Do you have any blessed facts laying around? Today was :( need a :)
unlike rabbits, a baby hare can run, fight, or flee almost immediately after birth.
Fresh out of the womb, ready to fuck shit up.
look at his gotdamn attack pose in the 2nd, this man will NOT hesitate
S T A N C E D
I want to talk real quick about something really important to me:
When you have something important to say on the internet that you care about, you will be most successful at changing people's minds if you take care to state your ideas in an understanding, non-aggressive, and non-accusing manner.
There has been a conversation a while back about how people of color should not need to be "nice" and "polite" when they are resisting being dehumanized and abused. This is true and I 100% agree with it.
However, it seems like some people have taken from that a principle that "if you really care about the truth, you should be willing to accept it even if the person saying it is not 'nice' or polite" and applied it to everything.
This is not good.
Emotional discomfort at being nice to someone who disagrees with you on a topic you are very emotionally invested in is not the same as the dehumanizing and demeaning experience of being "nice" in response to oppression and prejudice from people who think your life and the lives of people you love don't have value.
What I'm saying is, if you are talking about why spiders are important to the ecosystem, why cats should be kept inside, or why public transportation is a good idea, it will not hurt you to be patient and kind.
You may not feel like the person arguing with you deserves kindness. You may not think that being kind will help them get their stubborn opinion unstuck. But not only is understanding and patience much, much more persuasive, it makes people comfortable enough to ask questions. If they don't ask questions they will never get past their misconceptions.
People that would otherwise say "huh, I didn't think about it like that but now I see what you mean" get defensive when people present new ideas to them like an attack.
I have done it. You have done it. When someone on the internet is making what feels like nasty, rude accusations about you, demeaning you for not knowing a piece of information, or haughtily proclaiming how Right and Correct they are, your instinct is to get defensive.
So put your ego up on a high shelf and show grace and kindness to people who are ignorant. This is just how persuasion works.
The indoor cats debate is the biggest and worst example of this I've seen recently.
People feel like they have to defend themselves when they are called an animal abuser that doesn't care about their pets. Most people love their pets a lot, and most people think of "animal abuser" as an unspeakably evil category of people.
I get defensive about the indoor cats thing, because I had outdoor cats as a kid and bad things happened to many of them, and I used to feel incredible guilt about that even though I couldn't have done anything because I was a kid.
The main things that people are actually getting stuck on with the concept of indoor cats are:
I write this because I wrote something about the harms of outdoor cats in a reply one time and went back and read the tags on that post later, and the sheer number of people who had written that my post specifically had changed their mind because it was the first post they had seen on the subject that wasn't needlessly hateful and aggressive blew my mind.
Educating effectively requires you to think about the effects of your words. You can't just say things you Know are right and consider your job done.
Here is another truth: the most effective tactics to create social change are not necessarily the easiest to sustain. If you can't sustain being mild and approachable and patient while people ask the most frustrating, repetitive questions...
that is a sign that you need a break, or that you need to consider devoting yourself to a different kind of trying to do good in the world for a while, or that you need to rest. You do not have to be a teacher at all times. This is good, I say (as a teacher) because being a teacher takes work and skill and hard emotional control, especially when you are trying to teach people about something that you care very intensely about. Teaching is skilled labor, but it is always labor.
Speaking as someone who has done that work on the marginalization end as well as on the animal welfare end, on the science literacy end, on a lot of things I'm very earnest about: you have to set limits on education, and you have to be extremely clear with yourself about what is teaching work and what is self-protection from things that make your soul ache. When you're teaching, starting from a non-confrontational place and encouraging people to view you as a trustworthy, safe figure who won't judge them is absolutely crucial when it comes to establishing the basic safety necessary to consider changing our beliefs. The moment you make it an Us Vs Them fight, you lose the game. Doing it the hard way takes time and it takes effort and patience, and not everyone is suited to that work and no one is suited to it all the time.
When you're trying to just keep the space from punching you in the soul on a deep bruise one more time, though, you have other goals. You don't act from the desire to change the hearts and minds of the people you're talking to; you're acting from a desire to just get that crappy thing away from me. And sometimes we can orchestrate that within our social spaces, depending on who is watching and what our relative positions are, and sometimes we can't.
The danger, the riptide that will drag you under, is calling yourself a teacher when you are acting like someone trying to preserve the comfort of a community for yourself and other people like you. That second goal isn't necessarily a bad one to have! Sometimes we all have to engage in that kind of social behavior, because everyone needs a space in which they can feel safe to relax sometimes, even if that is a space that only a few kinds of people are allowed to come into. But lying to yourself that this kind of behavior is teaching, and that you are engaging in a higher form of moral wossname by doing so--when you don't have the bandwidth to do that properly--that can really get you into trouble. First, it can get you into trouble by encouraging you to frame picking certain fights as a public service rather than an act of survival, which can cause you to overweight the possible successes of starting a conflict and underweight the possible consequences. Second, it lets you frame behavior that can be really quite bad for the overall project of changing minds in the general public as effective activism, even to yourself, which leads you to forget that activist initiatives should be measured in terms of efficacy rather than in terms of how they make you feel at the end.
