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bat girl

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Persepolis is a great graphic memoir, but fundamentally, it’s just that—a memoir. It’s not a history book. All memoirs are inherently flawed and present only one perspective on historical events. They cannot substitute for actual history books. Given Marjane and her family's class background, her observations and interpretations do not reflect the experiences or opinions of all Iranians.

It’s best to approach the book as you would any other memoir, with a critical eye. You wouldn’t take every memoir as objective truth, would you? It’s strange to see people touting it as the definitive primer or the first book everyone should read about Iran.

Don’t make me end up hating that book, please.

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I suppose I should ask on behalf of my fellow ignoramuses why that persepolis quote is bad. I thought it was prescient, particularly to highlight the common humanity between the people of two countries that are hostile to each other. I don't think the part about our governments being the same are correct as America's worse for the world, but I didn't expect people to hate the quote that much.

In the era we live in, a government cannot exist independently of its people, "the usamerican government & the usamerican people" are not completely unrelated entities that happen to be on the same land with the people having no influence whatsoever on the government, nor is that true for any country on earth, let alone the Iranian people. The quote tries to ignore this reality by pretending as though the people of all countries are unrelated victims of their governments

While the "east" and "west" aren't perfect descriptions the world is very much divided! Again, the political scene does not exist independently of the population! Denying this reality denies the very context all governments currently exist in and make their decisions based on, it is denying the very active global hegemony's oppression, it therefore denies how the governments of SWANA exist in relation to it: sucking up to the west in expense of the populace and / or trying to protect the populace, it denies the victimhood of all Iranian people within this order actively hostile and deadly to their very life because it pretends such a hostile order does not exist in the place.

As you said it yourself too, "(our) governments being as bad as USA is incorrect". It is actually the worst offender here, the above so far is a deeply flawed understanding of how states & the world order operates. This deeply flawed understanding piles up to logically result in the final misconception: That the US; the deadly force that has been causing suffering and mayhem in SWANA for over a century, couping and scheming to install puppet regimes that results in the death of millions, dehumanizing everyone within the made up category of "the middle east", (something it carries from the west before it!) and the very aggressor here, is the same as its victims

The Iranian nation is a victim of the US, the Iranian Government does not exist independently of the people, the "just the government, not the people!" play pretend of trying to position the government as seperate from the general populace just furthers the said justification to attack every nation the US victimizes. Therefore it is a very detestable quote, born from mistakes in analysis the citizens of periphery who gather fame in the core unfortunately tend to fall in by passively internalizing the core's logic used to manufacture consent and combining them with the sometimes valid complaints they had of their state, admittedly it can also be from trying to assimilate by appearing as the Good Token Anonymized Person Of The Global South who would never think the opposition to the west is justified

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just to be clear and yes by extension of my earlier post: i don't think strong friendships between men are important. go talk to a woman.

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I suppose I should ask on behalf of my fellow ignoramuses why that persepolis quote is bad. I thought it was prescient, particularly to highlight the common humanity between the people of two countries that are hostile to each other. I don't think the part about our governments being the same are correct as America's worse for the world, but I didn't expect people to hate the quote that much.

In the era we live in, a government cannot exist independently of its people, "the usamerican government & the usamerican people" are not completely unrelated entities that happen to be on the same land with the people having no influence whatsoever on the government, nor is that true for Iranian people, let alone any country on earth. The quote tries to ignore this reality by pretending as though the people of all countries are unrelated victims of their governments

While the "east" and "west" aren't perfect descriptions the world is very much divided! Again, the political scene does not exist independently of the population! Denying this reality denies the very context all governments currently exist in and make their decisions based on, it is denying the very active global hegemony's oppression, it therefore denies how the governments of SWANA exist in relation to it: sucking up to the west in expense of the populace and / or trying to protect the populace, it denies the victimhood of all Iranian people within this order actively hostile and deadly to their very life because it pretends such a hostile order does not exist in the place.

As you said it yourself too, "(our) governments being as bad as USA is incorrect". It is actually the worst offender here, the above so far is a deeply flawed understanding of how states & the world order operates. This deeply flawed understanding piles up to logically result in the final misconception: That the US; the deadly force that has been causing suffering and mayhem in SWANA for over a century, couping and scheming to install puppet regimes that results in the death of millions, dehumanizing everyone within the made up category of "the middle east", (something it carries from the west before it!) and the very aggressor here, is the same as its victims

The Iranian nation is a victim of the US, the Iranian Government does not exist independently of the people, the "just the government, not the people!" play pretend just furthers the said justification to attack every nation the US victimizes. Therefore it is a very detestable quote, born from mistakes in analysis the citizens of periphery who gather fame in the core unfortunately tend to fall in by passively internalizing the core's logic used to manufacture consent and combining them with the sometimes valid complaints they had of their state

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I'm so sorry to be defending Zohran Mamdani, a figure that is by all measures not sufficiently socialist for a lot of those on my dash, but he's still a Muslim public figure who is visibly nonwhite and some of you are way too comfortable with overlooking what it means for someone like this to win the mayorship of one of the biggest cities in the USA despite a constant racist and islamophobic mainstream coverage.

