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since apparently this is controversial, reblog with your country in the tags and whether or not you think noodles and pasta are the same thing

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You will come to Chicago prime and you will like it

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yeah these tags are getting promoted to being part of the post

Obligatory “fuck JKR” and “I don’t know enough about Yud to say for certain but I’ve heard some sus things and if he’s an ass, fuck him too”.

But like, I see a lot of people use HPMOR as an easy roast by comparison for any sort of complaint or fic or story along the lines of “this story is bad because the characters would have simply done x if they were rational”. Like, saying an HPMOR illad would simply have Odysseus build ladders or something.

And putting aside the whole conversation on that stuff, I just gotta ask - has anyone actually read HPMOR? Like beginning to end. Because I have, and it’s not actually the thing everyone seems to accuse it of being. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely starts out seeming like it is that thing, because the story is in part a conversation about the idea of “what if x character was perfectly smart and rational all the time ”. But in addition to being about a whole lot more than that idea, it’s also just that: a conversation about the whole concept of a perfectly rational protagonist.

Okay, case in point. Harry in the story is a supergenius, and an ardent believer in rationalism, but he’s also not perfect or always right. Hell, multiple times he ignores rules or instructions or laws because he believes that he’s smart enough to break them safely and rational enough that his reasons for doing so are justified. And most of these times the result is that it either backfires, or he realizes that the only reason it didn’t backfire was pure luck and that he was in way over his head without knowing.

And it’s not as if the story doesn’t scale the challenge to meet his new level of competence - Tom Riddle is made just as smart as Harry is, has memorized and internalized the Evil Overlord List three times over, and comes within a (rather literal) hair’s breadth of winning.

Idk it’s far from a perfect story, and by no means above criticism or jokes at its expense but speaking as someone who did find some of the ideas it played with legitimately narratively compelling at times (especially Riddle, I mean no notes, second biggest canon to fanfic upgrade in quality of antagonist writing I’ve ever seen, and given the first is AFO in The Dark Below, the best antagonist I’ve seen in anything, that’s a high bar), it does kinda irk me when people dunk on it for being something that it objectively isn’t.

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US-based writers: don't miss out on getting into the class action suit against Anthropic / LibGen

Apparently the deadline is tomorrow. (See the Bluesky posting over here for useful URLs.)

...Just doublechecked my entries in their database. They scraped essentially everything I've ever written. And confused Diane Wynne Jones with me, ffs. ...FUCKERS.

If you are US-based, get yourself on that list. Here's its URL:

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You know...there is an interesting counterpoint here. Which is that most of the Zionists in significant positions of power and influence within the US are not, in fact, Jewish. Oh, some are, but most - due to sheer demographic size - are not. They're Evangelical Christians. Specifically, the type of lunatic Evangelical that thinks the Jews need to control all of Israel to bring forth the end times. If it was just Jewish people alone Israel and AIPAC wouldn't have nearly the political clout they do. It is, as with most of this country's problems, the fault of our millions of insaneEvangelical zealots.

If someone's whining about the banks that's definitely antisemitism though, because if you want to point fingers at a sector of the economy for enabling the Palestinian genocide and you pick the banks over the military industrial complex, you're not arguing in good faith.

why do people seem to forget the existence of dogwhistles the moment the conversation is about Jews or Zionism?

Yall will see someone say “The Zionists secretly control the media and the banks.” And when someone points out the obvious antisemitism in that you throw a shitfit because they said ZIONIST, not JEW, and therefore it cant possibly have anything to do with the common trope that jews control the media and banks, and YOU’RE actually antisemitic for conflating them.

like at this point MTG could’ve just said it eas a Zionist space laser and yall would’ve believed her

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Say it with me folks:

“Eat the rich” means 1%ers and billionaires

middle class is closer to poverty than being a multimillionaire

“The rich” does NOT include children of billionaires (come on we’re at least slightly better than the plagues of Egypt)

Upper middle class children SHOULD NOT feel guilt over having money

Being aware of privilege and using your privilege to help others IS NOT a guilt trip

Constantly feeling guilty helps no one

Billionaires, however, should feel guilty over hoarding wealth.

Upper middle class is NOT rich

Black Lives Matter

Trans rights are human rights

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not to sound like a christian facebook mom but some of yall need to have grace in your hearts for the people in your lives or the people you pass once on the road and never see again like you literally need to stop assuming the worst of everyone and their intentions it is poisoning your brain. you can be careful and responsible without being a miserable person. it is possible i promise

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Now, the giant fuckoff data centers used to train these AI, that’s a different story.

But yeah, once a model has been created. you can run that shit on a laptop.

what the fuck are you people talking about it doesn't cost a bottle of water to AI generate an image. you can run those bitches locally it's not even hard. takes a few seconds for a neural network to generate an image on your GPU. it costs more energy to use that exact same GPU to generate thousands of images over the course of playing a video game

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Scattered Thoughts on Conspiracism and MAGA

I was watching some YouTube videos about really abusive parents who got away with it for a long time because they had a media presence as really super duper traditionally religious families, and sort of contemplating the fact that these violent, destructive, selfish people were so enamored with this incredibly moralizing language.

And I started to wonder if, for people like that, God functions to transform their own intuitions about how things ought to be into universal, objective rules.

