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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • Bari Weiss is a disgusting hack, and laughably unqualified, but being a news outlet editor is way more complicated than just rubber stamping factual reporting. Editors allocate resources - from writers and photographers/crews to even start a story, to how the front page is divvied up, how stories are promoted, how many column inches (or words, or minutes) a topic gets.

    Point being that there are definitely feelings involved. Even if it’s one story is more interesting than another, or we’ve covered this topic more than enough lately, or this story is factual but not adding anything new, etc. etc. etc. It’s a hard job, and more subjective than you’d think, so I don’t blame her for being defensive when she’s literally the worst editor to ever hold a national news desk down.






  • I do think no matter what reforms we do in schools, the subject being the most interesting / stimulating thing currently available must help a lot.

    We are getting to a point where we need to rethink how we teach to be more resistant to technological distractions. Students would be more stimulated by topics they are interested in and pursuing interests doesn’t stop when the school day ends. Instead, kids are bored all day and naturally looking to relieve that boredom by focusing on passive videos or social media.

    If we make the classroom reward being self-driven and passionate in an environment mirroring the real world (with guardrails provided by schools) we’d get driven, passionate students ready to operate in reality.

    … Of course, we’d probably have to have motivated teachers that give a damn, kill toxic social media, and abolish capitalism to keep kids from trying to make pragmatic, soul crushing decisions to make money over interests but, well, I’m willing to make that sacrifice.









  • People just want to make snarky comments about the second amendment because we’re not shooting ICE agents in the face. They don’t want to hear about the things our communities are actually doing.

    My own community hasn’t been hit as hard as MN but we’ve got rapid response hotlines tracking ICE, getting people with cameras and signs on them at the blink of an eye, and resource support groups for the undocumented.

    Apparently that counts as nothing to a bunch of people that probably haven’t lifted a finger against their own government despite the fact that fascism is almost certainly rising there too.


  • I’m with you on rejecting AI being sane, but the idea that gaming wikis should be integrated into wikipedia is kinda nuts. If I search “Iron” on wikipedia I’m looking for facts, not a thousand item long disambiguation cluttered with every game that has iron as a resource. Conversely, on a game wiki my search for “Iron” has an entirely different context and I’m looking for different info.

    Not to mention game wikis have way lower editorial standards, their own tone (e.g. making jokes), versioning concerns, their own new user friendly homepages etc.

    Wikipedia could tuck this all into a separate namespace, sure, but that’s effectively a separate wiki anyway and then it raises questions like “why is wikipedia hosting a mechanical guide for this porn game?” or “How long do we need to host the content for this game that peaked in 2012 and is now abandonware?” that are conveniently sidestepped by those communities supporting themselves.




  • The treatment of Bernie in the 2016 primary also made me lose faith in our form of flawed Democracy. Living in a red state, primaries are my only chance to have any effect on the national Democratic Party and 2016 made it obvious they would accept no challenge to the status quo. Superdelegates are plainly undemocratic, but the post Citizens United world makes both parties absolutely beholden to the corporations.

    We literally can not have a candidate that is against business and therefore can not have a candidate that is against fascism.

    That said, I will probably continue to pull the lever on my purely symbolic, utterly pointless, placebo vote for the lesser of two evils because people don’t understand that the only non-voters that matter are the ones in battleground states.