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continually astounded to learn that someone around me is actually for real christian. like. aren't you supposed to grow out of that

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genuinely curious but I don't know how to phrase this in a way that sounds less accusatory so please know I'm asking in good faith and am just bad at words

what are your thoughts on the environmental impact of generative ai? do you think the cost for all the cooling system is worth the tasks generative ai performs? I've been wrangling this because while I feel like I can justify it as smaller scales, that would mean it isn't a publicly available tool which I also feel uncomfortable with

the environmental impacts of genAI are almost always one of three things, both by their detractors and their boosters:

vastly overstated

stated correctly, but with a deceptive lack of context (ie, giving numbers in watt-hours, or amount of water 'used' for cooling, without necessary context like what comparable services use or what actually happens to that water)

assumed to be on track to grow constantly as genAI sees universal adoption across every industry

like, when water is used to cool a datacenter, that datacenter isn't just "a big building running chatgpt" -- datacenters are the backbone of the modern internet. now, i mean, all that said, the basic question here: no, i don't think it's a good tradeoff to be burning fossil fuels to power the magic 8ball. but asking that question in a vacuum (imo) elides a lot of the realities of power consumption in the global north by exceptionalizing genAI as opposed to, for example, video streaming, or online games. or, for that matter, for any number of other things.

so to me a lot of this stuff seems like very selective outrage in most cases, people working backwards from all the twitter artists on their dashboard hating midjourney to find an ethical reason why it is irredeemably evil.

& in the best, good-faith cases, it's taking at face value the claims of genAI companies and datacenter owners that the power usage will continue spiralling as the technology is integrated into every aspect of our lives. but to be blunt, i think it's a little naive to take these estimates seriously: these companies rely on their stock prices remaining high and attractive to investors, so they have enormous financial incentives not only to lie but to make financial decisions as if the universal adoption boom is just around the corner at all times. but there's no actual business plan! these companies are burning gigantic piles of money every day, because this is a bubble

so tldr: i don't think most things fossil fuels are burned for are 'worth it', but the response to that is a comprehensive climate politics and not an individualistic 'carbon footprint' approach, certainly not one that chooses chatgpt as its battleground. genAI uses a lot of power but at a rate currently comparable to other massively popular digital leisure products like fortnite or netflix -- forecasts of it massively increasing by several orders of magnitude are in my opinion unfounded and can mostly be traced back to people who have a direct financial stake in this being the case because their business model is an obvious boondoggle otherwise.

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I could NEVER be one of those ppl complaining about the classic undertale characters being “irrelevant” in deltarune. I find the way deltarune highlights each of their flaws through their much more mundane lives so fascinating

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the same people who cry 'debttrap diplomacy' when it comes to chinese ties to allies in africa are somehow incapable of applying the same level of 'scrutiny' to chinas financial interactions with imperialist countries

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Yixuan by Jelmul [Twitter/X] ※Illustration shared with permission from the artist. If you like this artwork please support the artist by visiting the source.

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not surprised that the gvt has backed the bombings of iran but also fucking hell. fucking. hell. death to australia forever

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love to see someone say something like, "this person can not be transfem as they are nonbinary."

oh, okay. guess I'll go fuck myself then

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the making of the perfect performance

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obviously to be clear you should care about us imperial aggression because of its victims, the people of the global south who are immiserated and murdered by it. but also if you are at all a fan of living on a habitable planet you should be deeply concerned by what it means for nonproliferation. how could any state that fears the us as a strategic threat, seeing what is happening in iran right now, not conclude that obtaining nuclear weapons is in fact a necessary priority

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Table: Projected Fatalities by March 2025

"These figures are not speculative—they reflect the grim logic of total siege. Nearly one million Palestinians in Gaza, or 40% of the entire population, may already be dead or dying as a result of this genocide. Over half are children. This is not hyperbole. It is arithmetic backed by epidemiological modeling, humanitarian reports, and the lived reality on the ground.

Some may struggle to accept the scale of this toll. But Gaza has already provided ample evidence. By late 2024, Gaza’s own health officials were warning of “thousands of excess deaths” due to disease outbreaks and untreated conditions. International humanitarian workers described watching children die of dehydration and women die in childbirth with no medical help. In one field survey, over 60% of Palestinians reported losing at least one family member since the genocide began. In families of six to eight people, this means multiple losses in each household. The pain is collective, interwoven into the fabric of survival itself.

And still, many of these deaths go uncounted—not because they are invisible, but because the world has chosen to look away. The elderly man who dies because he cannot access dialysis. The infant who vomits blood from typhoid. The teenager with an infected wound that turns septic in a tent. The entire family who dies of hunger surrounded by fields of food they are not allowed to touch. These are not “indirect” deaths in the moral sense. They are central to the machinery of extermination. They are what make this genocide not just an event—but an ongoing system.

The magnitude of this loss is not always visible in news footage. But it is carved into Gaza’s epidemiological data. It is heard in the final voicemail of a doctor who could no longer treat his patients. It is felt in the testimonies of parents burying child after child. And it is codified in every policy decision that blocks aid, bombs hospitals, and calls starvation “necessary pressure.”

The indirect deaths may be harder to photograph—but they are no less real, no less intentional, and no less worthy of mourning and outrage. They are genocide by other means. They are the slow kill. And they must be counted."