Nik Simurdak 🏳️‍⚧️

Choosing to believe this is actually an ancient packer

"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."

- Ursula K. Le Guin
November 19, 2014

Had a pleasant urge to write something adjacent to an essay or opinion piece earlier. I think I might want to make a habbit of it just to give myself a break from academic writing.

At one point he said he overheard a security guard talking about bets made among the staff over which detainee would be next to die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into a pool, with the total pot riding on the outcome. The talk was particularly jarring, he said, because he had contemplated suicide himself.

Indifference to suffering is a hallmark of genocide.

Say it with me: charging disabled students to park on campus is forcing us to pay more to use the same facilities as able-bodied students. It's discrimination.

WE HAVE A WEBSITE!!

...it isn't even close to done BUT I GOT REALLY FAR!

Today's the day I [re]tackle html and css to build my own website. Last time I did this was like... 18 years ago?

Made a new little maker's mark for myself (in letterboxing we'd call this a siggy, or signature stamp) and decided to jazz it up with some fun colorways

Extremely annoying to try and secure your own usernames across platforms and finding one person camping it in only 2 places. Like you're not even using it! That's my me!

Vindication is a nice feeling sometimes

So far have only been able to find one source that even provides numbers that could be used for a claim like this ("The Adult Hip vol 1" 1998) and they are VERY clear that their numbers should not be used this way!

Hollow Opposition On Iran, top Democrats only have procedural concerns

I wrote about how Democratic leadership has abandoned the moral high ground on Iran, and how it has left them toothless when opposing Trump.

The way this kind of person has somehow always anecdotally met more detransitioners than studies have ever recorded. Gender confirmation proceedures continue to have the lowest rates of regret, and most documented cases are attributed to external social pressures. "A number" WHERE?? 🧐

sounds like it's time to post a meme made by you (mine is a three-parter)

New rheum said something that pinged my bs detectors ("10 lbs off your body is 80 lbs of your joints") so I went on a hunt last night and you'll NEVER guess what I found! 🫩🫩🫩

Having to type ± so many times that I added the alt code as a macro to a dedicated key on my data entry board

Oh hell yeah, thank you! I agree that it's very funny to call it "pretty" - something something design standards and purpose. Like yes it's pretty that's why it was done but also it's so much more functional than just pretty which is also why it was done?? How goofy

The focus on impacting fertility when we are talking about children feels particularly insidious here.

“You can’t bomb a country into democracy,” says Zack Polanski. The very same words I used myself on BBC’s The Politics Show during the Iraq war. I think we are correct.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

James Baldwin

The idea of a legislative body representing the population having the ability to check the ultimate power of a country’s leader sounds really neat. Someone should write that down.

Picture of Marjane Satrapi alongside a quote from her. The quote reads: The world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don't know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same... - Marjane Satrapi, Iranian-French graphic novelist

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

it's not even a close call. you can drag out some marginal law professor to say otherwise, but this is *textbook* violation of the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force against "the territorial integrity or political independence of any state"

The same war crimes as 20 years ago but without even the effort to fabricate a fake rationale for it now. Blowing up negotiations towards recreating a treaty that he himself pulled us out of 10 years ago. Second time as farce, I guess

prison for everyone involved in this illegal war of aggression

Who arrests the president? Who arrests military leaders? My god when will anyone with any power or authority recognize that this keeps happening because they know there is no physical force that will stop them? When do we put the president in JAIL for all these broken laws???

The State of the Union is, we're going to start a war with Iran because the President doesn't want you to know he raped children.

God we really do live in an economy built on war

GenAI exists at the intersection of anthropomorphizing technology & dehumanizing other people. It's a lot easier to ascribe meaning & intentionality to the machine if you don't believe that other people are people. There's no difference between AI & human writing if EVERYTHING is devoid of soul.

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