What fucking rock have people been living under that the thought of actively malicious bigots being employed by the corporation that runs a social media website is somehow unrealistic.
“yeah tumblr is incompetent but specifically in a way that makes them super ignorant of the moderation systems that they designed. They are actually the most competent company in the world when it comes to hiring people in a process that makes sure no one with transmisogynistic views could ever be in a position of power where their biases might effect someone” what is wrong with you
my hot take on the awful nuclear war movie discourse is that i do actually think there is a way to create a critical but sympathetic biopic abt the jewish leftist/communist scientists involved in the manhatten project, who at the moment of 1942 did earnestly (and had reason to) view themselves as part of an urgent struggle against global nazism, and which can cut thru the usamerican imperialist apologia hero-fetish impulse and lay bare the genocidal devastations left in the wake of continuing us counterinsurgent militarism across the continent and pacific (which means addressing the anticommunism!) w/o resorting to white man existentialist handwringing. such a film however, would not be politically commensurable as a bajillion dollar summer blockbuster directed by christopher nolan!
it would require such film to face why so many american atom bomb researchers ended up as soviet spies when they realized this bomb is meant to be eventually used against ussr.
“It was due to this misconception, to this separation of science from society, of science from human beings and human lives that I came to work on the atomic bomb during the war. I believed, as did many of my colleagues, that our job as scientists went only so far as to find out the truths of nature. Anything beyond this, anything to do with the application of the knowledge we scientists discovered, was of secondary concern to us. In our study of pure science, we had no time to concern ourselves with such trifles.The application of science must be left to statesmen and engineers.
And I am ashamed to admit it took the horror of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shock me out of this ivory tower of complacency, to shock me into the fundamental realization that there is no such thing as “pure” science; that science has a meaning only in relation to its service to mankind; only in so far as it helps to create a rich and beautiful world.
I say to those scientists, both in Japan and the United States who even now are still engaged in research on atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs and bacteriological warfare: Think again what it is you are doing! You may believe that you are gaining scientific fame by the papers marked “secret” which you are now filing away in the safes of the U.S. Army, but this is utterly false and shameful fame is an illusion, which will soon be trampled to dust by the hatred of the peoples of the whole world.”
Joan Hinton (Chinese name Han Chun) addressing the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, October 1952. She worked at the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos and had witnessed the Trinity test. This marked her first public appearance since 1948 when she left her position at the Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago to witness the revolutionary struggle in China. Hinton and her husband, Erwin Engst, subsequently dedicated their remaining lives to advancing Chinese agricultural collectivization and mechanization.
Supposedly someone donated $1mil to the project to eliminate predators/turn them into herbivores. Imagine the good money like that could have done for actual conservation projects instead of this nonsense.
Why support actual conservation when you can fund nonsense like this instead? 😬😬😬
In the UK there are around 430,000 foxes. Each fox must eat an average of 8 rodents a day. That means you would need to release over 3.4 million of these robotic rodents every single day just to feed one species in one country.
Now scale that up and imagine how many billions of these you’d need to feed every predator in every country. It’s beyond stupid.
On the flip side, if one of these robotic rodents = one real life mouse or rat saved:
One female mouse can have up to 10 litters in a year, with numbers ranging typically from 5-14 pups each (average number that survive is closer to 7 or 8, but we’ll go with 8)
Numbers are very similar for rats, so we’ll just go with the above numbers.
Since obviously predatory species aren’t taking out every single rodent ever, we can assume that each of these rodents has the capacity to become a breeding pair with a rodent that would otherwise not be eaten.
So if these robots fed the foxes of the UK and totaled to 3.4 million robots in a year, and each robot is equal to one mouse or rat saved…
Roughly 8 pups per litter x 10 litters per year = 80 new mice added to the population per breeding adult mouse per year
3.4 million rats/mice saved from being eaten by foxes x 80 new mice added to the population per breeding adult mouse saved = 272,000,000 (272 million) new mice/rats added to the population for every year this project is a success.
And this is just the number OP stated for foxes in the UK alone. There are many other predatory species living in the UK (both native such as owls and other raptors, and invasive such as domestic and feral cats), some of which rely solely on mice or rats. The amount of mice and rats consumed total by every predatory species in the UK alone is probably in the mid-to-high millions, and as I’m sure everyone knows, there are still plenty of mice and rats in the country. If the predators of the UK would be made to instead start hunting robotic mice and rats, we’re talking potentially many multiple billions of new mice and rats added to the breeding population every year in the UK alone.
That’s not good for people, since wild mice and rats can carry fatal diseases, but it’s also not good for the wild mice and rats as they suddenly need to compete even more heavily with each other for resources and have more chance of spreading diseases and parasites to each other. Not to mention, with all of these new rodents needing to eat, we would see significantly more crop damage and loss, and there would be significant damage and loss to native plant species as well. Also, this should go without saying, but predatory species typically physically are incapable of surviving solely on plant matter, especially when relegated plant matter found in their natural habitats.
This entire project, if ever taken seriously, genuinely attempted to be implemented, and even in some slight way were to become successful, would be a disaster and a death sentence to the whole of nature and ecology as we know it.
Oh don’t worry, they have a solution to that!
They believe they can control the fertility of every single wild animal on earth using birth control and/or biomedical engineering. Cause that’s totally feasible. And even if it was somehow possible, imagine the costs of having to give birth control to billions and billions of animals worldwide. Where would the money and resources from that come from? Is that really the best use of government money when there are millions of people starving and living in poverty or on the streets?
That is actually literally the person who made me question if my emotional responses to someone “being wrong” were normal because there is NO possibility any of their plans will ever happen and they’re not yet harming anyone by just having this positively absurd ideological obsession, but instead of being funny or silly to me I violently despise them for thinking this asinine ridiculous garbage and for not loving nature exactly the way nature is. Having talked to a couple of their followers they aren’t a joke and I want them to die of flesh eating bacteria.
companies underestimate how much locking their content behind needing an account will just make me go do something else. oh your website wants me to make an account to view this content? oh your website doesn’t show media to logged-out users? okay. i didn’t actually want to see it that bad. yeah. bye ✌️
Their flagship store and New York has unionized along with 3-4 other stores! This is happening! People are tired of being seen as dollar signs and being made to work just to get to work more, to survive instead of thrive. Keep it UP.
Every time self taping comes up in SAG- AFTRA discussions I just remember that Lukas Gage clip where an unmuted director complained about having to look at “poor people in their tiny apartments”
/end ID]
[Video Description:
a recording of a self-taped zoom audition. Lukas Gage’s screen is pinned, showing him in front of a small section of his apartment as he prepares to deliver his material.
Tristram Shapeero: [not pictured] “These poor people live in these tiny apartments, like, I’m looking at his- y'know, background and he’s got his TV, and y'know-”
Gage: [pained expression] “Oof, yeah, unmuted-” “I know it’s a shitty apartment, that’s why- give me this job so I can get a better one.” “Alright. Ready?”
Shapeero: “Oh my god I am so, so sorry, Lukas- [unintelligible] I’m so sorry.”
Gage: [overlapping, jokingly] “No, it’s totally-” “Listen, I’m living in a 4x4 box, it’s fine, just give me the job and we’ll be fine.”
Shapeero: “No I’m- I’m mortified.” [overlapping a burst of awkward laughter from another participant]
Leftism leaving westerners body when you ask them to do something about the Global North’s consumption of Global South’s resources
Leftism leaving westerners body when you only ask the hypothetical question about the way revolutions in the global south will cut their supply of all year long bananas and mangoes
