to be precise, discord servers perfectly recreate the experience of being surrounded by people who aren't your friends but you're lonely enough that you're desperate for their attention and then saying something that you really hope is funny and/or entertaining because it was to you but instead all you get is silence and a few weird looks but it's not high school anymore it's the rest of your life forever
i like that the maned wolf and the bush dog are each other's closest living relatives. they're like cartoon henchmen
op disabled reblogs but I think the point still stands
reminder that the books themselves also suck ass actually. there's an entire plotline endorsing slavery. the one character who advocates to end slavery is bullied and made fun of. the one slave who doesnt like being enslaved is bullied and treated as an outcast. the bankers are the picture of racist stereotypes of jewish people. the one asian character is named fckn Cho Chang. the worldbuilding SUCKS. fuck harry potter and fuck rowling. stop giving her your money.
Don't fucking go see this shit
To summarize some of the recent findings: the US Coast Guard is terrorizing civilians in the Eastern Pacific by monitoring their targets with Shield AI surveillance drones, attacking them with FPV drones, and then picking up and torturing shipwrecked survivors with the assistance of the CIA, who are operating out of an infamous airbase that was the central hub for arming the contras and trafficking cocaine back to the US. When an Ecuadorian prosecutor tried to investigate these drone attacks on civilians, she was gunned down in broad daylight.
The fishermen targeted for summary execution by the CIA had been boarded, searched, and cleared by the Ecuadorian coast guard earlier in the day. But the Americans' garbage AI drone technology decided for some unknown reason that they were drug traffickers who had to die.
Shield AI, the company who made the drone used in this attack, has been advertising to Capitol Hill and Pentagon officials in the DCA airport recently
these are also used by the iof
they’re manufactured in frisco texas
ALTI know it’s emotionally unsatisfying, but such apparent contradictions need to be treated less as hypocrisies, flaws, or “kinks” in the system. We shouldn’t even treat them as “double standards” in the abstract, but rather see them for what they are: the very mechanisms through which a system actively reproduces legitimacy and decides who is heard, who is civilised, and who is a problem to be solved or ostracised.
Instagram is gonna fucking kill me one day
he was first guy to hang out with normal people. No one had done it before
Women in Ukraine have increasingly come to occupy a central position in resisting coercive mobilisation, what is colloquially referred to in Ukraine as "busification", from бус ("van"), a term derived from the vans into which military-age men are forcibly bundled in public spaces.
Because the overwhelming majority of women are not subject to compulsory military service, they are also disproportionately the people who actually witness what is happening. They do not live under quite the same omnipresent threat of being stopped, hauled away, or forcibly bundled into a vehicle at random while simply going about their daily lives. That relative freedom of movement has, in practice, produced a peculiar gendering of public space, with streets, squares, public transport, shops, and all the other spaces of civilian life becoming overwhelmingly female domains (aside from the occasional male pensioner on his way to yet another medical appointment or the relatively carefree male student who has not yet reached mobilisation age). As a result, women are often among the first people to witness these incidents and, importantly, among those actually in a position to confront them (see, for example, this video).
A woman on her knees, pleading with draft officers not to mobilise her husband and send him to war. Kamianske, Dnipropetrovsk oblast (Havryshko, 2026).
This is discussed in considerably more detail in an article by Ukrainian scholar Marta Havryshko. The topic itself remains conspicuously underexamined in Western discourse (see, below, the link to the recent case of a Swedish journalist in Kyiv who *accidentally* captured an act of forced mobilisation unfolding in the background of his own footage, filmed with such understated casualness, the expensive shirt, the whole thing, that it becomes a somewhat perfect allegory, you know). And when the issue does surface, it gets subjected to censorship, as happened recently when one of the European universities cancelled a scholarly conference panel dealing with coercive mobilisation.
Surely this is because the reality of coercive mobilisation sits in such stark contradiction to the carefully cultivated post-2022 narrative of Ukrainian resilience and the supposedly inexhaustible willingness of people in Ukraine to endure Russia’s increasingly destructive, for people in Ukraine, invasion "for as long as it takes".
ALTUkraine under Western eyes: as a stand-in and projection screen for our own inherent supremacy and our pathetic need for affirmation. It doesn’t matter that, until about five minutes before February 24, 2022, most of the West was far from certain that Ukraine was like us, let alone part of us.
Ukraine is our magic mirror: an ageing queen, our hearts eaten by doubt and our features held together with fillers, we ask it to affirm that we’re still the most beautiful of all. In this version of the tale, the mirror reflects only what we want to see and pays the highest price for its service (Rochowanski, 2026).
