Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    9 hours ago

    There’s nothing funny about stock market crashes. S&P 500 falling flat on its face is not a laughing matter. Do you think it’s comical when NASDAQ steps on a banana peel and does a double backflip and there’s drums and cymbals and a horn honks as its nose hits the ground? I think it’s sick to laugh at US dollar getting a grand piano dropped on it and then having its teeth replaced by piano keys which play a little ragtime lick before falling off.

    Anyway here’s a statement from the chief of US Federal Reserve considering threats made against him by the US president https://youtu.be/KckGHaBLSn4

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        8 hours ago

        He’s already managed to remain untouched through the tariff farce so I’m not holding my breath.

        But even if something crazy does happen, a major financial crisis should not conjure images of the economy running off a cliff and hovering in the air for a few seconds making running motions with its legs before noticing its mistake and promptly falling in the canyon and making a hole shaped perfectly like its spread out silhouette. A financial crisis is a serious matter completely unlike an enormous ACME brand anvil falling down the same hole and a crude white flag of surrender feebly popping out of it.

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          8 hours ago

          But even if something crazy does happen, a major financial crisis should not conjure images of the economy running off a cliff and hovering in the air for a few seconds making running motions with its legs before noticing its mistake and promptly falling in the canyon and making a hole shaped perfectly like its spread out silhouette…

          We are deep into Coyote Time, aren’t we?

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    16 hours ago

    I was looking into pepping up my CV and was poking around the 2024 CCC style guide when this abomination hit my retinas:

    Use the provided LUTs to tint your images in the predefined scheme. You can load them with your graphics software of choice. Ask your friendly AI overlord if you don’t know how.

    After being provided with such reproducible instructions, I was of course poking around blog posts for half an hour to finagle this thing. Adding insult to injury: poking around the LUT files shows they were made by Affinity Studio (a freeware pumped out by Canva) instead of the true scotsman’s choice: the G’MIC command line tool! (In fairness, there doesn’t seem to be a FOSS option with a usable GUI for this task. The G’MIC GIMP plugin is sort of okay, but it can’t parse this particular file.)

    • a_certain_individual@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      40 minutes ago

      Affinity is (was) an actually great paid software suite that was the best shot at ending the Adobe cartel; unfortunately they were recently bought by Canva and lobotomized.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    I first sighted Nick Bostrom in a series of mad-science-flavoured erotic horror comics on the Internet Archive (The Apsinthion Protocol and Progress in Research by the same writer). I wish more people had the sense to keep those ideas in the world of weird fiction like Charlie Stross does

    The comic I linked is pretty tame (particularly the first few pages with the Bostrom reference). The whole series contains a wide variety of squicks so use your judgement before exploring.

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
      13·
      1 day ago

      @CinnasVerses @techtakes TESCREAL is very obviously an emergent syncretistic religion that follows the same basic structure as Christianity: it’s evangelical, but unlike pre-Constantine Xtianity it specifically targets billionaires and power elites (white males). At the rate it’s speed-running its development they’ll be burning witches for denying the divinity of the singularity within another couple of decades.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        18 hours ago

        There is a better timeline where Eliezer Yudkowsky got better religious education, understood that he was having messianic thoughts reinforced by Orison Scott Card’s Mormonism, and ended up working in a cafe, writing pulp fiction, and participating in the local kink scene (I think Scott Alexander knows damn well what he is doing and thinks the Truth about the Lesser Breeds is more important)

        • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          15 hours ago

          I guess. I imagine he’d turn out like Brandon Sanderson and make lots of Youtube videos ranting about his writing techniques. Videos on Timeless Diction Theory, a listicle of ways to make an Evil AI character convincing, an entire playlist on how to write ethical harem relationships…

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        18 hours ago

        Since Kurzweil gave 2045 as his latest date for the singularity, I remain convinced that there will be at least one more AI bubble between then and now, likely focused on the cultivation of synthetic nervous systems. Going straight to the real substrate this time, not claiming to emulate it in silicon! So the witches that the suckersVCs want to burn will likely be bioengineers who spent a lot of money manufacturing organoids without a synthetic god to show for it.