Now, I've seen the scars from people who always focus on efficacy over being able to feel safe and to rest. I have those scars. People with the best intentions and the highest moral goals have thrown one another into a meat grinder of yearning for a better world that way. I'm not saying you always have to drop everything and be a teacher.
I'm just saying that you should keep your tactics distinct, your short term goals clear in your mind, and above all else, figure out where you can find a place to rest.
Imagine if the rapture happened and this was how you found out.
What was the point in animal planet airing those incredibly convincing fake documentaries about dragons and mermaids
If the aim was to convince incredibly gullible children that they were real it worked on me
I distinctly remember watching these and being like why is no one talking about this this is INSANE and then my mom had to explain that it’s fake
Sorry for believing animal planet. The channel that tells me facts about animals 99.9% of the time
pirates of the caribbean really introduced an eldritch octopus man who kills indiscriminately and torments the dead as their poster villain and then you watch the movies and it's like, "oh no, actually the worst villain in this series is a small white british man who functions as the herald of capitalism" and that was very very brave of them
been thinking about trains
there's cafe cars/meal service on the train and plenty of leg room/you can get up and walk around. plus minus if there's wifi.
Care to debate abortion?
Mood. -V
This reminds me of a party I went to last year. I was standing with some friends, chatting, and someone said something that indirectly implied that sexism exists. Some trivial recounting of the basic facts of daily life for most women. Something so mild, so uncontroversial, so mundane that I don’t even remember what it was.
Suddenly, this man standing on the outskirts of our conversational circle piped up with “actually, I think men are more discriminated against than women these days.”
All conversation died.
I turned to look at him and he had this smug, insufferable grin on his face, relishing this moment, expecting us to waste our time and energy refuting this ridiculous thing he had just said.
The Devil’s Advocate was among us.
And, in my mind, I saw the next 15+ minutes playing out. The parade of facts and statistics in a vain attempt to defend ourselves, our gender, and to prove that misogyny is real. The glib, snide denials from some shithead who is getting off on our pain and frustration. The Gish Gallop of bullshit that would take a whole evening to properly dismantle. It was depressing and overwhelming. I hated it. I had to kill it before it began.
So I looked him dead in the eye and I said “OK,“ shrugged, and just walked away.
Nothing I have ever said to another human being has ever been so crushing. As I walked away, I watched the smug grin vanish and confusion and anxiety set in. The rest of the group turned their backs to him and carried on as if he had never spoken - as if he was invisible. He was still staring at me when I walked over to another friend and told her what he had said. I pointed him out for her and made direct eye contact with him while we both laughed.
tl;dr: Don’t feed the troll. Let it perish, cold and hungry, in the wasteland of your indifference. It is weak and you are strong. Live your best life.
Love bombing is not a euphemism for "too much affection too soon," or "high desire for contact."
"Love bombing" is a term originally used in the context of cults to describe a deliberate and coordinated recruitment method that involved feigning friendship and interest in a potential recruit, via flattery, flirtation, physical affection, and very directed positive attention to everything the recruit says in order to lure them into the cult.
Since cults and abusive relationships operate in similar ways and use similar tactics, love bombing in an interpersonal relationship looks like manufacturing closeness in order to trap someone into a relationship in which the abuser has all the control.
And I know these days there's a million bullshit junky articles out there that make you think this is a symptom of cluster b personality disorders, but there is no way for you to be love bombing somebody without realizing it.
If you are an affectionate person and the level of affection and attention you give makes someone uncomfortable, you are not "accidentally" abusing them.
If you are uncomfortable with the level of affection and attention someone is paying you, they are not de facto abusing you.
Love bombing is about using someone's desire for human connection to fast track them into a situation you control that they will feel disinclined to leave.
Felt like doing something picture book like.
me and my mutuals reblogging tumblr posts
I love the details with the pink on their paws!
The Air Force's Chief of AI Test and Operations said "it killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective."
An AI-enabled drone killed its human operator in a simulated test conducted by the U.S. Air Force in order to override a possible "no" order stopping it from completing its mission, the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations revealed at a recent conference.
At the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit held in London between May 23 and 24, Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations held a presentation that shared the pros and cons of an autonomous weapon system with a human in the loop giving the final "yes/no" order on an attack. As relayed by Tim Robinson and Stephen Bridgewater in a blog post for the host organization, the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton said that AI created “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal,” including attacking U.S. personnel and infrastructure.
