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The obvious (although not necessarily correct) explanation would seem to be that a post with a question drives more engagement than a questionless "here's a thing" post, because people feel the urge to answer (even when that answer is "I don't know," which baffles the hell out of me).

It's also possible for the first example that the one image that is different actually drove most of the engagement, especially given that it's the one only of the five that has something that looks like a tentacle in it.

today i learned twitter artists are posting their own art but captioning it as if they're reposting someone else's work, bc it gives them waaay more engagement. and its worked every time. the state of social media is truly so over 😭

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> Ukraine will seek to retake those by force as soon as militarily possible, but would be extremely reluctant to launch a ground offensive beyond 2014 lines.

This seems perverse. In terms of red lines for a peace deal, perhaps being prepared to accept (for the time being) the continued existence of the so-called “people’s republics” makes sense, but why on Earth would Ukraine refrain from excising those mafia-state cancers if it finds itself in a position to do so?

Arestovych yesterday reasoned that Putin’s *maximum* aims at this point are basically to reach Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson oblast borders (in that order of priority) + the southeast half of Zaporozhia, long-term entrench there, exhaust Ukraine and allies with static warfare for several months (counting on the flow of aid to wither), and from there push for some sort of Minsk 3 rotten peace deal that’d let them secure those territories while leaving Ukraine maximally crippled

Hence no declaration of war, no formal mobilization and no more open nuclear blackmail in the cards.

If those aims prove elusive, then keep sending a trickle of reserves into the grinder to wear out Ukraine and prevent it from amassing combat power for a counteroffensive, hold and fortify current lines, and likewise hope not to lose the war of attrition before Ukraine can be pressured into a ceasefire.

Arestovych and other officials, including Zelensky, have been adamant that Ukraine will never consider a ceasefire that’d leave any recently occupied territories out of Ukrainian control. Ukraine will seek to retake those by force as soon as militarily possible, but would be extremely reluctant to launch a ground offensive beyond 2014 lines.

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Kys homophobe

Wat.

I mean, seriously, if you want me to have any real reaction to your ask at all, beyond amused contempt, you're going to need to have to be more specific than that about what it is that's pissing you off, especially given that, as far as I can tell, my most recent post that had anything to do with homosexuality was back in 2019, and that was very much taking a "fuck Mormonism" line, not a "fuck homosexuality" line.

My best guess is that you have somehow stumbled on one of my reblogs of one of @theunitofcaring's posts about how "yes, it's okay to be attracted to women" memes must apply to straight men as well as to lesbians. But you could also be a TERF who is angry about my views on how can reasonably identify as a lesbian. Or someone who disagrees with my take on @multiheaded1793's post about the implications of there being alternatives to "being a man," and who doesn't quite grasp the difference between being heterosexual and being cisgender. Or someone who is mad about something completely unrelated to homosexuality, but picked "homophobe" out of a hat full of Terms for Badthinkers.

Or, and, honestly, this is probably the second most likely explanation, after the "not just lesbians" thing, you're MFC and something has reminded you of me, and you've decided to go with "homophobe," rather than "ableist," as your explanation for why I'm evil and deserve to die for my contempt for "greater goddess powers," that somehow still haven't killed me yet.

#lulz #endless lulz #mfc #random libel #anon hate #cw: scrupulosity triggers #cw: suicide baiting

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There may come a day that I will re-encounter this — whether because someone reblogged it from me, or for any other reason — and will not once again reblog it, but today is not that day!

golden eagle having a relaxing time

#positive activism #aw #enormous winged predator #clucking happily #belly rubs

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Stumbled upon this, and felt like sharing.

Tails is the best friend in the world.

#sonic the hedgehog #watersports #vore #nature facts

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If men emphatically and affirmatively don’t have to “be men” and can thoroughgoingly become something entirely different… then the entire psychosexual machine of making young men kill and die at old men’s direction is manifestly non-functioning and unsalvageable.

This has some truth, but seems overstated, and somewhat typical-minding.

