polyamorousmisanthrope

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

I feel like the reason certain dog-lovers insist cats are evil is because they read their body language as if they were dogs. So here’s a very basic guide to common “mean” things cats do that actually aren’t mean at all if you know what they’re thinking.

Rolling and exposing belly- attacks you when touched Does not mean: Give belly rubs! - haha I tricked you!  Actually means: I’m playful! If you reach for my belly I’ll grab your arm and bite it because I think we’re playfighting! 

Lazily exposing belly - still attacks when touched Does not mean: tricked you again! Actually means: I’m showing you my belly because I trust you. Please don’t break that trust by invading my personal space. I might accept a belly rub if I’m not ticklish and I know you well. Snapping at you while being pet Does not mean: I suddenly decided I dislike you! Actually means: You’re petting me in a way that gives me too much restless energy. Please focus on petting my head and shoulders instead of stroking the full length of my back next time.

Is in the same room but makes no attempt to interact Does not mean:  I’m ignoring you Actually means: We’re hanging out! I’m being respectful by giving you space while still enjoying your company. Slapping/scratching your hand when you try to pet them Does not mean: I hate you! Actually means: You’ve failed to establish that we’re not playing, or the way you’re approaching me scares me. Be calmer, speak more gently, make eye-contact and blink slowly at me before you try again.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Yes, It Is Just Like The Nazis

Hey so remember Anne Frank? The Jewish young girl who hid in an attic and was killed by the Nazis? The emblematic person we think of when we think of victims of the Holocaust? 

She did not die in a gas chamber or in a death camp. She died in a ‘temporary’ detention center for the mass deportations which preceded the death camps. She was in that camp because a patriotic neighbor ratted her out to the German deportation force. She died, not of a bullet to the back of the head or choking on gas, but of typhus. She contracted typhus because the Nazis couldn’t realistically deport people at the rate they wanted to, because before the death camps their infrastructure couldn’t handle the sudden influx of ethnic minorities they had decided to imprison, and because they didn’t care about the consequences of that so their deportation detention centers were unhygienic and prisoners were underfed and overcrowded. 

And she was picked up by the deportation force not because she was an illegal citizen but because, just like the US is doing with asylum seekers, she was part of a formerly recognized class of citizens who were legally redefined to lack citizenship by a new administration. 

Anne Frank is exactly like the children who have already died in the United State’s detention camps. Exactly. Down to the very last detail. There. Is. Not. A. Single. Difference. 

So unless you want to fucking tell me that Anne goddamn Frank was not a victim of the Holocaust, y’all can shut the fuck up with that “stop making concentration camp comparisons, you’re diminishing the suffering of the Holocaust” bullshit. 

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Someone was asking in a thread what kind of people could work for ICE right now.

I think it's a good time to remember that the image above are the people who put children into gas chambers.

When I was little, I asked what kind of person could work at a concentration camp.

The answer to both questions I think is "normal people who have accepted the dehumanization of another group of people."

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

When Republicans say the best way to get health care is to get a job, they are dishonest.

It's the worst way to provide health care.

Capitalism will NEVER provide health care for everyone. They will deny, deny, deny.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Everybody raise a glass to activist Opal Lee, one of the driving forces behind how we even got a Juneteenth in the first place.

Born Opal Flake in 1926 Texas, her home burned down when she was a small child and the family moved to Fort Worth. In 1939 the family purchased a home in a south side Fort Worth neighborhood --the first Black family to do so, which didn't sit well with some of the neighbors, and after only a few weeks an angry mob burned the house down. Despite these dual childhood traumas, Opal graduated from high school in 1943, and then eventually from Wiley College in 1953. She took a job teaching at an elementary school in Fort Worth, married fellow educator Dale Lee, and ultimately earned a Master's in counseling in 1968, from the North Texas State University (today the University of North Texas). She retired from her career in education in 1977 at the age of 51... and was clearly just getting started.

Beginning with a post-retirement career supervising a local food bank and its adjacent 13-acre farm, expanding it to a 33,000 sq. foot facility that today serves upwards of 500 families a day. More recently she also founded Transform 1012 N. Main Street, a coalition of Fort Worth area nonprofits and arts organizations aiming to reconstruct a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium into the Fred Rouse Arts Center (named for a Black man who was lynched by a Fort Worth mob in 1921). But Lee's greatest passion was always aimed toward preservation of local Black history, leading into the founding of the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society. It was from this starting point that June 19th began to be more widely acknowledged and celebrated as a yearly event. Each year Lee and other members of the society made a point of walking two and a half miles, symbolically covering the number of years between the formal end of enslavement (i.e., the Emancipation Proclamation) and the time most Texans found out about it.

In 2016, now at the age of 89, Lee took the advice of the society to "go bigger," and walked from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. (a distance of roughly 1,360 miles), taking more than five months to complete and collecting enthusiastic signatures along the way, in support of the premise of at last elevating Juneteenth to the status of a national holiday. On June 17, 2021, Lee was present at the White House when then-President Joe Biden signed the bill officially marking Juneteenth as an annual federal holiday. Today Lee is the oldest living member of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation (NJOF), and is both a board member --and Honorary Chair-- of the National Juneteenth Museum. She was named by the Dallas Morning News as 2021's "Unsung Hero of the Pandemic," has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2024 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

This past year, Habitat For Humanity built and gifted Opal a new house on the very Fort Worth lot where a racist mob burned down her family's home 85 years prior.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

THE ENTIRE WEST IS BEING PUT UP FOR SALE AND I AM BEGGING YOU TO CALL YOUR SENATORS

Trump’s budget bill has many, many things in it, but buried amongst it is the MILLIONS OF ACRES OF PUBLIC LAND FOR SALE.

This is the entirety of the Arizona state forests, the entire Cascades mountain range. Swathes of pristine desert around the national parks in Utah. On the doorstep of Jackson Hole.

THIS BILL IS BIG, BUT IT CAN BE AMENDED AND ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT PASS AS IS please.

If you have ever enjoyed the wilderness, we stand to lose it all forever.

CALLING your senators - NOT JUST IN THE WEST. ALL SENATORS, is CRUCIAL.

Outdoor alliance has a great resource for reaching out.

I don’t have a huge following but please, everywhere I have ever loved, the forests I grew up playing in, the land I got married on, is all at risk and I am begging.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

I would encourage you to look up the stats on women going to jail in self-defense situations. I'm a fat middle-aged white woman but I do have a martial arts background. I absolutely guarantee that a prosecuting attorney would try to make me out as some kind of damn Black Widow. Unless I could afford a much much better attorney, and I can't, I'd see jail time if I ever defended myself.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Some PTerry quotes that feel especially salient at the moment:

"He asked you to shoot at people who weren’t shooting back,” growled Vimes, striding forward, “That makes him insane, wouldn’t you say?”

“They are throwing stones, Sarge,” said Colon.

“So? Stay out of range. They’ll get tired before we do."

- Night Watch

Odd thing, ain't it... you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.

- Jingo

It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.

- Snuff

The poor devils. They thought a king would make them free.

- Feet of Clay

Beating people up in little rooms…he knew where that led. And if you did it for a good reason, you’d do it for a bad one. You couldn’t say “we’re the good guys” and do bad-guy things. Sometimes the watching watchman inside every good copper’s head could use an extra pair of eyes.

- Thud!

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

[polyamorousmisanthrope]

Buzz off, tovarische.