When The Signifiance Be Nomading So Hard You're Genuinely Tweaking

Reminder to people upon gaining power it took Hitler only 57 days to dismantle German democracy and declare himself dictator and start purging the "undesirables"

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

Listing my TBR! Italicised books I own. Last updated - 26 July 2023. Current total - 88.

Czytaj dalej

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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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.

there is no going back, run with the railroad

journal entry from the road, 1AM 13.08.2023, Istria, Croatia.

Inspired by Keren Cytter’s „White Diaries” I’m launching an irregular series of journal entries from the road (I am on the road pretty much the whole time, since last June). May these entries contribute to my monography or at least to my graduation movie.

I’m in amok. For the most of the day I’ve been in amok. I’ve been calling my friends frantically, talking with them about my next, September journey. Planning things isn’t as exciting as it used to be. Today I’ve committed a faux pas. I gave in to my inner greedy goblin. My friend Joffroy told me that he’s got a spot for a vintage near Lyon. I, blinded by vision of being 1800 euros richer enthusiastically signed up, even tho I’ve dropped out of it almost a month ago. Five minutes before that I’ve been bitching to my parents that I feel like I’m being fucked over by my friends, cause I try to make everyone feel good and combine their busy calendars with my urge to go to Latvia to see art and drop acid and whatever else do nomadic art students do when they don’t attend universities. As soon as I announced my decision to leave for a vintage in France, to my Latvian crew they got angry, rightfully. I lacked empathy for my koibito, since we wouldn’t see each other for over 4 months and I didn’t even tell them in a separate call or message bout that. They told me they felt very sad. They were right, it was too sudden, but I was in amok, just today W420’s aunt told us she wouldn’t be hosting us in Berlin, which derailed our summer plans for 7th or 8th time. I took the occasion as it happened, but than I reflected on it realized I could’ve done it more smoothly. I apologized, we sent each others some music we found, it’s better now. Mediatized communication sucks ass. Tomorrow I’m gonna text my koibito I got kicked out anyway since I can’t work for the whole duration of the vintage (that’s 100% true). We’re gonna go to Riga. My parents told Riga is cheap and cool. I don’t have a joint like Cytter does in her diaries, but maybe for the better? It would hurt my lungs and I would get stoned too much, I have weak tolerance. I’m currently living in something that resembles a very luxurious refugee camp, with almost no POC, only rich, white german kids. Imagine 2000 people in tents and vans, crowded, laying almost on another with pitches among those little 5 meter pines. All the way from the mountain to the sea. My dog is getting mad over people walking near the tent. Swimming has cleared my mind. Deep blue of sea depths does its job. I need to sit down and write down some of my research notes for my new movie. I’m gonna build a dirty video mixer. Hopefully with my koibito, we’re gonna play something together. Soon I’m gonna write an analysis about “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler and “Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson with their implications for further research and my upcoming movie. The landscape is very cowboy here. It’s dry, cut in half with a big road. It’s very sharp and high resolution, like a photo taken on a quality color film. With colors so bright it deceives you at first, that it wasn’t taken on a Texaco station in 1985. This is a landscape Rango wanted to die in.

"Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow" ~ Joanna Newsom

why isn’t there radical solarpunk Jewish futurism. Where’s the art of a future Levant where Jews, Palestinians and Samaritans live side by side in ecological-technological harmony. Where’s the art of shuls on mars. Where’s the art of post-apocalyptic and thriving shtetlakh. WHERE IS IT