I am not on reddit. Are you?
I am not on reddit. Are you?
When smartphones were new, I started dating a girl who would roll over in bed first thing in the morning, pick up her phone, and start scrolling. I thought it was incredibly weird. Why not life? Why computer? Now, I do the same thing, and it’s normal. Or rather it was until a couple of weeks ago.
The scary thing is that I’ll start to get antsy as the one-hour mark comes near. I’ll keep checking the clock for when I can pick it up and get my stimulation. So far it is working most days, though, and it feels like it improves the rest of the day for me.
No phone or screen usage for 1 hour after I wake up.
I haven’t broken the addiction completely, but it’s progress.
It won’t be my fault.
Yes it will.
Come to !rcv@ponder.cat and make a better solution.
If you are waiting for either mainstream political party to suddenly become champions of the people on their own, and you’re refusing to take certain actions even in the face of catastrophic threat until they do, then yes, it will be your fault if the catastrophe comes true.
That outcome may be fine for you, and you may feel virtuous about your participation in that outcome for your reasons. It’s somewhat safe for you if you’re wealthy and white and born in the US and not active in left-wing politics, and confident that that all of that will keep you safe from a second Trump presidency. Of course there’s no way to be sure that it will. But regardless, a lot of people don’t have that luxury.
There is a very real possibility that a person will come to power in this election who will end elections in the United States, end the rule of law, end protest, end socialism, end third parties, end elections in the future, install his hand-picked generals into the military and then turn the inconceivable power of the United States military loose, not just on a handful of victims who have come into our crosshairs from time to time, but wholesale onto anyone and everyone anywhere in the world who it comes into his head to target.
Do you define sending weapons to Israel as “enthusiastically participate?” Wait until US troops are on the ground in Gaza and Lebanon. Wait until Putin gets a green light to invade anywhere in eastern Europe that strikes his fancy. Wait until the US military is directly attacking anyone inside the borders of the United States that dares oppose his rule, or the rule of the person who comes after him, in this or any future election.
Wait until millions of people of the wrong ethnicity inside the United States are dying in concentration camps. Wait until legal immigrants are being deported by federal troops.
Yes, the system in the United States is far from democracy. Making it ten times worse is not a good solution. Pursuing a solution is a good solution.
Like I say, I have no idea where this argument that it is okay if Trump wins the election came into the comments for this article, but it is wrong, wrong wrong. It is not okay if Trump wins this election. If you actually care about the values expressed in this article I posted, you hopefully can see that. Maybe not.
There were no WMD’s.
It’s why we’re helping Israel commit genocide.
It’s why we’re involved in Ukraine.
One of these sentences is not like the others.
If Harris wants my vote, tell me you’re going to cut the military budget, not increase it.
Why is this tying back to refusing to vote for Harris? Am I crazy, or did that come completely out of nowhere at all?
If you care about genocide, destroying millions of lives, and making the rich richer, you should be phonebanking for Harris every day of the week. She may or may not be ideal but it hardly matters. Her opponent is 1,000% worse by any conceivable measurement.
And then, after the election is done: !rcv@ponder.cat to lay a foundation for better candidates beyond that in the future.
I think that over the next few years Sam Altman is going to learn the same lessons that events have been trying to teach Elon Musk since circa 2021.
Even if you know it was very bad, you don’t really know how bad it was.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
It’s on the ballot statewide in six states so far, and it’s already in action in a bunch of places. Almost everybody who isn’t a malicious establishment politician likes it wherever it gets tried. Read the sticky post to learn more.
St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.
King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.
The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade…
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)
Content warning, imperialism.
I didn’t write this. G.K. Chesterton did.
White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
It’s a pleasure to see the only party that everyone respects worldwide, the master negotiators who fixed the Iran nuclear deal, in action.