si tacuisses

— BERTOLT BRECHT, trans. John Willett.

British journalist Stacy Dooley did an excellent documentary on the facade of respectability contrasted with the sexualisation of children in Japan, available (in the UK) here. I've been into anime/Japanese video games since I was a kid and found it really eye-opening/horrifying.

But going even deeper, Japan has a nice facade of everything. Their media is controlled, their police is corrupt and inefficient, their government is extremely conservative, their education system is actually bad, they have a jury system that condemns 99% of all cases, meaning, you go to jail 99% of times, their prison system is terrible, even their record of people who exist is very non trustable and the thing about Japan having so many people older than 100, a lot of times are people scamming the government saying their dead relative still alive to continue to receive money

Cool Japan is lie. I been an anime fan since a kid, which made me search about Japan, and like many, I was once my dream to go there. Now with 26 years old and all info I know, I don't really think Japan is nice anymore

They deadass let a murdering cannibal walk free.

They let Junko Furuta's rapists and torturers walk free.

Oh and I cant remember if this is Japan or Korea but cellphone camera's make a shutter sound you can't turn off because men used to mute it and take upskirt shots...

realizing that sticking to the "do it bad" "do it scared" mentality implies theres also a "do it bored"

well. did it bored 👍

DO IT SCARED. DO IT BAD. DO IT BORED. DO IT HALFWAY. DO IT WRONG. DO IT EMBARRASSED. DO IT UGLY. DO IT LATE. DO IT DIFFERENT. but by god do it <3!!

nabil anani, "palestinian folklore," 2020, acrylic on canvas

i wish i was one of those girls from classical mythology……. i could just turn into a cypress tree or a crystalline lake and be done with it

“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.” ― Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, written ca. 1148

go OFF queen

Today is a very important day for women in France: the Parliament is gathering this afternoon in the palace of Versailles to vote on enshrining abortion into our Constitution. This would make it extremely difficult for abortion rights to be threatened by a change in governing party, as the Constitution is the central legal text our republic is based on.

The Parliament gathering is scheduled to start at 3.30pm CET with results expected at 6.30 CET. I'll be reblogging this post with updates throughout the day.

Should the vote pass (🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞) this would make France the first country in the world to explicitly protect abortion rights in their Constitution

Voting is underway.

What happened so far:

WE DID IT

🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷🇫🇷

724 yes votes vs 72 nos!!!

Mosab Abu Toha, "The Moon", published at The New York Review, March 21, 2024. You can also read it at his Instagram here

This really makes the Studios costing themselves even more money (and getting more unions involved) by prolonging the strike for the promise of free ai labor even more fucking funny. you dumb fucking bastards lol

I personally said the same thing when AI art was first really taking off. Oh and you can thank PETA for this.

For those that don’t know, there’s a semi-famous story of a wildlife photographer who had her camera stolen by some monkeys she was taking pictures of. When she got her camera back, she discovered one of the monkeys had taken a selfie, and she published the image in a journal as a “look what happened” kind of story. PETA, being the insufferable waste they are, took it upon themselves to sue the photographer, claiming that because the Monkey took the picture, the monkey owns the copyright and thus the photographer was not allowed to publish it. The courts ruled this whole thing stupid and that now art can only be considered protected by copywrite if it was made by a human. So, this “only made by humans” ruling could easily apply to AI as well, meaning Hollywood is gonna screw themselves over if they try to replace their writers with bots.

also, crucially, the monkey in said court case was named naruto

visual gag where someone is thrown against a stained glass window and lands in the exact same pose as the holy figure depicted on it

academic bias is so funny because you’ll be reading about the same historical event and one person is like “Despite the troubles that befell his homeland and near constant criticism of the court King Blorbo remained strong in the face of adversity” and the other one is like “after letting his people carry the brunt of his cringefail decisions Blorbo the Shitface refused to listen to any reason and continued to be a warmongering piece of shit. Also he was ugly.”

tags by @hexjulia

#third paper: King Blorbo's actions were not actually as influential as has often been assumed by both cringefail authors A and B and-

ok so people are making fun of this but adding this with other anti-global warming tactics will work

This isn’t adding ice just for the sake of denial, it’s adding to the Earth’s albedo. This in turn actually makes the Earth’s climate cooler, and then more ice will be produced naturally because of this.

It isn’t a process we need to continue forever, in fact it’s one that needs to be calculated so that we don’t do it TOO MUCH. The only worry would be cooling down too much.

So yes, this is a good idea. It simply isn’t the only thing we should do because we still have gross pollution.

For the love of god do it . anything just do it. Give us hope.

Here’s the thing: Most environmental catastrophes humans have ever or are currently creating can be fixed. It’s not just a matter of “oh no, things are ruined, and maybe we can stop the degradation so that things don’t get any worse, but we’re stuck with how things are.” There are some things we can’t do, like bringing back extinct species. But there are a lot of other things we can definitely do, many of which are being done right now. The problem is that most of our willpower and effort is spent on bullshit tiny things that won’t solve the problem (individual recycling, etc.) and not on the large-scale things that can and will make a large-scale difference.

Ice caps are melting? Guess what! We know how to make ice. It’s not that hard. Designing mostly-automated robot ships to go to the poles and rebuild the ice caps is well within our current technical capabilities. We just need to fund it.

Deforestation on a massive scale? Destruction of other biomes? Guess what! We know how to plant trees. We know how to plant grasslands. We know how to take barren, lifeless land and turn it back into a viable biome. It’s not that hard. In a lot of cases, if there’s neighboring areas where that biome still exists, all you have to do is dump a few tons of biomass (plant clippings, food waste, etc.) on the barren land and stand back and wait. The biomass will provide nutrients and keep the topsoil from blowing away, and the plants and animals from the neighboring biome will move in. In two decades, even if you don’t do anything besides dumping the biomass on it, you won’t be able to tell what was the barren area and what was the still-existing biome.

Coral reefs dying? Now, coral reefs are a bit more fragile than most biomes, but guess what! We still know how to replant/rebuild them, and in fact are working on that in places affected by coral reef die-off! And we’re learning how to do it better every day.

Desertification? Guess what! We know how to turn desert back into green space. They’re doing it on a large scale in China and sub-Saharan Africa. There are several different techniques, none of which are even very technology-intensive. It takes money and time and labor, but it’s perfectly doable. We know this because we’ve done it.

Plastic in the ecosystem, particularly in the ocean? Guess what! There’s a lot of people working on this, both on “how to remove plastic from the ocean” and “how to reuse/recycle it more efficiently.” And the techniques are improving by leaps and bounds every year. This is a solvable problem. These are all solvable problems.

So if you’re crushed by the weight of the coming environmental catastrophe … don’t be. These are all solvable problems! We can stop things from getting worse, and we can fix the things we’ve broken. The issue is political, not practical.

On the political side, of course, is the need to tighten up environmental regulations across the globe. (What’s the statistic, that 90% of pollution is caused by 100 corporations?) And then of course, we need to fund these programs on a large enough scale.

In some ways the political aspect is the hardest, but consider this: we are at a tipping point. Things are changing about the way politicians talk about climate change and ecological degradation. More ordinary people are concerned about this, which means more pressure on politicians. One of the ways that things are changing is that people–even conservatives–are starting to talk about “job opportunities in new green fields” and switching the conversation so that it’s not “rainforest vs. jobs” makes political action a lot more possible. And no, it’s not going to happen on its own, but it can happen.

This is a solvable problem.

I *needed* this. Climate change has had me feeling SO helpless, having a list of things that can actually potentially be done is beautiful

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