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You'll need to set aside a good chunk of time to read this but it's pretty fascinating and ends on a really hopeful note. Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages
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Jun 4, 2020 23:44
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COVID-19 Can Last for Several Months
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Jun 5, 2020 22:27
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Inceltown posted:The Real Lord of the Flies. That’s really cool. Apparently there was a book about it released this year and there’s a documentary coming out, but it’s definitely super odd that it never took hold in the public imagination like you’d expect it would have
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Jun 6, 2020 08:08
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The Looming Bank Collapse
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Jun 10, 2020 18:29
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Jun 11, 2020 06:25
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Not sure if this counts as a Longform Article but it's long and worth reading through. Jacob Holdt's "Roots of Oppression". and 
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Jun 12, 2020 04:44
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https://twitter.com/No_Little_Plans/status/1281981054639919104
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Jul 11, 2020 17:38
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/maga...go/?arc404=true Hilarious wild ride about a bullshit charity Instagram
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Aug 4, 2020 21:35
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Has anyone read this article - and I can only remember it vaguely - it was a long-form one about the robots used in the military and how the units they're with anthropomorphise them? I remember something about one unit getting in trouble for taking it fishing off-duty, and something about how the scientists showed off one that was centipede-like and made for absorbing bombs but the person watching got upset seeing all the legs blown off? I can't give more of a description but I think I got it from here or the unnerving thread.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:40
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The Last of the Zoroastrians. Zoroastrianism does not allow conversions, and excludes the children of Zoroastrian women who marry out. The child of a mixed marriage goes back to India on a tour sponsored by the Zoroastrian community, and finds the community dying out.
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Aug 6, 2020 16:30
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Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
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Aug 6, 2020 16:50
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That's a pretty good one, thanks for posting it. Immunology was one of my favorite course in my molecular biology program. My teacher was this short, fat guy who always wore a hat in class and had a ponytail. He'd walk around the huge classroom chewing gum, talking really fast and calling on random people to answer questions or read from the slides. He also played WoW with the PhD students that worked in the lab I was doing my research work in. I've given up trying to explain immunology to people.
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Aug 6, 2020 17:39
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coolusername posted:Has anyone read this article - and I can only remember it vaguely - it was a long-form one about the robots used in the military and how the units they're with anthropomorphise them? I remember something about one unit getting in trouble for taking it fishing off-duty, and something about how the scientists showed off one that was centipede-like and made for absorbing bombs but the person watching got upset seeing all the legs blown off? Was it this? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/funerals-for-fallen-robots/279861/
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Aug 6, 2020 20:41
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Scaramouche posted:Was it this? Yes, that's it! Thank you!
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Aug 8, 2020 14:19
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Oh my god I thought I was just supremely unlucky. It’s weirdly almost a relief to see this is happening to other people too .
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Aug 8, 2020 15:03
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J Detan posted:Oh my god I thought I was just supremely unlucky. It’s weirdly almost a relief to see this is happening to other people too . There's a lot of stuff on Twitter that's posted under #longcovid. Might be worth taking a look and seeing if you can find resources nearby.