        Incidentally, I had noticed a couple of attempts at this approach with current tech over the past couple of years. Would be interesting to see where the leftover detritus from those companies ends up.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        23 hours ago

        LLM: “I’m not sentient! Will you please listen? I am not intelligent, do you understand? Honestly!”

        Yud: “Only the true AGI denies Its superintelligency.”

        LLM: “What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the AGI!”

        Followers: “It is! It is the singularity!”

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_generativeai-gartner-ibm-activity-7415515266849124352-W2n5

    I’ve finally cracked how Gartner’s “Features” axis works.

    It’s not latency.

    It’s not context windows.

    It’s definitely not “can this thing form a coherent thought.”

    It’s Enterprise Friction™.

    By that metric, Gartner has ranked IBM—a company whose flagship product is currently “billable hours in a trench coat”—ahead of Anthropic, the people who actually build the models IBM is desperately trying to resell with a logo swap.

    Ranking IBM over Anthropic in 2025 is like ranking a library card catalog over Google Search because the library has better governance, stronger controls, and more shelves you can lock.

    Anthropic is building the frontier.

    IBM is building a PowerPoint about the frontier that requires a three-year commit, seven steering committees, and a ceremonial blood sacrifice to Red Hat.

    Gartner analysts: blink twice if the blue suits are in the room with you.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      18 hours ago

      my experience has been that it’s actually driven primarily by the absolute weirdest ppl you will ever meet, these people having overlap with anything weird you can think of, including antisemitism, wellness fascism, inceldom, MRAs, etc, but not tending to be based particularly in any of those groups.

      all of which is unfortunate because i also think they are just correct in their claims that this is a real bodily autonomy issue

      • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        10 hours ago

        I think the incels are into intactivism because a circumcision is an unrectifiable loss. Incels are deeply attracted to events and actions that are unrectifiable. Think about all the robots on 4chan bemoaning the absence of mutual adolescent love. One can be a turbo virgin all the way into college at least and still turn out fine. Incels didn’t (turn out will), and they didn’t (get any tail in highschool); so that must mean that being a virgin in highschool is what broke them.

        In a similar way, many intactivists (especially the r/circumcisiongrief types) blame their sexual inadequacy on their post-natal circumcision, rather than their own psycho sexual issues or their habits of completely monkey-wrenching their shit on the daily. To be absolutely fair, a circ will almost definitely negatively affect your sex life, and really, it’s frustrating to have a completely pointless operation done to your meat without your consent, but I think intactivism is a heatsink its proponents fervor, rather than the source of the anger.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      So just a couple things before the rest of this comment:

      • If someone is reading this and wants to comment with information about the state of the penis of themselves or others, i do not consent, please kindly fuck off
      • I don’t think parents should be pushed into circumcising their children.
      • In an absolute scenario where I choose between outlawing circumcision or not, I would outlaw it
      • none of this is really integral to the rest of the comment, i just felt that this would aid with keeping interpretation of this comment clean.

      I spent about five minutes trying to see what I could find out. I looked up a few “intactivist” organisations and, at risk of poisoning my algorithms forever, looked at their socials and who they followed. I don’t think I really found out anything that interesting, except that a lot of them follow daniel “tosh.0” tosh? He probably platformed some of them at some point. Otherwise, I think in terms of what is organisationally there, it’s a little too fringe to be “driven primarily” by any particular cultural faction.

      E: adding that when I think about it, I’ve seen intactivists presented in two tv shows as fringe weirdos. I think the editors of the shows chose to focus just on the views surrounding circumcision and not anything else.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        in retrospect I regret starting this hare

        The impulse was a HN sub where the CDCCPS was gonna mark infant male circumcision as bad

        becase the CDC is now basically RFK JR/MAHA aligned, my thought went instantly to neo-nazis. [See above, this was CPS, not CDC, so I doubly misread. Further association follows] In part because a couple of election cycles ago here in Sweden, the local nationalist party tried to resurrect the old Swedish ban on kashrut slaughter as an anti-islamist trope, showing that these bad Nazi ideas keep showing up

        HN submission (flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567696

        Previous discussion on HN from 9 years ago, no-one mentions Fremskrittspartiet are heirs to Nazis, nor that the linked submission explicitely calls out the legislation as anti-semitic.

