Inbread cats (Cats provided by lightrup, sk33t3r)
"The Earth is listening" painting by Mikhail Pyaskovsky, USSR, 1988.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/virginia-eubanks-interview-automating-inequality-poverty
I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.
Some of my favourites include:
Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)
Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?
Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?
Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!
Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?
The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.
So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:
Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"
Here is a masterlist of every single genocidal statement made by the State of Israel, all appropriately quoted and sourced.
These statements cannot be retracted.
Quote from the Israeli State Minister of Agriculture and Development.
And yet, Zionists will tell you that “This is not a genocide, Hamas are using Palestinians as human shields!”
Drawing in mspaint? Cool, impressive, But whenever I see that, I think about the person who makes their art in power point Every time I see them it boggles me
(their account)
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Two decades of conspiracy theorizing about the extent to which 9/11 was an "inside job" have revealed no all-encompassing sinister secrets or grand plots except the least exciting smoking gun of all: that terrorism and mass death are a feature, not a bug. The creation, financing, support, control, and loss of control of terrorist groups has been one of the key weapons in the arsenal of american imperialism since the 1970s. The "inside job" is that the cycle of murder is intentional even if the individual events may not be.
The fact that the US intelligence apparatus runs a constant treadmill of funding governments and organizations to topple their enemies that then in turn need to be fought by more US-funded client states and terror groups is not a failure of foreign policy, or a shadowy conspiracy by some deep state, it's simply how foreign policy works in modern empire. It works for them! Look to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Panama, the post-Soviet states. Every butchering leader or violent radical cadre that turns from a help to a hindrance to the USA becomes yet another opportunity for the exercise of force and the continued operation of the military-industrial-intelligence complex.
You don't need thermite or holographic planes or insurance fraud or budgetary coverups to explain the simple fact that if the USA is willing to accept millions of dead in the imperial periphery as the basic digestive process in the ourobouros that is imperial power-dealing, then a couple thousand dead in the imperial core is at worst a regrettable hiccup, and at best an unexpected twist, a chance to take another bite, a new opportunity to launch yet more destructive adventures abroad, which will in turn cause their own crises and opportunities, on and on circularly forever until the whole thing collapses or is brought down by force.
"immortality sucks because all your friends die" all your friends die anyway. those we do not mourn are those who mourn us.
"immortality sucks because you forget who you are" we always forget who we are. do you remember who you were at four years of age? who you were at fourteen? "who i am" is a shadow cast on the wall.
"immortality sucks because" skill issue. skill issue. skill issue. give me your liver
It’s a little bit silly, but I have this little Hippocratic oath for data designers in the book. There are two basic questions I encourage them to ask themselves. One is, does it increase self-determination of poor people? And two, if it was aimed at anyone but poor and working people, would you be able to do it? And if you answer “no” to either of those, don’t do it. You’re on the wrong side of history.
The High-Tech Poorhouse