"I'm in this photo and I don't like it"

Nice to know I can finally cancel Prime though. The entire value proposition has now gone. Free shipping is hugely conditional (and prices are artificially jacked to cover it in the first place), and now they want to put the worst thing on the internet (ads) into the only component of Prime I still sorta kinda use sometimes. I'd rather keep the $140 a year or whatever.

Zillow, who had aBsOLuTeLy NoTHiNg tO Do WiTh ThEsE pRiCeS now has some thoughts on it huh

Sure. Here's one for example. Geimer's take is 100% going to ruffle feathers; when she speaks about her angle on feminism, I mean. But the thing that makes this one philosophically very interesting to chew on, in a "what would Jesus do" kind of way, is that, again, she is the victim, and she was even 'over it' at the time it happened.

I think people are very quick to extrapolate out that understanding a position like Geimer's is tantamount to a tacit endorsement of the kind of abuse she suffered, or of letting people off the hook willy-nilly. I find it the sort of idea-challenging wrinkle that makes existing as a human being so fascinating.

When we think about crime and punishment, morals and ethics, abuse and victimhood, we really, very often, just do not know how to handle something like a person saying, "no, this is my problem, not yours, and I'm saying this has been overblown", or whatever the case may be. Or like, to put it another way, when a family of a murder victim don't believe, for religious or whatever other reasons, in the death penalty, and they advocate against the death penalty for the person who murdered their loved one.

I think it's really important that we sit with those challenging thoughts rather than gloss over them. Glossing things over is really easy, and it's a kind of intellectual shortcutting that often gets us into more and more difficult positions where we find it impossible to see eye to eye...in cases like this, even with the people who we're trying to stick up for. Somebody can can definitely think Geimer is wrong, but they can't deny that it's at least her right to feel how she feels, because she's the one we're all arguing about.

That said, there were a few other accusations about Polanski at that time, and I don't know much about them because Geimer's was, as I understand it, the one for which he was going to court. Unsure if there was ever litigation on those others.

I can't remember where I saw it, but there's some interesting video footage of her talking about this stuff as well. More on those notes about how she feels to watch other people get riled up in her defense even while she's sitting here telling them they don't have a right to. It's certainly all a lot of food for thought.

*Edit: this reminded me of another one I like to sit back and fascinate over. There's a fellow called John McWhorter who is, I believe, a libertarian, and he is a linguist, and he is black. He has written some very interesting stuff about language, which I really love, but I also find his attitudes to be really endearing as well. But what I must point out is I'm a big leftie. Bernie Sanders leftie. "In this house we believe..." sign out front Leftie. So I don't see eye to eye with McWhorter and his bootstraps attitudes about everything.

So one thing he brings up a lot is what would help the African American lower class. Pretty much anyone with eyes to see in this country understands African Americans are, for historical reasons, systemically disadvantaged; but where a progressive fellow like myself is very quick to say, "we need to understand, and accommodate, and effect this, that and the other kind of change to make things more equitable," John McWhorter will refer to those suggestions as ineffectual and coddling. His attitude about how to help Black America is more rooted in holding people to higher standards rather than lowering the standards to which they're asked to rise. His ideas for helping black folks economically are more of a "rising tide lifts all boats" sort that suggest that rather than targeting black folks with economic stimulus policies, we just target the poor class to which so many black folks belong, and perhaps, in the process, reduce the 'us vs them' mentality that so many poor whites harbor toward blacks.

Now, again, if those ideas were coming out of a white person's mouth--a Rand Paul, let's say--someone like me might find them problematic and disagreeable. But McWhorter is a black person, he's of the afflicted caste here, and isn't it unsavory of me, well-meaning white person, to suggest that his ideas are wrong? Like, what do I even know about it? And I'm not saying that makes him right by default. Goodness knows you have your Larries Elder and your Candaces Owens out there who are black but also sewing the ideology of white supremacy to make their personal fortunes being the white-appeasing token political pundits. I'm only saying that it gives me cause to think a little harder about what McWhorterhas to say, politically. It gives me that little 'check' that I don't know everything about the world, and my ideology is not fully informed, and that just because I think I have heard out the situation and attitudes of a class of people, that is not necessarily so, and so on and so forth.*

Only an aspiring Trekkie over here. Can you explain this line? I don't follow.

