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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Anne Frank didn’t die in a gas chamber. She was never in an extermination camp. She was at Auschwitz, not Auschwitz-Birkenau. She died in Bergen-Belsen, most likely from Typhus.

    Anyway, you do realize they didn’t start off with gas chambers, right? You need incremental steps, making it worse little by little, because otherwise people won’t accept it. First it was the rhetoric, and the rhetoric got worse and worse. Taking away people’s rights. Taking over the newspapers to print whatever you want them to. Changing laws, removing laws, writing new laws. Violence in the streets to intimidate and persecute people, using his brownshirts. Imprisoning political opponents (socialists and communists were first, of course, because they resisted the hardest). Imprisoning anyone who went against the propaganda; journalists, scientists, artists, teachers, any and all intellectuals basically. Banning political parties except your own. Executing religious leaders that refused to kiss the ring. Anything and anyone that could possibly ever turn into a weapon against him, even his own people weren’t safe. But each step came after the previous, a 100 little steps that resulted in industrialized genocide. You can’t start at 100.

    The extermination camps weren’t built until '41/'42 and mostly they did that because executing shitloads of people was very traumatizing for his own murder squads (Einsatzgruppen) and very time-consuming. It wasn’t efficient, it was bad for their mental health. They had already gassed people in smaller settings like hospitals, mentally and physically disabled people. They industrialized it, but it wasn’t what they advertised in the 30’ies. If Hitler had stood up during elections and said “hey guys, you know what would be cool? Let’s gas millions of people!” he never would have gotten to power. But once he had power… well, he could do whatever the fuck he wanted. His rabid supporters loved it, any and all actual resistance was already squashed, and anyone who didn’t love it had to pretend they did, because otherwise they’d be dragged off.

    Even then, remember that the most votes the Nazis ever got was 39%. 39% too many, obviously, but they never had a majority. The only reason Hitler got absolute power in the first place is because the conservatives worked with him, thought they could control the Nazis, use them against the socialists and communists. They made him chancellor, and then Hindenburg died and Hitler made himself president as well. Of course by then there was nothing or nobody who could even try to stop him anymore. But yeah, the conservatives handed him power on a silver platter. Underestimated him. Sounds familiar, no?

    Remember: Nazis in the 30’ies hadn’t done yet what Nazis in the 40’ies ended up doing. They were still fucking Nazis.

    Hitler wasn’t Hitler, until he was.

    Edit: Also remember that extermination wasn’t even the goal at first. What they wanted was to get rid of the Jewish people, not necessarily kill them all. Jewish people could voluntarily leave, some were being deported to Poland and other places. Entire ships filled with Jewish people were sent to Cuba (where they were denied entry) and the US (where they were denied entry) and other places (often being denied entry and being forced to go back where they came from, only to still end up in concentration camps). They even had an ultimate deportation plan (the first Final Solution, I guess): The Madagascar Plan. They were going to deport all Jewish people to Madagascar. But when they couldn’t defeat the British and any invasion of GB was deemed impossible, they gave up on the plan.

    We have already seen that camps with immigrants are apparently perfectly acceptable in the U.S. and now with the new shit being built in Texas… do you really think all these people are actually going to be deported? Or are they going to rot in camps while being used as slave labor? How many are going to die from horrific conditions? Americans actually voted for all this, Trump has never been shy about his intentions. And they still refuse to accept any Nazi-parallels. Just because people aren’t being gassed, doesn’t mean any comparison is false.

    Edit 2: correction: I don’t actually know if any building has already started. But Texas has offered land to Trump for his Mass Deportation Facilities. Sources: here and here



  • That’s funny. I’ve only ever known 2 of them personally and they have all of it. The whole damn package. Yeah, that wasn’t fun.

    Data show that, unlike normative, healthy self-esteem, which is associated with positive outcomes (5–7), narcissistic self-esteem is fragile, because it is highly contingent on achievement-related successes and feedback from the social environment (13–15). Narcissistic self-esteem is thus conceptualized as precariously elevated. When an individual with NPD is faced with an ego threat (e.g., real or imagined criticism, failure, or reduced social regard), unrealistically high self-expectations crumple into perceived inferiority (16, 17). Individuals with NPD are, therefore, hypersensitive to ego threats, and when threatened, they respond with efforts to reduce concomitant distress and upregulate self-esteem (17–19). These regulation strategies include some of NPD’s most recognizable and maladaptive behaviors. Classic “grandiose” responses include being aggressive or devaluing toward others (20, 21), fixating on grandiose fantasies (22), or engaging in self-serving bias (23). Classic “vulnerable” responses include alienating and isolating themselves (24) by avoiding situations that may threaten self-esteem (25), relentlessly criticizing themselves (26–28), or engaging in suicidal behaviors and fantasies (29, 30). This vacillation between overly inflated and deflated self-appraisals, alongside efforts to regulate this unstable sense of self through grandiosity, flawlessness, and/or avoidance, are described in both early psychoanalytic theories of narcissism (31), the contemporary Alternative DSM-5 Model for Personality Disorders (8), and the personality disorder section of the ICD-11 (32–34). It is important to note that research is continually adding nuance to scientific perspectives on self-esteem in NPD (35). Various frameworks differently emphasize shifts between distinct states of grandiosity (i.e., elevated self-esteem, arrogance, and entitlement) and vulnerability (i.e., shame, insecurity, and neuroticism). Scholars are working to clarify whether and how grandiosity may function to conceal ever-present vulnerability and whether fragile self-esteem is a driving force or an outcome of this process (17, 18, 26, 36).