Most young males want to be men, and not solely because they don’t see any alternative other than being a failed man. The latter is certainly an additional spur, and therefore probably increases how aversive the requirements that one has to meet in order to be a man can be without having an unworkably large fraction of young males decide that even being a failed man is better than that. So presenting a model of gender in which being an AMAB adult doesn’t limit your options to just those two certainly reduces how much the war machine can safely brutalize the rank-and-file, but I don’t think it’s sufficient to make it impossible to have a war machine in the first place.

This is even more true given that a lot of the relevant characteristics that go into “being a man” -- courage, toughness, aggression against enemies, etc. -- are things that at least a sizeable fraction of those young males will want to have and/or will have and want to express anyway, even apart from the fact that they’re part of “being a man,” because testosterone itself tends to promote risk-taking, status/dominance ambition, aggression, etc.

Wilhelm Reich was so right about fascism being psychosexual.

In a way they’re kind of rational to want to annihilate us as an existential category, although not in their choice of means, y'know!  If men emphatically and affirmatively don’t have to “be men” and can thoroughgoingly become something entirely different… then the entire psychosexual machine of making young men kill and die at old men’s direction is manifestly non-functioning and unsalvageable. And that glaring reminder needs to be stamped out in a narcissistic rage, never mind contending with the actual causes of that system’s decay.

(what the system is, or was… isn’t even the patriarchy as commonly understood, it’s the fundamental power politics underlying the patriarchy. stuff like the Roman virtus et al, the practices of population control, violent acquisition, culling and upward redistribution via constructing and enforcing masculinity; control over women being in some ways auxiliary to that)

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I DON’T LIKE THEM PUTTING CODE ON THE SERVER THAT TURNS THE FREAKIN’ FROGS ALL-DEVOURING!

#amazing #minecraft #frogs #vore

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It’s also worth noting: Mariupol is overwhelmingly Russian-speaking, and quite heavily (for a city in Ukraine) Russian-identified. As in, in a survey on language, identity, and political attitudes conducted there a couple years ago, respondents were given a choice of what language to be interviewed in, and less than 1% chose Ukrainian. 88% supported making Russian a second national language. 83% agreed with the statement “Russians and Ukrainians are one people.” And so forth.

All the horrors and atrocities shown in the pictures above, and all the ones that are not shown here, but have been extensively covered elsewhere? This is how the Russian government and the Russian armed forces have chosen to respond to a refusal to surrender from what was, prior to the current invasion, one of the most pro-Russian cities in Ukraine. This is how Vladimir Putin “protects Russian speakers” in Ukraine.

#putin #genocide #mass murder #mariupol

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There’s a broad, appalling, and fundamentally anti-libertarian phenomenon that goes something like this:

1. There are “good reasons” to criminalize doing X (whether this is actually true or not varies).

2. But one or both of the following is true:

2.a It can sometimes be hard to prove in court -- beyond a reasonable doubt -- that someone was actually doing X (when they actually were), and/or

2.b A cop on the street can’t always be certain whether someone is doing X (when they actually are), and therefore can’t know whether to arrest them for it.

3. But, conveniently enough, doing X requires doing Y, and proving Y -- whether in court or in the mind of the cop deciding whether or not to make an arrest -- is perfectly straightforward.

4. Now, unlike doing X, doing Y is not itself worthy of punishment, and while doing X requires doing Y, doing Y does not require doing X.

5. But there’s “no good reason” to do Y if you’re not doing X; requiring that people not do Y is “perfectably reasonable” and “a minor inconvenience.”

6. So the government criminalizes Y itself, and not just as evidence of doing X.

7. Therefore, if you’re caught doing Y, it doesn’t matter whether you were provably not doing X, because you *were* doing Y, and doing Y is a crime.

