The Rum Tum Tugger is awful annoying

Joan of Arc in Paintings

Hey real quick, can anyone tell me why i'm still trying to have honest, direct, good-faith discussions with people on the internet in the year of our lord 2026?

bonus ask from someone else:

The reason I'm not sharing the links and articles I'm being sent, nor debating the specific issues people in this post are bringing up, is because none of it matters to the point I'm making. All large organizations, all governments, all world powers, will inevitably try and shape the narrative of world events in their favor. That has always happened, and it always will, and that is why it's so important to take these grand narratives with a grain of salt. I don't believe there are any governments in the world that can claim innocence here, though the largest powers are those most guilty.

This post is not about debating the details of any one specific event. This is me saying, broadly, that in my circles i have noticed an uptick in stories minimizing China's faults and emphasizing their achievements based primarily or even solely on the word of sources i personally find unconvincing. I don't feel the need to wade deeper into those waters other than to remind folks to think critically and question the narratives of large organizations when reading the news.

People have responded to this by delivering unto me an onslaught of questionable "proof" delivered by individuals and organizations I neither know nor trust, many of which take hard line stances that the things China has been criticized for are complete fabrications (something which I do not believe to be the case based on the evidence I've seen and heard from both sides of this discussion). To debate these individual sources, these individual events or the veracity of specific accusations, is to ignore the point that, as the great lasagna lover tells us, you are not immune to propaganda.

the next day i ended up punching someone in the face with a doughnut in my fist because she thought i was being a big fucking buzzkill who tattled to teacher about a harmless game, and, guess what, grabbed my butt. i got icing all over her hair. she complained to teacher...who let everyone know that this was why they weren’t supposed to be playing grabass in the fucking shop.

Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.

The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.

In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.

Word for today: wisdom of repugnance

Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down. 

Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls. 

But wait, there’s more!