Image Alt Text: On the left is a picture of Mountain Dew flavored lip balm. On the right is a comic with two thin masc presenting people wearing collars, one playing a game with a controller saying "Damn, I keep dying in the same spot. Could I get some Mountain Dew real quick?" The other says "I'm on it!" while applying lip balm, beneath that is a drawing of the two kissing.
This is so damn fascinating, an AI playing the game, not as a speedrun but humanlike, and dynamically monologuing in the voice of the original character!
I'm really tired and at the end of my rope and could use some broad advice and help... I don't expect much...
My sibling (by choice) got arrested last night because they were in a major mental health crisis (really bad Borderline/Bipolar episode) and slapped/shoved their partner in the middle of it. I don't think that's okay for them to have done and am not remotely justifying it.
This was brought on by their breakup with their partner and the fact that they ran out of their medications.
I'm in the US, Texas to be specific. They need consistent access to medications and therapy to be remotely stable... and that just isn't available.
We moved into this apartment last year with various plans on how I would support them but all of those plans fell through. Their mother was supposed to cover their half of bills until they could get on disability, but just before move-in she basically disowned them.
They were off and on able to pick up some work initially, but were very unstable. Started this relationship with their now-ex who moved in and covered their half of the bills for most of the past year, but that ended recently and their ex is moving out.
I simply don't make enough to really cover them by myself and I can't abandon them when they're actively trying to be and do better. We just happen to live in a country and state that believes that it's better for people to just die than actually help someone who hasn't "earned it"
Felix Dzerzhinsky: Where lies the way out of the hell of present-day life, in which the wolfish law of exploitation, oppression and violence holds sway? The way out lies in the idea of a life which is based on harmony, a full life enjoyed by the whole of society, by all mankind; the way out is in the idea of socialism, the idea of solidarity of the working people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Robert Parry: What we have now is the Reagan-Bush press corp. It's the press corp that they helped create - that they created partly by purging those, or encouraging the purging of those who were not going along, but it was ultimately the editors and the news executives that did the purging. The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy - a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: To pay for the arms race the nation has to cut thousands of social programs, ... The nation cannot go wild on military expenditures and also afford to care for old people, poor people, disabled people, farmers, or students. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA." wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression. Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Stockwell: Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Glenn Greenwald: Establishment journalists and media stars are not on the outside of the establishment, they are members of the establishment. They work for the largest corporations. They live in Washington. Socio-economically, their colleagues and partners and family members are people within the government, within the establishment. And what they want to do is to protect and defend the establishment, more than anything else. To protect the idea that the establishment is functioning properly. And so, their interest is to minimize the public anger and the public rage. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Caitlin Johnstone: Why do mainstream media reporters within ostensibly free democracies act just like state media propagandists? Why are they so reliably pro-establishment, all throughout every mainstream outlet? Why do they so consistently marginalize any idea that doesn't fit within the extremely narrow Overton window of acceptable opinion? Why does anyone who inconveniences western establishment power always find themselves on the losing end of a trial by media? Why are they so dependably adversarial toward anything that could be perceived as a flaw in any nation outside the US-centralized power alliance, and so dependably forgiving of the flaws of the nations within it? wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Eric Zuesse: The U.S. mainstream 'news' media are propaganda-organs for the U.S. Government. While some American news-media are Democratic Party propagandists, and others are Republican Party propagandists, and therefore all of them eagerly expose lies that are of only a partisan nature, none of them will expose lies that both Parties share. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Edward Herman: Pravda and Izvestia in the former Soviet Union would have been hard-pressed to surpass the American media in their subservience to the official agenda. They have abandoned the notion of objectivity or even the idea of providing a public space where problems are discussed and debated. It's a scandal that reveals the existence of a system of propaganda, not of serious media so essential in a democratic society. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Paul Craig Roberts: The success of print and TV pundits is based on allying with a prominent point of view or interest group and serving it. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Glenn Greenwald: Rush Limbaugh can depict himself as being this insurgent outsider, but he supported the wars of the last eight years. He supported the tax policies that Ronald Reagan essentially instituted as conventional wisdom - that we need to lower taxes, reduce government spending. All of the conventional clichés that the media airs frequently, and doesn't need much time in order to explain, are ones that Rush Limbaugh and the furthest fringes of the right essentially embrace. