squigglebingus.bsky.social

The thing I never see people talk about when they are freaking out about the human-robot boxing match is that there is a point where you can literally see a dude using a large controller device to control the robot

11 Sept

To me, it says a lot that replies and post quotes are disabled for this. You people are absolutely fucking ridiculous. Here's what I know. Multiple people have been gunned down by federal agents in the streets and the sanctity of our elections are currently under attack, and our economy is fucked

11 Sept

And we're in a stupid war, and, and, and the list goes on and fucking on. And I can't help but feel like these things probably wouldn't be happening under harris and it would be a lot easier and safer to protest them under harris. But here you are, pulling this shit like it is at all relevant.

11 Sept

But I think you know that and that's why you disabled the replies and the quotes. Don't want people with functional brains calling your asses out on your dumb shit. Sometimes, I think people on the left are as stupid as the right. Myopic ass bullshit.

1 Sept

Personal shout out to @jamellebouie.net for consistently making rational, intelligent, and well-measured posts and videos about what is going on instead of the deeply unhelpful and irrational "NAZI GERMANY! WE'RE ALL DOOMED!" posts that other influencers have figured out get them all the clicks.

I don't know if anyone will see this. I don't have a particularly large following, nor am I the sort to engage with social media. That's probably apparent enough by the fact that I am engaging with a twitter-like environment with an essay instead of just putting my thoughts down in quick digestible

they deserve and dishonors the sacrifices that people have made to resist. Those books and movies are not real life. Real life is not happening there nor is it happening here, on this platform.

The pillars of hope, change, and progress are being built out there in the real world by the people who aren't spending their days here, posting about how cooked we all are. How do you want to be remembered? Coiled in fear behind your screen? Or Out there, helping to build that better tomorrow?

and then people continued to go out and protest and then a judge told them to go home so they did." Let me be clear at the end of all of this. I understand that people have been killed and people have been hurt and that should absolutely outrage us. Those people should still be

happy and healthy and alive with us today and it is an unforgivable crime that they are not. And I hope that the world is ultimately just and the people that caused this harm receive the punishments they deserve. But treating this regime as all-power and omnipotent gives them more power than

solidarity. It all feels a little mundane when you really lay it out like that, doesn't it? But the reality is, that is what reality is. It often isn't exciting. It isn't filled with hyper-drama and mastermind. Giving in to the fantasy that it is accomplishes very little other than giving

the bad guys power and paralyzing you with fear. Reality isn't "there were troops in the street and with fought them tooth and nail until they retreated." Reality is "they mobilized the national guard who didn't want to be there, then forgot to make sure that the NG had food and beds

the regime doubled down on the lie because they are emotionally incapable of accepting failure. This all ultimately resulted in a majority of people calling them on their lie and communities further rallying, non-violently pushing back and

successfully putting an end to these large en masse shows of force that ICE and the regime were pulling because they realized it was not having the effect on us that they wanted. Their impulsive and malicious desire to make themselves feel strong by creating fear was met with defiance and

Because reality looks more like this: In Minnesota, communities came together and pushed back. They did so, ultimately quite successfully. In the process, some poorly trained and poorly vetted fragile men with no understanding of how to handle high tension and crisis situations reacted in a panic

and in their panic and because they are ultimately cowardly fragile people, ended up killing two people. In an attempt to do damage control, Noem moved to defend those men before having actually even reviewed the footage. And then when it was revealed that the men in question were at fault,

The fantasy is more entertaining that reality, it better appeals to our emotions than reality, and it makes us feel less culpable for letting it get to this point through years of complacency. But it isn't reality.

Reality is less entertaining. Reality is less dramatic and exciting. The bad guys intentionally trying to escalate violence to invoke violence so they can escalate to martial law is way more exciting than the much more likely reality.

The issue though, is that we take that media and that literature and we try to translate art as 1:1 with reality when it is not. And in doing so, we prop up our enemies as monoliths. I see this entirely too often in threads. People lamenting that we've already lost.

People believe that it's gonna be any day now. They see these people as some sort of lockstep masters who have managed to successfully dominate the majority instead of what they are; reactionary buffoons making impulsive decisions based on emotion and vibes who lose support every day.

Forgotten that it is fiction and it is art. And in doing so, we fail to create distinction for ourselves between reality and fantasy. As much as these works of art do reflect life, it is important to understand that they are ultimately meant to also be entertaining. And therein lies the problem.

A dramatic story about a fascistic authoritarian regime that rules with an iron fist would be less drama and more comedy if the villains were bumbling fools so the narrative demands that they be masterful tacticians in order to provide an exciting foil for us to fantasize ourselves going up against.