Or in this particular case: There are “good reasons” to criminalize possession of prescription medication that you were not prescribed. But if someone who’s been in and out of various hospitals and free clinics says they were prescribed those pills a couple weeks ago, and they don’t remember where exactly, it can be (realistically) impossible to prove otherwise. But (unless you’re great at prescription label forgeries) you’re not going to have a bottle for prescription medication with an appropriate label with your name on it unless you were actually prescribed that medication. And, conversely, you should always receive such a bottle together with your medication if you were prescribed it, so there’s “no good reason” to possess prescription medication outside of an appropriate container.

So the government criminalizes possession of prescription medication outside of an appropriate container, because this makes it easier for the cops and the courts to enforce the law against having prescription medication without having been prescribed it. But being able to show that you *were* prescribed it is no defense, because possessing it outside of an appropriate container is itself a crime.

In this particular scenario, there’s probably a defense available related to clear legislative intent (even apart from muggings, the legislature surely did not intend to criminalize having a muscle spasm and spilling some pills on the ground while extracting and consuming one pill in accordance with your prescription instructions). For that matter, one could argue lack of *mens rea*, not only in the spilling of the medication, but also in gathering it up afterward (at least if he still possessed the bottle and intended to place it in the bottle). But neither of those helps if you’ve already confessed.

Like many former lawyers, I remember representing a client whose case embodied such a gross miscarriage of justice that I now use it as an example to explain the unfairness of the law to others. My client, whom I’ll call Bobby, was an elderly man with a recent traumatic brain injury that had left him disabled and unable to find stable housing. I was working with him to secure a place in assisted housing and was in contact with him on an almost daily basis. At some point, though, for about a week, he vanished—no notice, no clue regarding his whereabouts. He just disappeared.

When Bobby finally arrived back in my office, he told me that he had been arrested. He had been robbed, and during the robbery his prescription heart medication was taken. The robbers, presumably after discovering it was not a drug with street value, threw his prescription onto the street in front of him. A witness to the attack had called the police, but when they arrived the robbers were long gone. Bobby, however, was still at the scene trying to pick up his medicine from the ground. Bobby was arrested by the officers for possession of prescription medicine outside of a proper container.

Since the non-profit organization that I worked for couldn’t handle criminal cases, Bobby was assigned a public defender. He sat in jail for a few days before meeting with his lawyer, who explained that if Bobby pled guilty, he would be placed on probation for a year and the charge would be dropped at the end of that time. Bobby, who wanted to leave jail as soon as possible, agreed to this and thought that the matter was resolved.

As Bobby told me this story, I immediately began to worry about his housing situation. The assisted housing facility would not allow people who were on probation to reside there. After several calls with his public defender, I realized that there was not much that could be done. Bobby, after all, had admitted his guilt in front of a judge and had waived any rights he had to appeal. So he had to wait a year, living in substandard housing, before he would be eligible for the assistance he desperately needed, all because he had made his guilty plea without understanding the full consequences.

“Defendants don’t know what’s what,” said Dan Canon, author of the new book Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class, when discussing Bobby’s situation with me. “You take a poor or working-class person that gets swept into the criminal justice system and is accused of a felony or something like that and the defense attorney is like, ‘You need to plea…’ and they can’t weigh the strengths and weaknesses of their case—they can’t tell what’s a good deal and what’s a bad deal.”

#tyranny #all tyrants must hang

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Are there obvious joints to carve it apart at? (Genuine question; I have relatively little knowledge about Russian internal divisions.) Bits can be lopped off at the edges easily enough. Speaking for myself, I think it would be a truly delightful historical revenge to see Stalin’s White Sea Canal used as a specific physical realization of the Three-Isthmus Border. I’m sure there are analogous opportunities on various other borders. Königsberg probably makes the most sense as an independent state, bar massive demographic changes.

But lopping off all of Russia’s disputable peripheral bits would still leave a pretty damn big rump to be divided up. Is there an obvious good way of doing that, in terms of existing identities, natural borders, or (ideally) both? (One that leaves something that can reasonably be identified as a resurrection of the Novgorod Republic would be really nice. Although maybe that criterion just boils down to “don’t put Novgorod and Moscow in the same succesor state?”)

