askchapo

toss up between "I got big hairy legs that turn blonde in the sun.", and "I worsked on the Paris Accord, with Deng Xiaoping, and the others!"

The only thing you can find online is usually catering to rich western tourists or "expats" and usually boils down to "Which place is the most western/ High GDP and McDonalds!" so I'd rather get an opinion from someone that's been there that isn't a business tourist.

I think I'll always enjoy shenanigans, even the utterance of the in-game slang, long after that game fades from public awareness. I can't even fully explain it, it presses fun buttons for me.

I feel the same way about though it may be because the concept is so strange and so specific yet is also so applicable.

Showing my age, I still remember this one fondly, even if it's older than a lot of people posting on this site, right now.

Anyone else grow up with alcoholic parent or parents?

shit was and still is tough

yes or no?

it always embarassed me growing up that our house was kind of dirty.

like i avoided bringing women over and shit because of the clutter.

i cant be the only one who grew up like this.

To me, Silicon Valley is a confusing beast. I'm not sure if this is remaining liberalism but there are some things about it (on the surface level) that I find admirable: it's generally science-positive and is a beacon of intellectualism in the US, even if tech is not your cup of tea I like the idea of some people being in the "problem solving business", and if I must participate in capitalism then working for a company that helps with sustainability in SV doesn't sound too bad. Not ideal, but leagues more tolerable than working on an oil field.

However, this facade crumbles at even the quickest glance and it sometimes almost becomes just as nakedly reactionary as the oil and gas industry. Elon Musk is practically the poster child of Silicon Valley and was a lib that just needed one scratch to give up the ghost and go full fash. Silicon Valley is literally acting like an Ayn Rand villain. Silicon Valley has also practically soured my attitudes towards technology and some of that can be blamed on pretty much all new "innovations" just being inventing a new form of landlordism. Even many of the people in the supposed blue city are complete and utter fash, the whole thing feels like it's permanently an 80s Wall Street movie but with tech.

Is there like any books that can better explain Silicon Valley and what it actually stands for?

scenario: you know a chud at your workplace. he shows you a 'funny' meme on his phone and you peep his twitter handle. it's LoliHitler88. you hate this guy so much. can you put his real name and face on a billboard next to his greatest twitter hits if you don't call him any names on it. is that considered harassment or free promotion. this is a hypothetical

It's rant time because depression and racing thoughts are fun.

I've been thinking about all of the more blatant Dem actions lately to push the "left" away from the party as far as possible. Part of me is confused. Why push away a potential voting block? After all, aren't you calling yourselves the "big tent" party?

Part of me wants to think that there is an ideological push from the centrist and Conservative Dems to get us out of their way. That they honestly did a 180 on the border and suddenly love cops, etc.

Maybe part of it is fear? Are Democrats getting enough credible death threats behind the scenes that they are running to the right out of fear?

A material analysis might come up with this: Democrats know how their bread is buttered and want to keep the money flowing. There is a large "industry" or NGOs, 501c3/4 orgs, party organizations, vendors, and other groups that make their money from donations or grants to push for this or that reform. If abortion becomes legal, Planned Parenthood Action Fund doesn't need to exist. If elections stop being close Priorities USA PAC can go away.

Money comes from all of the bullshit PACs like the Lincoln Project getting funded by bazinga-brained dipshits from Silicon Valley that believe in "both sides"/"unity" crap. They have all of the money, so those are the PACs we get. Black Lives Matter doesn't have money, so there are no orgs to sponsor it, which means no staffers needing to cover their asses.

Of course AIPAC is a huge part of this as well.

All the shitty Dem behavior kind of makes sense when you see it as a bunch of career staffers trying to protect their paychecks. They may not even be thinking about things this way, but they sure are acting like it.

What do you think?

I'm mostly thinking about video, but things like blogs as well, anything is good. It just feels like kind of a gap, that of all the Deaf content creators I know, their talk of audism and intersectionality never seems to progress into a more holistic critique of capitalism.

But I guess this is the same algorithms and self-selection and other factors they're subject to that make the big trans creators a bunch of liberals, too; most of the less-viewed Deaf content I've found is content from universities, or content funded by this or that charity named after this or that capitalist... And otherwise the small Deaf creators seem rather like myself as a teenager, who saw anti-autistic sentiment as a "problem of NTs" rather than a problem of capitalism, that they might see audism as a "problem of hearies".

But I'm sure there are Deaf and Coda creators who make the exact sort of content I'm interested in. I mean, there just has to be! It's just that search engines are absolutely useless at finding that type of content. Like my attempts at Internet searches only really told me that there was a textile artist in the Bauhaus called Otti Berger who was a deaf communist Jew who was killed in the Holocaust; and that there's a book called Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity and an article called Building an Organization According to Our Own Wishes: Deaf Agency in East Germany, 1945 to 1960, which might be interesting with the right expectations set. Otherwise I can confirm that Deaf communists, like, exist in the present day, which yeah, obviously, and there was a mention of "another deaf communist manifesto" on some odd Japanese and Korean language website about Deaf culture, which I don't know what that's about.

But in any case, you'd think that for such a large, clear form of marginalization with a strong cultural identity, that there would be more than three pages of search results, right? So what's causing there to be no results?

yo i am probably going to need a surgery and I noticed I was referred to a religious hospital by default and am not sure what to do about it. I haven't gone there yet. I don't know if I should just ignore that religiousness of it. I was kind of shocked to get a letter in the mail addressed to me with a big ol cross on the envelope.

how do you feel about hospitals (and other health care organizations) that have some tie to religion? I guess a lot of them used to be totally run by churches or whatever but have become somewhat secularized over time. now they get funding from taxes, non profits, insurance companies or whatever.

In my experience it is usually catholic with other christian denominations showing up and many major cities having at least one jewish hospital.

