1. Stop calling it “the fediverse”

Don’t fuck with the paws

Everyone wants to belong

Everyone wants allies, close friends, brothers and sisters they can rely on and love and support

In the modern world we have pale imitations and crap. There is no village, there is only a dim landscape through which we shuffle, largely alone.

And so there is craving for some substitute, because the under structure is unfulfilled

Real bed pillow

Once you try it you will never go back to the horseshoe neck strain weak sauce

What are the lions even gonna do?

“Haha I will bite some of you! And then sit there doing that thing where I make a chewing motion with my tongue out and shake my head vigorously, because it isn’t working!”

Ants all the way man

Yeah. They used to be the OG good stuff. No more. 😢

Breyer’s has become an unrecognizable watery filth

BOB: Well, when you have TIME magazine do a cover story on Palestinian rights you see that the perception of the problem is changing.

Any fuckin day now

Filled with self advocacy, more like

Shelter cats have limited avenues for expressing their disagreements, and it sounds like he’s being as measured and puncture-free in voicing his opinion as he feels like he needs to be

The interfaces are relatively modern too, with VGA and a PS/2 keyboard.

Yeah, you’re right. It looks like there’s a consensus now that the population in the Gulag was way lower than I thought. Fair play. There’s also a chart year by year, in the “history” section, which I missed.

If it was 2.4 million in 1953, out of total population of 179 million, that’s 1,340 in detention per 100k. The modern US is only 40% as bad as the literal Gulag at its peak. Fuckin hooray.

Yeah; that’s probably why there is such a lack of data. The period for which there are estimates vary by a factor of 20 between low and high estimates. 🙁

Ah, got it. I was talking about USSR, not modern Russia. Modern Russia is its own thing and its own brand of horror but not the same as OG Communist USSR which was more what I was trying to highlight.

Yeah. I’m taking the high side of the widely varying estimates of the Gulag population, which in the period of the 1940s range from 3.5 million to 17.6 million depending on who’s doing the estimating.

The Gulag at the peak housed about 7,500 (edit: 1,340) per 100k of the Soviet population.

(And yes, the US’s 531 is still also an atrocity.)

Where did you get 329? I actually couldn’t find any post-Kruschev numbers, but I know after privatization, Russia was pretty competitive with the US’s dystopian nightmare.

Edit: I was way wrong about the size of the Gulag

Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines’s habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US’s prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don’t even make the claim of being “democratic” and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.

Also, I just looked, and I don’t think these numbers are accurate. I think they’re straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.

US Incarceration Rate

List of Countries by Incarceration Rate

The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of hope as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!

Cool now do USSR

Dude you weren’t kidding. “New” was always a pile of ass, and just now I went back to Reddit for a little bit just to poke around and see how “new new” is. It was better for the first two things I clicked on (actually better than both old and new IMO for popping open memes and pictures), and then I clicked on an actual thread, and (1) the thread was clearly a fake story (2) it broke the back button and I couldn’t go anywhere else until it snapped me suddenly back to mbin again.

I decided to take that as a sign

Ha, yeah, I get it. “lol they gay” is usually a joke. In this case it is not, as you mentioned:

In Sparta […] the cropping of the bride’s hair and transvestism likely aimed to transform her temporarily into an adolescent Spartan boy – a less threatening figure to the groom, who probably had made his own transition to adulthood via a close emotional and sexual relationship with an older male

It is just what was up

I was being sarcastic but I was in no way whatsoever joking