host of a million other abdications of valuing human life at a basic level.

I am considering getting a graduate degree in science, but one of my first questions to an advisor would be, can and will this institution stand up to an authoritarian leader who challenges the integrity of free speech in the society the university is in?

Actually my first question would be whether the university has ever acquiesed to the cowardice of conflating antisemitism with being against a genocide because it is politically convenient and allowed their students to be arrested for peacefully protesting without using EVERY tool at the universities disposal to resist, no matter how existentially the authoritarian leader threatened the university.

Unfortunately most U.S. universities, even prominent ones that used to claim to be centers of free speech and freedom of thought like Columbia fail at this test in a spectacular fashion and are now complete jokes in my eyes. Anyone who goes there and isn’t lividly angry about this is just telling on themselves for being a naive fool and putting a professional label on themselves that says “I AM WITH STUPID”… or maybe “stupid” is too harsh, how about “I AM WITH THE GENOCIDE DENIERS”?

Even more unfortunately, as someone who was has lived my whole life in the U.S., I can think of no more damning proof that the U.S. is an embarassing backwater nation full of cowardly racists subjugating people far more capable and open minded than them.

No judgement to anyone, but I think pepper spray is a better option here because bigots want you to be a threat which makes resisting hard because resistance can be so easily propagandized as a violent threat.

If you spray someone in the face with pepper spray, well… it is much harder to make the argument you are a violent threat vs. that person was being a fucking creep and making you feel uncomfortable because you were alone with a stranger in a bathroom being accosted about details of your gender and body that have NOTHING to do with them.

It is 2025, I am not going to judge trans people or other vulnerable groups for taking their safety into their own hands, just be mindful of how you do it and consider how you can subvert the toxic attempt to narrativize your actions as evil.

If someone confronts you in a hateful way about your gender like this, maybe you suddenly become afraid for your safety (valid!) and spray them in the face with pepper spray.

When people ask what happens say you became afraid the stranger was trying to hurt you and put your body under threat because they were.

Pathetic losers trying to negotiate with Trump, the upper level faculty of Columbia have already failed by even entering into a conversation with Trump under the guise that the destruction of Academia was an unintended consequence not Literally The Point.

The place of faculty “negotiating” with Trump was showing up with the students in solidarity and getting arrested.

…and before anyone goes into a response like “they are afraid of losing their job”, I get that but there will be no future for anyone in academia in the US if we lose the fight today that we are losing, fight now, it is now or never.

Who the hell in their right mind would want to buy a switch after seeing this?

This does look like a blast

Nice! If you want to keep looking and find some new RTS games/keep up with news in the genre I enjoy this youtuber’s videos

https://youtu.be/xScfcZ28WGc

Operation Harsh Doorstop - I have been missing a moddable big map team based vehicle shooter for… a decade? EA really screwed this space over and for years and years mods like Forgotten Hope 2 and Project Reality stayed on the Battlefield 2 engine because no new alternative came. OHD is that game, and it is free! Flying helicopters in multiplayer is a mental challenge and rush like no other. Still early access and a lot of rough edges, but the core is so good that I have been totally addicted and spent a lot of time helping noobs figure out the game because I like it so much.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

Motor Town: Behind The Wheel - Recently there has been a big increase in multiplayer servers with 20+ people on them, which this game ABSOLUTELY deserves and even more excitingly I have started to see custom race events organically pop up in populated servers which I think will become really popular since Motor Town is a fantastic racing game that just happens to also be a fantastic driving job simulator. It is a blast to organically meet up with some other drivers on a server and do a couple of races together and then go off and do other driving jobs.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/

Out Of Ore - Really I don’t know I hadn’t gotten this game before, I am a geologist and I like big machines, in this game it is like one of those satisfactory/factorio games… except you ACTUALLY mine instead of all the fun bits being abstracted away leaving only the fiddly automation parts. There are a plethora of loaders, excavators and trucks and digging and terraforming land with them is a blast in this game. I haven’t played for super long but it is already a huge recommend for me!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2009350/Out_of_Ore/

You ever try Beyond All Reason?

I am not sure I remember anymore, I have eaten my tail one too many times.

I don’t think this is a direct meaning of the metaphor, though any metaphor of endlessly repeating cycles can be placed in a rhetorical framework where it represents enshittification so I am sure I am not the first person to add or tweak the metaphor with that context.

People have been saying this about the U.S. tech industry for years and the reason is that the rich were mad working in tech here in the U.S. used to be a decent career and so this became the bullshit line given to corporate media by CEOs.

There is literally nothing to it beyond this.

idk but every time I look up I feel like I see one

What most people don’t know about the ouroboros is that every time the creature eats itself it becomes a little bit closer to being a turd (a consequence of its peculiar metabolism) so even though from an inside perspective the system appears to be in a complex mysterious cyclic kind of stasis, from the outside it is just more and more obviously a turd in the shape of a donut.

Hey 'murican here, the other day I punched my friend in the face and started bragging about maybe taking their home from them with violent force and now they are ravaging our friendship by refusing to hang out with me.

What can I do? Threaten my friend with more violence and intolerance?

Thnx ahead of time for any advice.

Very dark times in US

Can you make the algorithm open source that determined it was ok for you to murder Tuvix tho

Elon is a Cowardly Nazi Billionaire, which is somehow astronomically more pathetic than being just a Nazi, which is already one of the most pathetic things you can be…

Social media didn’t break people’s brains, the massive influx of conservative corporate money to distort society and keep existential problems from being fixed until it is too late and push people resort to to impulsive, kneejerk responses because they have been ground down to crumbs… broke people’s brains.

If we didn’t have social media right now and all of this was happening, it would be SO much worse without younger people being able to find news about the Palestinian Genocide or other world news that their country/the rich conservatives around them don’t want them to read.

It is what those in power DID to social media that broke people’s brains and it is why most of us have come here to create a social network not being driven by those interests.

The only way this could be an even remotely scientifically rigorous study is if they randomly selected the people who were going to respond to the AI responses and made sure they were human.

Anybody with half a brain knows just reading reddit comments and not assuming most of them are bots or shills is a hilariously naive act, the fact that “researchers” did the same for a scientific study is embarassing.