Month: September 2017

navajowotd:

did-you-kno:

The Navajo language was chosen to
code U.S. military operations because
it has no written form and is almost
impossible for non-native speakers to
learn. After the operation was
declassified in 1968, the Japanese Chief
of Intelligence admitted that though
his army had been able to decipher
many U.S. codes, they were never
able to crack the Navajo code. Source Source 2

If you wanna try some Navajo words, check out the NavajoWOTD (Word of the Day) archive 🙂

Here’s an example of one of the verbs. There’s also a huge archive of Navajo words at the NavajoWOTD SoundCloud! (https://soundcloud.com/navajowotd)

Learn away!

Source: didyouknowblog.com

ninthemage:

ampersandworm:

bogleech:

kajedheat:

bogleech:

Another weird and frustrating phenomenon when you get sucked into an argument with conservative types (something I usually try to avoid bothering with anymore) is that there’s this very narrow set of people they’re convinced are key figures, even “leaders” on any given topic. Talk about climate change and they bring up Al Gore. Talk about women’s rights and they bring up Anita Sarkeesian.

To this day I have NO IDEA what any of those people have ever said on those topics, and in most cases, I never even heard of them outside of conservative complaints and memes. I would never know the name Anita Sarkeesian if she wasn’t one random blogger out of thousands that an obscure niche of people went positively ballistic over. I’ve never heard of anyone accepting the existence of global warming just because non-scientist Al Gore said to.

If I tell them this they never believe it. They’re completely convinced that the beliefs they hate actually revolve around some random youtubers or B-list politicians they randomly elevated into their own bugbears and the idea that the people they fight hardest against actually have barely any influence or fame outside their own subculture seems almost impossible for them to accept.

George Soros.

I always see people saying George Soros pays people like me to protest (I wish), or buses people to vote on battleground states, some way or another he has us under our thrall.

I don’t even know who the fuck George Soros IS

I don’t even feel bothered to Google him and find out- he’s utterly irrelevant to my life. But apparently all liberals are on his payroll somehow.

I, too, never heard of George Soros before just recently.

They could make up absolutely any name in these arguments and it would have just as much meaning to me. “You’re only pro-vaccine because you’re shilling for Jiminy Ferpendoodle!!!”

I’ve heard this referred to as the central fallacy of the authoritarian mindset: It’s not that authoritarians don’t care about facts, it’s that facts aren’t real until they are confirmed by an Authority. Of course no liberal believed in Global Warming until Al Gore said so! Why would they believe it, until Someone In Charge said it? And moreover, if you can prove That Person Isn’t Really An Authority, the facts will change! See also:

  • Why Creationists are obsessed with disproving Darwin – not his theory, but the man himself. As if casting doubt on Darwin-a-dude-born-in-eighteen-fucking-oh-nine-for-chrissake-’s personal beliefs will somehow completely disprove the ensuing two centuries of scientific research.
  • Why various idiot politicians try to legislate away Global Climate Change, as if making laws against the ocean will stop it from rising. 

I’m sure you could add on ten thousand bullet points but it’s Saturday and I don’t wanna do the research when I could be cleaning my kitchen and playing Minecraft. 

I remember when some EDL fucko accused my and my mates at a counterprotest of being in Soros’ pockets.

WE’RE FUCKING BRITISH.

^^^

How White Canadians Made Me Ashamed Of Myself

sugarmoonaki:

cheshicat:

Read this, it’s powerful. Anytime a cutesy meme of Trudeau is passed around, an article like this should be posted in response.

“I used to think Canada was just Anishinaabe and white. I was young and left my little world only on rare occasions. It’s strange to think about it now, but I believed that beyond our dusty gravel roads there was nothing but white people, white communities, and white cities. I knew there were Indigenous people in Winnipeg, of course — it’s home to the largest urban Indigenous population in Canada — but I was stuck in the childish belief that we were mostly confined to small plots of land known as reserves. I had no contact with them and they had no contact with me, and I thought that’s how it was supposed to be.
“

How White Canadians Made Me Ashamed Of Myself

aegipan-omnicorn:

toast-potent:

tilthat:

TIL: During the Vietnam War, the US decided to draft 350,000 people who had failed military entrance tests. “McNamera’s Morons” died at 3x the rate of other GIs.

via http://ift.tt/2gEudTA

not to be dramatic but this is no joke one of the most evil things i have read in my life

A passage from the article that’s cited the Reddit thread:

There
were plenty of men of draft age in America, but most were unavailable.
Many were attending college and using student deferments. Others had
found safe havens in the National Guard and Reserves, which by and large
were not sent to Vietnam. Still others were disqualified because they
scored poorly on the military’s mental and physical entrance tests.

How
could McNamara and Johnson round up enough men to send to war? They
realized that they would anger the vote-powerful middle class if they
drafted college boys or if they sent National Guardsmen and Reservists
to Vietnam. So they decided to induct the low-scoring men, whom Johnson
referred to (in a secret White House tape) as “SECOND-CLASS FELLOWS.” On
October 1, 1966, McNamara launched his program, which he called Project
100,000 because he wanted to induct that many low-aptitude men each
year

(Emphasis mine).

Think about that for a moment: Not only did they send 354,000 unqualified men into active combat – it was all to keep the machine of an unjust and unwinnable war grinding along.

Because if they had dared to draft non-disabled men, from middle class families, the political backlash would have been too strong.