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lewis H. Lapham: Essentially Walter Chronkite was a shill for the government. It didn't matter whether it was Democratic or Republican. He was for the status quo. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: Lenin showed that imperialism is moribund capitalism, that imperialism is the eve of the Lenin on imperialism socialist revolution of the proletariat. In his work on the foundations of Leninism, Stalin points out that Marx and Engels lived and fought at a time when imperialism had not yet developed, in a period of the preparation of the proletariat for revolution, whereas Lenin's revolutionary activity was effected within the period of developed imperialism, the period of the unfolding proletarian revolution. Leninism is the further development of Marxism under new conditions, under the conditions of the epoch of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. It follows, therefore, that at this time one cannot be a Marxist without being a Leninist. It also follows that to deny the Leninist theory of imperialism is to break away entirely from Marxism. It is clear from this that any distortion or mistake in the theory of imperialism inevitably means a break with revolutionary Marxism-Leninism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: In essence, Marxism and Marxist notions need to evolve with the development of historical conditions. It is on the basis of Marxist methodology that Marxism evolves. In the conditions of the last stage of capitalism, imperialism, Marxism becomes Marxism-Leninism. Refuting Leninism is tantamount to decrying Marxism, as anti-Leninism is rendered a form of anti-Marxism. Marxism to- day cannot be understood without Lenin's contribution to Marxism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Neil Postman: TV is not what happened. It is what some man or woman who has been labeled a journalist or correspondent thinks is worth reporting. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Chris Hedges: Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity reporters, masquerading as journalists, make millions a year and give a platform to the powerful and the famous so they can spin, equivocate, and lie. ... It is not one or two reporters or television hosts who are corrupt. The media institutions are corrupt. Many media workers, especially those based in Washington, work shamelessly for our elites. ... The well-paid television pundits and news celebrities, the economists and the banking and financial sector leaders, see the world from inside the comfort of the corporate box. They are loyal to the corporate state. They cling to the corporation and the corporate structure. It is known. It is safe. It is paternal. It is the system. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
R. Palme Dutt: The British ruling class are not fighting to liberate the people of Europe from fascism and reaction. They have always been, for a century and a-half, the main stranglers of every popular revolution in every country. The war aims of Churchill, for which the British workers; are asked to die, are the war aims of British imperialism; to protect and maintain the domination of the British Empire over a-quarter of the world; to smash the rival German imperialism and inflict a new super-Versailles; to maintain the reactionary interests of capitalist class rule against the world Socialist Revolution. There is nothing they fear more than a real popular revolution in Europe, which they know would lead to the victory of Socialism. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Gore Vidal: Unfortunately, we get only disinformation from the New York Times and other official places. Americans have no idea of the extent of their government's mischief. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Michel Chossudovsky: Media disinformation has become institutionalized. The lies and fabrications have become increasingly blatant when compared to the 1970s. The US media has become the mouthpiece of US foreign policy. Disinformation is routinely "planted" by CIA operatives in the newsroom of major dailies, magazines and TV channels. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Charlie Robinson: In America, we grew up thinking that the people that we see on the nightly news are journalists. But, there is no journalism happening there, only script reading. That is understood by anyone with a sliver of common sense, and the objectivity to realize that their newsperson is basically an actor. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Lewis H. Lapham: The major news media that serve at the pleasure of a commercial oligarchy that pays them, and pays them handsomely, for their pretense of speaking truth to power. The prominent figures in our contemporary Washington press corps regard themselves as government functionaries, enabling and codependent. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Andrew Gavin Marshall: The mainstream media is a conglomerate of collective corporate thought, designed to make you ignorant and unaware of the realities of the world, of the important issues, and to hide in the shadows the sacredly guarded truths of power. Our mainstream media - the large newspapers, radio and TV news stations - are dominated by billion dollar corporations, whose boards of directors reflect the 'who's who' of the corporate, political, and financial elite, with former government officials, industrialists, and bankers controlling the dispersal of information and the perspectives we are given. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
John Pilger: Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education - Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia - and with careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Shiri Bailem • •