#Delenda est

[thespectrehauntingfodlan]

This is how the NYT is reporting on Israel bombing the car of humanitarian workers, they make it seem like Gazans did it. This is way beyond parody, this is genocide abetment.

[painiac]

[thepariahcontinuum]

Transfemme Supervillain called "Delenda Est-rogen"

Is that anything?

[havendance]

Remembering the one Hades and Persephone fanfic retelling I read where the author had clearly never eaten a pomegranate in their life and just had the character in the Persephone role take a bite out of the side like an apple

[eightyonekilograms]

*wipes away happy tear* he’s going to kill it faster than I ever dared dream

[trustintheharper]

03x11   "Delenda Est" Part 5

[probablyasocialecologist]

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

[...]

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica. The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years. The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

24 September 2024

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

Tonight, our community made history. This election was never about me. It has always been about our community and the values we share. And it's about our undying belief that there is an alternative to inequality, poverty and war. Tonight's result in Islington North gives us a glimpse of a different future, which puts the interests of the many ahead of those of the few. It is also a warning - a warning to the incoming government that dissent cannot be crushed without consequences. That ideas of equality, justice and peace are eternal. That hope for a better world can never be extinguished.

[st-just]

Objectively it's not even in the top ten worst things about Canada but def. one of the most personally embarrassing to me is that half the population lives in one narrow 1,000 km strip bookended by major cities and yet we still haven't managed to figure out high speed passenger rail up and down the corridor. Absolute joke of a country.

[youarenotthewalrus]

The thing about slashing copyright terms to something sane is that we'd still see a ton of stuff based on old work but a lot more of it would be motivated by creators going "so I have this cool idea for a new spin on an old classic" and a lot less of it would be motivated by corporate rightsholders going "I own this intellectual property and would like a Return on my Investment."

[giantpetrel]

Journalism Delenda Est

President of Harvard does something that'd get a student expelled instantly, with a permanent black mark on their record. School desperately refuses to get rid of her for what, a month? All for purely political reasons. The media pull out the stops to portray it as some "crazy right wing conspiracy theory" for weeks even though the evidence is literally right there and utterly damning. She gets to resign (albeit forced) rather than being formally shitcanned. The media portrays her as a victim of the "far-right conspiracy theories" that they themselves declared into existence, which is latitude that no student would ever receive. And once again, this is at HARVARD.

Why do people respect academics again? These people have no principles whatsoever above political convenience. Every professor who signed that petition to not fire Gay should have a plagiarism checker run on their own CV; I'll bet you we find quite a few interesting things.

And as always, every journalist involved in this story should be boiled alive in oil.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

not exactly a shocking new insight, but its pretty fucking nuts that if you can demonstrate you only pleaded guilty bc a mafioso threatened to try and kill you otherwise, this is a paradigmatic instance of a coerced involuntary plea, whereas if you plead guilty only bc the prosecution threatened to try and kill you otherwise, this is simply the bread and butter of plea bargaining. its not extortion at gunpoint once its the state doing the extorting

"Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? [...] Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, 'What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.'"

[richo1915]

[havendance]

My silly headcannon is that Tim sends out a weekly email newsletter to everyone's batmail accounts like: Batman's going off the rails again 🙄 Oracle says you all have terrible passwords and need to change them because everyone fell for her phishing tests. Except Cass. Cass, Oracle says you need to actually check your batmail. The Joker's been lying low this week, but someone's been buying up a bunch of abandoned movie theaters so be ready. Also, Dick, you're out of Zesti again. You should get some more. It's on sale.

[eightyonekilograms]

I turned off reblogs on this post because it was about to breach containment in a way that looked unpleasant, but I did want to provide one bit of followup for those of you fortunate enough to not be following Twitter drama. You'll want to follow this bit though, because it's really funny.

The second bit is, as Matt says, that because a lot of leading figures in tech have gotten so annoyed at their treatment in the press recently, they've conjured up this theory about how journalists attach tons of status and self-worth to their blue check marks. And Matt is saying, no, this really isn't true at all: the fact that journalists all get blue checks by default is more of an implementation quirk of Twitter and nobody really cares. I have no reason to doubt him on this. So what's sort of funny is that apparently Elon got caught up in the same hatejerk as the rest of tech, and thought that "bluechecks" really did put tons of value on their verified status and could be extorted out of money for it. Which is probably a mistake, and one that's going to cost him literally billions.

At the time I thought this might have been a little uncharitable, but it turns out it was completely correct and, if anything, did not go far enough.

Today was the day that "legacy" blue check marks got turned off, and so now only the people paying Twitter $8/month get to have one. And this is absolutely hilarious, because now suddenly the blue check mark is a strong signal that you support Elon Musk and his Twitter machinations. So it went from being something which was free and had maybe slightly positive "eh, sure, I'll take it" valence, to something which (for most former bluechecks anyway) has strongly negative associations and costs money to boot. So they are, overwhelmingly, declining to pay. In fact, Twitter can't even give them away: LeBron James said he wouldn't pay for a check, Elon offered to give him one for free, and James refused, because the association is now so toxic. ell, em, ay, oh.

And this is absolutely infuriating the Elon fan crowd, because they never understood the indented paragraph above, and really did think that people valued the status of their blue check mark, instead of it being a "eh, whatever" thing that was barely worth it when it was free and certainly isn't worth $100/year. So you're getting deranged takes like this:

You can find thousands of these I'm-not-owned corncob posts, along with even more posts in the replies of people going "no thanks", cajoling and begging them to buy a blue check.

Sociologically, it is frickin' fascinating that this symbol just overnight had a complete valence inversion (and also that, despite this flip, the word "bluecheck" still refers to somebody just as insufferable as it did before).

[trustintheharper]

03x11   "Delenda Est" Part 4