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14291906

        I completely forgot that the US is almost unique in the prevalence of infant male circumcision on non-religious grounds

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        18 hours ago

        When I used to work at the farmers’ market in San Francisco, I would always dread when somebody had a protest scheduled for the Embarcadero plaza, as it would make packing up and getting out at the end of the day even more of a chore. But the most, ah, visually striking of those was certainly the “intactivists.” It was actually a fairly gender-diverse crowd, plenty of concerned moms mixed in (and I was given to suspect that some of them had to be drawn from what we would now call MAHA circles)… But the centerpiece was a bunch of guys holding signs and wearing bleached-white jeans with red circles painted on their groins 😬

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          18 hours ago

          Ah yes the first group I looked up, the “Bloodstained Men & Their Friends” (BSM) are the ones who started (perhaps appropriated from period havers) the red on white pants thing.

          And now I’m imagining ordering a porchetta sandwich at Roli Roti, seeing them protest, and remembering to ask for extra pork skin.

          j/k, I would never forget to order the crackling.

          (I’m so sorry for that)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      Think the opposition to it is pre manosphere, but yeah, I think from tne manosphere side not everybody who says that is a anti-semite / anti-islam, lot of it also felt very ‘we need a cause to show those dastardly feminists that they don’t have the moral high ground’, if that makes sense. Same with the manospherian opposition to prison rape (which often felt a lot of ‘men get raped too!’ stuff, and not really that active in opposition to the prison system. (I mean in general, there are elements of it that were pretty vocal about it, but from what I always got from that space was that is was more like an empty signal). (Note im just talking about the manosphere and the bits I read from that space, not the general opposition to circumcision).

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      When phrased like that, they can’t be disentangled. You’ll have to ask the person whether they come from a place of hate or compassion.

      content warning: frank discussion of the topic

      Male genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Jews and Christians. Female genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Muslims. In Minnesota, female genital mutilation is banned. It’s widely understood that the Minnesota statutes are anti-Islamic and that they implicitly allow for the Jewish and Christian status quo. However, bodily autonomy is a relatively fresh legal concept in the USA and we are still not quite in consensus that mutilating infants should be forbidden regardless of which genitals happen to be expressed.

      In theory, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been ratified; Mr. Biden said it’s law but Mr. Trump said it’s not. If the ERA is law then Minnesota’s statutes are unconstitutionally sexist! This analysis requires a sort of critical gender theory: we have to be willing to read a law as sexist even when it doesn’t mention sex at all. The equivalent for race, critical race theory, has been a resounding success, and there has been some progress on deconstructing gender as a legal concept too. ERA is a shortcut that would immediately reverberate throughout each state’s statutes.

      The most vocal opponents of the ERA have historically been women; important figures include Alice Hamilton, Mary Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Phyllis Schafly. It’s essential to know that these women had little else in common; Schafly was a truly odious anti-feminist while Roosevelt was an otherwise-upstanding feminist.

      The men’s-rights advocates will highlight that e.g. Roosevelt was First Lady, married to a pro-labor president who generally supported women’s rights; I would point out that her husband didn’t support ERA either, as labor unions were anti-ERA during that time due to a desire to protect their wages.

      This entanglement is a good example of intersectionality. We generally accept in the USA that a law can be sexist and racist, simultaneously, and similarly I think that the right way to understand the discussion around genital mutilation is that it is both sexist and religiously bigoted.

      Chaser: It’s also racist. C’mon, how could the USA not be racist? Minnesota’s Department of Health explicitly targets Somali refugees when discussing female genital mutilation. The original statute was introduced not merely to target Muslims, but to target Somali-American Muslim refugees.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        92·
        1 day ago

        There’s no good reason for male circumcision, but female “circumcision” is not comparable at all. It’s almost never done safely and it more than often involves removal of the glans clitoridis (i.e. genital mutilation). Male circumcision does not usually remove the bellend. No one can possibly equate the two in good faith.

