happybadger [he/him]

Scientific proof of demons.

It’s the youtube algorithm wearing a skin suit to convince children to gamble.

Whoa there lil guy. Dogs don’t speak. You bark.

On second thought, this is as good as you get. I’d just give up.

…I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/teagle/texts/martin-luther-king-jr-letter-from-birmingham-jail-1963/

That’s where you are right now. You can hopefully do better if you challenge yourself, but I wouldn’t consider you anything different from the most milquetoast liberal hiding behind rhetorical civility while you support the violence of the state. Your progressive politics are at best redistributing the loot of that violence while perpetuating the system causing it, either out of cowardice or malice or apathy. All of them would make you the same judas goat for the imperial slaughterhouse.

If you have a pen, you can cross out the parts of the golden rule that are pacifistic and make it “Treat others as they treat you”. When someone slaps me I’m not going to turn the other cheek because they’ll slap that one too and think they can freely slap others. The goal is just to restore an equilibrium state where nobody slaps anyone else because they understand that they aren’t powerful and there will be immediate consequences.

What specific ideology are you looking for? There’s no neutral political community because there’s no neutral ideology. Either you have a place with Nazis and Genocide Joe enthusiasts or you have a leftist one that’s critical of the entire political spectrum and wouldn’t tolerate those freaks in our communities. Anything in the realm of /r/politics becomes /r/politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_flying_fox

They’re a fruit bat in the Southeast Asian tropics. Absolutely massive bats. You walk under a palm tree and there are a dozen large puppies looking down at you. The fruit farmers of the region are ecocidal toward them, despite deforestation being the reason why they’re congregating in the only reliable food source left. They’re a great generalist pollinator with a similar ecological niche as squirrels, shitting out edible plant seeds over an almost 2km range.

https://teachmecommunism.podbean.com/

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/

I really like these two podcasts for breaking down concepts, history, and significant figures. The second one has two spinoffs, Red Menace for individual works of theory and Guerilla History for historical events, which are both also great.

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

I like the Snowflake Method. You start with the core idea and branch out in a fractal-ish pattern to develop different elements and plot points. Mindmapping software helps keep it organised: https://xmind.app/

Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.

A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we’re chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I’m putting the needle in his arm he says “you’re from the government.” in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He’s furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask “what?”, he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming “you’re from the government” repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.

Interlingua: Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,

Esperanto: Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ

English: Give us this day our daily bread;

We have our choice between Spanish Latin, Romanian Latin, or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

I really like esperanto as a project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

It had a lot of support with early 20th century anarchists who saw it as a way to make people less nationalistic and prone to their domestic propaganda.

Fuck yeah. Burn baby burn.

/r/chapotraphouse was the best socialist subreddit and it got banned over saying “death to slave masters”. The intense censorship campaign, at one point consisting of being site banned if you upvoted a comment in the subreddit, was so disgusting that I wanted to take the Reddit out of reddit. Chapo.chat-turned-hexbear was its direct continuation.

It’s 8% of the shares in total. Everything prior was purchased in venture capital drives well below the IPO price. We both know that the price is going to crater after that. My incentive is to buy in now and cash out the moment it launches, but that’s also their incentive and they’re doing so much quicker with far more shares. If I kept my shares, my only hope would be that whatever dividends it pays out cover the 24/7 customer service job of moderating at the state minimum wage. It wouldn’t at the amount it allows me to invest. The people drawing much more profit from their much cheaper shares will make that 24/7 customer service job worse as the website becomes worse to use and everything I say on it is sold to train the LLMs that are threatening labour more broadly.

The gamble every person who got that message faces is whether or not they think they can cash out within the first day. After that there is no happy ending for reddit, its mods, its users, or people dumb enough to invest in the modern Myspace.

I try to cross-reference things and then look at the critical angles. Public media generally has higher editorial standards for me. I don’t trust right-wing sources or the New York Times because they lack editorial standards. State media I don’t trust for domestic issues, but while I don’t go to Al Jazeera for news about Qatar I trust their coverage of Palestine and France. I try to avoid sources that have an involved stake in the conflict, so something like Ukraine means no RT/Pravda but I’ll watch the primary footage coming off Telegram and then compare it to multiple countries’ coverage of it. I try to stay dialectical with all of it, so I’m cognizant of the history and material/social angles which create the issue and the biases of those covering it. I’ll read a socialist article but I don’t want to uncritically agree with news so that’s more supplemental unless the media hasn’t yet/won’t cover it.

Otherwise I listen to a lot of podcasts that are leftist or left-liberal, keep a critical eye on social media coverage, and follow scientific journals/niche science websites that summarise those journal articles without editorialising.

r/snackexchange was fun. I sabotaged the subreddit by embracing Spez’s call for user democracy, making everything about it up for a vote every day. Some weird little goober ratfucked that and the admins made them the head mod, despite them only participating in the subreddit one time ten years before and there being two existing mods who programmed third-party tools we were protesting for. Those tools were necessary for running the subreddit. The users instantly turned on this guy despite me being a more or less absent mod for years and destroying the subreddit in protest. He became a proxy for the admins and caught so much flak that he has only posted a couple times since, and not in r/snackexchange.

There were a few larger subreddits that got mod couped with similar hate toward the scabs, but having seen the worst case example it’s great. They do their big power move and it’s the gun. When they threatened to do it in r/Science the guy requesting it was an antivaxxer who markets herbal supplements. Let a thousand fuckups bloom.

That might happen but that’s not where the real pressure point is. Sometime shortly after the IPO, whatever hype exists around it is going to give way to the reality that reddit is an unprofitable company at the end of a tech bubble built on 0% interest rates that aren’t coming back. There is no way for reddit to become profitable without making itself unusable and sanitising the NSFW content that drives a huge amount of its traffic. When the price tanks, they’ve bribed their 75k most loyal users and mods into accepting the IPO with advanced purchase options at what might be the high point of its value. That’s when shit stands to rupture. Reddit will have failed everyone to enrich Steve Huffman and the venture capitalists who invested in their earlier rounds and there’s no way for them to control that tantrum spiral.