Yeah, It Pains Me So Much. I Have So Much Other Things To Say, But I'm Arguing Online With Bigoted Idiots.

Shana tova everyone i hope we all have a very sweet new year as opposed to whatever the fuck last year was.

😁🫡🤭

Bra Cam wearable interactive art installation (sousveillance art) that reverses the ‘male gaze’ of surveillance by resituating a pair of surveillance cameras as two wearable wireless webcams. | 2001

Two days ago I found this beautiful video of Ibrahim Ag Alhabib and Bombino playing together. I WANNA GO TO THE FUNCTION LIKE THIS

Thinking more about Mech dysphoria today.

Stepping out of your cockpit and stumbling because you don't have the right number of legs.

Blinking your eyes out of sync because you don't have the right number anymore, don't have access to on board cameras the way you're supposed to.

Struggling to grab and pick things up because you have the wrong number of fingers.

Failing to recognize your face in the mirror without layers of armor plating over it.

Feeling like a brain pulled from its body and forced to function independently.

Also check your shit with multiple sources.

OMG, COULD EVERYONE PLEASE STOP IMMEDIATELY BELIEVING AND REPEATING DISINFORMATION?!

Sorry, I just. Was just on Twitter, and I snapped.

I literally haven't seen one true statement about Israel on social media in MONTHS.

It's gotten to the point that I'm seriously considering starting a sideblog fact-checking all of it.

PLEASE STOP BEING GARFIELD I AM BEGGING ALL OF YOU

BE NERMAL FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

I've written at least one really long post about fact-checking things before. I have another saved as a draft somewhere.

But all you really have to do at this point is GO LOOK AT AN ACTUAL NEWS SOURCE.

What do I mean by an Actual News Source?

An actual news source will tell you where it's getting its information.

Basically: Wikipedia rules apply at all times. Citation. Fucking. Needed.

Except with news articles, I don't mean a detailed footnote.

I mean, if they say, "Rosco Flubberish reported seeing a pig fly across Whatever Place. 'It was a flying pig,' he said," they're fine.

If they say, "Sources close to the President reported that the Department of Farmland Creatures launched a pig into the air this afternoon," they're fine.

If they say, "There have also been reports that pigs flew," they are purely making shit up.

Just check CNN or something. CNN checks their shit, and they're very quick on the draw.

NBC has been very reliable too, in my experience. So have ABC, Newsweek, the Jerusalem Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, the AP, PBS, the Washington Post, and Reuters.

You can break through most paywalls by putting archive.is or 12ft.io before the https:// of the URL. Or just go to either of those sites and paste the URL in the box.

Nobody is perfect. I've seen some articles from all of the above that were accurate, but left things out that I personally thought were important.

Journalists are humans, humans fuck up.

(Also, NONE OF THIS APPLIES TO OPINION PIECES ON ANY TOPIC. Opinion pieces are exactly that: opinions. They don't seem to be fact-checked anywhere, as far as I can tell. They range from super-accurate and informative to complete nonsense.)

(Surprisingly unreliable sources in my experience: Democracy Now, Jacobin, Workers World Party. The latter two act like news sites but are basically running nothing but opinion pieces; Democracy Now can do important deep dives, but I've also seen news coverage from it that was wildly misinformed in that same way.

On the flip side, Slate and the Atlantic are largely opinion -- the Atlantic more than Slate, maybe -- but they often have really well-researched analysis of political situations. Ditto Teen Vogue, and sometimes Vox.)

You don't have to read CNN or the NYT or whateverfor fun. You don't have to make it one of your news sources.

Just. Do a quick check on Google News before you assume anything is true, and then run it through a bullshit filter as described above.

You are being actively lied to, all the time. So am I. We all are.

And people will believe and repeat literally anything that sounds about right.

That's just human nature.

That is WHY none of us are immune to propaganda.

if you want my personal shortlist of Bad Sources, as in Sources That Consistently Publish Absolute Falsehoods:

Any and all state-owned or state-controlled media. For example:

Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government, and so are a bunch of other news sites.

Mehr News, the Tehran Times, Al-Quds TV, and Al-Alam are owned by the dictatorship of Iran.

