“Left Wing” Zionism: How to Sell an Ethnostate by overzealots: It bothers me that this commentator repeats multiple times that states have to justify themselves to exist. States don’t need to take on a specific form to be legitimate. If their existence was inherently legitimate when possessing specific attributes, they wouldn’t need to employ as much force to ensure the continuity of their existence.
States don’t have to justify their existence because they hold the power to enforce their own existence. People take the amount of violence that states are ready to employ to ensure their existence for granted. States are inherently violent, and were they not, they wouldn’t be able to exist.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: States can’t have rights, period. People have rights, but that’s people. Rights only matter when an entity exists that has the power to violate or revoke them, and for states there is no higher entity than they themselves.
The Crazy World of Korea’s Plastic Surgery Industry by Mina Le: Calling that industry “crazy” is an understatement. Young people have to get work done or else they might struggle in their romantic relationships or finding jobs. At the same time, them getting work done makes it easier for other to refuse any procedures because they increasingly become a minority. In a way, this is patriarchy acting as a double bind yet again. Either way the person’s fucked.
My CD collection is coming together nicely. I’m sitting at 30 CDs and counting. It started with my favorite albums (at the time), but I’m expanding little by little. Eventually I’d like to stop renting my music and listening to my own collection. 🎶
Imagine living a long life – in centuries – of exclusive leisure in solitude. That sounds like hell to me, like what’d be my purpose? What would I be alive for? I could die and it would mean nothing to no one, not because they’d detest me, but because they wouldn’t be conscious of my existence.
I used to have a Last.fm account up until recently. I kept one around intermittently after initially creating one for the first time in 2019, connecting it to my Spotify and then forgetting about it for two years. After that I used it a bit but hated seeing how “horrible” the information it gave me looked like, so I started fresh with a new one. Then I started focusing too much on the numbers and had to quit it until I gave it another shot at the start of 2024.
In a way it was good for me to have started out blogging on Bearblog. It was simple enough, maybe a little too simple, but exactly what I needed to learn how to customize my experience with CSS and HTML – things I should’ve learned in school, but they kinda didn’t stick around in my head. Doing stuff like a DIY book section and trying to bootstrap a microblogging solution on top of Bearblog taught me a lot of things about rudimentary code logic and I’m eternally grateful for that.
I have way too much free time at the moment and I’m spending it alone for the most part. That is the worst combination for me.
Finished migrating my Mastodon profile to this blog. I hope this is the final migration. My current setup to make up for the lack of Ivory’s amazing timeline save and sync involves Reeder as a read-only Micro.blog client. Since Micro.blog doesn’t have the robust RSS capabilities of a dedicated reader and only allows for replies as the single way to interact with others, Reeder makes up for the former and satisfies the latter.
I get the timeline saved and synced and it’s just one timeline. If I want to reply, I just swipe to open the post in Micro.blog. Best of all is that it all works seamlessly!
Seeing all of the pretty pictures people take on here makes me a little jealous. My photography skills are bad. I take pictures like an elderly person holding a smartphone for the first time. I’m going to start being a little more delicate with how I take pics from now on. I guess the best way to learn is to try!
I think I’m done with migrating from Bearblog now. One thing I didn’t count on just working without my fiddling with it is the RSS feed. People who followed the RSS feed from my previous Bearblog don’t have to change anything because Micro.blog and Bearblog place the feeds at the same location.
Been obsessed with this album. It has been in my MusicBox for a while, and I regret not checking out sooner because Magdalena Bay’s show in my city was two weeks ago. Missed my chance, but maybe another time. Transitions everywhere, album has consistency and variety, and this [redacted] sings like an angel. Ever since listening to Trip by Jhené Aiko for the first time last summer, I’ve been looking for an equally ethereal experience.
I use devices that can do so many different things that I nearly forgot the beauty in tools that do one thing and do it well. Keeping things simple pays off for me in the long run because I can focus on the goal more easily. I live in a very touristy city and in the past two years or so, I’ve been seeing lots and lots of people using standalone (digital) cameras for pictures.
The movie is really shallow with little to no character development. It is way too long because most of it is hectic fighting scenes or preparations for fighting, and quite frankly I couldn’t give less of a fuck. There is still like only one woman which is insane to me, and the acting in general is pretty mid to actually bad.
There are no side characters you can grow attached to because importance is only attached to the three main characters who you just know won’t ever be killed because they carry the already shallow story.
Copyright is supposed to give artists and creators ownership and control over their creations. Art and knowledge are intangible, merely bits of information, that can be copied and duplicated easily compared to tangible assets like money or real estate. Copyright was supposed to be the tool for protecting the small person. Yet, in all of its history copyright has only stifled creativity and commodified the commons of art beyond the reach of those who need it most: the poor, indie artists, and basically anyone who doesn’t hoard enough money to survive unemployment for six months without welfare benefits.
The way this is not even a joke, coming from someone who tried to study economics for a semester but gave up because it felt like indoctrination even more than the school system is, lmfao.
Mainstream economics as it’s taught at universities is a joke. It’s a religion that twists reality to fit its theorems instead of adapting to what is out there. It even had its own prophets as found in John Locke or Adam Smith, eternal suffering be upon them. Their scripture is obsessed with trying to be physics so badly and it’s pathetic. Human interactions don’t follow neat laws. If your theory needs a model that is never found anywhere and never under any circumstances, then what the fuck are you modeling it for?!
What made me the angriest I could be at ever putting myself through that hellish semester was not even the indoctrination and twisted reality. It’s the lies with which they coat the “facts” as benefitting everyone. Like at least be upfront about who is benefitting from doing this or that. An economic exchange doesn’t automatically result in a win-win because we’re rational. Even if we’re rational, economics has no concept of power (imbalance). If a billionaire offers a mining slave 5 options for trading and the slave picks the least evil out of these, while rational, they didn’t win. These two weren’t equal in power, whether social or material.
This bullshit makes me furious whenever someone brings it up and today is the day for it to resurface, it seems. ❤️
For a while now, I’ve been deeply interested in robots and sentient intelligence other than that of humans in general. At first, it wasn’t much of a conscious decision to surround myself with media that in one way or another discusses this topic. In part it was sparked by a class I took in my first semester of political science in which we studied AI from a social scientific perspective in which we looked at the impact of AI on society, how society interacts with AI, who plays an important role in the AI space, and lastly who largely benefits or loses from AI (everywhere – vertically in the hierarchy and horizontally across geography).
My exams are over, summer is here, and I’m busy again. This is the first summer in which I have a plethora of activities to engage in, thanks to antidepressants and plenty of therapy. There are a few games I’d like to play, many books I’m reading or about to start, and lastly a couple of shows and movies I’m watching sometimes alone and some other times with friends. I’m still crocheting my dwarf hat and now I’m also taking care of my body by going to the fitness studio.
