100% this
What left wing criticisms of “New Atheism” should be:
*Thinking of religion purely in intellectual terms and viewing the matter of class as a product of that rather than the other way around.
*Not talking enough about the role of religion in imperialism and colonialism not simply as justification but in terms of how organized religion was an inherent part of colonial states both in theocratic hegemonic forms (Iberian colonialism) as well as recruiting native religious elites to serve as agents of the colonial state (Dutch East Indies)
*Eurocentric understanding of the history of atheism and criticism of religion that views opposition to (organized) religion as a modern product of the European Enlightenment and not something with an intellectual history going back far deeper and longer in places such as India and the Near East
*etc
What is not a left wing critique New Atheism:
*Getting upset people are criticizing religion at all
*Getting upset atheists articulate their reasons for being atheists in any form other than “It’s for purely personal reasons”
*Doubling down on Eurocentrism by aggressively asserting that criticism of religion is only done by white people and non-whites are all super religious fae creatures or whatever
One of the best critiques I’ve seen of ‘New Atheism’ is that in treating non-belief as a purely intellectual thing, often it gives up perfectly good secular-spirit-building practices like coming together regularly in community- especially to do things like sing together.
As a non-theist, I appreciate not being made to put up with systematic bullshit and abuse, but having been brought up among churchgoing folk, I sometimes miss the tightness of community and good networking
They always want the law to apply punitively to their enemies, and for its institutions to protect them. The law, as they understand it, isn’t to apply equally to everyone- after all, in their view, not everyone is equal and the purpose of law is not for everyone to be equal before it, it is rather to constrain you lot and protect your betters so that order is maintained.
three cheers for the end of the confederacy already
you punch nazis!
(requested by anonymous)
instructor144
I will mash that Reblog button every single time this shows up on my dash. I spent a lot of years martyring myself for “the needs of the business.” Young people? Don’t fucking do it. They don’t care about you, you are a “resource,” not a human being. I can’t say this strongly enough: see to your self-care!
Take every bit of PTO available to you and don’t let anybody tell you not to. If you are made to regret it, that’s a great big red flag
Data, Star Trek New Generation
Cue autistic panic in 3..2..1.. go
Davie can Rickroll me repeatedly and I won’t be mad
Your daily reminder
Not to minimize how bad 45 really is, if we’re honest with ourselves that number from 1-44 probably deserves to be a lot higher but isn’t because powerful people that stand a chance of becoming president have a certain way of not being the target of criminal investigations that might be career-limiting for would-be prosecutors and investigators and such
Whatever Republicans say, just take the opposite to be closer to the truth.
Here is a great example:
When you don’t have anything to offer that majorities might want to vote for, you need a disaster for them to vote against.
When there isn’t a bad guy or a disaster to rally people against, you lie to people and tell them there is
An educated workforce is harder to exploit. Of course they want you ignorant and malleable- it’s really expensive to keep power in a democracy when anyone in it is able to coherently question what you say, especially when most of what you say is bullshit
The reason they want humanities degrees to go away is that folks without them are just as good at making them money and the ones without them don’t seem to remember that guillotines are a thing It’s the humanities scholars that consistently register early warnings about creeping fascism and who remember their history when people falsely claim ‘this has never happened before’, and we’re the ones that helpfully re-frame politics and your rights not as God-Given, but as features of a social contract.
If all you want in the workforce are exploitable cattle without ideas of their own, of course you want humanities scholars to go away
So the 99% don't set up guillotines and murder your corrupt asses?
Yes. Our politics desperately need to be re-framed into the context of social contract theory, where questions like this one are always answered with ‘it’s part of the deal by which rich people are allowed to exist in the first place’ so nobody quite forgets that guillotines are a thing before they start talking about squeezing the poor any further
people (mostly on twitter) are pissing me off so much with the "its reddit, who cares"
like, its not a social media, its a collection of forums, if you hate certain subs for their politics or opinions, dont visit those (you control the buttons you press or whatever)
meanwhile were about to lose so much information about niche hobbies and interests,
and these are the same people who were complaining last week that you cant find anything on google without adding "reddit" at the end,
are you fucking stupid, do you want to have to look through unrelated blogs and ai generated/pay walled quora answers everytime you need technical assistance or wanna talk about a hobby? is that what you want?
im this close to losing it
FWIW you can export your reddit content to lemmy
To be a man, you don’t need to:
• bind your chest
• wear masculine clothes
• have short hair
• have a penis
BUT, you must be:
• swift as a coursing river
• with all the force of a great typhoon
• with all the strength of a raging fire
• mysterious as the dark side of the Moon
Wait, what? I’m supposed to be all of these things? Nobody told me this shit
Tumblr Migration 2: Reddit Boogaloo
We all know about the Twitter immigrants, but there seems to be radio silence on what's happening now with Reddit users from certain subreddits doing a similar thing.
What's happening?
Reddit is restricting their API later this month and killing off third-party apps. An AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the CEO Steve Hoffman was held and it was clear that he would continue with the changes.
In protest, thousands of subreddits across the site are planning to go dark for 48 hours on June 12th. Some are planning to continue indefinitely until the changes are reversed.
Okay, so how does this affect Tumblr?
