uboat53 - Tumblr blog

[uboat53]

Look, USians, I don’t want to step into your internal politics, but you see, 45 years ago, we spaniards had the occurrence to write in our constitution that the head of state (the king) has immunity from prosecution for anything they do while they are in the job, and now we have an ex-king with a Wikipedia page that includes an “alleged corruption” section 55 paragraphs long.

And it’s only “alleged” because he can’t be taken to court even with the piles of evidence that exist.

Just saying.

[uboat53]

[uboat53]

I genuinely believe that some people could encounter a button that says “if you push this button everyone in the world has the opportunity to live a better life and your life remains exactly the same” and they would not push it.

They’d be like “well that button’s not fair to me, though,” even though there’s literally no other buttons around and nothing newly bad would happen to them if the button was pushed.

[uboat53]

I laughed so fucking hard at this

[uboat53]

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

[uboat53]

Well, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court figured out how they can get the results they want in the Trump immunity case. To quote Alito from oral arguments:

“I’m not, as I said, I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case.”

Source

[uboat53]

So on my posts about racism or transmisogyny, I often see tags that basically say “I don’t understand this but I’m going to reblog it anyway.” If you see a “social justice” type post that you want to reblog but don’t understand?

Don’t.

I know this goes against everything you’re used to hearing on this website, but listen. Reblogging posts you don’t understand is basically the equivalent of blindly repeating whatever you’re told. Even if you’re right, if you don’t understand why you’re right, you could be spouting utter bullshit and you wouldn’t even know it.

When I see “I don’t know what this means but I’m gonna reblog it anyway” it sends a lot of messages. It says that you care more about seeming right than being right. It says that you want good ally credit without any of the work of being a good ally. It says you’re on my side because I can make a post sound good, not because you actually agree with me on anything beyond the surface level.

So instead of just reblogging that post, save it for later. Like it, draft it, bookmark it, whatever. Go to the op’s blog and skim through a couple of pages, see if you can find some context. If the post is old, you could try asking for context in a non-condescending way. “Is this post referring to something specific?” is a lot better than, say, “Does this even happen? I’ve never heard of this.”

If that doesn’t help, do some more research. Google, search tumblr tags for recent posts on a subject, ask people who have EXPLICITLY stated they are willing to educate. Maybe in the process you’ll find more posts with a similar message to the original, but in easier to understand language. Maybe someone else already added a reply that adds useful information onto the op.

And maybe all of that takes a long time. Maybe, by the time you finally understand what the post was talking about, it’s months old and no longer relevant. Maybe you don’t even want to reblog it anymore. Who cares, fuck that post. You learned and grew as a person. That’s more important than looking good on a blog.

[uboat53]

I cant believe this tweet is how I find out

[uboat53]

Some useful commentary on AI that I found recently.

"Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern."

Source

"The realms AI is touted as transforming — such as health care, legal practice and education — are precisely the sorts of areas where generative AI's "mostly right but frequently wrong" accuracy rate could cause havoc."

Source

[uboat53]

Anyone else notice that, for all the Republican complaining about how bad inflation is, their economic agenda is almost tailor made to supercharge it?

[uboat53]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[uboat53]

Hey look, another right-wing figure crossed an invisible line after years of being openly racist and now other right-wingers are finally denouncing him as such. Any bets on how long it takes for the right-wing to get rid of a racist BEFORE they've had decades to spread racist ideas?

More importantly, are they actually upset about Carlson's long run of antisemitism or are they just mad that he criticized Israel?

[uboat53]

On average, my assumption is that a woman or minority who made it through med school and residency and became a doctor (or any other difficult profession) is going to be better at it than a white man. There's certainly individual variability there, but if we're dealing in averages, it's probably the case; the mediocre ones don't make it while a lot of mediocre white men do.

And I say that as a white man.

[uboat53]

"We usually talk right about racism = bad for people of color, or racism = good for White people. That’s one way to do it, but it’s also true that racism impoverishes our democracy and undercuts our social safety net. For most White people, unless you are Elon Musk, you or someone you love is going to need a social safety net. Maybe you are safe in your middle class position, but you’re going to know some young person that can’t afford higher education and ends up in a really bad spot. You’re going to know somebody who needs medical care they can’t afford, and they die because they can’t get it. That stuff happens all the time, and we act like it’s normal and it’s not. That hurts a lot of White people. When you start looking at racism not just as something that only gives or only takes but as something that does both things, then you can ask yourself if it’s worth being silent about it. I calculate $146,000 from my family that probably they had because of racism. I calculate $225,000 of money that I have had access to or equity I’ve gained probably because I was White. That’s almost $400,000. But I also lost my mother because we didn’t have public health care. And I had a really traumatic childhood because we didn’t have public health care. Most of that money from my family and most of those bonuses I’m talking about with housing, I wouldn’t need if we had affordable higher education. I wouldn’t need them if we had affordable housing for everybody. I think there are enough White people now who understand that this isn’t really working in our favor, but we don’t have language for it."

-- Tracie McMillan, author of "The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America"

It sounds like a good book and the whole interview is well worth the (~5 minute) read.

[uboat53]

Please don't forget Armenians

Today is Armenian genocide remembrance day. On april 24, 1915 started mass deportations of hundreds of Armenian intelectuals and community leaders, who were (most of the time) eventually killed. Armenian women and children were systematically r//ed and forcibly converted into islam. There were more than 2 milion Armenians in ottoman empire prior to ww1, 1,5 milion of them were viciously killed. Three millennia of Armenian civilaziation in eastern Anatolis was fully destroyed. Turkey today refuses to acknowledge genocides of christian minorities in early 20th century.

Do you know that mass ethnic cleansing of Armenians in ottoman empire inspired Lemkin to coin the term 'genocide'?

Last year in september azerbaijan allied with turkey initiated a war against Armenia. More that 5000 Armenians were murdered, thousands of Armenia families had to live their ancestrial land to not get murdered. There are hundreds of vids on internet where armenian p.o.w.s are tortured. Recently azerbaijan opened a "museum" displayind dead or dying Armenians and kids were allowed to visit it.

Please educate yourself on Armenian genocide. You can also donate here to help Armenia. Thanks for reading!!

[uboat53]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[uboat53]

This is probably one of the coolest interviews I've listened to in a while, it's awesome to hear what the Biden Administration is doing to finally try to reign in the monopolies and oligarchies in our economy!