squirrel

joined 2 years ago
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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22889416

How to Fire J.K. Rowling: a guide to ethical engagement with Harry Potter

Personal note: This is not really news for anyone who is familiar with the TERF Supreme, but if anyone needs a concise write-up of her rampant bigotry, here is one.

 

The first castle of Bonaguil was built in the 13th century above a natural grotto which was incorparated into the dungeons of the castle (and still exists today). The castle's owners fought on the side of the English in the Hundred Years War and the castle was heavily damaged and changed owners several times.

It came into the possession of the wealthy Bérenger de Roquefeuil who was in a bitter rivalry with the French king. In defiance of the French king's orders, Bérenger used his wealth to heavily fortify the castle in the 15th century. The fortifications were so extensive that the castle was considered "unconquerable" for an army at the time. Several defensive rings and a complicated layout made it very hard for attackers to even approach the castle's gates. Yet it was never sieged and quickly lost its strategic relevancy.

Unlike other castles, it was largely left alone during the French Revolution and remained mostly intact, though some parts of the castles were neglected over the centuries. Still, it was considered such a prime example of a late Medieval castle that it was extensively studied, most famously by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and the British archeologist Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia (before his time in the Arabian peninsula).

 

Against the backdrop of Trump’s anti-DEI agenda, Hollywood is seeing a resurgence in anti-woke conservative programming. Producers say reactionary politics will hurt an industry already in crisis.

Archived version without paywall: https://archive.is/cmc9D

 

The Buffalo shooter says he was radicalized by memes.

 

An exciting moment in queer theatre.

 

Mark Brown, who posts game explainers to his Game Maker’s Toolkit channel, says his persona has been plagiarized.

Archived version without paywall: https://archive.is/Zn3PQ

 

The site of Aigues-Mortes (the name translates to "Dead Water") was already of interest in the Roman era: Located in the Camargues, the estuary of the Rhône river, it was used a saline since the Neolithic era. Legend says that the first settlement was founded in 102 BC by the Romans, but there is no surviving evidence of that claim. Carolus Magnus erected the first fortifications in the location in the 8th centuries which survive until today.

The settlement was heavily fortified in the 13th century when the French kings wanted a Mediterranean port under their direct control. As such Aigues-Mortes became the starting point of crusades under French leadership. The walls of the city were constructed at the same time.

Due to the shift of the marshland around it, Aigues-Mortes lost and regained its access to the sea several times. Nonetheless it lost its strategic importance when the French kings gained direct control of the Provence and thus could make use of the much bigger ports of Marseille and Toulon. The town survived due to the salines in its vicinity and remained largely unchanged for centuries.

 

South Korea's Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has identified a sweeping number of unfair contract terms used by major webtoon and web novel content providers, including clauses allowing for the unauthorized production and use of derivative works such as films and dramas without proper consent from creators.

 

A segment in a documentary about the cartoonist Art Spiegelman was edited two weeks before it was set to air on public television stations across the country.

Archived version, without paywall: https://archive.is/FQsBM

 

Skin Deep by Blendo Games is one of the best games I've played in years. It's genuinely the closest I think a game has come to capturing Hitman World of Assassination's chaotic magic, and that's already one of my favourite games of all time. Truly a marvel.

Thanks to the current state of the games industry and the resulting challenges stacked against indie games like Skin Deep - from development and production through to release and coverage - as well as the continued dominance of AAA megahits like Grand Theft Auto and the upcoming release of the Switch 2 (with all the associated talk of the cost of games rising to $80), I'm willing to bet you probably won't play it. In this combined game review and industry analysis, let's talk about why you absolutely should check out Skin Deep - the best game you probably won't play.

An alternate title for this video might be The REAL Problem With Modern Gaming.

 

An Instagram post by Alex Graham has stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy by suggesting that comics by marginalized groups are overrated

 

For context: The popular game GeoGuessr may look like it is build upon Google Maps/Streetview, but in the background it is fueled by an active community of players who handpick interesting locations to "guess", in order to keep the game interesting and fun.

