making trouble productively
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“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth. Modern dictatorships have become far more sophisticated still in how to achieve their ends. They learned that by constant bombardment, your senses become overwhelmed. You start to doubt, to shrug your shoulders, to tune out, and that makes you vulnerable. Instead of pushing one lie, one fake, they can push a dozen, or a hundred, and that’s pretty good odds against one lonely truth. They win when you say: ‘Who can be sure what really happened?‘” — Garry Kasparov (via wilwheaton) -
For years
The sun plays a pivotal role in our everyday lives and has for years.
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Chris Hedges on America entering the “Trump Phase” of late capitalism
Welcome to the postnormal.
(via stoweboyd)
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What “Fifty Shades of Grey is badly written” is really code for#1yrago
Laurie Penny has a spirited defense of Fifty Shades of Grey, a bestselling pornographic novel that started out as Twilight fanfic (“quite good, quite detailed descriptions of fucking written from the point of view of a woman who seemed to be really enjoying herself”) and looks at the gender issues and double standards lurking in the widespread condemnation of the book:
Similarly, I can’t recall Page Three of the Sun ever getting taken to pieces for its lack of artistic imagination. The point, the only point, is to show three million men some tits in the morning, and they’ve been happily ogling those pixellated teenage breasts on public transport for thirty years. That’s understood. Exactly the same basic principle applies to the Fifty Shades series, which has the added bonus that no actual nubile, desperate postpubescents were harmed in its production – but somehow the idea that women might gobble down a poorly-written book in their tens of millions just because they’ve heard there might be some fucking in it is uncomfortable for the sort of snobbish commentators who have absolutely never themselves bashed out a cheeky one over FHM magazine.
When you get down to it, the problem most people seem to have with Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s for girls. Even worse - it’s “mommy porn”, porn for mommies, for older women to read and get excited about, and that dangerous nonsense really needs to be stopped right now. Everyone knows that the only women who are allowed to actually have sexuality are slender, high-breasted twenty-one year old virgins – rather like, it has to be said, the heroine of “Fifty Shades of Grey”.
Hmm …
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Innovation
If Ben Franklin didn’t invent the light bulb certainly others would have done it but when?
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San Francisco’s bike lanes have become Uber’s pickup/dropoff zones (and the cops don’t care) #1yrago
It’s no secret that San Francisco’s cops hate cyclists – they won’t investigate hit-and-runs, they blame cyclists for accidents and harass them, they run them down in bike lanes – so it’s no surprise that they stand by idly while San Francisco’s busy biking lanes are turned into pick-up and drop-off zones by Uber and Lyft drivers, forcing cyclists to swerve into traffic.
Activists stationed volunteers on Valencia Street between 16th and 18th, in the Mission District, logging incidents in which cars illegally stopped in the bike lanes and timing them to see whether they stayed for less or more than 10 minutes, and counted the number of cyclists that had to swerve to avoid each car.
Between 6 and 7 PM (the “death trap” hour), on just one block, 53 cars illegally stopped in the bike lane, forcing 205 cyclists into traffic.
Most of the cars bore Uber or Lyft emblems and were dropping or picking up passengers. Several police cars and two beat cops were observed passing the illegally parked cars, and none of them took any action.
Before anyone comments about the terrible behavior of cyclists, please read this: a peer-reviewed empirical study found that the vast majority of cyclists are courteous, safe and law-abiding, and that the story of the psychopathic cyclist is largely an urban legend driven by confirmation bias.
https://boingboing.net/2016/07/15/san-franciscos-bike-lines-ha.html
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so my uncle, a Vintage Trekkie™ once told me that nerds of his generation would say “norman, coordinate!” when they were giving up in the face of an illogical dilemma or just to describe the fact that they are Done. he also told me in the next sentence that you can only use it if you’re from his generation, so why don’t we, out of blatant fuckin’ defiance, bring it the fuck back in 2017
(via apple-duty)
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tag when you joined the internet and how accurate this is
- 2016: probably enjoys old memes unironically, no idea how anything works
- 2012-15: uses "XD" unironically, has a basic understanding of the internet
- 2010-11: is a fairly average person, advanced understanding of the internet, might be nostalgic
- 2006-09: wayyy too nostalgic, remembers the old days of youtube, wants things to be simpler, has a nostalgiagasm when remembering old internet, probably has old youtube amvs on their channel from when they were 12 or remembers watching youtube videos when they were 6, age varies from preteen to 20s
- 2000-05: remembers internet pre-facebook, pre-twitter and pre-youtube, youtube poop expert
- the 90s: demigod of the internet, possesses unknown knowledge, reblogs 90s internet posts
- the 80s: remembers when eternal september began, probably still uses usenet, possibly doesn't exist, possibly god
- 60s-70s: is literally actually god, is a human myth, rest is unknown
