Reach for the Stars @antares@social.cleverlibre.org

Maybe an unpopular opinion but linking masks so intensely to covid specifically and not larger disease control in general was, and continues to be, a huge mistake. Obviously masking became much more common with the rise of covid in the U.S. and other places, but it's been a known - and used, form of disease prevention elsewhere for 100 years.

Tying masking to covid freaks out the people who are too in denial about covid to actually do anything about it - a wall immediately goes up before an interaction has even happened. It also misses the point that they're useful for other things - it raises the level of diseases in general that are going around. And maybe most importantly, it creates an entire culture of masks as symbols rather than as actually useful tools. When people see masks as a symbol of fear, a reminder of death or a difficult time in their life, or a sign that someone must be sick to be wearing one and so should be avoided, it creates a much more difficult terrain to build solidarity or even just effectively communicate. The practical use case has been replaced with concepts for many people - and that shift has a high body count.

phone calls are all spam. emails are all spam. text messages are all spam. if you want to reach me, pin a note to my door with a jeweled dagger or don't waste my time.

I guess when you make excuses like that you can justify any sort of genocide you want... we can literally just flatten all the hospitals (most of which they already did). Guess what, when your the good guys you are expected to play by different rules, when you dont, you arent the good guys.

If it isn’t available via #RSS in any “regular” podcasting app, it isn’t a Podcast, it’s an audio recording.

YouTube podcast? Nope. Spotify podcast? Not a thing.

#IWillDieOnThisHill

find interesting to note that after 20 years of "west exporting democracy" to Afghanistan, now the issue seems like "west importing talebanate state models" into the us and Israel ...

bibi and 45 a l' orange should tell us something about it ...

Is it just me or has the level of engagement gone down on #Mastodon? Not hugely, but noticeable.

Oh my God! Oh f*ck! I wake up to this big news and all I can say is f*ck! I went to bed having read something about Philip K Dick Awards (I can't even remember what I read about it!) and I wake up to learn that my book, Where Rivers Go To Die, has been nominated for this and its a big deal to me and all I can day is f*ck! What a way to start the year!

https://www.norwescon.org/2024/01/09/2024-philip-k-dick-award-nominees-announced/

@bookstodon #books #sff #book #writing #writingcommunity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU Rowan Atkinson (who plays Mr. Bean) talks about the importance of free expression.

I will say this as long and as loudly as needed: the "innovative" uses of AI by teachers look exactly like what these same teachers call cheating.

One clear use of AI in education: showing the wildly different standards adults hold themselves to, versus what they hold kids to.

hello. browsers should not be able to tell me what i can and cannot copy. fuck you

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire collectively blamed the millions of Armenians in their territory for attacks by Armenian resistance fighters. Around 1M non-combatants were killed by the Ottoman military — in many cases, by forced marches through the Syrian desert without food and water.

Denouncing this genocide doesn’t make you an Armenian resistance fighter or an advocate for their views. It just means you’re against genocide.

In 1994, in the wake of the Rwandan civil war, the president of Rwanda was killed. Military and government officials suspected the Tutsi-aligned Rwandan Patriotic Front and blamed the Tutsi and Twa people collectively. They organized the mass killing of Tutsi people; between 500,000 and 1M people were killed in the following three months.

Abhoring this murder doesn’t make you a partisan of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. It just means you’re a human, opposed to the systematic slaughter of humans.

On October 7 2023, Hamas’s military wing attacked and killed about 550 Israeli soldiers and as many Israeli civilians. They kidnapped, tortured and raped hundreds more. In response, Israel has denied food, water and medical supplies to the 2.3M people of Gaza, driven them from their homes to a tiny sliver of land near the Egyptian border, destroyed half of all residential buildings, killed 30,000 people and seriously injured 60,000 more. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has called this action a plausible genocide.

Wanting this genocide to end with an immediate ceasefire doesn’t mean you support Hamas or want Israel to be destroyed. It means you’re opposed to mass killing and expulsion of people from their homeland.

Is it exactly the same as these other examples? Absolutely not. Genocide never is. But you can be on the side of humanity against the destruction of the people of Gaza and it doesn’t make you an advocate for the views or actions of Hamas.

https://evanp.me/2024/02/04/taking-sides-in-a-genocide/

You call it eating 17 boxes of girl scout cookies. I call it supporting independent female entrepreneurship.

Absolutely. Do not use, do not support BetterHelp.

They took patients’ intake questionnaires and sold them to Facebook.

BetterHelp itself is not a ‘covered provider’ under HIPAA. But they heavily implied any data you gave them was HIPAA covered, and would not be shared.

They have been slapped with a $8 million fine by the FTC.

(I think they should be a HIPAA-covered provider, and they should be prosecuted.)

BetterHelp *cannot be trusted*. Stay away!

https://weirder.earth/@dessertgeek/111854230732895093

Max Wolf (of Wolf 359 fame) and E.E. Barnard (of Barnard's Star fame) were "lifelong correspondents, competitors, collaborators and friends. Wolf wrote a long obituary for Barnard upon his death in 1923."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Wolf

#Wolf359 #BarnardsStar #Space

We're so used to this, but I would like academics to take a moment and look at how much of the official and unofficial discussion around university is about despair, imposter syndrome, stress, harassment, etc.

What I often see in these discussions, especially the official ones, is discussion of coping mechanisms and "self-care".

What I rarely see in these discussions is questioning why we've built an education system that treats people this way in exchange for this education. @academicchatter

@maartjeoostdijk @academicchatter
Coming in to agree with those recommending that you push back *and* to defend the passive voice, especially in places where you want to focus on the something like an experimental apparatus, not the person using it. Modulating voice can also be a useful rhetorical strategy. Passive voice has a place in good writing, IMO. Against dogma.