so long as we're back to social justice 101 on this stupid website, u need to be aware of the feedback loop that emerges from disproportionate scrutiny: any social group that is placed under extra scrutiny, regardless of the actual prevalence of any particular behaviour, will appear to engage in that behaviour more often.

you see this most blatantly with racialised groups (more cops in black neighbourhoods = more arrests in black neighbourhoods = "omg look at all the crime in these neighbourhoods!" = more cops in black neighbourhoods etc). even if the rate of crime is the same (putting to one side the criminalisation of poverty which is also an important related factor), one group gets away with it way more often and a new generation of racists is indoctrinated with the crime statistics which "prove" that some groups are simply more criminal in nature. we see a similar phenomenon online with particular groups (trans women being a huge example) being subjected to mass stalking, their every move documented by weirdos and broadcast as representative of the group as a whole.

tl;dr - overscrutinising groups based on existing bigotries creates a recurring feedback loop, reproducing those bigotries across generations and nominally justifying them. this is bad, and you need to remember that you are not immune to it.

Yeah, the Nazi Party quite famously did this with Jewish people. They would publish every crime committed by any Jewish person in the country while other German citizens received the usual coverage, which made it seem to the casual news consumer that Jewish people were unusually prone to crime. News outlets here in the U.S. also did this with immigrants so that despite the lower crime rate among that group compared to domestically born citizens, it manufactured the urgency we now see of getting the criminal immigrants out by any means necessary. Don’t get fooled by literal Nazi propaganda tactics.

Part of what Cory Booker is doing with this filibuster is reading things into the record. Sometimes when people do a filibuster, they just say shit. I think one time Ted Cruz read "Green Eggs and Ham" into the record. Another dude sang the Mets theme song or whatever the shit.

If you actually have substantial things to say, you don't have to do that. I mean, not for nothing, but what we're watching here is a man doing the job he was elected to do. Our public officials work for us, the people. It's nice to see some of them take that obligation seriously.

Booker is standing there with a binder that he's not even halfway through reading. *Over 42k people are watching it just on YouTube. I haven't watched the news yet today, but I've got the live feed of this open on my computer.

I hope he has a catheter and/or a diaper on. He said he'd continue as long as he's physically able. Probably he's been on a liquid diet for a day or so. I would plan ahead for this.

If Republicans are going to refuse to do the work, if they're going to refuse to take up serious business and would like instead to fuck shit up... Well, we've got a choice to make, don't we? I don't know what the long-term solution looks like. But we can and should talk about it. We can and should take steps to make sure the public record reflects reality to the extent possible.

Really, if we want to come back from this, we have to talk about it. And we know that the official records during this time especially will be, shall we say, less than reliable. So there is value in speaking the truth into the public record.

I'm not in love with the Democratic party as an institution. But this can also be energizing and inspiring for people. He's setting an example, and hopefully his example will shame others into growing a backbone. Hopefully.

I really don't have any hope for Schumer. But Booker, along with folks like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and Jasmine Crockett, are doing what they can do, and I respect it.

This is definitely a coordinated thing, though. Finally, Dems are showing that they have some strategic ability. Booker is the main speaker, but other Dems are asking questions, while allowing him to retain the floor. In this way, it's clear that they're working together, and several people in the room have jobs to do in support of Booker's efforts. They're expanding on his points and doing a call-and-response thing, which is an effective tactic in more ways than one, and it allows him to rest his voice for a few moments at a time.

So I'm not becoming a cheerleader for anybody yet. But what he's doing is important, even if it doesn't change anything directly.

Miss me with bipartisanship talk though. I really can't see that as a viable option at this point. Unless something radical changes, I wouldn't trust that at all. So anytime somebody like Schumer talks about Republicans coming to the table, I can't be bothered to listen. They have repeatedly shown us that they have no intention of doing that and that they further do not care about right and wrong at all. Or if they do, they think their actions are right, and I'm not sure which is worse, but in both cases, I would not call them trustworthy. Their priority is being in lockstep with Trump and the prescribed agenda of the party, not the American people.