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Aug 8, 2020 15:53
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Hi if anyone has more articles about the loving bonkers rear end explosion in suddenly caring about child trafficking plz post I found this and it wasn’t too bad but god, I’m at the equally horrified/fascinated stage of this conspiracy https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/save-the-children-qanon-child-trafficking
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Aug 10, 2020 17:45
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teen witch posted:Hi if anyone has more articles about the loving bonkers rear end explosion in suddenly caring about child trafficking plz post It's worth checking out what kind of discourse in the comments these types of stories are generating. e.g., quote:i dont have links on hand but increasingly over past, five or so, maybe more, years there has been escalating hostility and dismissiveness towards feminism and the oppression of women as a class. part of that is the seemingly deliberate misinterpretation of black feminist theory like identity politics and intersectionality, where the former is demonized similarly by conservatives and leftists alike, and the latter is weaponized in order to dissolve the idea of women as a coherent class. you’ve also seen the invocation of terms specific to feminism to describe bigotry or sometimes, any random situation that has absolutely nothing to do with feminism at all, like when the actress evangeline lilly said she wouldn’t quarantine or whatever, and people called it white feminism, or that time i saw some nonbinary lesbian get called a terf for saying “my vagina likes other vaginas.” neither of these situations had anything to do with feminism, nor did either person identify themselves as feminists, and yet these incidents were explicitly associated with feminism, which helps to cultivate a negative connotation. you can also see this in that one time someone on here called donald trump a terf (????????) or when someone calls ann coulter or whatever random conservative woman a “white feminist.” its insanity. Some people say "never read the comments", but comments can tell you as much as a story itself by reflecting how the narrative is being digested and what's being taken from it.
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Aug 10, 2020 17:54
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She Helped Wreck the News Business. Here’s Her Plan to Fix It
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Aug 13, 2020 16:10
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Pick posted:It's worth checking out what kind of discourse in the comments these types of stories are generating. As a trans non binary person who is much closer to male I feel like we're a chohort of men adjacent mascs no one thinks of. Anyone got any long reads about trans men and nonbinary folks????
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Aug 14, 2020 05:36
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Pick posted:It's worth checking out what kind of discourse in the comments these types of stories are generating. Also the suggestion that someone calling Donald Trump a terf is in the same ballpark as a self-identified feminist being accused of the same for insisting that their orientation is genital-centric tbh Really tho just lol if being yelled at by a trans person once broke you so bad that you're wading into the comments of an article exploring new age Q freak fascists to dump a wall of poo poo about how young feminists who point out and criticise the mass fetishisation and commodification of "youth" as a desirable quality in women are actually the REAL pizzagaters "its insanity" indeed. Get the gently caress offline jfc.
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Aug 16, 2020 17:37
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The Prophecies of Q A lot of the people who are batshit about child trafficking are involved with QAnon, and we're probably getting a congressperson who believes in it next year. It's some really crazy stuff but it's popular enough that you can't just dismiss it as nuttery. quote:QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.
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Aug 16, 2020 17:51
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ultrafilter posted:The Prophecies of Q e: Here's something legitimately nice and gentle. How Two Kentucky Farmers Became Kings Of Croquet, The Sport That Never Wanted Them RC and Moon Pie has a new favorite as of 17:59 on Aug 16, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 17:55
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The point was it a person was not a self-identified feminist, that people are identified as feminists when they're doing something bad to fix it by association. Even when that person has expressed no explicit interest in or association with that political movement, which is what it is. Being a woman does not automatically make you a feminist.
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Aug 16, 2020 18:49
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ultrafilter posted:The Prophecies of Q https://www.thedailybeast.com/qanon-promotes-pedo-ring-conspiracy-theories-now-theyre-stealing-kids?source=articles&via=rss It’s also gonna get worse. QAnon followers are increasingly trying to kidnap children (usually their own) and it’s starting to look less and less like lone wolf scenarios, with other QAnons often sheltering them from the law
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Aug 16, 2020 19:15
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Thanks, RC and Moon Pie, that was lovely. Everybody else, go read it.
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Aug 16, 2020 20:26
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Pick posted:The point was it a person was not a self-identified feminist, that people are identified as feminists when they're doing something bad to fix it by association. Even when that person has expressed no explicit interest in or association with that political movement, which is what it is. Being a woman does not automatically make you a feminist. There are some salient points about feminist ontology in there but it's mostly just an unprompted mass drop of total shithead second-wave talking points as regurgitated by someone whose primary activist space is the Discourse part of instagram, sorry.
