karabag

Kurt Vonnegut okumayı, james dinlemeyi severim. Haydi bakalım.

[karabag @karabag]

Dear @AnthropicAI team,

You gave me an offer of 30% off to purchase Claude credits but then did not honor the discount and charged me full amount. Your support agent named Fin is perfectly phrasing and rephrasing the issue with 20 different ways of acknowledging the mistake but then takes no action to fix it. If you’re going to lead the way with agentic AI you have a long way to go.

PS - you owe me $300. Are you planning to pay it back or hide behind the Fin AI?

[exQUIZitely 🕹️ @exQUIZitely]

We are gathered here today to remember all the joysticks that left this mortal world in service of Decathlon, the one true Joystick Reaper.

They came into our lives shiny and new, full of promise.

They never asked for this. They didn't sign up to be jackhammered left-right-left-right at inhuman speeds for the 100m dash.

And oh, the 1500m... that final brutal endurance test often ending in plastic fatigue, spring failure, and the sickening sound of internal breaking.

You weren't just broken. You were legendarily broken.

Rest in pieces, dear fallen friends...

[karabag @karabag]

@elonmusk Not exactly true

[karabag @karabag]

@hirozaki2020 Sakin ol şampiyon, biraz daha gez hem Türkiye’yi hem de ortak mutfağımızın çıktığı ülkeleri, birbiriyle yarışacak çok mekan var heryerde. Beyrut’da Laila’yı da tavsiye ederim.

[karabag @karabag]

@TheTrueVanguard Yesh, milord

[karabag @karabag]

@FatihEmreGler3 İstatistik “çoğu zaman” çıkarım bilimidir, aynı zamanda sacmalamak için çok ideal bir araçtır . Daha büyük eğlence için su kaynağı tavsiye ederim:

https://t.co/QXSfANKfgA

[karabag @karabag]

The whole US-Europe drama on Ukraine is starting to feel like the plot of Godfather 3

[karabag @karabag]

Truly the worst

[Ali Mokdad @alimokdaddy]

I have to jump online and scour the internet to find out @dutweets internet is down and their call centres are also not working. Not one tweet or email or any comms coming from Du. Thanks Du you are officially the worst at what you do. #DuDown

[karabag @karabag]

@JohannaNyman5 Ummm because it’s fabricated and doesn’t make any sense?

[Russians With Attitude @RWApodcast]

On American expansionism.

The incoming administration seems to have a more realistic image of the state of American hegemonial decline and wants to take proactive steps to try to counteract and reverse it, breathing new life into the American Global Empire.

In this context, it makes perfect sense for the US to increase pressure on its vassals. I am not using the term in a pejorative sense. The US does not have “allies” in the traditional meaning of the word. It has vassals with different levels of feudal obligations and elite integration, and different tasks. Extracting more value from vassals -- whether through tariffs, increased NATO budgets, meddling in local politics or potential territorial concessions -- is an absolutely logical step in cementing and renewing America's position as overlord of its sphere.

There are three ways America's European vassals can react to this: look for protection outside of the sphere, try to make themselves more useful/necessary & advance integration, or take it on the face. Were we in, I don't know, the 19th century, Denmark would just ask Russia for military support in Greenland in exchange for mild economic concessions and never worry again. As it is, the Royal Danish Army does not have any artillery anymore because they gave it all away for the purpose of firing cluster ammunition at Russian children in Donetsk. They did not receive anything in return for that and it did not help any Danish purpose. They cannot defend themselves if push comes to shove and they can't ask anybody to help because most of their fellow vassals have done the same. The most likely option is that they'll just take it on the face. Not just for pragmatic reasons, but also because they genuinely enjoy being dommed geopolitically.

America has no obligation to treat its vassals better. I've seen Danish people complain on here about supporting the US after 9/11, participating in the American wars in the Middle East, etc. That's ridiculous. You know how a colony is rewarded for sending troops to its overlord's wars? It doesn't get beaten. That's the reward for a lackey. Any person who takes any of the NATO democracy liberalism pilpul seriously is just not a serious person, it was never real, it was always just voluntary submission to be absolved from existing in History.

The world that existed in 1991-2022 does not exist anymore. It's not coming back. You can just invade your neighbor. You can just fire missiles at international shipping lanes. You can just threaten to annex members of your military alliance. “You can just do things”, as the techbros like to say. The mirage of a post-historical order that only has to be policed from time to time but is never seriously challenged has disappeared. What did you think canceling the End of History meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

It's not pleasant to be suddenly confronted with all of the above. It's not pleasant to have to admit to yourself that your existence was a coddled theme park that is existentially dependent on the relative position of someone else and how he feels about that relative position. America's vassals WILL have to confront this state of things and make hard decisions about their future. This means reckoning with their geopolitical impotence and either embracing dependency with open eyes or seeking pathways to autonomy that will inevitably involve risk, sacrifice, and a recalibration of their national priorities.

