zephyrswarm:

jheselbraum:

cipherface:

intercal:

the fact that we made it through the Cold War is nothing short of a miracle. I wish we talked about Mutual Assured Destruction more in schools

William Gibson once suggested that the days on which we almost destroyed the world with nuclear weapons should be recognized as international holidays, to raise awareness of how very precarious the situation has been at times.

If you would like to observe such a holiday, October 27th should be Vasili Arkhipov Day. During the Cuban missile crisis he was first officer on Soviet submarine B-59 off the coast of Cuba. When the destroyer USS Beale began to drop depth charges to force them to the surface, his captain decided that WW III must have started, and ordered his men to arm and fire a nuclear torpedo at a group of American ships. Due to a strange circumstance, the captain had to seek Arkhipov’s approval to fire the weapon, because while he was only second in command of the sub, he was in command of the flotilla of which the submarine was a part. Arkhipov, outnumbered three to one, steadfastly refused to give his approval.

Important context: Arkhipov had previously been involved with a nuclear incident aboard another sub, and cited the things he witnessed happening to the crew as one of the reasons he refused to give approval.

Happy Vasili Arkhipov day

clotpolesonly:

firebirdeternal:

underthehedge:

cyberphuck:

nyctoheart:

nyctoheart:

movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….

girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.

if it were me having to repeat my dead father’s instructions on destroying the death star:

I was in a college psych class, and the teacher was doing some kind of exercise about memory, patterns, and retention. He began with, “for instance, if I asked you what number the first letter of your name is in the alphabet, you wouldn’t be able to tell me right aw–”

“Ten,” I said.

“What?”

“J. J is ten,” I said again.

He stared at me.

“I happened to learn it while looking at the alphabet when I was five or six, and it just stayed in my brain,” I told him.

Then we did an exercise on retention. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said, “and then I’m going to send you out of the room for five minutes, and when you come back, you have to repeat as much of the story back to me as possible.”

He told me a long and meandering story with no plot or structure, just a random series of events, place names, actions, etc. Then he sent me out of the room.

I looked at the wall for a while.

He called me back in five minutes later, stood me up in front of the class, and asked me to repeat “just as much of the story as you remember.” Apparently while I’d been gone he’d been telling the class about how eyewitness accounts aren’t reliable because people don’t remember things well after a certain period of time.

So I told his story back to him– not verbatim, but certain phrases were exact– and watched the consternation in his face as I accidentally blew up his (valid! and extensively studied!) lesson about how bad people’s retention is.

“It’s like a song,” I tried to explain to him, and the class. “Or a poem. Every part of the story has a little tag to remember it. I looked at the chalkboard while you were saying this part. My leg itched while you were saying that part. A chair squeaked during the next part. Then I just have to come back and go over all the sensations that I had while you were”

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat.

Turns out I’m Autisms Georg adn should not have been counted

ADHD version: A friend asked, on a field trip, why I knew the scientific name for Caltha palustris, “Well, we did that [one week long] field ID course [three years previously] and we saw it in one of the bogs”.

This, I was informed, is very much not a normal reason to remember the scientific name of a plant for the rest of your life.

It took me five whole years to learn when my partner’s birthday is.

I can remember specific details about games I played over two decades ago that I have not played since.

I once forgot it was my birthday. On my birthday. And when my sister (Who lived several hours away) jumped out of hiding and yelled happy birthday, I looked around to see who she was talking to.

clatterbane:

a-list-of-moods:

despite what popular opinion may lead you to believe, some rocks actually do have scientifically-proven auras! Unfortunately, those rocks are uranium and the aura is cancer. 

palaeosinensis:

catadromously:

catadromously:

the dubious philosophy of salmon

the number of people who have looked at this is officially too large a number

This will never stop being unspeakably beautiful or moving me to tears.

identitty-dickruption:

I am convinced that you are always only three people removed from an addict at any given time. maybe fewer than three. for every time I’ve been freaked out about telling people about my addiction, there’s been someone who’s gone “oh, my sister went through that” or whatever. we are out here. everywhere. it’s about time we were treated like normal human beings

the-incorrigible-chaia:

How To Be Anti-Zionist WITHOUT Being Antisemitic

Yes! It’s possible! But it’s not automatic.