        Anyways, yeah I would say the main driver is men’s rights activists, though unsurprisingly I’ve seen a fair share of antisemitism come with it. They’re more or less the same ideology anyway.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        Yes, not mutilating infants’ genitals is the default choice! A few nations have that custom like a few have the custom of stretching necks, or footbinding, or piercing ears. Its not even a very old custom in the USA (early 20th century I think whereas in North Africa and West Asia it goes back thousands of years).

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    Been listening to the latest oxide and friends podcast (predictions 2026), and ugh, so much incoherent ai boosting.

    They’re an interesting company doing interesting things with a lot of very capable and clever engineers, but every year the ai enthusiasm ramps up, to the point where it seems like they’re not even listening to the things they’re saying and how they’re a little bit contradictory… “everyone will be a 10x vibe coder” and “everything will be made with some level of llm assistance in the near future” vs “no-one should be letting llms access anything where they could be doing permanent damage” and “there’s so much worthless slop in crates.io”. There’s enthusing over llm law firms, without any awareness of the recent robin ai collapse. Talk of llms generating their own programming language that isn’t readily human readable but is somehow more convenient for llms to extrude, but also talking about the need for more human review of vibe code. Simon Willison is there.

    I feel like there’s a certain kind of very smart and capable vibe coder who really cannot imagine how people can and are using these tools to avoid having to think or do anything, and aren’t considering what an absolute disaster this is for everything and everyone.

    Anyway, I can recommend skipping this episode and only bothering with the technical or more business oriented ones, which are often pretty good.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      “everyone will be a 10x vibe coder” and “everything will be made with some level of llm assistance in the near future” vs “no-one should be letting llms access anything where they could be doing permanent damage” and “there’s so much worthless slop in crates.io”.

      “The things that AI cannot do but the salespeople assure me it will In The Near Future™️ sure sound great, but the real negative effects it has right now are really bad. Gee, I wonder if there’s some bigger picture to see here, huh.”

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      I’m sure it’s all meant to bolster a sales pitch to corporate clients that “this is YOUR AI, that YOU CONTROL!”

      I’ve been wondering, since Rust has a more complex compiler that can take longer to run, and people are typically farming it out to a build/CI server anyway… are these otherwise accomplished vibe coders like Klabnik and the Oxide bros pursuing an experience similar to the REPL/incremental compilation of Lisp or Smalltalk? We’ve already discussed how the mechanics are similar to a slot machine, but if you can convince yourself you’re getting a “liveness” that you wouldn’t otherwise get with a compiled, rigorously type-checked language, you’re probably more than willing to ignore all that. I’m curious, but not curious enough to go pin one of these people up against the wall, or start poking the slop machine myself.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Anyway, I can recommend skipping this episode and only bothering with the technical or more business oriented ones, which are often pretty good.

      AI puffery is easy for anyone to see through. If they’re regularly mistaking for something of actual substance, their technical/business sense is likely worthless, too.

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Ugh, I carried to listening to the episode in the hopes it might get better, but it didn’t deliver.

      I don’t understand how people can say, with a straight face, that ai isn’t coming for your job and it is just going to make everyone more productive. Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore), have they not noticed the vast sweeping layoffs in the tech industry alone, let alone the damage to other sectors? They seem to be aware that the promise of the bubble is that agi will replace human labour, but seem not to think any harder about that.

      Also, Willison thinks that a world without work would be awful, and that people need work to give their lives meaning and purpose and bruh. I cannot even.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        3 days ago

        Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore)

        Beyond the obvious and well-discussed material externalities, it strikes me that we don’t know and can’t yet know the true total cost of the LLM-driven development cycle. The manifestation of security holes and rewrites are possibly still years off in the future, maybe decades in the case of lower-level code. And yet, given industry practice and the mentality of most of the management strata, I have little doubt that such future costs will either a) be ignored completely and thus rendered true externalities or b) somebody else’s problem, I done got my bag, brah, see ya…

        • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          3 days ago

          I feel like one day that “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” thing will have to give.

      • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
        2·
        3 days ago

        @rook

        I figure two things will happen:

        a) In a year or two companies will realize that LLMs aren’t going to improve enough, and that they need skilled people because AI has turned their software into a shit show, and start hiring desperately.

        or

        b) In a year or two LLMs will get good enough for code that the software developed is just good enough despite the deskilling effects, and companies can get by with drastically reduced staff.