They sent disabled men to die because society doesn’t care about disabled lives.

(And Hitler tested his gas chambers on disabled people first, before he rounded up Jewish people, for the very same reason)

aegipan-omnicorn:

theprettynerdie:

sangambit:

abbygine:

sangambit:

stormingtheivory:

proletariangothic:

wasmnowf:

snartphones:

proletariangothic:

I think it’s funny that able bodied people think disability prejudice is gonna be solved by cyborg parts, like those of us who will have them aren’t gonna be bugged with constant “Yeah, but you know, you still aren’t human in the strictest sense of the term, I mean whole human, natural and organic, you know what I mean…”

And with capitalism still in existence getting implants or prosthesis will just be grafting planned obsolescence onto your actual body. People honestly think they won’t make limbs the same way they make other electronics?

These never occurred to me but you are right.
I can think of worse things.
Government control over what parts can not do for parts paid for with government money.
You got eye implants while on “welfare”. Then they better not be used for “immoral” things like strip clubs. Gps locks take care of that.

Government legs? You better use them for at least X number of steps a day to prove they were needed.

New arm but unemployed? Better have a job or it turns off.

A big thing I’m also thinking about is cyborg parts that are so specialized for one job-related task that they get in the way of literally EVERYTHING else you might want to do, unless you buy more of them, especially in the early years:

An arm specialized for factory work that’s so heavy it causes spinal damage and chafing around the stump area(more so then even normal artificial limbs)

An mechanized  exoskeleton so you can walk in an outdoor-type job, but nobody considered you might want to remove it to bathe or have sex because why would the cripples want to do a silly thing like that

This stuff is such a big deal and yet somehow a lot of transhumanists seem to have totally missed the fact that most cyberpunk authors are totally cognizant of what a nightmare hellscape future digital capitalism will be

And don’t forget the element of coercion/lack of bodily autonomy that will very absolutely come with having widespread mecha-upgrades that can “fix” us broken folks – because for sure, if disability can be solved with robot parts, do you think the able-bodied folk are going to trust us for long to make the decisions for ourselves as to whether or not we want those cyborg bits installed? They’ll be passing laws that say we have to get them or we don’t get accommodations we need anyway, jamming them into us as babies (whether they work fully well or not), using us to alpha test them, it’s going to be fun times.

I’m pretty sure we already do that last one with cochlear implants…

#like this is a thing i already see in the present? #when it comes to deafness and cochlear implants/hearing aids #and hearing people constantly sniping at us #like no i’m not getting a terp #why don’t you just put your hearing aids in #sorry it doesn’t work like that #i’d still need a terp even if i were wearing them #but even if i didn’t just seriously #wearing my hearing aids also aggravated my DEBILITATING MIGRAINES #to the point where i literally could not get through a day of work #without collapsing in pain #abled people just never trust us to make our own decisions about our health and our lives #like that is going to change in the least as technology advances #nope nope nope

Haha yeah that was my tags on that post. XD We are… already there with this on some of these things it’s just going to get moreso as technology progresses.

@imperfectkreis

Absolutely. All of this. Especially the part around cochlear implants.  Those things were creeping me out when I first learned about them 27 years ago.

I suppose they’re fine for adults who lose their hearing late in life, after having built up a strong social-linguistic network (especially if they’re at an age where learning a new language – such as the native Sign Language of their country – would be too difficult).

But to implant them into the brains of babies?! Before they’re old enough to consent? While their brains are still growing at their most rapid pace?!

*shudder*

How is that not nightmare fuel for everyone?

And here’s another dystopian scenario that my brain keeps going back to:

Okay. So imagine a future society does find a cure for every disability now known to man, just like the transhumanists promise us.

The very concept of “accommodations” fades from memory.

Sooner or later, life – being the wacky, chaotic, fragile, thing it is – will create a new disease, condition, or disability that’s never been seen before. 

One for which there is no cure.

And, now, there is also a political incentive to deny even the existence of disabled people, because the whole foundation of Transhumanist Civilization is Life Without Weakness.

Gradually (or not so gradually), the range of “normal variation” that’s deemed acceptable narrows, and anyone who has less then absolute peak strength/health/height/clear skin/straight teeth, etc. is not just looked at with pity, but with suspicion… as if they are willfully posing a threat to the social order.

And even people we would deem to be normally able-bodied/able-minded would find themselves marginalized.

I went undercover in a Toronto factory where a temp worker died. Here’s what I found

allthecanadianpolitics:

Amina Diaby died last year in an accident inside one of the GTA’s largest industrial bakeries where, the company says, worker safety is its highest concern. The 23-year-old was one of thousands of Ontarians who have turned to temporary employment agencies to find jobs that often come with low pay and little training for sometimes dangerous work. The Star’s Sara Mojtehedzadeh went undercover for a month at the factory where Diaby worked.

Continue Reading.

–

Submitted by kanadka.

I went undercover in a Toronto factory where a temp worker died. Here’s what I found

So much for that Voynich manuscript â€śsolution”

coldalbion:

However, this isn’t sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang, “They’re not grammatically correct. It doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense.” She added, “Frankly I’m a little surprised the TLS published it…If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat.” The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs’ claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages.

The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women’s health, however, might turn out to be correct. But that wasn’t Gibbs’ discovery. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides.

So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”