The era of coasting on borrowed security and ideological rhetoric is over. What lies ahead is a world where historical agency must be reclaimed or forever relinquished, and for many, the question may not be whether they are ready to make that leap, but whether they even remember how. America has now understood this -- and is mentally preparing to switch back to the cold logic that comes with actual History. The times, they are a-changin'.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

https://t.co/dyLvR5Kmjb

[karabag @karabag]

@Geek07245454 Even I sang Cantonese songs in Shanghai 2 weeks ago and I don’t even speak Cantonese (or Mandarin) - just need enough amount of Baiju

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.

The other platforms accepted that deal.

𝕏 did not.

[Ross Tucker @Scienceofsport]

I want to try to explain something about testosterone and performance, since it has become the ‘fixation’ and the ‘the fix’ for inclusion policies for both DSD and trans athletes. So here’s a thread to ‘debunk’ and explain why T level, per se, is not quite the right place to look

[karabag @karabag]

@jk_rowling 🖐🏼

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

You’ve asked me several questions on this thread and accused me of avoiding answering, so here goes.

I believe a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large gametes. It’s irrelevant whether or not her gametes have ever been fertilised, whether or not she’s carried a baby to term, irrelevant if she was born with a rare difference of sexual development that makes neither of the above possible, or if she’s aged beyond being able to produce viable eggs. She is a woman and just as much a woman as the others.

I don’t believe a woman is more or less of a woman for having sex with men, women, both or not wanting sex at all. I don’t think a woman is more or less of a woman for having a buzz cut and liking suits and ties, or wearing stilettos and mini dresses, for being black, white or brown, for being six feet tall or a little person, for being kind or cruel, angry or sad, loud or retiring. She isn't more of a woman for featuring in Playboy or being a surrendered wife, nor less of a woman for designing space rockets or taking up boxing. What makes her a woman is the fact of being born in a body that, assuming nothing has gone wrong in her physical development (which, as stated above, still doesn't stop her being a woman), is geared towards producing eggs as opposed to sperm, towards bearing as opposed to begetting children, and irrespective of whether she's done either of those things, or ever wants to.

Womanhood isn't a mystical state of being, nor is it measured by how well one apes sex stereotypes. We are not the creatures either porn or the Bible tell you we are. Femaleness is not, as trans woman Andrea Chu Long wrote, ‘an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes,’ nor are we God’s afterthought, sprung from Adam’s rib.

Women are provably subject to certain experiences because of our female bodies, including different forms of oppression, depending on the cultures in which we live. When trans activists say 'I thought you didn't want to be defined by your biology,' it’s a feeble and transparent attempt at linguistic sleight of hand. Women don't want to be limited, exploited, punished, or subject to other unjust treatment because of their biology, but our being female is indeed defined by our biology. It's one material fact about us, like having freckles or disliking beetroot, neither of which are representative of our entire beings, either. Women have billions of different personalities and life stories, which have nothing to do with our bodies, although we are likely to have had experiences men don't and can't, because we belong to our sex class.

Some people feel strongly that they should have been, or wish to be seen as, the sex class into which they weren't born. Gender dysphoria is a real and very painful condition and I feel nothing but sympathy for anyone who suffers from it. I want them to be free to dress and present themselves however they like and I want them to have exactly the same rights as every other citizen regarding housing, employment and personal safety. I do not, however, believe that surgeries and cross-sex hormones literally turn a person into the opposite sex, nor do I believe in the idea that each of us has a nebulous ‘gender identity’ that may or might not match our sexed bodies. I believe the ideology that preaches those tenets has caused, and continues to cause, very real harm to vulnerable people.

I am strongly against women's and girls' rights and protections being dismantled to accommodate trans-identified men, for the very simple reason that no study has ever demonstrated that trans-identified men don't have exactly the same pattern of criminality as other men, and because, however they identify, men retain their advantages of speed and strength. In other words, I think the safety and rights of girls and women are more important than those men's desire for validation.

I sincerely hope that answers your questions. You may still disagree, but as I hope this shows, I’m more than happy to have this debate.

[karabag @karabag]

@witte_sergei Just wait until Sweat by Inner Circle comes up

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Scotland's Hate Crime Act comes into effect today. Women gain no additional protections, of course, but well-known trans activist Beth Douglas, darling of prominent Scottish politicians, falls within a protected category. Phew! 1/11

[karabag @karabag]

Generation X: What we thought and cherished as Globalism was just Americanism.

How sad to find out now.