Blurbs. My level of comfort with social media is largely some light scrolling here and there interspersed with the occasional comment if the passion strikes me to do so. My past has made me prone to anger when faced with things I find objectively wrong so engagement tends to be unhealthy for me.

But in moments of calm, I have thoughts that I want to share and this is one of them. I think that our brains have been polluted by dystopian literature and media. This is not me saying that we should not consume or appreciate such things but that in the process of that consumption, we have

It is very much time to start acknowledging that the right isn't some mastermind movement of cunning manipulators. We, on the left, need to recognize that we ceded ground with our puritanical ideologies. Our collective decision to unilaterally abandon spaces and platforms made it so very easy

The reality is, the plans of the far right start and end with "maybe they'll just all be cool with it" and "maybe if we keep doubling down, they'll just give up." And we make these plans easier for them when we choose our own myopathy over empathy.

We mistake ourselves as empathetic because we care about certain things that they do not but I often still see us delight in their agony as much as they delight in ours. Empathy is the earnest attempt to understand someone else's world, even if you ultimately don't agree with it.

for bad actors to simply occupy those spaces and fill them with noise. This is made evident by the fact that MediasTouch has been able to rise meteorically in some of these otherwise abandoned spaces by just... putting forth the effort to occupy those spaces.

This may seem a wild idea but in order to meet people where they live you have to... y'know,... go to the places where they live and engage with them with some amount of empathy and understanding and in a way that is digestable and approachable for the most average human.

7 Mar

Can we like... I dunno, maybe cool it with the "Armageddon" nonsense. This isn't even the first time in living memory that people thought something was the start of the end times. I promise, it isn't.

16 Feb

It continues to be apparent to me that, for all the panic and outrageous claims of martial law and canceled elections, the entirety of the p25 plan hinged on "maybe they'll just be cool with it"

28 Jan

I saw a video of someone criticizing people for going out to eat or finding some small moments of joy in all of this crisis and I have thoughts. I think that it is a well-intended solipsism to expect people to just stop peopling every time that there is some tragedy or challenge in the world.

28 Jan

To expect such is... madness. Truly, there is always something happening and unfortunately, it is unreasonable to expect a single person to care about every single one and take action against every single one. People still have rent and families to feed and jobs to attend in service of the priors.

28 Jan

All of this comes at the cost of stamina, a finite resource. Frivolity and joy are a need just as much as anything else. They recharge us and fend off burn out. You cannot care all the time. You cannot care about everything. And it is unkind to demand that everyone do so. Allow people to rest.

Incidentally and for what it's worth, I think there is a very sound and rational argument to be made for why Minneapolis is actually happening, once you realize that Minneapolis was where George Floyd was killed

People are getting hurt and we need to be outraged and motivated to action by that. But I think we need to stop equating their actions to some sort of well-thought out plot and recognize it all for the ham-handed hail maries that they are, done largely in service to the enrichment and retribution.

One thing that has become increasingly obvious to me over the last year is that a large portion of the heritage foundation's actual plan for implimenting p25 was "maybe they'll just all be cool with it"

And recognizing that Trump is nothing if not a petty vindictive child. It paints a picture that is much less "prototype for militarized takeover" and more a malignant narcissistic solipsist punishing a city for having the audacity to be ground zero for a movement that shamed him in his first term

This becomes more blatantly obvious when you also realize that all the cities he has targeted up until now are very specifically the locations of the blm protests that lasted the longest and got the most coverage

Over the past year, I've largely stepped away from actively engaging with social media and mostly have become a passive observer. My engagement with social media has largely been tantamount to a quick scroll here and there to see what people are saying and where they are saying it.

And wherein rational, well-measured responses have been fully replaced with a sort of rage-filled "gotcha" response at every available opportunity. I say this as someone who is not immune to this and have found myself getting caught up in that energy when I do choose to be an active engager

It is a problem and it is one of the poisons at the heart of the world, I think, where discourse has fully become a sort of performative popularity contest rather than a rational conversation between thinking beings

And I think what I have largely learned is that when this is all over, and I truly do believe even in my darkest moments that it will all be over sooner rather than later, is that what we will ultimately need to contend with is the solipsism and confirmation bias that social media has created

Wherein "only I can be right and the only posts that matter are the ones that confirm the opinion that I have already reached and if you don't agree with me, you're not just wrong but you're stupid and beneath me" is the normalized response to anything that comes across my feed.

These guys are consummate losers. They've been consummate losers their entire lives. I find it so weird how compulsively people want to act like they are constantly winning and the protests aren't working, as if they haven't repeatedly been sent home with tails tucked

LA was an abject failure for them. Chicago was an abject failure for them. The NG deployments have been abject failures for them. The tariff posturing has been an abject failure for them. The Greenland posturing is an abject failure for them.