This post is by no means comprehensive, but bear in mind rule one of the Internet: You CANNOT tell the difference between a well-meaning yet uninformed leftist, and a neo-Nazi sockpuppet pretending to be a leftist to spread antisemitic rhetoric. Reading and absorbing the information in this post will help you avoid dipping into antisemitic modes of thinking.

1. Don’t deny Jewish history in Palestine. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in Palestine ever since the Romans destroyed Judea - and not just the descendants of Jews who stuck around after that; Jews have been making aliyah to Palestine, and specifically the four holy cities (Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem), for pretty much the entire history of the Jewish Diaspora. Every time Jews got expelled from somewhere, some Jews migrated to Palestine. There was even an attempt, in the middle of the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians in the 7th century, to regain political autonomy in Palestine and reconstitute Judea under the Sasanids (it, uh, obviously didn’t succeed.) This is all historical fact, but that doesn’t mean any of it justifies apartheid in the modern day. Denying the history doesn’t help anyone, it just makes you antisemitic.
2. Don’t whitewash the Jewish population in Israel. Ashkenazim only make up about 31% of Israel’s Jewish population, less if you consider that the 2019 study would have counted Bulgarian and Greek Jews as Ashkenazim, when they’re in fact Sephardic. The majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahim who were expelled from other countries in the SWANA region who wrongly blamed their local Jewish populations for the Nakba. There is an internal racial dynamic within Israel where Ashkenazim hold hegemony, and that is worth critiquing in concert with Israeli oppression of Palestinians, but just saying “Jews are white Europeans” is antisemitic and flatly wrongheaded. Jews are an ethnoreligious group whose members come from all racial backgrounds.
3. Don’t invoke classic antisemitic tropes like dual loyalty, or tell Jewish Israelis to “go back where they came from”. Most Israelis do not have a second passport, are not eligible for a second passport, and cannot return to wherever they or their grandparents came to Palestine from. Litvak Israelis can’t return to Lithuania, their communities were destroyed by the Nazis and then paved over and replaced by the Soviets. Moroccan Israelis can’t return to Morocco, they were expelled. American Israelis only make up about 5% of the Israeli population. Jews have always lived on “other people’s land”, the difference in Palestine is that we’re the oppressor, rather than the oppressed.
4. Understand why Israelis fear the Palestinian Right to Return, even if that fear is something you (rightly) oppose. It’s true that settlers always become anxious about the people whose land they stole fighting back, but with Israelis this is even more potent due to two thousand years of antisemitism, and in particular, an event in living memory. In 1932, German and Austrian Jews were stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, and when the Evian Conference was held in 1938 to address what to do with the Jewish refugees, all 32 countries in attendance refused to take in more than at most 30,000 Jewish refugees, and that “most” was from the USA and the UK. (Except the Dominican Republic, but that was because Trujillo wanted to bring in a surge of Europeans to overwhelm the country’s Black population, so…) When my country, Canada, itself a settler colony, was asked how many Jewish refugees would be allowed into Canada after the war, the infamous response was “None is too many.” Golda Meir, then representing the British Mandate in Palestine, and later a Prime Minister of Israel who said and did some awful shit to Palestinians, was not permitted to speak or participate in the conference, she was only allowed to observe as country after country refused to accept Jewish refugees in any large number. (Though it should be noted that Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, later the first President and Prime Minister of Israel respectively, actually supported this bullshit, because they thought having nowhere else to go would drive Jewish refugees to Palestine. They were right.) Israeli settlers are terrified of becoming a minority, because they do not trust the Palestinians to be any different from the rest of the world. And again, none of this justifies Israeli apartheid, but it elucidates where the Israelis are coming from, and should inform your anti-Zionist work.
5. Be specific and precise in where your principled anti-Zionism is coming from. To say that “the State of Israel is an openly settler-colonialist venture that has displaced millions of Palestinians and continues to engage in daily human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing” is specific and precise. To say that “Zionists use the Holocaust to play victim and get whatever they want”… do you understand the difference between those two statements? And why the second one might sound like when you say “Zionists”, what you really mean is “Jews”?
6. Avoid double standards. Unless you genuinely believe that all white people should be kicked out of the Americas and return to Europe, don’t apply that same belief to Israeli Jews. There is no post-Israeli future in Palestine that doesn’t involve Jews living there. See points 1 and 4. And just to be clear, avoiding double standards cuts both ways. There is also no just future that involves the continued apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It’s evil, fascist, and genocidal for Israeli military officials to say that for all they care Gazans can go jump into the sea.
7. For fuck’s sake stop putting the Neturei Karta on my dash. The Neturei Karta are a fringe group of Litvish Haredim who split off from other Haredim in Jerusalem. They’re very publicly anti-Zionist while also being visibly ultra-Orthodox, so they get a lot of attention, but they’re also Holocaust revisionists who attended and spoke at a 2006 Holocaust denial conference whose other speakers included David Duke of the KKK and several outright Holocaust deniers, and their leader defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a president of Iran who claimed Jews made up the Holocaust. If you want anti-Zionist Jews, there are plenty of us. Check out Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices, or even the Satmar if you really want Haredim. Don’t give the fucking Neturei Karta any oxygen.
8. Finally: Zionism is not a euphemism. Zionism is not “when Jews do a thing I don’t like,” and a Zionist is not “a Jew I disagree with/don’t like”. Zionism is a nationalism, and like all nationalisms, it hasn’t fully delivered on the liberation it was created to provide, and it’s oppressed others in the process. Zionism will never go away until the material conditions that drive Jewish nationalism - that is, global antisemitism - are addressed, and yet the Palestinian right to liberation is not and must not be contingent on the end of antisemitism. This is the fundamental problem at the core of the issue: Zionists believe Jewish safety will only come from a Jewish ethnostate with a Jewish majority, and since everywhere on Earth is populated by someone, it may as well be in Palestine, given the Jewish historical roots there. And they’re wrong. They’re doing horrific, evil, genocidal things in the name of Jewish safety, and they’re wrong to do so. But we can condemn Zionism from an informed perspective, rather than from an ignorant one, and in doing so avoid antisemitism and strengthen our anti-Zionist work. The last thing we want to do is spread Nazi rhetoric in the name of Palestinian liberation.