And from there wondering if there isn't for some people a sort of fantasy of the total dissolving of the self into some stronger will.

In a lot of conservative religious ideologies in the US, children are to obey their parents, wives are to obey their husbands, and the husband is to obey God.

Nobody lower on the hierarchy has any authority to challenge people higher up in the hierarchy; if a wife realizes her husband is sinning, or abusing his authority over her, this does not give her the right to stop submitting to his authority; in the ideal, his authority over her still remains absolute no matter what sins he commits, and her only recourse is to pray to God, the one with authority over the husband, to order him back into proper behavior.

And so I think for abusive people in these structures they can justify their abuse of others through the pretense that they are doing the same thing. I submit to God, so why aren't my ungrateful kids or selfish wife willing to put in the same effort to submit to me?

But of course, God only speaks to them through vague impulses and intuitions, not the concrete demands that humans make of each other.

@memecucker talks a lot about faddish right-wingers adopting Catholicism with this fantasy of total submission, but then realizing with shock that the Popes, whatever else you can say for them, have actual coherent theological concerns and will actually, like, exercise their authority for purposes other than serving right-wing fantasies of submission.

An uglier leader, Donald Trump say, can play into that fantasy of total submission by being so changeable that the mass of their followers are never actually called on to do anything truly difficult. Individuals who get close to the leader might be smashed to bits for their failure to submit, but the vast majority of followers are not called on to do anything but to indulge whatever semi-conscious authoritarian impulses they already have, and if the leader realizes he's moving too far away from what they want he can simply reverse course and, because he has no principles beyond sheer love of power, simply change doctrine to something that his followers find easier to swallow (Look at Trump going from Operation Warp Speed to Anti-Vax).

This allows great masses of his followers to engage in a fantasy of authoritarian submission without ever encountering any situation where they would actually have to subordinate their own desires to those of someone else.

I'm not totally sure why, there seems to be this profound need to locate their own desires not as something that comes from them, but as something that comes from some source external to them.

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The kindergarten-ification of society

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I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:

A forty hour work week is considered full time.

It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)

A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.

Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.

Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.

Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.

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What VPN’s are good, then?

here's the story. i know expressvpn has been recommended in some 🏴‍☠️ how-to posts but it is not trustworthy. the parent company, kape technologies, not only used to distribute malate but has ties to multiple state surveillance agencies. and be careful where you look for info about good vpns, because kape technologies owns a bunch of "vpn review" sites too

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cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it

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It's the only retreat they have. They're asserting themselves at last, after they saw left-leaning society assert itself on them hundreds of times, and now for mysterious-to-them reasons it fails. If in your head you're thinking "jury choice is based on something other than the evidence 99% of the time, and people who believe otherwise seem kinda retarded", of course you get angry when you finally try it yourself and it only then doesn't work.

Yeah, that seems to keep happening.

Resentment is definitely a massive driver of current politics, that video about Candace Owens was pretty clear that a lot of her positions are based on defiance, a very literal "If Biden made it illegal to jump off a bridge I'd do it".

It's something that kind of perplexes me because it is an enormous focus on defiance but without a strong internal sense of self.

It's something that really bothers me about MAGA and Trump.

Democrats and leftists tend to think that a national Department of Education is a good idea. They also think that student loan debt has gotten out of control, and there should be some debt relief.

These opinions aren't in conflict.

But what that means is that the MAGA opinion has to be that the Department of Education should be abolished and also student loan debt collection is one of the most important functions of the government, which is contradictory; the Department of Education is in charge of student loan stuff.

And I find it really wild and scary how half-assed the attempts to try to reconcile these two things are. Student debt collection is crucial, and as far as I know the only plan to continue to do it once the Department of Education is dismantled is, "I don't know, some other department would do it. The Small Business Administration, I dunno, whatever."

Is there a plan to hire on new people? How would you face the legal challenges? What obstacles are there in terms of retraining? In terms of employment contracts? What about administrative and IT challenges? Would it be better, cheaper and/or more efficient to simply reform the internal structure of the Department of Education in order to minimize the disruption to this key function of the federal government?

For MAGA, these questions really don't seem to exist.

There's opposition but not in the sense of, "I will offer a competing view of the outside world", rather in the sense of "I will simply do the opposite of what you say."

I often find myself feeling that the conspiracist world-view involves a sort of...

It's as though the don't see statements about facts as statements about some sort of internally consistent world outside the self that we can discover.

Rather, a statement about facts, or about policy, is a moral story which justifies or refutes some kind of authority.

And so statements of fact don't need to be consistent with each other; Declaring that you are abolishing the Department of Education is a statement that the liberal elite no longer have the authority to tell people what to think about education. Declaring that student loan debt must stay at current levels or be increased is a statement that the liberal elite no longer have the authority to tell people what to think about education.

So there's no contradiction; these just mean "I'm in charge of this, not you" and on some level there just... Isn't an actual Department of Education or personnel or computer systems or record keeping or people with debt, there's just a sort of story about who is in charge and who's not in charge anymore.

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hello tumblr user. in front of you stands a confident and outspoken character. your challenge today & forever is to consider the possibility they may simply have self-confidence and are not just faking to secretly cover up massive insecurities. good luck

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why is all the text on this webbed site suddenly bolded. What the fuck.

Hate this. The only non bold text is text that was already italicized.