pick-up-zafon

[pick-up-zafon]

Too many people are mad about Microsoft and Adobe's latest nanny functions being marketed as "AI!!!" more than about them being spyware on a level that would have gotten these things blacklisted as highly dangerous Trojans by every anti-malware program on the planet in 2005.

And these companies are depending on that.

They would much rather be able to write off everyone who doesn't want these "features" as technophobic old grumps and Chicken Littles reacting to a buzzword than have people actually broadly acknowledge the invasiveness of it all.

Once more, with feeling,

It's not "Microsoft and Adobe want to integrate AI features to spy on the things you do on your own devices,"

It's "Microsoft and Adobe want to integrate AI features to spy on the things you do on your own devices."

[pick-up-zafon]

I’m such a fucking hater of this kind of stupidly opaque morality system that schools - especially for young children - as well as parents set up. It’s absurdly unhelpful, especially for neurodivergent children who need to know why in order to process the apology in the first place.

It drove me nuts and got me into all kinds of trouble at school and with my parents, especially when they blame you afterward for getting upset; as if their perception of being right when they told you off justifies not explaining any of it and means any resentment you feel for being punished for some bullshit you don’t even know you did wrong is unjustified and merits more punishment.

So many people seem completely unaware of what a genuine apology is.

And that's because children are forced to say sorry on command.

Before they ever had a chance to process what they did, why they did it, what effect it had on others, or what they should have done instead, they're expected to say that they're sorry. And they're expected to "say it like you mean it" with no indication of what that even means and with no time to figure out how to phrase it correctly.

Sometimes, even when the child's actions are justified by any logical reasoning, they're expected to apologize because an authority figure demands it.

The goal of saying sorry ends up being solely to avoid punishment. And they phrase the apology in whatever way the authority figure will accept.

The result is an entire society filled with people who give completely useless apologies that appear like they're only trying to avoid punishment.

[pick-up-zafon]

actually im gonna be honest some rules should be followed. people aren’t “boring” or like losers or whatever for not wanting you to smoke in the back stairwell directly next to their dorm room when school policy is 25 feet from any buildings. like that’s genuinely a matter of public health it doesn’t matter if you think smoking is cool or whatever.

[pick-up-zafon]

it's so funny to me when i see pearl-clutching articles about how "teenagers are diagnosing themselves with mental disorders via tiktok" because like. this is not happening in a vacuum. teenagers are severely and i mean severely medically neglected. i cannot stress this enough. teenagers do not have free access to medical care. those same news outlets would be clowning on women with housewife psychosis in the 1950's.

i sometimes go pale when listening to some of what my friends have gone through in their childhoods and teenagehoods. they talk about it so nonchalantly, things that would be considered straight up torture if done to an adult, can't fathom the effect this has on children. they are on multiple anti-psychotics and several antidepressants and anxiety meds now that they are adults. medical neglect has legally and effectively disabled them. a timely diagnosis and intervention could have saved them. of course teenagers are self-diagnosing using tiktok. if your knee-jerk reaction is to scoff at the idea and dismiss it as dumb teenager shit instead of being radicalized because the best shot young people have at attaining the mental health support they need is a fucking dancing videos app, you're categorically a political enemy of the youth.

[pick-up-zafon]

@dawgbog

it is so dang funny to me that there is this cultural pressure for artists to be modest about their art. 'you cant say your own book is five stars' WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO RATE IT FOUR? buckaroo if you create ANYTHING from your heart it has all the grand cosmic uniqueness you do. CELEBRATE YOURSELF

[pick-up-zafon]

empathy gets treated as this universally positive thing but we forget that empathy often equals pain, and pain often activates fight or flight behaviors. a lot of my most asshole moments as a person were motivated by a twinge of empathy that was too painful to engage with in that moment, so i became aggressive and mean, NOT compassionate and helpful

[pick-up-zafon]

consider: teenagers aren’t apathetic about everything they’re just used to you shitting all over whatever they show excitement about

[pick-up-zafon]

Two days into this tumblr account and I’m already addicted to venting my thoughts on the internet. I was thinking massacre in Palestine and the Troubles (in the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland) and the different ways they have both been handled by the governments they affected and reported on by the media.