acc0y:

feywildwest:

feywildwest:

employees should be allowed to steal, actually

idk. yesterday was a slow day and at the end of it, I still stared into a cash drawer, one of three, that had more than my rent in it, even if you only count the 20s. I spent a lot of that day trying to calculate in my head how many hours of work equal one pair of pants, let alone how many hours of work equals the fun thing I want to do next month.

I feel a cough coming on, because I work in a drug store, and all of my customers are sick. I always feel a little bit sick, now. I can’t afford to eat well enough to keep my body healthy. Cough medicine is worth two hours and 20 minutes of work. Our store probably bought a case of cough medicine for they price we’re selling one box. If this cough gets worse, I might have to call out, which will cost me more than the medicine in the long run- but that doesn’t give me the money to buy the medicine right now. I stock a case onto the shelf. I don’t buy any.

A mom wrangling three crying, sick kids enters my line and sets two types of children’s medicine down, says they’re both on sale and thank god for that. I ring her up, and she gets very quiet, because she misread the sign, and her total is twice as high as she was expecting. Her youngest screams in the cart, because she’s burning up with fever. Her mother very quietly asks, please, she’s so sorry, if I could please take the more expensive one off her total.

I agree, I move the box below the counter, and when she’s not looking, I slip it into her bag. I pray as hard as I can that if she notices the “mistake” she says nothing, because I so desperately want her to have that medicine. The store has lost profit at the cost of a child’s health. I don’t bat an eye. This is a terminable offense. If I’m presented with the same situation tonight, I’ll do it in a heartbeat.

