Alex

I would like to emphasize that I agree with all of these tags by the way. My post wasn't aiming to pin all of Europe's grotesque racism on the new elections.

Even here in Iceland, almost nobody has been talking about the fact that some of the far right populist parties have legitimately been talking about wanting to establish detainment camps to keep asylum seekers in.

Portuguese government announces major migrant expulsion plan by ANSA (InfoMigrants).

Never let anyone from Europe feed you the lie that racism and fascism are unique to North America in the 21st century.

should. should pregnant people have sex quietly so their baby doesn't hear?

Absolutely rancid combination of Christian morality with Christian morality.

I'm sad to say that the rise of fascism has been visible in my inbox for years as people become increasingly distrustful of their own bodies and pleasure. you see it in people's paranoia around becoming "porn addicts," their need for reassurance that a 24 year old isn't a predator for dating a 22 year old, their fears that they may have unwittingly committed assault by looking at another child's naked body when they were young, their insistence that consensual sex is impossible for anyone who has had a single drink or smoked a whiff of weed. people, especially young people, are doing a tremendous amount of work for fascism in terms of rigorously policing their own bodies and sexual expression, and they often don't even realize it.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

July 22, 2026 - People around the USA are taking down Flock AI surveillance cameras. [video]

big and small cities all over the US (and one so far in Canada!) are holding events like education sessions, marches, and public lobbying meetings with the local governments and police departments that decide whether to spend taxpayer money on warrantless surveillance. maybe my city and yours can join the nearly 100 places that have already rejected or ended contracts for mass privacy violation cameras.

But any time you wonder wtf the weather is doing- THIS IS NOT NORMAL, NO. THIS IS NOT WHAT IT WAS EVEN TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Companies in the 2020s: That digital copy, which you have paid for, doesn't really belong to you. We're removing it from your library now.

Death of the author just means that you’re focusing on the reader’s interpretation of the work, not the author’s intention. It can also ignore the author’s history/beliefs, yes, and you can absolutely critique that, but that is why it is a literary theory and just ONE way to interact with literature, not the end-all-be-all of literary criticism

so when i encounter the phenomenon i call "baby's first feminism" it's reeeaaally hard for me to be patient. you need to catch the fuck up.

Personal experience and intuition are not everything. Your experiences under patriarchy can be radically different to someone else's experiences under patriarchy, and only from learning how everyone is treated and including everyone in the conversation can we get a full, nuanced picture of the harms of patriarchy.

June 26 2033

As for unavoidable….you understand that the vast majority of people who have ever graduated college throughout history did so without ever once using AI, right? You understand that?

A professor uses AI to generate their lecture outline and slides, because it saves them time; their students then use AI to summarize the lecture, because it's easier than taking notes themselves. The TA, overworked and underpaid, uses AI to generate the class assignments, which the students use AI to answer - and once they're handed in, the TA uses AI to grade them, too. The professor then uses AI to make the final exam, which the students use AI to answer, and which the professor and TA again use AI to grade. The semester ends, and none of the human participants have materially done any work. Who benefits from this? It's not the professor, whose skills begin to atrophy due to cognitive offloading, nor is it the students, who never develop those skills in the first place. And it's certainly not TA, because in a scenario where this level of AI use is normalized - which is what the AI companies want - they've functionally made themselves redundant. If the AI can do a TA's job, then who needs a TA? Come to that, if the AI can do a professor's job, then who needs a professor? And if the AI can do a student's job, then who needs to be a student? Why do any of these people need to be here at all? Why even have a university? To which the tech giants reply: pfft, never mind the ever-mounting financial, environmental, ethical and social costs of AI - isn't using it just easier? Well, yes - in the same way that it's easier to die than live. Death, after all, is a tremendously simplifying affair. You don't need to learn or study or struggle or suffer or love or err or improve or feel or encounter setbacks or wrestle with anything difficult at all when you don't exist - and this, too, ultimately, is the lure of AI: to outsource the fundamental business of being human; which is to say, of living. But as this would make a rather terrible sales pitch, it's presented instead, not just as convenience, but as an exclusive convenience - one whose power is predicated on others being too stupid or moral or Luddite to do likewise. Thus: students are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more quickly progress through their studies, while universities are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more easily manage students. Both groups are told that using AI will help them keep up with their workload while surpassing the competition; that it will free up extra time to do more enjoyable things, and that, the more others use it, the more necessary it becomes to use it yourself. But the implication is still that the traditional professional, social and intellectual systems that AI intends to parasitize will continue to exist - because if they didn't, what would be the point in using AI to cheat at them? The best-case scenario is that life becomes like an Olympics at which everyone is doping - which, as we recently saw with the Enhanced Games, turns out to be a fairly dismal prospect. Counter to the assumption that PEDs would cause the contestants to surpass all previous human limits, only one world record was actually (barely) broken and, in fact, multiple victories were claimed by non-enhanced athletes. In a lesson that AI shills would do well to learn from, it turns out that raw human effort, ingenuity and skill are actually the biggest factors in human success, and that whatever minor advantage you might gain from cheating is annihilated in a context where the whole field is doing it. The worst-case scenario is that we irreparably break several centuries' worth of our most collectively vital institutions, innovations and accomplishments so that a handful of the very worst people on Earth can, briefly, be richer than god. So, no: just because the AI industry has baited a hook for college students with the promise of Finish All Your Assignments Faster And Worse (While Getting Stupider) does not mean you have to swallow it. Use your own brain! Civilization will thank you for it.

and like, personally i tend to tag beyond that. personally, i appreciate when other authors do. it's a great practice. i love tags. but they are not something that is owed and we really need to get off this weird take that it is. it's not, and it's reader's responsibility to assess if they want to take the risk of reading something untagged, and to curate their online experience. and yes, this includes simply not reading things if you are unsure about its contents even at the risk of missing out sometimes.