At least Booker is trying to do something. Shit.

* When I started typing this, the number of viewers was just over 42k. Now it's over 45k and climbing.

“Magneto’s backstory should be changed, it’s unrealistic that he’d still be alive after all this time!” Have you forgotten what franchise he’s from?

You can suspend your disbelief for the man transformed into sentient rocks by space radiation, the interdimensional bird, and the flaming biker skeletons, but one guy being a little old is where you draw the line?

It's the ~antisemitism~

#its also worth noting that marvel *DID* change magneto's backstory#he was originally presented as someone who had survived the shoah as an adult#and marvel retconned it to him surviving it as a child#iirc his original debut backstory involved him losing a wife and two kids??

Well, no, not really. When Magneto was made to be a Holocaust survivor, he was a survivor from childhood, though by the end of the Holocaust he was in his teens. His daughter Anya was killed by an antisemitic mob after the Holocaust, at some point in the 1950s.

It's also an attempt to pretend that the Shoah is ancient history, when it's really not.

"It's unrealistic for a Holocaust survivor to still be alive."

Assholes, there are Holocaust survivors still alive in the real world.

They're really telling on themselves because Wolverine is like 170 years old.

wolverine being a hundred and fucking seventy: normal

magneto being the same age as currently alive holocaust survivors: impossible

While there are definitely living Holocaust survivors today, most of them aren't up to doing half the shit Magneto does, and it seems to be affecting the impact his stories have on audiences. I remember reading Magneto stories as a kid in the 90s, knowing he was a little younger than my grandparents, and getting hit with a truckload of sympathy for the dude. He just wanted to have a normal life like Grandma and Granddad, and then the war happened and oh FUCK. Younger readers now are much less likely to have that personal connection; that's just how human lifespans work. And it's only going to get worse. Magneto does need some future-proofing.

That's not to say I think Magneto's origin should be changed, or that he should be permanently killed off. Far from it. This is comics; all kinds of timeline bullshit happens all the time. As someone pointed out above, Wolverine is most of the way into his second century of life.

What I'd do--and what I'm shocked Marvel writers don't seem to have done yet--is wave the mutant bullshit wand and make Magneto functionally immortal. Secondary mutation, maybe. Something something magnetic fields. The mechanics don't matter any more than "Wolverine is functionally immortal because healing factor" does. What matters is this:

At some point, Magneto will be the last living Holocaust survivor. And he will not let the world forget.

There was a story I read as a kid where Magneto took a handful of soil from the camp where his family died and spread it on the surface of the moon, where he was building a mutant haven of some kind. The image of him on his knees with soil running through his fingers and an agonized look on his face has haunted me ever since. To some part of him, it's always 1945. Never again is quite literally now.

I want to see Magneto as the furious conscience of the Marvel universe. I want him to rip a hole in the UN General Assembly building and stride in with his full regalia on--except for one sleeve, stripped to the forearm to show his tattooed number--and read the UN the riot act in all his nigh-unkillable glory. I want him to storm into summits between warring planets, atomize the ferrous metal in everyone's weapons, and lay down the galactic law that is There Will Be No More Genocides On My Watch, And My Watch Is Eternal. And I want future writers to use his story, and his enduring popularity as a character, to make sure that audiences don't forget either.

Magneto being a Holocaust survivor is only a flaw in the storytelling if you're a goddamn coward.

@leaving-earth requested the least seen movies. So here we have a list of the top 100 films that tumblr users reported as having heard of but not having seen per results on @haveyouseenthismovie-poll.

TW: A couple of films famous for racism are on this list so please enter at your own risk.

An ex-colleague of mine was complaining to me the other day about the ai problem in her students' papers, and I told her, "Just make your students hand-write them in class. Easy." She looked at me like I was insane and tried to explain how that would never work, but I just said,"That's how we did it for a thousand years. The invention of word processors doesn't erase all that."