The myth of evil employees stealing from the company falls apart the second you realize the company would shoot you dead to make a profit. This isn’t two equal players, one of whom is stealing from the other. This is someone fighting for survival versus someone fighting to make an extra million. It’s not equal.

Employees should be able to steal, actually.

Bro I teared up oh my god bro

rslashrats:

rslashrats:

how do i make it so i can see this tweet every friday

another fat fuck friday is upon us

wafflebloggies:

the-greentext-guy:

aw i found the sequel!! ;U;

lacefuneral:

macromothmicroplastic:

tiktoksijustthinkareneat:

reminds me of when some old church in Sweden was cleaning out their storage and they forgot they had left like 80 medieval corpses in some ikea bags during renovations so somebody opened a closet door and it’s just

fenmere:

writing-prompt-s:

“Welcome to the afterlife. Do you want to go to Heaven or Hell?” “Wait, you’re asking me where I want to go? You don’t decide it based on how I lived my life or anything?” “Nope, it’s entirely your choice.”

“Fascinating!”

“Not really.”

“Can I ask some questions?”

“Certainly.”

“What are they like?”

“About what you’d expect.”

“What does that mean, though? About what I’d expect? Or about what a Christian would expect? And what kind of Christian? Or is this somebody else’s Heaven and Hell? Like Zoroastrianism, or something like that?”

“About what you’d expect.”

“Neat…”

“Is this adequate to give you an idea of which it will be?”

“Well. Hm. Can I check them out? Or travel between them?”

“What do you mean?”

“See, I’ve never liked being stuck in one place.”

“Oh.”

“I want to get the full experience. However awful or wonderful that might be. And, like, I really want to see other people’s Heavens and Hells, too, if they’re separate, you know.”

“I’m not so sure…”

“To me, real Hell would be to be stuck in any given state for eternity, whatever that state is.”

“Well, there you go, then.”

“Yes?”

“It sounds like you wish to go to your Heaven, where you’ll be able to visit everywhere else.”

“Oh! Neat! I like that. Yes, I think, maybe… Hold on though. If I do that, then I won’t get to experience being stuck in Hell.”

“Ma'am, is it?”

“m'Drah.”

“m'Drah?”

“Yes, it’s short for ‘my Drak’ or ‘my Dragon’, I’m a dragon.”

“Very well. m'Drah, if you choose to be stuck in Hell, you’ll be stuck in Hell for all eternity, as per the rules. If you choose to visit it from your Heaven, you may choose to be stuck in it for any period of time, as a sample, but then are you really stuck?”

“Dammit.”

“That is the idea of Hell, yes.”

“And it’s my choice?”

“Yes.”

“I feel like I’m in hell already.”

“I have heard that before from a few people.”

“What did they end up picking, Heaven or Hell?”

“They haven’t.”

“They haven’t?”

“No. They are right over there.”

“Oh, delightful! That’s quite the crowd.”

“There have been a lot of people.”

“I think I’ll go talk to them for a bit, and see if they have some suggestions. Also, I do like people, it’s good to see some.”

“I thought you might.”

feyosha:

Computers are very simple you see we take the hearts of dead stars and we flatten them into crystal chips and then we etch tiny pathways using concentrated light into the dead star crystal chips and if we etch the pathways just so we can trick the crystals into doing our thinking for us hope this clears things up.

twocubes:

twocubes:

people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm’s length continuously for seventeen years

every so often since like, March, this post will spike in popularity, and I’ll just suddenly know that a few thousand people somewhere are Going Through it for reasons I cannot know in any detail, like I’m some small node in our collective lymbic system that doesn’t actually know what to do with the signals it’s given. it’s interesting.

cheshiregrinfu:

wasabikitcat:

lostwoodscutie:

Documenting what is quite possibly the best exchange I have ever seen on this website.