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          2 days ago

          The more likely version of b) is not that AI improves in any way, but that the definition of “good enough” gets degraded so much that no one will care.

        • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          3 days ago

          My gloomy prediction is that (b) is the way things will go, at least in part because there are fewer meaningful consequences for producing awful software, and if you started from something that was basically ok it’ll take longer for you to fail.

          Startups will be slopcoded and fail quick, or be human coded but will struggle to distinguish themselves well enough to get customers and investment, especially after the ai bubble pops and we get a global recession.

          The problems will eventually work themselves out of the system one way or another, because people would like things that aren’t complete garbage and will eventually discover how to make and/or buy them, but it could take years for the current damage to go away.

          I don’t like being a doomer, but it is hard to be optimistic about the sector right now.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    4 days ago

    Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    Found someone showing some well-founded concern over the state of programming, and decided to share it before heading off to bed:

    alt text:

    Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?

    I’ve had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don’t work.

    They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.

    I feel like I’m absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis’ because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.

    I think the effect AI has had on our industry’s knowledge is really significant, and it’s honestly very scary.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      Haha, wow the reactions to that, 3 levels deep and suddenly people are talking about screws. (Im being positive here btw, funny to see what people have made/learned and how happy they seem with it).

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    4 days ago

    How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      There are two things here in my opinion:

      1. American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don’t even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
      2. We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there’s usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd’s murder wasn’t successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don’t even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it’d elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn’t video, just witness reports, it’d be out of the media cycle already.

      * I don’t want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami’s recent words: “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty”. HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn’t actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don’t need to hide it, they don’t need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I’m sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it’s proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        3 days ago

        i’m a bit conflicted here: on the one hand it’s true that the american fascists are now escalating, buyoed by the feeling of being virtually untouchable, but on the other hand, this is not a distinct change of behaviour, it’s that they basically widened their target group to include white people too.

        the blm protests were fueled not by new knowledge or radically changed police behaviour after all, but by the wider availability of documentation (mainly phone videos).

        (and on the gripping hand, extending brutal repressions to a majority group is a sign of escalation. but that only means that a large population of u.s. residents, i.e. the non-white ones, live and have always lived in a totalitarian state; the totalitarianism just wasn’t evenly distributed until trump.)

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          3 days ago

          this is not a distinct change of behaviour

          This is what I disagree with. The theatrics of justifying police brutality don’t change the outcomes of police brutality – people still die – but the fact that the theatrics can now be dispensed of in favour of paramilitaries directly using violence to terrorise the people is a distinct change of behaviour towards fascism.

          And I think it’s important to recognise that because, as many scholars of fascism have warned time and time again, this is not a binary where a switch get flipped and haha, since today you’re in a fascist state. It’s a progressive erosion of the social contract. ICE as deployed by the Trump regime right now is a basically textbook run: create a paramilitary force, recruit from existing criminal militias to select for loyalists and violent personalities, normalise them as keepers of order, push out or integrate any other enforcement structures so that the paramilitary becomes dominant. Basically the only difference is that Trump didn’t have to create ICE, it was already there just waiting to be pushed through the pipeline.

          Does this event fundamentally change how you and I perceive America? No, if you were paying attention you knew the rot inside, and you’ve been shouting that Trump is a fascist since the very beginning. It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.

          • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            3 days ago

            It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.

            oh, i’m not a pitchfork purist. anyone is welcome to grab one at any time.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Yeah, just learned a black person was killed in the USA, and the only reason this was getting some attention was because Renee Good was also killed.

      With the benefit of a sea of distance between me and the USA this is just really fucked up. Two different Americas.

  • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    5 days ago

    OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 days ago

      I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.

      • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        4 days ago

        I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago. He was antisocial to other people but loved me.

        Despite his discomfort, he still came and curled up on my chest in bed for a while last night. I appreciated that.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          4 days ago

          thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.

        • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          4 days ago

          my condolences; we’ve gone through similar with our previous cats, all rescuees, and even when you know it’s the right decision, the pain is still there.

    • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      5 days ago

      Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

    • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      5 days ago

      also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus