Spyke

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Rescuers recover more than 260 bodies at music festival attacked by Hamas

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"Palestine" is not the one that did this. Hamas is a terrorist group, and their actions do not justify the fact that the Israeli government operates an apartheid state where people are given rights, status, and property on the basis of race, and also participates in the slaughter of innocent people.

This isn't a "whoever's worse should lose" situation. Israel commits human rights violations and Hamas is a terrorist group.

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Had this conversation with someone who chose to no longer be at my table after meeting a blind NPC

I'll echo the words of my friend, who is a permanent wheelchair user:

"Yes, I identify with my disability as part of who I am, but I would still take a cure without hesitation"

Yes, people with disabilities identify with their disability, so even in a fantasy setting I can see how their disability would be part of their character.

But every disabled person I know would figuratively leap at the opportunity to reverse their disability with magic. It is also basically impossible to use a wheelchair while holding something like a wand or a staff or a fireball in one hand, so if there's enough magic around to push a wheelchair, there's probably enough to make your legs work. That's why somebody has a good reason not to expect a wheelchair in a fantasy world. I can see how somebody who doesn't really know any disabled people would panic at the idea of a wheelchair being part of the narrative or something like that, and I can sympathize with it.

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Alien life may not be carbon-based, new study suggests

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  1. You can eat them if they have the nutrients you need. Non-carbon-based just means it won't use carbon as the foundation of its molecular and cellular workings. By mass, there's relatively little carbon in living organisms and on earth, so whatever's out there could still use carbon and other elements enough that it has something we could eat. There's barely any telling what kinds of chemicals will be found in an organism like that, but it could easily be a mix of things we can digest and things we can't. Even carbon-based life is like that. Wood for example is biologically very similar to us, but is mainly made of cellulose, which we can't really digest at all.

  2. yes, if it fits.

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*Permanently Deleted*

The United States does not have a democracy. The United States Government is an enemy of democracy.

A serious analysis of our government and history exposes layers and layers of undemocratic rot in no particular order, and by no means exhaustively: The electoral college, police intimidation and violence against protestors, gerrymandering, regulatory capture, the historic and current slavery, segregation, and disenfranchisement of Black Americans, mass surveillance, imprisonment of Asian Americans, torture of prisoners, the genocide of Native American Indians, systematic destruction of voter registries, and the ability of our lawmakers to invest in the industries they regulate, and regulate the industries they invest in. This injury to our democracy is topped with insult as every one of these glaring injustices is either still festering in our government, or had to be taken down through immense sacrifice and pain, or for the aforementioned minority groups, represents an irreparable scar on our history.

The result is a Princeton study that, even according to its critics, describes our government as having only a 50/50 chance of serving the will of the American public.

And that's just at home.

Abroad, the United States is a zealous and brutal enemy of democracy anywhere its true goals are threatened. Over the past century, the US has overthrown dictators and democracies alike in service of private wealth and power. They have murdered countless innocent people and left countless more to live and die in the aftermath. In at least one instance, just a few people in our government with a blank checkbook and no oversight or accountability were responsible for the destruction of democratic governments abroad.

The United States does not value democracy or freedom. It values the feeling of democracy and freedom while actually crushing people and taking everything they have unless they stand to benefit us more if we let them keep it.

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Sex education classes often don't include LGBTQ+ students. New restrictions could make it worse

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In order to learn about sex you're going to have to learn about either straight sex, gay sex, or both. Turns out both types of sex happen to exist. If you're going to learn about straight sex you should probably learn about gay sex too in case you're gay. If you're trans the topic of puberty and your changing body gets 10 times more complicated. You should probably learn about that in case you're trans. It would be helpful for queer kids and the things they experience to not be left out of sex ed, also so that kids who don't know there's some form of queer yet don't grow up thinking that they're broken.

Since both straight and gay sex exists, and because trans people exist too, learning about sex from those perspectives is important.

This kind of education is what could have stopped an entire country from thinking that AIDS is caused by being gay.

Excluding queer sexuality and gender from sex education is what we've been doing since forever, and surprise it's left queer kids unprepared for the things they will encounter, and the other kids with the kinds of assumptions that you express here.

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New Leica camera stops deepfakes at the shutter

"that it’s a true representation of what someone saw."

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but photography has never ever ever been a "true" representation of what you took a picture of.

Photography is right up there with statistics in its potential for "true" information to be used to draw misleading or false conclusions. I predict that a picture with this technology may carry along with it the authority to impose a reality that's actually not true by pointing to this built-in encryption to say "see? the picture is real" when the deception was actually carried out by the framing or timing of the picture, as has been done often throughout history.

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Well, that is a pretty ridiculous interpretation.

Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.

An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn't pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say "workplace democracy"