    Source.

    So. I guess it’s not actually clear yet which one of us is right (whether it’s ever-present or not).

    All I can say is that in my (limited) experience they have extreme reactions to any sort of criticism, they take almost everything personal, and this just doesn’t happen with people who are actually really self-confident. I know plenty of confident people and they can handle criticism just fine without throwing huge fucking temper tantrums. It came to a point where I was walking on eggshells trying to never say anything that could be interpreted as criticism, because their fragile ego couldn’t handle it and they’d turn it around on me. Like… trying to make themselves feel better by putting me down. Anyway, I’ll stop dragging my personal issues in here, and just say: perhaps some day we’ll have a definitive answer.

    Edit: typo.




  • The total death toll and the number of people suffering health issues (past and present) due to coal are orders of magnitude larger than those due to nuclear power (not to even mention the damage to the environment!). The problem is that people respond more to one-time big disasters than to numbers over time. Something like Chornobyl is terrifying and a big deal, so people remember it. They don’t remember every Tom, Dick and Harry that’s died over the years due to black lung or accidents or other stuff from coal.

    You can even see this attitude in other ways too. It seems like a lot of Americans are still suffering mass trauma from 9/11 and accept the most horrific Patriot Act-type shit because of it. But in the end, it was less than 3000 people who died in the attack (and don’t get me wrong, it was terrible!), but waaaaaaay more people die (and have died) from lack of (access to) healthcare, and it seems that still barely anyone is actually trying to fix that. Or a mass shooting that kills 11 people, that’s a big deal, right? But the fact that over a million Americans died due to Covid didn’t really register as a disaster for a lot of people.

    Nuclear power is such a no-brainer to me, but it sounds ‘scary’ and lots of people don’t understand it, which makes it even more scary. Plus, of course the fossil fuel industry propaganda and lobbying, and the memory of people who know other people who used to work in coal towns and had pretty decent lives. Or the “what about nuclear waste!”-crap that always comes up. Yes, nuclear waste is a thing, but let’s put it next to all the damaging crap that coal mines produce, accumulated. It’s way worse.

    Anyway. It’s hard to fight all that, even when rationally, statistically, nuclear power should be a no-brainer. Edit: and there is no political will either, it seems. Whether it’s because they love their fossil fuel bribes or because they’re too scared to lose some voters… they’ll never do good things just to do good.

    Edit: just to be clear, it’s definitely not a USA-exclusive problem. I currently live in Germany and their weird relationship to nuclear power is also batshit. All based on fear and bullshit.


  • Ugh this. I hate it so much, in fact, that when I finally (FINALLY) found one that actually, really fit, I spent almost €800 on bras, just to buy a bunch of them and prevent the necessesity to go bra-shopping. Plus, I checked recently and they still have them, so I’ll just order a bunch more and be done for a while again.

    I mean, sometimes I look in the mirror and think ‘well, I guess they look nice’ but god, breasts really are more trouble than they’re worth. Especially in summer. And especially if you don’t have like a ‘standard’ size.




  • How would this even work? How are they going to stop brigading, bots, low effort spam crap for upvotes, massive reposting, etc? How will this actually increase quality of content?

    Also: this would mean giving reddit your actual information, right? How else are they going to pay you? Or are they going to try using crypto and nfts?

    It sounds like a terrible idea to me, tbh. Maybe they should start with paid moderators to deal with all the extra spam, crossposting, brigading and bots that will result from this move.


  • You can think the mother and daughter should face consequences AND at the same time think it’s beyond disgusting that facebook even has this info to begin with AND that they handed it over so easily.

    The problem isn’t that “facebook followed the law” – it’s that they knowingly created a situation where they could follow the law to begin with. If they would stop collecting so much data and just encrypt their chats, there would already be less of an issue.

    I think people have the tendency to think like “well I have nothing to hide, so who cares?” or “well in this case I agree with what happened, so it’s fine.” But laws get changed all the time, government changes all the time. And when a dictator at some point changes some laws, suddenly facebook is ‘following the law’ by giving law enforcement information on who is atheist, or gay, or what books you like, what your political opinions are, etc. They’d still be “following the law” – but just because something is law doesn’t make it right and imo it’s terrifying that companies who have so much money and power (and with it you would hope: responsibility) don’t seem to have any scrupules regarding working with government/LE.