For your and our freedom!

That's horrifying to watch… I almost threw up when I was downloading that video.

The most painful quotes:

-When the Russians took me, I was sent to a technical school where I was subjected to daily false stories about Ukrainians and sometimes even insults. One day, I was called to the principal’s office and when I got there, she had citizenship documents ready for me to sign. I was stunned and disgusted. I had never been more afraid, but I refused to become a Russian citizen.

The principal glowered at me with hatred in her eyes. She berated me for being "stupid." Moments later, I was expelled and sent packing, in a country that I did not know, and that hated who I was.

-After Save Ukraine helped me return home, I needed to get my brother out too. I found him in a new foster family, but he was not the boy I knew. He had been subjected to months of Russian propaganda and manipulation. He was like a puppet, saying things that I knew he did not believe – that Ukraine was run by Nazis, that nobody in Ukraine cared about him and that he had no future unless he became a Russian citizen.

-When I begged him to return home with me, he refused. Hour after hour ticked by as we argued. As I was about to lose hope, he came to his senses and agreed to come home with me. We were lucky. But there are 19,000 kidnapped Ukrainian children still in Russia. The Russian government bombards them with propaganda and abuse to weaken their Ukrainian identity. Many are punished for speaking Ukrainian.

I'm in tears: "... I feel very sad and have no desire to live". Russians' obsession is to break Ukrainians mentally, including children.

Ukraine has handed over to Qatar a list with the names of 561 Ukrainian children who were taken to Russia. This was reported by Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets. ▪️Wait for the return of a group of Ukrainian children home. We are not disclosing details at this time. ▪️ Talking about the return of orphans and children deprived of parental care. Qatar agreed to work on the issue of their return to Ukraine. Preliminarily, there may be more than 3,600 such children. ▪️Qatar agreed to participate in negotiations with Russia on the return of civilians illegally detained by Russia. Lubinets also once again refuted Russian propaganda: there were no direct negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. All negotiations are mediated by Qatar.

Two districts of the region were attacked by the enemy.

In the Vasylkivka hromada of the Synelnykove district, the Russians targeted a residential area with a UAV. A boy, born in 2013, was killed. His parents - a woman, born in 1988, and a man, born in 1986, were injured. A private house was destroyed, another one was damaged

In the Pokrovske hromada of the Nikopol district, a man, born in 1955, was also injured in the enemy attack - he suffered a mine-explosive injury.

And with the destruction, death and atrocities only rising, the silence looks not just hypocritical, but increasingly hostile and deliberate.

They WANT us to die in silence because they got bored with our "trend" and have moved on to the next one. With just as much sincerity in their support for that other cause (none).

It's an either/or binary to them, as if these topics are rivaling fandoms.

“Never Forget” until the new target is those that they disagree with.

Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century, many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. (from Wikipedia)

This is a reaction to paintings like this:

(Tableau I, Piet Mondrian, 1921)

(Champs de Mars: La Tour Rouge by Robert Delaunay, 1911)

But it wasn't just paintings. The nazis also thought architecture was "degenerate". Stuff like this:

(A Bauhaus style building in Chemnitz)

(La Samaritaine department store in Paris by Henri Sauvage (1925–1928)

(Club Moderne, designed by architect Fred F. Willson and built by Frank Wullus in 1937 for John Francisco)

I am showing you because it is important to understand what they were calling "degenerate", and understand that Art in the West had been moving away from representing reality and into specifically NOT doing that for SOME DECADES. They had likely grown up with new styles of architecture that were a radical departure from all that had come before (Nouveau, Deco, Moderne, Modern, Futurism, Bauhaus), ditto with philosophy, paintings, clothing, even gender politics. The Weimar Republic was the centre of the cutting edge of queer rights and that was largely thanks to people like Hirschfeld, basically the first person in the West to say there was nothing particularly wrong with trans people and help them transition and live their lives to the fullest. He also wrote and advocated for the queer community, and kept a huge library (which was burned by nazis in 1933 during one of these sweeps for "degenerate art").

just when you think fascists only hated then-modern architecture, here's what fascist architect Le Corbusier wanted Paris to look like:

much like "trad" types today, they only liked "traditional" art and architecture when it conformed to their imaginary vision of what the past was

The custodial staff leave for a day, everyone notices.

I am not scared of any of that nonsense. The first reason, is that chatGPT isn't a "new technology" at all, both because it is just a scaled-up version of stuff that already existed, and because "technology" implies a thing that does something useful and ChatGPT doesn't appear to do anything useful.

The second reason, is that the people frightened of looking like Luddites assume that because we are all alive, the feared bad outcomes of new technology have never happened, and that is just completely false. New technologies have sometimes had awful impacts upon human quality of life and the environment. Sometimes, unilaterally inferior technologies have replaced superior technologies for economic or other reasons. Almost always new technologies have a mix of positive and negative impacts.

For example, I assume it's someone's job to write the text on the back of a bottle of soap informing me that it will "envelop [my] senses in almond and sandalwood bliss and whisk [me] away to a paradise of clean."

I am extremely optimistic about my future personally in a world where everyone is using AI, because I am using the superior technology.