tumblurker

A few weeks ago I was at a board game night with some of my old classmates from various mainland European countries. They started talking about how horrible Trump's treatment of immigrants is and how they're so glad to be in Europe where nothing like that is happening right now. I asked them what they thought about the fact that their own governments were complicit in turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave of asylum seekers, and some of them legitimately didn't even know and were surprised to hear that their own governments had enacted policies that caused the deaths of thousands of asylum seekers.

Additional readings:

This post is a few months old now, and the bit about Iceland is now outdated, because Alþingi (the Icelandic parliament) passed the bill approving the detention center for asylum seekers. It will be legal to handcuff and detain children there.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/internationaldevelopment/2024/06/19/fortress-europes-migration-crisis-a-man-made-phenomenon/

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

holy shit.

You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.

Yet Eve is not only Mary’s opposite but also her mirror image—reversed and yet identical. […] Both Eve and Mary were propositioned, even seduced (as certain Rabbinic and Christian texts claimed)—Eve by the serpent and Mary by Gabriel. “Eve,” Tertullian wrote, “believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel.” Both suitors claimed to be angelic messengers—and neither lied, though one of those two angels had fallen from God’s grace. Both Eve and Mary, according to the tradition represented in the Salzburg Missal, were impregnated by their supernatural encounters: Eve by Death and Mary by Life. And both Eve and Mary were promised deification. The serpent promised Eve that she would become like a god, while Gabriel promised Mary that she would become the Theotokos, the God Bearer.

every time I see some bigshot scientist revealed as a fraud my knee-jerk reaction is "hell yeah elisabeth bik got 'em good" AND IM RIGHT

actually beautiful

Did you know that soda machines at restaurants and movie theaters spy on you? That most common new cars now record your sexual preferences and send it to the manufacturer (and also data about anyone who also gets in your car, walks by your car, and maybe happens to be within visual range of your car)? That grocery stores are trying to force customers to download an app to scan barcodes on shelves instead of putting up prices, so the app can scan the phone, decide how much that customer should be squeezed for, and adjust the price? That more and more innocent people are being sent to jail for crimes committed hundreds of miles away because an AI facial recognition algorithm spit their faces out and the cops didn't bother to do the most basic of checks?

Death by spreadsheet is an acceptable degree of separation for most in middle management. They can sleep at night without guilt for what they've done, because the system charitably setup twelve degrees of separation between their choices and the real-world harm. But do not be fooled, their choices set that harm into motion. Without their reckless disregard for human life, the harm would not be done.