Consider, for a moment, the consequences had instead of ‘just’ instituting effectively martial law in Belfast, including on-sight shootings for suspicious individuals (which often ended up being teenagers, making their way to school), checkpoints in the streets (along with paramilitary checkpoints). Tens of thousands died in the multi-decade span of the Troubles. Now imagine, after ‘attacks on civilians’, in Manchester, in London, in Brighton, and more, after the personal friend of Margaret Thatcher was killed in a bombing, after the IRA sent a message to Thatcher that went as the following:

You need to be lucky every time. We need only to be lucky once.

Imagine if Thatcher had instead decided to level Belfast and everyone in it. Now, the parallel isn’t perfect - Hamas is the government of the region, and the IRA and other paramilitaries were not. They both enjoy strong support, however, and the same arguments being made by rightwing Israelis now aren’t hard to imagine coming from the same views in the UK that spawned Enoch Powell. There’s a lot of unexpected similarities, however - documents declassified recently found Thatcher was propping up smaller paramilitaries financially, allowing them to buy more guns, more bombs, more ways to kill people she was supposedly trying to protect, so the Irish would fight each other and not the British - just as Netanyahu has been sending billions of dollars through Qatar to prop up Hamas as a convenient enemy and scapegoat.

A considerable proportion of Protestants in Northern Ireland were essentially imported Scottish Protestants brought in to shift voting power away from Irish republicans and toward the unionists, and Catholics at the time were heavily discriminated against - barred from work, housing, places of leisure, in some cases even education, on the basis of their faith. I don’t need to spell out the parallel there. The so-called Troubles, called so because it was and still is politically inconvenient to say ‘Irish Uprising’ or ‘Irish Civil War’, happened on a backdrop of nine hundred years of Irish oppression by the British. In the 1920s, in Cork, it was legal for a soldier of the Crown - Ireland being under effective military occupation at that point, as far as I know - to shoot any Irish person stood in a group of three, or with their hands in their pockets. That’s why Cillian Murphy (from Cork) stands with his hands in public, as far as I know. During the Irish Famine (how I hate that phrase, as if it was the fault of the Irish people) enough food was produced in Ireland to feed every Irish person, and yet

ALMOST SEVEN MILLION OUT OF A POPULATION OF EIGHT MILLION

either starved, were worked to death, or fled the country in a span of around two decades. The issue? The British refused to stop taking so much food out of the country, and so the Irish starved. Ever wondered why there’s so many follies and random high-quality roads in the middle of nowhere in Ireland? The landowning aristocracy, bless their hearts, couldn’t fathom the idea of simply giving out food and housing, so they set up pointless work projects so they had a reason to give children and starving families food. Today, the Irish population has not yet recovered to pre-genocide-by-neglect levels, but the population worldwide of those that call Ireland home is over a hundred and ten million. Without the Irish diaspora, the USA would likely be speaking German. Hell, we might all be speaking German.

The parallel here? Israel is supposed to provide sufficient food, water, and housing to all the Palestinian people with its supposed territorial remit. It interpreted that as ‘we own all the basic necessities in this, our claimed land’. And yet, organisations like the UNRWA have been providing essential aid for years and years. I cannot have been the only one that saw the news articles about Israel saying they owned all the rainwater that fell in Gaza.

Next parallel? The total demonisation of Hamas and, though it was the most prolific group in the Troubles, it was by no means the sole culprit, the IRA (and by extension, Sinn Fein, though Sinn Fein has shaken much of its old reputation). I’m not disputing that either of these organisations is in the wrong. I’m saying both of the “defending” parties in these situations totally ignored the fact that the existence and continued activity of their convenient antagonists was almost exclusively their fault because of the oppression they visited upon certain groups and the violent backlash that inevitably entails. Even Hezbollah likely only exists because of the 1983 invasion of Lebanon by, you guessed it, Israel. It took Ronald Reagan getting on the phone for that action of ‘self-defence’ to be called off, possibly the highlight action of his entire career. Hamas might call for the total eradication of the state of Israel. Netanyahu openly calls for its total eradication also.

