Category: Uncategorized

mcumeta:

amuseoffyre:

The more I watch the scene with Phillips telling Steve they’re not going to rescue anyone, the more I feel Phillips is playing him. “Nope, we’re not going to go after them, because – and let me point out very clearly and specifically on this map exactly where they are – it is in dangerous territory and I will not order anyone to go in there”.

“Incidentally, Rogers, I know you have hero-issues coming out the wazoo and you want to be respected as a soldier and a man, so I will diss you to your face, call you a chorus girl, and basically wind you up to the point that you do something damned reckless and stupid without orders, because you’re the kind of dumbass hero who will jump on a grenade for your fellow-man or chase down an armed man while unarmed and barefoot in your shorts and I know this because I watched you do it before.”

“And Carter, if you’re about to say something, just don’t, because no one needs to know that I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s called ‘dance, monkey, dance’. And if he dies, wasn’t on my orders.”

You notice that he’s not exactly surprised about Steve being Captain Dumbass Hero. You’ll notice he’s also not massively surprised when Steve returns.

Colonel Chester Phillips. Didn’t get to be head of the SSR because he’s just a pretty face.

Importing this, since Phillips needs more love.

It’s not about the porn

Re: tumblr. I feel like some things are getting lost in the ‘omg the children’ stuff.  Now, that is totally legit. There was absolutely some nasty stuff on the site that they weren’t catching. However, it goes deeper than that.

Tumblr really couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it for the last two-three years because in large part the usage base was young, broke, and at the fringes of the internet. I saw a stat yesterday that .0001% of people had a tumblr. No clue how accurate that is but what I do know is that it was heavily tilted to people on the LBGT+ spectrum, PoC, etc. Tumblr, in essence, was a conversation between people on a comment to comment level. Someone posted something and the real conversation happened in the reblogs and in the tags. It was a space in which you could follow a tag link and go down a rabbit hole of everything that was tagged with that post.  And users liked it that way. They totally flagged things that didn’t belong in the tags (like pron) and it was a great way to find people with similar interests without having the gatekeeper of a moderated forum.

Here is where it gets into the real world tho – Tumblr got bought by Yahoo a while ago and Yahoo is owned by Verizon. The biggest investor in killing Net Neutrality and managing and controlling your internet experience. There is an interview with the president of Verizon that came out today that says in essence ‘we wanted tumblr but not the pron’. Well, yeah, except by going wholly in on destroying the pron they wiped out huge communities of people talking about their bodies. Chronic pain communities are gone. LBGT education communities, breastfeeding, trans support groups, sex education, and yes, fandom. They crushed huge categories of content where people were just figuring things out about themselves and they cloaked in SESTA/FOSA because what they want is sanitized content to serve ads.

So Verizon told Apple to pull the tumblr app a month ago because of the porn (Nov 17?). They removed a whole swath of tags from searchability (you had to know a username to find someone and then scroll their whole blog) in the week that followed.  And yesterday they sent out their, guess what, we’re deleting everything we’ve flagged as sensitive which everyone is having a good laugh at, including me. Now, checking tonight it looks like they’ve removed a lot of those flags and people are calming down but I don’t buy it. A lot of that content is gone already and it’s not coming back.

Net Neutrality is failing, where it hasn’t failed already. Fandom as I know it is moving but the infrastructure isn’t there yet and I know a few folks are trying the distributed network stuff but we always, always lose folks when this happens.
Anyway, it’s about the porn but it isn’t about the porn.

Biden says he’s ‘the most qualified person in the country’ to be president

breakthecitysky:

jeffthehardway:

“I am a gaffe machine, but my God what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can’t tell the truth,” Biden said.

As an outsider I would say he is the only chance the Democrats have at soundly beating the Republicans and Trump.

Even Bruce Springsteen has said as much. Though he figures Trump will get re-elected because there are no strong Democrat candidates.

Y’all know how hard I stan for this man. I love Joe Biden. He’s a tremendous public servant who has done real good for this country.

He should not run for president.

That long and distinguished legislative career that predates his time as our favorite vice president slash Uncle Joe carries a lot of baggage that I don’t think he wants opened up. I don’t want it opened up. I mean, the Anita Hill testimony, y’all.

Yes people change. I believe he has learned and evolved and I celebrate that. But we have to invest in new leadership.

I am profoundly grateful for him. This country is better because of him. He is doing great work in the private sector and that’s where he should stay.

This. ^

Biden says he’s ‘the most qualified person in the country’ to be president

argumate:

but really porn is just the canary in the coal mine that our supposed general purpose computing devices are tightly controlled by a duopoly that makes Microsoft in the ‘90s look relaxed and open minded: Apple doesn’t want porn apps on its phones, so there are no porn apps on its phones; other apps can stay if they tithe 30%, but they’re on thin fucking ice.

you can leave Tumblr and go to another social network, but if that gets sufficiently popular it will face the same threat, there is no escape.

the last bastion of freedom is the open web, and I anticipate the day when mobile Safari blocks access to sites that aren’t signed by Apple, for security reasons.

the right to install whatever software you want on your own computer is a vital one, and we should be fighting for it.