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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • Jewish Federation Los Angeles meanwhile blamed the university’s chancellor for allowing “an environment to be created over many months that has made students feel unsafe”.

    The group demanded that the encampment be cleared and that UCLA meet leaders of the Jewish community.

    Fucking hell, this is such a callous response. In any other situation, the group representing the side that just had masked vigilantes attack peaceful demonstrators would make amends. “These people don’t represent our movement. We disavow them and what they stand for.” And so on.

    I see they’re taking a page from Israel’s book: refuse to apologize, defend unprovoked violence, and blame the victims on top of everything else.


  • Even the title of this article asserts that this latest “tragedy” is part of a larger systemic problem than just the incident itself.

    “There seems to be a consistent pattern of utterly reckless behavior,” said Cobb-Smith, who helped investigate the Doctors Without Borders shelling.

    The whole point of this is the lack of accountability for Israel’s repeated “mistakes,” which they have no intention of correcting. The indiscriminate violence is a feature for Israel, not a bug.

    To try and excuse or deflect from Israel’s current missile strikes by bringing up the US’s own missile strikes is an odd choice here. Like, the same people who are calling for Israel to stop its indiscriminate bombardment are largely the same people who were calling for the same when the US was doing it.





  • Ok but remember when Republicans made up that Biden was going to “outlaw burgers” with the Green New Deal? And how even the made up idea that the govt would stop subsidizing meat caused half the nation to flip their shit, while the other half went “no don’t be silly, we would never ever touch your precious tendies.”

    Appealing to individuals is important because without shifting the public’s perception of meat as it relates to climate change, the government will be too terrified to enact those kind of changes for fear of getting voted out by the angry, barbecue-loving mobs.

    Until flexitarians, vegetarians, and vegans (I’m vegan btw, just need everyone to know that) become a sizable enough percentage of the voting population, these systemic changes are never going to even be considered by our leaders. So we should keep pressing the importance of these changes to collectively move ourselves closer to that tipping point.


  • It’s funny, the US Marshalls interviewed for this are extremely forthright in explaining their methods, but clam up and say they “can’t explain these methods” as soon as they have any leads relating to cell phones. Probably because they’re using the US’s vast warrantless surveillance system to pull any possible info they can on her.

    For example, they “track[ed] down the phone number for an American businessman they believed had connected with Armstrong at some point,” and are cagey about how they got that number. I’d bet that they pulled her phone records and started cold calling everyone she’s ever contacted through her cell phone until they got someone who could give them a lead.

    Later, they set up the fake yoga instructor ad, and mention that they’re tracking the phone location of the person who answered the ad to make sure they’re at the sting location.

    It’s crazy that even with all those “methods the Marshalls won’t go into,” they almost gave up on finding her.




  • Maybe we can’t convince everyone to quit eating meat, but I would hope that we could appeal to self-described environmentalists, who have a stated interest in making sustainable changes.

    That’s the OP’s point, after all. That the science unambiguously states that we need to stop eating meat if we care about meeting our climate goals. Any environmentalist who learns that this needs to happen and still chooses to eat meat is acting against their own ethics.



  • Man I had to rephrase this a dozen times and I still don’t have a good way to communicate what I’m trying to say.

    The goal of this kind of callout is to make vegetarians, people who already value animal welfare, aware that they may still be contributing towards animal cruelty. For example, I was a vegetarian for years and then got rocked by the realization that, “oh wait, vegans aren’t just crazies that I can blow off, it was me who was ignorant the whole time.”

    So I anecdotally assume that a huge percentage of vegans are vegetarians who went from thinking “vegetarians and vegans are basically the same, besides vegans taking the idea too far” to “oh wait there’s a huge important difference between the two.” On vegan spaces, people often joke that “bullying worked on me lol” because the gentle approaches are easily ignored, but the really blunt “your actions don’t align with your stated ethics” is really difficult to brush off.


  • TL;DR yeah I think you’re right. The original announcement from the Reddit admin comment didn’t give any details, so I filled in the gaps myself and assumed “heart” would imply compassion, especially since I’ve seen that “stay for the empathy” tagline for so long. After all, why would the change from “front page” be necessary if “heart” of the internet gives a the same sentiment that it’s the core or cutting edge?

    The contracted marketing team’s writeup has some limited insight into the reasoning:

    …Reddit’s updated brand materials would all point back to four traits: inherently eclectic, positively different, delightfully absurd, and genuinely candid. These traits, along with the uniquely empowering foundation of Reddit as the best place to discover and participate through real conversation, led the team to a new, strategic description of Reddit as “the heart of the internet.”

    I’m not experienced enough in marketing jargon to understand if this is saying that “heart” only implies that there are lots of communities available on the platform, or if “genuine” and “real conversations” should be factored in to imply that these conversations and communities should be heartfelt.

    But all in all, it seems like the focus is on “you can discuss with lots of communities.” And since “front page” doesn’t imply discussion as much as it implies reading a newspaper, the change was needed.


  • I find it odd that they changed their tagline from “the front page of the Internet” to “the heart of the Internet.” Reddit is certainly a massive hub for discussion, but “compassionate” is not the first association I have with Reddit conversations. Smug condescension, certainly. Frothing mob mentality, often. But compassion? Rare, at best.

    I suppose that Reddit may be trying to simply manifest their hopes for the platform into a reality, but I don’t think it’s that easy. The Reddit welcome banner reads, “Come for the cats, stay for the empathy,” but most people probably know Reddit for the Boston Bombing debacle, r/theDonald trolls, and other nasty news items. It’s hard to believe the cushy corporate messaging when Reddit has so consistently allowed horrible shit on their site until the media fervor gets so intense that they can’t ignore it anymore