When the IRA demanded a united Ireland, on account of them being Irish and the land belonging to them, it was ‘we can’t just throw out the Protestants who want to be part of the Union! Monsters!’. When Putin invaded Ukraine it was ‘we must repel Russian imperialism’. When Israel says ‘this is my land by ancient right’, on grounds that can definitely be heavily disputed like the IRA’s couldn’t, I’m hearing fuck all about the Palestinians, who are being actively repressed in all walks of life, inside and outside of Palestine.

[pick-up-zafon]

killing you with a giant laser beam

funny pictures

[pick-up-zafon]

It occurred to me waking up that the objective “realness” and inherent, self-determined substance of any divine being whom people place the foundations of their faith upon is.. less relevant than I thought it was, barely nine hours ago.

The faithful create their own god - a thousand thousand thousand twice over, like a strained tapestry of divine fragments, close enough to form one full picture of the almighty He until our pathetic mortal fingers try to touch and the tapestry gives - and those thousand thousand thousand twice over shards struggle away from each other, though stretched so thin the mantle already is over the shoulders of a thousand thousand twice over of the self-professed faithful.

Though I am not faithful, I can see the work of small gods everywhere - as if they sit on the shoulders like some caricature of conscience. I see the hand of small gods in fiery rhetoric in the newspapers about rightful ownership of this land and that land and this country and that country - for a truly good being would not allow his faithful to be misled so blatantly. So, I blame the small god, because I know one person does not reflect the wider faith.

It is difficult, not to condemn the faith as a whole - absolute power corrupts absolutely, yes, but the belief in an absolute power has equal potential to corrupt, both for the faithful and unfaithful, as well as to be corrupted. I hear “good works” and am reassured of the morality of faith until I recall proselytism is good works, conversion is good works. I hear “faith is the measure of morality” and “faith is the key to heaven” and panic - how do you expect a person to behave with no limits on their actions but that oh-so-malleable faith and with a key to heaven strung above their head, as opposed to round and round their neck like the millstone it should be.

Were a god real tomorrow, especially the one which occupies my thoughts given its impact in the world outside of its jurisdiction of faith, it would not deserve my faith. Any self-declared all-knowing, all-powerful god that tolerates the blatant and deliberate misuses of its creed for hundreds of years - even one day - is an outcast of my mind, an exile of my philosophy, a fugitive of my internal laws. Any god which allows its name to be used to condemn whole swathes of people it claims to have created in its own, self-claimed flawless image - will experience the same, tiny protest. I hope it bothers someone, somewhere. A minuscule mortal grit in a divine boot that is unlikely to even exist.

This isn’t to say the past, present and future of all faith is hopeless; the message of a faith is often evident through what appears to be doctoring. Faith is no tool or weapon or rallying cry - it is a box of things. You simply take from it what you need. It is those who hand out hate and say ‘this came from the box’ that deserve any vitriol I have toward faith. Those who accept all until it comes into their own home are a close second.

It has occurred to me that this likely stems from a deep-rooted hatred of unnecessary hierarchy, especially those that enact unnecessary violence and bureaucracy. Faith symbolises that, for myself, as it commands that it should not be questioned. How do you free somebody from something they’ve been conditioned, likely from the point of awareness, that they do not wish to be free from?

[pick-up-zafon]

HELLO - me, 20/09/24

I had a picture of a cat saying something whimsical about lies lies falsehoods to put here but I lost it

consider yourself warned that I am a habitual and serial liar about lots of things that aren’t really even worth lying about

big fan of any media involving clever words (rap music, poetry, literature and many other kinds of book)

using this for rambling into a void about anything that catches my fancy

call me zafon for short unless you know me as something else (zafon is still an option in this case)

he/him

18

british but trying to change my ways