Oops. Looks like every form of broadcast Iranian news media is owned by the dictatorship of Iran, which has a monopoly.

Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, Palestinian News and Info Agency, and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida are owned by the government of Palestine (the Palestinian Authority)

Al-Aqsa TV and Felesteen are owned by Hamas.

TASS / Russia News Agency, Russia Today, and a fuckton of others are owned by the Russian government.

State Media Monitor seems to do a pretty great job of tracking and listing these things. Check out your own country there!

I specifically listed those ones because some of them (especially Al Jazeera, Mehr News, and TASS) are sites I've seen come up frequently on Tumblr, or in my attempts to fact-check what people are saying here and on Twitter. The rest are just more examples from the same governments.

Al Jazeera deserves special notice because it's become a very popular leftist news source. Believe me, I used to read it all the time too.

It can be reliable and accurate sometimes. But:

It consistently tweets things that are unsourced, never appear anywhere else, and that would be big news you'd expect it to follow up on if they were true. It seems to be following a strategy of "tweet every rumor you hear in case it's true, so you can get the scoop."

It also does this with its liveblogs of the war. And ALL its coverage of the war at this point is liveblogs. So things that are verifiably true will run right next to things that are complete hearsay, but are too long to just tweet.

This is especially dangerous because as far as I can tell, Al Jazeera doesn't delete anything that turns out to be false.

I've also seen regular news articles in Al Jazeera, on multiple topics, that veer from Absolutely True Statements to Wildly Exaggerated Numbers and Speculation. Stuff you wouldn't expect a source on, like statistics or descriptions. And there's no way to tell the difference unless you already know a topic really well, or are fact-checking them while you read.

One especially terrible example, from Gazan activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib:

Al Jazeera has never posted or published a correction.

Alkhatib has also blamed it for destabilizing the region, although he's exaggerating about it being Hamas's official propaganda outlet:

TL;DR: If you see a Tumblr post making any kind of factual news statement without a link, at this point you need to assume it is absolutely not true. And either scroll on past, or go check Google News.

If there IS a link, you need to click through to see what it's from and what it actually says.

(Honestly, you need to do that with Wikipedia too. I've repeatedly clicked through on citations that absolutely did not say what the article implied they did.)

And pro tip: on mobile, you can just smack a button to sort Google's news results by most recent, and it helps A LOT. There's gotta be a way to do the same on desktop, but if there is, it's not immediately visible, which sucks.

Glory

“We are inclined to think of peace-time as a condition in which nothing particular happens; in which we can put our feet on the mantelpiece and retire into our private lives, leaving the status quo to maintain itself. There is no surer preparation for war. The maintenance of peace requires a perpetual vigilance, because as life goes on and conditions change the balance needs ever fresh movement to keep it stable. In other words, peace is an active and not a passive condition.”

— Dorothy L. Sayers, in Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (1940), applying entropy to peace.

Signal boost!

Recently my beloved cat has been diagnosed with tumours on her milk glands. She is scheduled for surgery on October 18th. The surgery co//st is quite a lot for me so any tips, com//missions or shares are greatly appreciated! The tumours are very small as they were caught early so her chances for recovery have been estimated as very high and she should be alright after the procedure. She has been with me since my childhood and she’s extremely dear to me. Even with her age (14) other than hyperthyroidism and an eye condition, she has been in perfect health. Both those conditions have been in check since they were diagnosed a few months ago and she’s a very happy and lively cat.

The cost has been estimated as about $520 + bloodwork that will be done on Monday and after surgery care. $1 = ~4 PLN so even small tips can make a world of a difference.

Thank you for any help!🐈‍⬛💔💔💔

The f/undraiser in Polish (you can translate that page into English at the bottom):

pomagam.pl/bpcghr

Pomagam.pl

Mastektomia kotki Fisi | Pomagam.pl

Fisia jest kochaną czternastoletnią kotką, o czarnym futerku. Całe swoje życie towarzyszy swojemu właścicielowi od dzieciństwa.  Mimo swojeg

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Very adorable panel from The Rabbi’s Cat