Today the community published this note:

We, the creators of a considerable share of GeoGuessr’s most popular maps, have decided to make our maps unplayable in protest of GeoGuessr AB’s decision to host a World Championship wildcard tourney at the Esports World Cup (EWC) in Riyadh.

The EWC is a sportswashing tool used by the government of Saudi Arabia to distract from and conceal its horrific human rights record.

Groups targeted by the government include women, LGBTQ people, apostates and atheists, political dissenters, migrant workers in the Kafala system, religious minorities, and many others. The subjugation of these groups is extensive and pervasive. Members of these groups are routinely subjected to discrimination, imprisonment, torture, and even public executions. These severe human rights violations are well-documented and indisputable.

By participating in the EWC, GeoGuessr is contributing to that sportswashing agenda, which is designed to take attention away from Saudi Arabia's human rights violations.

The GeoGuessr community is diverse and includes many members of groups that would be harshly persecuted were they to live in Saudi Arabia. In solidarity with those currently residing in Saudi Arabia while being subject to oppression, as well as members of the community who would feel and be unsafe attending the tournament in Riyadh, we have decided to black out our maps by replacing all their previous locations with random garbage locations, rendering them unplayable.

This blackout includes dozens of creators and their maps, including a supermajority of the most popular competitively relevant world maps. It will continue until we see action from GeoGuessr; specifically, we demand that GeoGuessr cancels its wildcard event in Saudi Arabia and commits to not hosting any events there as long as it continues its oppressive regime.

You don't play games with human rights.

Thank you for reading.

The GeoGuessr mapping community

Original post on Reddit

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 months ago

If you point boils down to: I never experienced this, therefore you must be lying; we can stop having this conversation.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I really do not appreciate the insinuations, particularly not "If the biggest hurdle you've ever experienced in unionizing an office is "tankies"". Have I said that? You have no basis for this claim and if you really want to question my union activities in order to score a point, that says more about you than me.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Internet communities where an administrator imposes some kind of auto-ban rule for using keywords they don't like. Or power users posting spam in the chats because they've got the tact of a ball-peen hammer.

Well, as I have done some modding here on Lemmy and previously Reddit, you can probably count me among one of those administrators/mods, because that's where I encountered many of them, apart from the particular incident in my previous comment.

The communities I have managed always had tight rules in regards to what was allowed and what was not. Yet far too many tankies did not care much about those rules at all. A particular favorite of the tankies was...

R-SlurLibtard

...and it was explicitly forbidden for anyone to use that. So guess, how much "fun" it was to argue with tankies in modmail why they were supposed to be allowed to use that term because they were "suffering under capitalism" and the users they argued with "deserved" to be called that.

It was not only the disregard for the rules that was aggravating, but their complete lack of empathy for whoever they argued with. They completely denied that other users could "suffer under capitalism" too, showing exactly the lack of empathy for others that I decried in my original comment.

You may have made different experiences, but these interactions and the previously mentioned unionization effort shaped my perception of tankies. And ultimately that's where things come down for me: If people cannot leave their ill behavior at the door and show no respect for others who may be in a similar situation as they are (let alone work with them), they do not deserve to be part of that community.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

I am not going to respond to you in detail, because - I think - we mostly agree with each other, but allow me to explain where I am coming from with an anecdote: I was once part of a grassroots movement which aimed to unionize a particular sector of the entertainment industry. (Sorry, for being vague, even after all those years, the events are still a sore point for many involved.) There were a few hundred people taking part in all of this.

One chunk of people who joined the group were the worst kind of tankies who would hurl abuse at anyone who did not agree with them. The reasons for that behavior varied and ranged from the entirely trivial to the usual "Stalinism was great, anybody who says something different is a CIA plant."

One regular point of contention was tankies' demand to include praise for China in the group's official communications, which was way off topic for what the group was about. Of course, most of the group refused and - because the tankies were a very vocal minority, they could not ultimately prevent democratic decisions of the majority. Which - of course - annoyed them even more and created even more drama. Rinse and repeat.

The group ultimately imploded during the Black Lives Matter protests. One major reason for that was because the tankies prevented a statement of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. AFAIR the justification was something like "fighting racism is a distraction from the real struggle of the working class". Most of the PoCs left the group in exasperation because the group could not even speak out against racist police violence without the tankies completely derailing the proceedings.

The reason why I bring this up is because this was a group of workers who were actively working on organizing a worker's movement. But it was not enough for the tankies, they had to bring in their political sectarianism and demanding adherence to it, while simultaneously claiming that the others in the group did not represent workers like they did and thus the tankies were justified to pressure and abuse the other members until they agreed with the tankies' positions.

So yes, empathy cuts both ways. And I may have empathy for tankies on a personal level, but if people can't leave their ill behavior at the door and show solidarity towards their fellow workers when trying to get a grassroots movement off the ground, then these people have no place in it.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 3 months ago (13 children)

Of all the ideologies in the world, they chose communism. Why? Probably because they hurt. Because they saw the ugliness of capitalism and wanted something better. Because, at some point, they were moved by the idea that we could live without exploitation. [...] The pain turned inward, and now they lash out at anyone who doesn’t match their script. That’s not an excuse. But it is something to hold with empathy.

I wish I could easily subscribe to your call for empathy. The reason why I can't is because I have seen so many tankies deny the pain of others. It's not just the historical revisionism and the denial of Stalinist atrocities, but denying that people in the here and now are suffering like they do. Often this was tied to them insisting that they had every right to abuse others, because they themselves were suffering from capitalism. They completely failed to acknowledge that everyone around them was suffering under the very same conditions.

And there is the crux of the issue: One unspoken, implicit tenet of their beliefs is the denying others the same humanity they claim to uphold and represent. They demand to be accepted and their behavior to be tolerated, but will not grant the same basic rights to others.
The same notion allows them to deny the humanity of victims of Stalinist and Maoist terror.

And that's why I have a hard time to show them empathy, because I know they will not show the same empathy towards me.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 42 points 3 months ago

Hey! Mod here! Sorry to intervene!

Your picture is more about being trans in general, than something that is specific to femcels. It would rather be something for the peeps over at transmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone

To keep things on topic on FemCel Memes I locked this thread.

Thanks for your understanding.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The NYT had an article from 2006 which described a very similar "training". It goes into greater detail. Here is an archived version without paywall: https://archive.ph/n4GPa

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 24 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

It all may sound like a great big bucket of bad news for the car company, but the stock market has a different take. "If this is the worst it gets for Tesla, then certainly there must be some upside for the stock once tailwinds, such as the highly-awaited cheaper model and the Robotaxi, finally hit the market later this year," wrote Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at investing .com.

Quote from this article by Ars Technica

I am not posting this because I think it makes any sense. It only makes sense if you are a rich person with way too much money to be bothered by Elon Musk's track record of just making shit up.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 months ago

No, he didn't make a u-turn. Kid Starver - ever the opportunist - only uses the moment to reveal his complete lack of morals and convictions yet again.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 30 points 3 months ago (1 children)

For years on end Fox "News" told these people that they are the vanguard in the culture wars. This is the intended outcome.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 69 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Yes, unconscionable opponents will always resort to violence, but people seriously underestimate the power of strikes. If an entire society comes to a halt because people refuse to keep it going, the power of authoritarians dwindles away. No dictatorship can control a complicated, modern society of millions of people through violence alone. That's why they have always been worried by an organized workers' movement and unions.

[–] squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 months ago

There are already some good suggestions in the other comments, I just want to add a point: Anxiety attacks can be a problem by themselves, but they may also be a symptom of something else. Insofar it is good to sort things out with a professional (therapist or psychologist) who can do the tests to determine what the root cause is.

Having said that, a personal addition: Mental and physical exhaustion can exacerbate mental health symptoms of all kinds and - to me - it sounds worth pointing out that you experience these anxiety attacks at or after work. So anything you can do to reduce the exhaustion may already help a little to alleviate symptoms. If you have a possibility to slow down a bit and ensure that you are well hydrated and that your blood sugar doesn't drop too much (ie. make sure you aren't famished) that could already help you to get a better grip on these anxiety attacks.

Either way: Stay strong, friend!

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