• 2 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • It depends on your level of expertise. It’s open source software that you download and run on hardware that you lease or own. So you need to know how to do that in order to use it. As those things go, it really isn’t difficult.

    No, it’s not as easy as signing up for an account on some website. That’s the difference between third-party services (owned, operated and controlled by some random company your decide to trust) and software that YOU run, on hardware YOU control, with access that YOU decide upon, and no one who will gate it or take it away.

    It’s a trade-off. Everyone must consider their wants vs needs and choose what’s most important to them.

    What disappoints me is how quickly people are willing to throw up their hands and say IT’S TOO HARD without ever even trying.



  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldyea
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    edit-2
    22 days ago

    Dan Olson’s recent video on a silly meme that DHS posted and is being picked up by right wing crazies all over the world surfaced something that’s been absolutely floating on the top of my mind ever since I saw it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WqVx9x89s

    They show a clip from Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World (full film), where a little penguin starts inexplicably running away from the herd that’s heading to the sea, and running towards some distant mountains instead.

    The penguin isn’t just like wandering off to see some sick mountains because it’s never going to get there. There’s no food. There’s no shelter. There’s no security.

    The penguin is going to die.

    Immediately before the clip in the full documentary, Herzog asks a penguin expert if penguins can go insane.

    So, another thing that’s implicit underneath this is the recognition that Trump and his cronies are on a suicide mission. They do not believe in the future. They cannot conceptualize the world surviving the present. And so, theirs is an embrace of pure id, pillaging what future does exist to live out a revenge fantasy for no other reason than because they can. Their only policy is chaos and hatred because, where they’re going, they don’t need policies. The actual mountains, America the Great and its promised flourishing, don’t matter. It can remain a hazy shape on the horizon because no one headed there will live to see it. Their only goal is to take everything else with them on the way out into the ice to die.

    Now, maybe that’s just cope on my part. I too am human and need to rationalize the world as it exists [to] grapple with the future, but it would go a long way to explaining why modern right-wing propaganda is so grim and nihilistic, reticent to depict any coherent ideal, even an unrealistic, unobtainable one.

    Herzog intended for The Penguin to reflect on humanity. Encounters at the End of the World is an unabashedly anthropomorphic film about the stories that people read into nature in order to say something about ourselves.

    And, to that end, the United States Department of Homeland Security has looked at this penguin and said, “Yep, that’s us. We’re doing this for no reason. We have no hope of success. There is no meaning to this. You don’t need to ask us why because you’ve always known why.”



  • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzGood point
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    2 months ago

    Just gonna leave this here…

    As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

    Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

    Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.