Forgive me, sire; I hadn't $80,000 to spend on a luxury truck.

You fuck.

lol how bout just not allowing that shit in the web store in the first place? Browser is garbage.

Leaving carts outside the corrals at the store. Failing to signal. Actually a lot of car or car adjacent behaviors. All of which go back to "my immediate convenience is more important than being a conscientious member of the society I live in with other people."

'Female', when it's used in a non-clinical or technical context to describe a human woman. Everyone has a slip here or there, right, so, broad stroke take incoming, but, generally speaking, I've never met or talked with anyone who reliably refers to women as 'females' who actually respects them. It's a word you'd use to refer to a complete person only if you see them first and foremost as some kind of specimen, and it reaks to me of poor socialization, unhealthy relationship with that sex, or simply low class.

Something that trips me up a bit about federation and instances is the overlap of identical communities from different instances.

So for example, I'm an atheist, but it's be years since that was a part of my identity that moved me to care about atheist memes or patting myself on the back for not being religious, which (sorry guys), is what I feel like happens in those communities. So I get them out of my feed by blocking them the way I block plenty of other communities I'm not interested in. In Apollo I was spoiled by the 'hide subreddit' feature that I don't believe existed in Reddit itself, but which was crucial to my enjoyment of that particular app. But since there are multiple instances hosting a version of any given community, I must've blocked at least three 'atheist' and two or three 'atheistmemes' communities, which look the same to me, but are hosted on different instances.

Is my All feed destined to continue having different instance versions of all the topics I don't want to see, no matter how many times I block them, as long as there are more and more instances hosting those communities? I don't want to sound unimpressed by this new technology or ungrateful for the amazing service you all are building, but this feels like either a pretty big flaw in the federated user experience or a pretty big gap in my knowledge of how to work the platform. I'm entirely receptive to the idea I may just be doing something wrong.

Just curious. Thank you for everything you do.

Anything that is, or once was affiliated with Gawker / GMG is, in its current state, a cringe-inducing, shambling husk of whatever it once was. My muscle memory still directs me to a number of those blogs and everyday I recoil at what has become of them.

That 'motivation' bit is so important. Former educator, currently still working in education, and I'm always wary of anything that makes a sweeping statement about 'the kids' not being 'all right'. But there are important, substantial contributors to undesirable outcomes that need to be acknowledged. Poverty being one, as well as the cycle of poverty and abuse which is deeply tied to white flight and de-industrialization (which we might collectively assign to the death of the American dream if we aren't too concerned with being precious about the the notion of patriotism).

Saying 'iPads' or 'TikTok' is the culprit doesn't help anyone. But iPads and TikTok are contributing factors because they both exacerbate the feeling that being entertained is enough to scrape one's way through life at the bottom of the barrel of expectations...as well as over-informing young people (and adults) that there is positively nothing left to look forward to. Industry is collapsing, housing and transportation are unaffordable, everything you once expected to purchase (and let's not get lost talking about purchasing as a metric for determining whether one is living a good life) has now moved to an ever-bleeding subscription model; inflation is compounded by corporate greed (and maybe we should talk about how the business incentive of endless growth contributes to every other problem) and corporate greed (something no one but the executives and their shareholders can influence, let alone control) is raping all the natural splendor, wealth and even health and stability of the very ground we walk on and air we breathe.

Why the fuck wouldn't some young person whose future job prospects (which were shit to begin with) are being devoured by AI, just turn toward the boundless font of readily accessible entertainment rather than going uphill toward seemingly fruitless self improvement? Why would they bother to rise to the level of literacy that allows them to appreciate a 19th century classic translated from the original Russian, or to parse the dense theming of some modern masterpiece? What's the reward, to someone whose entire life to this point has been flavored with instant gratification? To them it's all just 'content', and there's plenty of content more accessible than literature. Art may mean nothing for many reasons, not least of which is it can be falsified to a level of acceptability (AI songs by dead artists, for example).

It's a Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Brave New World living nightmare. But what is the alternative? What systems or entities or organizations are coming to save the day? There are none. This moment is a gruesome forbidden experiment: it is a post-Reaganite, neoliberal race to the cultural bottom, and the youngest generation are the lab rats.