He / They

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of piece? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?

    Are you asking me to speak to this? I can’t speak to the personal motivations or viewpoints of either Native American tribes, nor of a myriad of Asian cultures. But I can say that I don’t personally believe it is either fair, appropriate, or necessary for Buddhists to stop using a symbol they’ve used for thousands of years in order to distance themselves from a group they are not in fact associated with.

    groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that

    I think you may have fallen prey to a false narrative around this. From what I’m seeing, the “whirling log” (the native american symbol that resembles the swastika) was mostly dropped due to pressure from white people over their own white guilt and the politics around Nazism, not out of some collective spontaneous show of empathy, and never actually fell out of use completely, and is now being actively reclaimed by various native americans.

    During World War II, Eskeets said the U.S. government asked the Navajo to “hold off” on using the symbol. So for an unknown amount of time, Eskeets said metalsmiths, weavers and other artists stopped incorporating it into their work. That helped create the misconception that items with a whirling log are no longer being made at all.

    It’s apparently still being actively used by the Navajo, as well, but they tend not to talk to white people about it since people can’t have a normal one.

    The sacredness of the “whirling log” makes it challenging to get some Native Americans to speak to non-Natives about the subject. That’s according to Edison Eskeets, a trader at The Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site and the oldest operating trading post on the Navajo Nation and in the United States. Several Navajo artists were contacted and either didn’t respond to requests or hung up the phone when asked to speak about the symbol’s significance.

    Eskeets said the whirling log represents humanity and life and is still used for healing in hundreds of Navajo ceremonies.

    “It kind of has everything on it,” he said. “It represents the constellation, the moon, the sun, the equinox. It’s down to the earth, the four directions, the rotation of mother earth, all of that … it’s the rotation of life.”


  • But the old meanings are all dead.

    I’m sorry, but this is completely false. The swastika is still used all across the world for its original meanings. If you’d said this about e.g. Norse symbols like the Valknut or Sonnenrad, I’d be 1000% on board with you, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve not been to anywhere that Buddhism is common if you think everyone associates the swastika with Nazism.

    There are specific versions of the swastika that Nazi Germany created that are only associated with Nazism, such as the 45-degree rotated swastika, or obviously any swastika embedded within another German military symbol, but to assert that the basic symbol itself has been co-opted is very Euro-centric.


  • Sidebar, but the nominees for this year’s TGAs are ridiculous. It’s the same ~7 games shoehorned into every category they can, and a few others sprinkled in where they can’t.

    You’d think there were only like 20 games that released this year that were good.

    Some games that released this year, but snubbed by TGA in favor of kissing up to the same games n times over:

    • Hades 2
    • V Rising
    • Satisfactory
    • Mouthwashing
    • Factorio: Space Age
    • SULFUR
    • Rise of the Golden Idol


  • I like this. 👍🏼

    We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful.

    We are all well aware there are Nazis out there right now, and text is more than sufficient to convey reminders of that.

    I think it’s also worth noting that a lot of media pictures of Nazi/ Christofascist/ RWNJ marches use photographic techniques (e.g. low-angle shots) for dramatic effect to drive clicks, rather than a more direct and undramatic approach, and it’s hard to see that as anything but giving them exactly the kind of attention they want.

    Charlottesville was a great example of this.

    Likewise, one article about the Ohio march showed the Nazis through a cafe window, as people inside looked on, with the camera set low against a table. The photographer was trying to convey a juxtaposition of Nazis against people living their “everyday lives”, but if they’d just taken a picture of the 10 assholes at face level, walking down the sidewalk, it would have better conveyed the reality of them being a tiny group of Nazi cosplay losers.

    “We’re coming to your neighborhood” is the message that Nazis want to sell, and media is doing it for them for free half the time.






  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.orgHow's your week going, Beeple?
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    9 hours ago

    It depends how you want to use it. This isn’t strictly a NAS controller, it’s also running the Jellyfin server. If I was going for a “pure” local NAS, I’d probably just set up Samba.

    Technically, for this project I actually used an rPi-like, the FriendlyElec CM3588, so it’s a little beefier than a normal rPi. It’s got the 4 M.2 SSD slots, which let’s me RAID the drives if I want, as well.



  • I think it’s important for groups of people to be able to choose to ban propaganda and misinformation, because propaganda is not simply information being imparted, it’s an entire ecosystem of deceptive methods to disseminate information and to alter your perception without you realizing.

    If it were calling for the EU banning X solely because they don’t like Musk’s shitty personal opinions, I’d agree with you, but they cite the disinformation, misinformation, and outright propaganda that the platform is being used to spread, and I think that’s perfectly valid.

    Take 2 scenarios:

    5 million actual people telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.

    500 thousand actual people, plus 4.5 million bot accounts telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.

    In reality, you don’t even need the bot accounts to outnumber the real users if you control the algorithms that determine what people see, which is exactly the situation that X is in right now.

    tl;dr This isn’t about banning the viewpoints themselves, it’s about banning a platform that deceptively alters visibility of viewpoints to manipulate people.

    Banning things you don’t like is not a solution

    Tell that to Musk; X bans TONS of people over their viewpoints.


  • t3rmit3@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.orgHow's your week going, Beeple?
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    24 hours ago
    • Getting over a pretty debilitating flu that lasted 4-ish days
    • End of this week I take a 2-day train ride, which I’m looking forward to SO MUCH, so I’ll have senioritis at work all week
    • Finished up a couple different hands-on projects that all went amazingly
      • dremeled a non-safety-cut P365X-Macro frame for thumb and magazine safeties all by eye
      • finished assembling a rPi NAS for my dad’s place that has spotty internet, so he can have a local ‘streaming’ service with movies and tv shows





  • I think it would probably become “2X” in that case, given the “exploit” and “exterminate” parts. :P

    Against the Storm is sort of a citybuilder/ 4X hybrid, that’s all about a bunch of fantasy species (humans, beavers, lizards, foxes, and harpies) working together to reclaim the world from this (un)natural blight.

    The Bustling World is an RPG/ Citybuilder/ 4X hybrid that looks pretty interesting, but is not out yet.

    I can’t really think of a 4X that leans towards the Grand Strategy side, that isn’t pretty combat-heavy. Distant Worlds: Universe can be played without focusing on combat, but it’s definitely still there.