Earlier Russophobia anon here, oh no I didn’t mean to make it sound like NATO or the EU want to aggressively expand by letting in Ukraine or Georgia, lol why would they want more mouths to feed? All these dead weight countries mean is their utility - pipelines, military footholds. The gauntlet small states are in isn’t that they will either be forcefully absorbed by Russia or The West, it’s that their heart-wrenching attempts at asserting their dignity and their sehnsucht for freedom are always doomed. Either they put up with puppet regimes or leaders who are good at placating Russia and live in resigned indignity, or they rise and Russia fucks them up for their defiance because it can’t lose them to The West. And there is nowhere they can turn for protection other than the outwardly compassionate but double standard-ridden, ruthlessly calculating and self-interest driven, at best indifferent West. The gauntlet doesn’t give a fuck either way.

I guess I don't see how NATO or the EU are necessarily so awful. Like, what are the material drawbacks of being part of the EU, from the standpoint of a country that might want to join it? AFAICT most of the effort that goes into depicting either as part of an evil empire simply takes it for granted that the moral contagion of America pollutes anyone who falls under the sway of either organization, and I just don't see it.

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sylvia plath masturbating with her head in the oven

. . . apart from being a striking mental image, is a search time that @slatestarscratchpad​ discovered, approximately 8 years ago, had led someone to his blog, and about which he commented at the time “I am almost certain this is not anywhere on my blog.”

This post is meant to note (since comments on that post have been closed for, you know, about 8 years, and he appears to have tumblr asks turned off, and I wanted to share this discovery with someone) that he was kinda right and kinda wrong: In his review of Infinite Jest (posted about a month before his list of search terms) he talks about both masturbation:

Infinite Jest is about wireheading. More specifically, it’s about not wireheading. It’s about the difference between masturbation and sex. It’s about the dangers of self-reference and the need to connect to something outside yourself.

So how’s this for symbolism: the book is set in a future USA-Canada-Mexico merger called the Organization of North American Nations. I originally thought O.N.A.N. was just a cheap gag, in the same way Robert Anton Wilson called his supercomputer F.U.C.K.U.P. But David Foster Wallace does not do cheap gags. The book was taking place in a society literally named for masturbation, and its entire structure was based on pleasure without purpose.

and (tangentially) the death of Sylvia Plath:

There are other, weirder referential loops. James Incandenza commits suicide by sticking his head in a microwave (possibly meant as a quick-consumerist-culture equivalent of Sylvia Plath sticking her head in an oven) after trying to give up alcohol. David Foster Wallace ended up committing suicide after trying to give up antidepressants.

I don’t know whether the masturbating-Plath–searcher had read that post before and was trying to find it again, or if they just had a weird fetish and stumbled upon that post as a result. Either way, I’m amused.

Oh, I almost forgot: The reason I’m aware of this at all is that the list of search terms is what comes up if you go to https://slatestarcodex.com/search.

#lulz #cw: suicide #cw: eroticized self-harm #cw: scrupulosity triggers #brand new sentence #(although it's technically only a phrase)

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Sharing partly for valuable information, and partly to ask about something that’s been nagging at me (and without endorsing medically unnecessary use of the hypothetical approach described below, even if it is feasible, just trying to understand):

With humans, it is occasionally the least bad option, medically speaking, to permanently remove a fingernail or (more commonly) toenail. Not at all often, but it does happen (e.g., as a solution to ingrown toenails that have continued to recur despite more conservative surgical treatment). But even in that case, the standard procedure (as I understand it -- I’m not a physician, much less one with a relevant specialty, but I’ve done a bit of reading) is not to remove the terminal phalanx; rather, it’s to first remove the nail, and then destroy the underlying germinal matrix with phenol, so that the nail doesn’t grow back. The end result is a finger or toe that is missing its nail, but is otherwise basically normal.