The point shouldn't be to identify for sure 100% what is ai art and what isn't. I keep seeing posts advising one to look out for wonky perspective (as if perspective doesn't routinely trip up even the most experienced artists) or to pay attention to fudged detailing (as if impressionism wasn't one of the most influential artistic movements in history), and I think that's coming from a good place but frankly it's a losing battle. Remember when everyone was on about counting the fingers or counting the teeth, and a week later they had that shit ironed out completely? All you're really doing is giving these people more data points to work with to refine their algorithm. It's just going to be constantly shifting goalposts, and at a certain point real artists are going to get exhausted trying to make their art look as not algorithmically generated as possible. It'll be impossible to keep up.
So what should we do? Honestly, I think old practices are still best practices. Find real artists and follow them. Don't repost art, and dont spread reposted art. If something doesn't have a source, skip it. Support artists you like, either by sharing their work directly or donating. And if someone's work looks suspicious? Maybe give them a second look. See some of their other art before jumping to conclusions.
And yes, that means sometimes, you're gonna be tricked. Some people are going to fly under the radar and pass off ai art as their own. And that sucks, and they're liars, but you can't let the obsession with bad actors police real artists out of their communities, or discourage new artists from entering the scene.
Not to hijack your post, but the whole ai art debate reminds me of the fake vs real diamond debate in a sense. I personally think it's.... not good to lust after diamonds in this day and age, but framing the debate as "Oh fake diamonds have the exact same chemical structure as real diamonds, therefore people who value real diamonds more BECAUSE they are not man-made are delusional bimbos" is so similar to how pro-ai peeps justify their artist-hostile view.
In a way, it's a repeat of the same old song we already heard a dozen times: first the threat to art was factories massproducing consumer goods, then robots, now AI.
The imperfections of human made art ARE the point. The process for how something is created DOES give it meaning. I can admire another person for their skills in creating beauty from nothing. I will never admire a robot for creating the same thing.
Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
If i was a middle aged white man I'd wear fish lures as jewelry idc
I'd serve so much cunt
Another day in the Office
Surrealist humor sure is taking on a new flavor huh
I have finally identified my only two braincells.
The perfect Martini by Guy Buffet, 2000
I never get over this one. Absolutely incredible
New Ea-nāṣir lore just dropped and I don't know how to feel about that. I hate the meme but the guy having thugs coming after him for bad copper sales is perfect.
Wait wait WAIT
As someone who hard agrees with all your tags re: tired of the meem
BUT who is also invested in antiquities
Is it possible for you to drop the new lore
So the building in Ur where the infamous tablet was found (1 “Old Street” Ur Excavations VII) was actually full of similar tablets, all detailing how badly this guy's deals went. All of these tablets were collected and put into storage at the British Museum. Typically this kind of thing gets forgotten about, many of these tablets have been sitting there for a century, untranslated or partially translated.
This was recently partially translated and it's incredibly fragmentary, but it's a letter from the man himself reassuring a customer in Larsa about a bad shipment (a lot of goods were missing). He is upset that the customer sent thugs to collect (which is located in a different tablet). In turn, he sends his own to the customer's home. They are to make offerings at the temple of Šamaš together to symbolically "smooth things over". They are taking an oath.
He later goes on to blame the customer for the missing ingots. He (Ea-nāṣir) decided to employ a third party to deliver said ingots to the customer (all the way in the next city-state in the Sumerian cultural sphere). It seems like the third party either stole or got into a fight with the customer over the goods.
Ea-nāṣir now has to haul his ass to Larsa to deal with this personally. There's a lot of "Why don't you believe me?" "They don't listen to me!" "Please don't send-" going on in the tablet. But from what I can gather it looks like this peace offering (making an oath at the temple of Šamaš) broke down too. Everyone is blaming each other for the missing copper ingots and now the man himself has to take the three-day journey to sort out this issue. We have a name for one of the thugs: Mr. Shorty (kurûm). He seems to be a bit scary. The man from Dilmun got kicked out of the Merchant's Guild for a reason, he's had this problem before with copper shipments from Elam. Either he's the world's worst judge of character or he's embezzling, and badly. This is his side hustle stage where he's selling everything from used clothing to speculating (badly) on real estate. He may have dabbled in money lending too. He's your classic failed finance bro.
I did not think the story of Ea-Nasir could get any better, and yet here we are
Ma’am. What are you doing. You can’t be here.
This is my childhood home and my babies will grow up here too.
Ma’am. This is an orphanage.
And?
Good point. Welcome home, ma’am.
I AM FINE I’M NOT CRYING
I am going to spit on Thomas Edison's grave
Its really shocking how much evil shit can be traced by to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford
Im sorry but this is not true?? Job interviews used to vet multiple candidates existed wayyyy before then lol
gonna call in a shitter like it's a medevac helicopter and I'm a wounded GI in the jungles of Vietnam
imagine getting in one of these and sitting down and a few seconds later you feel it lift off the ground
too busy imagining one of these malfunctioning and raining shit from the sky onto the populace
Is no one going to mention the fucking glass door
Who tf came up with the name SHATTLE 🥲