To me it seems obvious. Readings are done out of class, handwritten essays are done within it. No more ai papers.

I give all my exams in blue books. A lot of my colleagues have started doing the same. The struggle to interpret student handwritting is worth avoiding the whole plagerism academic protocol nonsense.

Man of all the unexpected Secondary and Tertiary effects that AI Slop could have I think the best and funniest would be if it forced all schoolwork to return to being done in school and thus by necessity killed Homework.

AI - The Future of Entertainment

listen: cheating at baseball is like a whole second sport. as long as baseball has existed, people have been cheating at it

look at this shit.

One team once had a little person on the team as a pinch hitter when then wanted a walk. Since the strike zone is the space between the chest and waist, his strike zone was so small no one could get a strike on him. They would get him a walk and then call for a pinch-runner. MLB implemented a minimum height for their players after the fact.

NJ Democrat senator Cory Booker takes the floor in protest of Trump/Musk, "saying that he will keep going “'as long as I am physically able'.”

“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said at the outset of his remarks. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.”

“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety; financial stability; the core foundations of our democracy. “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.” -source

I am posting this at 2:30am EST. He has been speaking since 7PM EST. This link (at this moment) is to a live stream.

FUCK YEAH, JERSEY!

So very proud of my state at the moment.

Reblogging and adding the livestream link from Senator Booker's YouTube (the other one was glitching) . It is almost 4am. He is still going STRONG. If you are watching and plan to go to sleep, turn the volume down and leave it up so that the "watching" number reflects the involvement of people supporting him.

If he can LITERALLY stand and protest as a single voice, we can keep it playing and symbolically stand with him.

Senator Booker is on Hour 13 and going STRONG

Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about. No business as usual! Slow the Fascists down! He should get some Democrat colleagues to join him so they can periodically cede to each other and spell each other off to keep it up longer!

STILL GOING! If you can open up the livestream to show support.

Folks, he's still going - and importantly, he's talking about his own shortcomings, his own failures and the things he wants to do better because he knows he fucked up the last time.

If your disdain for Democrats has been rooted largely in their reluctance to meet the moment, then I heartily encourage you to watch the livestream — other Democratic senators are asking long-winded "questions (which is part of the rules and allows Booker to take the occasional break for a drink of water or to rest his feet or whatnot) and helping however they can.

Booker's going to hit 24 hours at 7 pm and it's worth watching a few minutes, don't you think?

hey everyone its april fools. but dont worry i dont have anything planned. just going to sit here and...

I LIED !!!! GET PRANKED

POST BELOW ME GET FUCKING WET

the degree that parents of young children seem to think Baby Shark came out of nowhere astounds me. this is a DECADES-OLD camp song, that has spanned generations. 

i am not a parent of a young child but i worked at summer camps for years and let me tell you before it was ruined by parents of young children baby shark was the most fun camp song ever. kids went buckwild over baby shark. but then it had to be commercialized. you ruined it. yall motherfuckers stay away from the bear song or we’ll have words 

#part of the problem w/ commercializing camp songs#other than you know Everything#is that it canonizes a specific version#one of the best parts of baby shark was that every camp had slightly different versions#does the singer die and go to hell?#are they reincarnated as a shark?#are they left as a concsious severed head bobbing in the waves?#it was different each time it was sung and its fucking beautiful

Love that more than half of votes are for other despite the poll options being pretty well chosen.

THE WEEK February 21, 2025

cant stop thinking about this video

For context this was in response to someone saying their cybertruck was heavy duty

oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.

The Toyota Hilux is absolutely the small god of endurance and defiance (and possibly masochism).

yes I'm reposting about a small god truck are you kidding me

I don’t want a pickup truck and this post made me want a Hilux. Not even an ad and it’s the best damn ad I’ve ever seen.