While this would still not be a great thing to do to a cat -- it hurts, albeit quite a bit less than amputating a full joint would (even for a plantigrade species like ours, let alone a digitigrade one), there’s a risk of infection, it inhibits a major natural behavior, it reduces their ability to defend themselves, etc. -- it seems like it would be much better than lopping off part or all of the distal phalanx itself, both in terms of pain and in terms of functionality. If I understand the above diagram correctly, it should (at least in theory) even allow the cat to “extend” its no-longer-present claws normally when stretching, since it shouldn’t affect the attachment points for any of the tendons or ligaments (i.e., the cat could still move its bones in the same fashion that would, if it still had claws, extend them).

But I’ve never seen this discussed as an actual or potential practice; even discussions of (rare) medically necessary “declawing” by well-informed people who are opposed to unnecessary surgeries seem (assuming I’m understanding them correctly) to still be discussing partial or complete phalangectomy.

What am I not understanding?

Cat Claw retraction 

#cw: animal cruelty #cw: animal abuse #declawing

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This is completely tangential, but just FYI: The name of the city that sits at the Southern end of Cayuga Lake in upstate NY, and is home to both Ithaca College and Cornell University, is spelled “Ithaca.”

There are a number of other municipalities in the US (and at least one (former) municipality in Australia) named after the Greek Ιθάκη, and all the ones that I’m aware of share the same spelling -- although there are some non-municipalities (songs, schools, housing developments, people) that use a spelling of “Ithaka” or “Ithica.”

Meet Phoebe, the polydactyl Highland Lynx complete with curled ears and a bobtail (Source: http://ift.tt/1WV7Q9M)

#sharing information

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What treason are you talking about? You are aware that Maryland was a Union state during the Civil War, right?

all i have cached for delaware in my head is “like maryland, but without the treason”

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I've got no love for cops, but rioters who loot and burn the property of those who have nothing to do with those rioters' pretextual "grievances" should all be bayonetted! Everybody looty till the roof starts to shooty!

I won’t sugarcoat it, you guys are completely fucking fucked now. Fucked. You can’t yet imagine how fucked you are, and how little you can do about it.

There’s going to be a tremendous bipartisan hard right, austerity + law-and-order crackdown in your country, early 1990s style, and much like then it’ll go completely unnoticed by anyone but the victims. Silent, ruthless and persistent, not loudmouthed, embarrassing and patchwork. The media will cryptically allude to its wisdom and necessity from time to time, and amplifying it will be automatically suspect and divisive. The commentator class will treat the mildest criticism of what’s going on… approximately how the new vice president’s supporters have been treating the mildest criticism of her. It’s going to get so fucking ugly.

(if only those edgy accelerationist anti-anti-Trump takes had emphasized the immediacy of that prospect upon a Biden win - not just what comes in 2024 - they’d be getting taken a lot more seriously. maybe.)

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Very relevant right now.

golden eagle having a relaxing time

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I am striving, really hard, not to read or watch political shit that will not help me vote (or do anything else) but will just infuriate me. I am not doing some work online that would be useful for me to do, because when I set out to do it, I end up reading ot watching infuriating political shit instead.

I am reading a book. Perhaps in a bit, I will watch a specific YouTube video from a specific channel, that is not about politics, without looking at my "recommended" videos. Perhaps not

If *you* are tormenting yourself with political news, or commentary, or opinion pieces, or anything else, that does not help you to do anything of value, but just makes you sad, or angry, or upset, or anxious . . . STOP. Read a book. Have a drink, if that's something that will actually give you pleasure and not just a different form of self-abuse. Masturbate. Go for a walk. Work out. Weave (or knit, or crochet, or spin). Play a game. Do any of ten thousand things that will make you happy instead of working yourself up, to no good end.

I'm not a consequentialist. I believe that there are plenty of circumstances in which fighting, without a hope of victory, is just and honorable. But fighting is one thing, and getting angry (or sad, or anxious, or . . .) alone in your apartment is another.