In terms of the anglosphere are there any other religions that have hospitals? I have never heard of a muslim, hindu or buddhist hospital in "the west" though these of course exist elsewhere. do they exist in the US? has anyone ever tried to start one?

In terms of your own (or your family's care)

• do you judge them on their own merits?

• Prefer/boycott them compared to others?

• LGBTQ+++ people: do you trust them?

• women: do you trust them? if you were choosing to carry a pregnancy would you have doubts about going to such a place when the time came?

• religious people: do you trust the ones of other religions? or your own?

• atheists: do you trust them?

• indigenous people: do you trust them?

What kind of hiring practices do these places have? I remember hearing about Salvation Army being anti-queer in hiring. Are they generally allowed to discriminate in accordance of their religious bigotries?

Any other general political ideas too.

Is there any reason these places should be allowed to exist?

Is it still an ongoing failure, post by post, to actually be just writing prompts instead of "here's my le epic predictable plot twist. I need someone to be my personal ChatGPT and write this out for me because I'm just le Ideas Guy" bazinga behavior?

Is it still "dae le number over your head" "dae le multiverse" "you wake up as Hitler, but with a TWIST" and " does something le clever and epic, now write it out for me" as its most common repetitive more-than-prompts?

I don't lurk there anymore. That's a dead dove I've kept in the fridge for a long time.

Does anyone know if there would be penalties for having an organized sick-out if there is no contract yet signed? We are not bound to any no strike clause and a coworker was fired and I think naturally people are calling out sick anyway due to stress. Can we be fired for insubordination or something? What are the risks?

How was it?

The "Grey Tribe" techbros and techbro stans of the "LessWrong" cult insisted they weren't political while announcing over and over again that the robot god requires billionaires to get richer and faster.

used to have such an unassailable PR fortress going that even some leftist communities had struggle sessions about him. One of the most naive ones ever even said that he might bring "reason" to the then-upcoming Trump regime.

I remember being declared "nonpolitical" by his cultists.

Joe Rogan of course had the "he sometimes has a lib on his show so he's strictly nonpolitical even while mostly signal boosting fascists" thing going for a while but I think no one really believes it anymore, not even his devotees.

Most recently, "MrBeast" started to visibly ride the chud slide, even if he was more incognito for a while because of the garish facade of le epic charity grifting.

Anyone actually remain in the plausible pretenses of nonpoliticalness that you know of?

I saw a lot of them in my teenage years, and I saw similar propaganda in printed media such as TIME, Newsweek, and US News (I used to be quite a liberal even with the bad vibes detector going off and me trying to ignore it and eventually the tear gas wakeup call).

For those that don't remember or weren't there, the most well known versions of these, but not the only ones, were the AT&T "You Will" commercials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2EgfkhC1eo

There were some creepier ones I am having a hard time finding now, one involving upward camera tilting toward skyscrapers and a blue sky with distant echoing sounds of children laughing while a narrator voice said something about knocking down all the old barriers and uniting the world in the new information superhighway and so on and so on. For all it was promising, even as a teenager watching it it felt creepy and that was especially because there was no product, sometimes hardly even a corporate logo put on for long, but a lot of "everything is going to be amazing, you'll see" from what was likely the same batch of aging vampires that are continuing to burn our planet down now while frantically trying to escape or hide from the ongoing consequences of their actions.

I'm sure I'm not the only one that remembers that creepy "end of history" siren singing era.

I've never really looked into Zimbabwe and its revolution, but I'm interested in it right now. Y'all have any books or articles to read?

Everyone doing okay?

It whips ayoss

idiot-friendly, for my personal pics, vids and documents. mostly pics, mostly from my samsung phone. nothing affiliated with google, microsoft or similar

thx bears

Germans have only ever defended themselves from bolsheviks invading their home, but we're expected to see them as evil, the scary other. The Germans must be bad because they pose a threat to us. Oh, and because they're ugly.

At least in the first World War, the Russian soldiers are sympathetic because they are merely surviving a situation they didn't want to be in, put in peril by an empire sacrificing them for profit. Empires, not people, are the true villains of the war.

But in World War 2, our hero Stalin goes back to Germany with the Red Army to kick some German ass. While this is ostensibly a mission to save a group of Holocaust survivors, Stalin has no interest in a search-and-rescue mission. She only agrees on the condition that they go there to kill every last Nazi.

Stalin is more than willing to exterminate an entire ideology to save white people. In fact she still wants to genocide them even after winning Bagration!

Stalin: I say we invade Germany, it's the only way to be sure

Churchill: This is clearly an important industrial base we're dealing with, and I don't think that we have the right to arbitrarily exterminate them.

Stalin: Wrong!

be sure of what, Stalin? you can just fucking leave. Just don't go back to Germany with all the Nazis in it. seems pretty easy to me now of course it turns out that Burke doesn't actually care about the Nazis, he only wants to exploit them for profit. while this is keeping with the corporations=bad theme from the first war, now we're supposed to think corporations are bad for... not wanting to do genocide? because of course no good person would be against murdering an entire ideology for no reason, only a villain would propose such a thing.

Now I'm not saying you can't enjoy World War 2, it deserves its status as one of the best wars of all time, and I'd argue these problematic reactionary themes actually make it more interesting and morally complex, giving us much to analyze and critique, elevating it above an average popcorn movie. Just please don't take it at face value.

Stalin is no longer the hero, even if he is portrayed as one. In World War 1 he is the scratched liberal, and in World War 2 he is the fascist who bleeds. In a tragic turn, she has become the villain of the story. She reacts to her own trauma and loss of 27 million people with mass murder, by killing another nations babies right in front of them, and we're all supposed to clap and cheer, instead of asking why these humans are there in the first place.