ALTthe 2026 satanic panic is actually people who think that there are secretly powerful transgender ideologues corrupting their child, who they are convinced can be fixed via straight sex or conversion therapy, and that the ideologues will be stopped by sending bomb threats to elementary school. there is a scary fascist world outside of pro vs anti discourse :/ also johnny depp beat his wife
feminist killjoy hours again, what the actual fuck is “weird girl literature” and how often do we acquiesce to the latest degrading gendered advertising campaigns
Women did not fucking pioneer horror, thriller, and science fiction as we know it for publishing to infantilize it into a high school phase
is Stephen king “weird boy literature”? Or does he get to be an adult horror novelist?
seeing how much of mainstream cultural life is organized around the standardized myth of The Genders after living outside of it for a long ass time now is uncanny, depressing, and fills me with utter dread at what our species has done to itself and will do to itself.
I've always found it interesting how cis people don't realize how many gender affirmations they rely on day by day
as a girl who went to all boys school the idea that cia people don't think about gender is laughable. they go to great lengths to create and maintain their own gender identities and their kids' and the system of gender hierarchy, including child abuse. they wilt or bristle at any threat to the simplicity of their gender hegemony. they construct elaborate rituals to indoctrinate themselves into the cult of gender. nobody understands gender like trans people because not because we think about it all the time but because we stopped letting it rule our lives and we can see the world for how it really is.
If you pay your credit card on time and never have to deal with interest or late fees, your credit card company will start offering you cards with much higher limits, sometimes as much as 10x your current limit. You gotta remember that even if that's fine for a lot of people, those offers are specifically designed to be traps, not rewards. Credit card companies do not like "deadbeats", people who pay off their card in full and on time, because they make the vast majority of their money off of interest and fees. They want to increase your limit so that you get careless and spend more than you can actually afford.
It is extremely easy to fall into credit card debt, especially if you get comfortable. Getting a higher limit can help improve your credit score but going into debt because of that limit will tank it anyway, so just be careful.
Hello to everyone who saw this post and decided that to pay their credit card bill. Happy Pay Your Credit Card Bill Day.
ALTIf you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/20/epistemic-void/#expert-agencies
AI is alarming for many reasons: it's a dangerous financial bubble, an environmental catastrophe, and a tool for eroding wages and labor power. But in addition to all that, AI is an epistemic disaster.
We've had photoshopped images, voice impersonators and visual effects for years, of course, but with deepfakes, we've democratized access to reality-bending images, sounds and videos that appear real but are not. It's harder than ever to know what's true. Politicians and celebrities and activists show up in our feeds, declaring their fealty to this cause or product, or their fury at some turn in the world's events. Battlefields mound high with bodies and influencers marvel at impossible, sumptuous meals. It all seems plausible, and some of it is real, but not all of it, and because we know some of it is fake, we can't be sure if any of it isn't.
It's a very putinesque way of living. Vladislav Surkov was Vladimir Putin's media strategist, and he had a deadly effective tactic: he announced that he was covertly funding some of the groups that publicly opposed Putin, but did not disclose which of those opposition groups were fake. That meant that any of the groups could be fake, which meant that any discussion of the opposition was liable to devolve into an argument about its authenticity. Anything could be a lie, so nothing was necessarily true. Putin's method isn't to get you to believe a lie – it's to keep you from believing that anything is true.
That's life under AI – a world of uncertainty, an epistemological void full of plausible phantasms, some of which are actually real. A world where it's impossible to know what's true, and where anything might be fake.
But here's the thing: AI's assault on our ability to know isn't a new battle – rather, it's the latest barrage in a war that's been waged for years, as corporations grew larger and more powerful, capturing their regulators, who let them lie to us and abuse us with impunity.
This complicated, technical world – the world that produced AI – is full of complicated, technical questions, and none of us can answer these questions for ourselves. You're not stupid, but even a generational genius could not acquire the expertise to answer the long list of life-or-death questions we face every day.
Are the food hygiene standards followed by your grocer or lunchtime spot adequate, or will your dinner make you shit yourself to death? Are the building codes that specify the alloys in the steel joists that hold up the roof over your head sufficient, or are you about to be crushed to death? Is the software in your anti-lock brakes any good, or will you die in a fireball on the way to work?
From food additives to pedagogy, psychotherapeutic techniques to retirement savings, it would take a hundred lifetimes for you to acquire the 200 PhDs needed to answer these questions for yourself.
Thankfully, we don't have to answer those questions for ourselves. Instead, we defer to expert agencies: governmental regulators that assess truth claims by soliciting input from all comers, publicly deliberating about the evidence they've gathered, and then making a rule in public. These regulators are meant to be experts, nonpartisan and neutral, operating with the highest degree of probity, recusing themselves in the event of even a whiff of conflict.
And once again, the hypocrites and idiots who were okay with the terrifying state of things for entire decades are now mad because the current terrifying state of things now has some eeevul tech bro sorcery in the mix.
But when you start looking at it, it becomes obvious that the new competition in bullshitting people for attention and spare change just outperforms them by a long shot, despite all the shortcomings in other fields, and they can't stand that.
I'm gonna say it, I do think that even the laziest person imaginable should have a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and access to healthcare
a lot of people are reblogging this saying that most "lazy" people are actually just disabled or that the concept of laziness itself is a product of our society's obsession with productivity. this is all true, but it is not my point.
even if someone WAS just lazy and simply didn't want to do anything but lie on the couch and watch tv, they should still have these things. it's irrelevant whether some people aren't actually lazy because everyone, including hypothetical lazy people, should have their basic needs met.
if we have the resources to do it, there is no defense of letting people die because they don't want to work, and much less because they can't.
I don't want lazy people to have basic necessities because they "actually" deserve them because they ARE working or CAN'T work. I want lazy people to have basic necessities because they are people, and we shouldn't leave them to die when we have the resources not to.
eighthdoctor
luimnigh
Wake Up Dead Man was really like, “this is our narrator, Judas Duplicity. You can trust him.”
wait a minute wait a minute
OKAY OKAY OKAY !!!!!!!
