[Time passes.]
Ok ok how many of us here had “flesh-eating bacteria” on our 2023 bingo cards? How many? C’mon, 'fess up!
8 Likes
I’m still wondering how many natural disasters will happen in Florida before folks start calling it biblical. 
If only we could convince the residents there that sacrificing their leader is the only way to make it stop. I’ll bet Disney makes a great model volcano! 
12 Likes
in florida-da, “flesh eating bacteria” is the free space in the middle of the card.
9 Likes
4 Likes
“Is everyone hanging out without me?”
The extrovert’s most nightmarish question began nagging at me several weeks ago when I started seeing references to Bluesky—the invite-only social-media platform with just under 100,000 users as of late May—pop up with regularity on Twitter. I’d just marked my 16th anniversary on the bird site, and it was becoming buggier and more unwelcoming by the day. Bluesky sounded like a haven, a place where, reportedly, folks were goofing around and sharing animal pictures and consensual smut and meeting fun new friends without being creeped on and harassed by Twitter’s increasingly empowered contingent of right-wingers and $8 pay-for-play Blue Thirsties. Indeed, it sounded like the answer to the quandary journalists, content creators, lefty tech-types, pundits, and the Very Online have been struggling with ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter last fall: Where are we supposed to post now?
When a friend passed along an invitation in mid-May, I gobbled it up and commenced with the skeeting, mostly finding the platform as-described: chill, silly, friendly, and a little lefty-righteous but in a goofy, self-aware way. I didn’t get all the jokes, and I still haven’t figured out what makes a good skeet, but there was also an undercurrent of the depressingly familiar in this otherwise warm new space: users of color and trans users hosting conversations about how to nip Bluesky’s nascent troll problem in the bud. Of the few hundred folks I follow on Bluesky, dozens have tried to make recommendations about moderation policies and curbing harassment to the platform’s small team, to little avail. Bluesky’s response so far has been to point folks to a boilerplate statement and the “block” function, implying that they are simply too busy and understaffed to kickstart meaningful moderation efforts just yet.
This was an uncanny replay of a similar dust-up in late April following the launch of Substack Notes, a platform I had enjoyed as a means of engaging with my mysterious but enthusiastic newsletter readers. Then, the platform’s top brass bungled repeated queries about how they planned to handle harassment and the proliferation of bigoted content and comments, effectively saying they believe the format of the Notes platform will solve the problem on its own. (So far, it … uh, hasn’t.)
The subtext—and sometimes the text—of these mealy-mouthed responses to calls for meaningful recourse against harassers and creeps is: We’ve got to give trollies the benefit of the doubt lest we let a few free-speech-averse snowflakes run away with the whole operation based on nothing more than the facts of their lived experiences. Again and again, these scions of new social media conflate users’ requests for spaces in which they are not regularly exposed to and targeted with hatred for some sort of hostage-taking demand for an ideologically pure leftist utopia wherein insufficiently radical posters will be drawn and quartered in the digital town square.
It brings to mind Anderson Cooper’s dippy justification of that disastrous CNN “town hall” event with Donald Trump in mid-May, wherein the anchor accused people tired of seeing a seditious serial sexual predator given a(nother) mainstream prime-time platform as “staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with.” So too, it carries more than a whiff of the New York Times ’ odious response to their own contributors’ call for fair, evidence-based treatment of transgender issues in the paper, whose coverage has been cited by right-wing groups and politicians in their attacks on trans people and children.
It’s hard to imagine breaking this news to Anderson Cooper or to the New York Times , but perhaps this concept would surprise them: When a man on the internet details how he’d like to see me sexually assaulted, I’m not confused about where he’s coming from—I understand his worldview perfectly well, perhaps even better than he does. I spend every day of my life navigating my safety in and around the fetid cesspool of patriarchy. Neither should trans people be subjected to debates about their own humanity, or BIPOC folks be forced to engage with racism and racist dog-whistles for the sake of their own edification or anyone else’s. Marginalized people simply do not lack for knowledge about the motivations of their abusers, harassers, and oppressors.
If we choose to engage in a public forum with people who mean to harm us, we ought to be able to do so on our own terms. If we watch or read mainstream news, we should be able to do so with the expectation that bigotry will not be given preferred coverage. That’s it. That’s the whole ask. The fact that this request is repeatedly denied and devalued by people who are heavily insulated from bigoted attacks and harassment is more than both-sidesism. It is the denial and devaluation of the lived experiences of people who have been closest to harm, to the express benefit of an actual ideological minority, who do seek an echo-chamber universe in which queer and trans folks and people of color and women and sexual-assault survivors are not merely silenced, but erased entirely.
9 Likes
That should be a sticky somewhere on this site.
9 Likes
4 Likes
1 Like
2 Likes
7 Likes
Establishment clause? Canceled!
6 Likes
Or at least, the churches who are not playing by the IRS rules that us boring regular plebes have to obey?
8 Likes
If you do the math, 49.57°C is 121.1°F.
In Pakistan.
Where summer solstice and the arguable beginning of “Summer” has not even happened yet.
How heat kills when combined with humidity:
3 Likes
Huge chunks of the more-tropical world will be experiencing utterly uninhabitable conditions without climate control in the very near term (like this year-next year.) Climate refugees may not be as much of a problem because so many will just die. 
5 Likes
5 Likes
(pls note: I don’t love this, don’t endorse all of this, don’t welcome the bad-news-ness of this even though my guess is everything mentioned here is factual, but fwiw:)
From a Canadian firefighter who knows what’s going on: #canada #wildfire #smoke (Worth the read)
“I know you may know, but people need to know and understand that most Canadian wildfire management agencies have fire “zonation” policies similar to Alaska.
This means in large areas of their jurisdictions, especially in the northern part of the country, wildfires are left to run there natural course w little or no direct action or suppression. We’ll protect values at risk, ie. infrastructure, communities, critical habitat or culturally significant features on the landscape, we’ll map them and maybe try to burn them to natural barrier, fight one flank and let the rest roll (limited action) but we are not putting them out.
On many of the fires we don’t even try. A number of these fires are huge boreal gobblers (I am currently assigned to a 250,000 ha fire, well over 600,000 acres and you could fit the org. chart on one side of a beer can).
The only thing that is going to put out this fire out and many across the country is winter, 5 months from now. It’s going to be a long, smoky summer for everyone. You have a wide reach, it would be great if you can help people understand these dynamics in the Canadian wildfire scene when they’re b-------g about the smoke.
Cheers and thanks.”
Pretty decent picture of what’s going on. Thanks for the insight.
In the industry we call this letting a fire “Do its thing”. It’s especially common in these vast boreal forests. Siberia does the same thing. Identify hazards and values at risk, mitigate, let it go.
Cheers.
10 Likes
If you think about it, how many firefighters’ lives would be sacrificed if they tried to put it all out, every time?
Simply not possible.
11 Likes
Understood. Agree.
But.
“If only we could have seen this coming.”
They could.
They did.
They did: nothing.
The answers are certainly available. Implementation is… slow? lacking? nonexistent?
9 Likes