Some subreddits (mainly queer and left-leaning meme ones, don't worry too much about Reddit Atheists™ overrunning us) are encouraging their users to jump ship to our beloved - and beloathed - hellsite. There will be another influx of new users and many will be unfamiliar with how the site works.
What do us Tumblr users do?
Show them how to use the site; introduce them to the site's culture, tell them to reblog shit and curate their dashboard. Sorta like how we welcomed Twitter users back when they flocked here. Kungpowpenising optional.
I'm new from Reddit, what do I do here?
CHANGE YOUR PROFILE PICTURE AND BANNER TO SOMETHING OTHER THAN DEFAULT BECAUSE THIS SITE IS FILLED WITH BOTS AND YOU MIGHT BE MISTAKEN FOR ONE. This is the FIRST thing you should do after getting a blog.
Other folks can help you with stuff like curating your dashboard or creating sideblogs (or you can look shit up) but please, PLEASE just give yourself an icon and reblog some stuff so people don't mistake you for a bot
This is one of the first posts I've seen after trying to look at Tumblr again, so I've decided to head their advice and reblog this. I don't even know what a reblog is but I'll find out in time. It's a learning process
a reblog is what you just did! it's similar to a retweet on twitter and it's the main way things spread on tumblr
For what it’s worth, Lemmy is a drop-in replacement for reddit, and it’s a fediverse app (like Tumblr is supposedly going to become)
I was part of the twitter exodus to Mastadon, and since then I’ve found: Mastadon functions more or less like twitter, but on fedi PixelFed functions basically like instagram, but on fedi Friendica works like facebook, but on fedi Lemmy works like reddit, but on fedi
by ‘on fedi’ here, I mean it supports the ‘ActivityPub’ protocols of the fediverse; this means my pixelfed posts appear in my mastadon feed, and vice versa- it’s like a federated cloud of twitter/insta/fb except not engineered as a walled garden to prevent you from cross-posting or leaving, not driven by tech giants mining your data to sell it to anyone they can, not animated by algorithms crafted around maximizing viral spread, etc. The Fediverse has most of the good parts of social media (and some of the downsides) but at least it’s got functional moderation and mostly opt-in design patterns that give users a lot more control.
Extra bonus upsides: You get social media without the antisocial aspects of monetized social media. Downsides: a lot of the people you use the popular social media apps to stay connected with don’t know the fediverse exists (this can, of course, be a silver lining)
Plus, it’s time to really distinguish immigration from colonization. The USA is something less a nation of immigrants than it is of colonizers.
It’s something of a tell when the descendants of colonizers proclaim themselves to be immigrants, and at the same time howl in fury at the idea of that immigrants might come here and not respect their customs and traditions
It takes a colonizer to mistake an immigrant for another colonizer
In a press release, the FTC said that "Ring deceived its customers by failing to restrict employees' and contractors' access to its customers' videos, using customer videos to train algorithms, among other purposes, without consent, and failing to implement security safeguards." In one case, an employee "viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms," the FTC said.
That allegedly occurred between June and August 2017 and invaded the privacy of at least 81 female users of Ring products. "The employee wasn't stopped until another employee discovered the misconduct. Even after Ring imposed restrictions on who could access customers' videos, the company wasn't able to determine how many other employees inappropriately accessed private videos because Ring failed to implement basic measures to monitor and detect employees' video access," the FTC said.
...
Amazon completed its purchase of Ring in April 2018. The FTC complaint says that in August 2020, "a whistleblower notified Ring that between March 2018 and September 2019, a former employee had provided Ring devices to numerous individuals and then accessed their videos without their knowledge or consent."
The complaint continued: When the employee left Ring in September 2019, the whistleblower alleged that he took copies of these videos with him—without the knowledge or consent of his unsuspecting victims and without Ring noticing that anything was amiss. In February 2019, Ring changed its access practices so that most Ring employees or contractors could only access a customer's private video with that customer's consent.
"Importantly, because Ring failed to implement basic measures to monitor and detect inappropriate access before February 2019, Ring has no idea how many instances of inappropriate access to customers' sensitive video data actually occurred," the FTC said. "Indeed, Ring only discovered the incidents described above through the good fortune of employee reporting, despite having given employees zero security training and no responsibility to engage in such reporting. It is highly likely that numerous other incidents of spying, prurient behavior, and other inappropriate access occurred entirely undetected."
(emphasis is mine)
I think it’s worth ruminating on the double-standard between criminal behavior done by or under aegis of wealthy corporations, and criminal behavior done by regular people.
Either this is proof that corporations ought not to have the rights or privileges of people if they’re plainly not subject to the same accountabilities that people are, or it’s an argument that courts ought to put corporations that break the law into time-outs like jail, or death (perhaps in the form of revoking their charters).
If it was a poor or brown or trans person doing it, would they be prosecuted and punished? If the answer is yes, why should it be different if employees of powerful corporations do it? If corporations get to have the speech rights of people, they should be subject to at least the accountabilities and punishments to which people are liable.
Personally I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas puts one to death
Voter fraud and election fraud are unilaterally Republican mission statements.
They admit it.
The only way Republicans can win- cheating.