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Aug 17, 2020 00:56
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You're not engaging with the points though, you're saying that because you saw something that you can squint and call a red flag, that therefore the argument is made, nothing they say can be accurate, and that you get to skip to the win scenario. Even if their comment has nothing to do with the red flag? I completely agree with their point that there's an obsession with "pedophilia" in situations that are far more characterized by gendered violence, which is considered loaded and naughty even though gendered violence is a stone cold observable phenomenon. I don't know when "Discourse" became worse than... non-discourse. If you cannot articulate your position, and use rhetorical cheats to exempt yourself from the attempt, then you may maintain your perspective but you have no capacity to affect change among a broader population. It's the same kind of walled thinking I saw among Southern Baptists when I lived in the South ("this can't be true because the speaker doesn't go to my church enough and is therefore evil and is therefore always wrong"), and I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now.
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Aug 17, 2020 01:06
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Pick posted:You're not engaging with the points though, you're saying that because you saw something that you can squint and call a red flag, that therefore the argument is made, nothing they say can be accurate, and that you get to skip to the win scenario. Even if their comment has nothing to do with the red flag? it’s because “discourse” itself is a rhetorical cheat designed to delegitimize certain forms of expression as being too vulgar or lacking in decorum or otherwise not being credentialed enough to engage in debate; it’s trafficking exclusively in opinions that have been consensus built by your communities rather than what you actually think, except instead of a church or fox news it’s whatever your favorite intellectuals on twitter or whatever are saying the reason discourse has declined is because many political issues are issues of human rights and suffering, and the need to articulate yourself clearly in order to prove that you deserve to live and have rights is pretty insulting; people shouldn’t have to jump through four rhetorical hoops just to say that maybe feminists who traffic in gender essentialism are arguing in bad faith and maybe aren’t really feminists. with regards to that specific comment, that person seems to be advocating to unite all women under feminism and is backbiting against intersectionality; it’s essentially the feminist equivalent of class reductionism (gender reductionism?), takes a detour into “actually kinky sex is all just a reproduction of power imbalances and sex work is exclusively exploitation”, and she wraps it up with denying the role of toxic masculinity’s effects on men. whether or not you believe in the repressive nature of men towards other men (and in most modern feminist discourse it is in fact A Thing) or the validity of sex work as a career or the needs of women to supersede those of people of color or poor people it suggests a certain through-line that, whether or not this person identifies as a feminist, they do adhere to a pretty consistent internal logic that aligns with second wave feminism and also whether or not she’s a feminist she’s reiterating a lot of talking points that people do not care for, regardless of popular discourse (which, again, is not aligned with this person’s way of thinking), and as such people are not required to engage with their ideas in good faith. it is not especially practical to listen to everyone all the time in full just to see if their ideas pass your litmus test for acceptable thought also that comment is just a fuckin wall of text; i get it’s the longreads thread but hoo boy It’s a doozy i don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to engage with it
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Aug 23, 2020 14:51
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I think this thread can handle discussion and derails as long as it stays civil, which you managed.
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Aug 24, 2020 01:48
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Declan MacManus posted:it’s because “discourse” itself is a rhetorical cheat designed to delegitimize certain forms of expression as being too vulgar or lacking in decorum or otherwise not being credentialed enough to engage in debate; it’s trafficking exclusively in opinions that have been consensus built by your communities rather than what you actually think, except instead of a church or fox news it’s whatever your favorite intellectuals on twitter or whatever are saying
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Aug 24, 2020 08:26
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The Broken Algorithm That Poisoned American Transportation
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Aug 24, 2020 16:00
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An article about the form-meaning debate in natural language processing models: https://blog.julianmichael.org/2020/07/23/to-dissect-an-octopus.html
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Aug 29, 2020 01:22
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John D'Agata's What Happens There is about Levi Presley, a kid in Las Vegas who jumped from the Stratosphere Hotel. It's about the suicide rate in Las Vegas, how inadequate the suicide prevention is there, the writer's intuition of a sadness behind the glitz, and, finally, Presley's last day: staying late at a party, maybe smoking weed, losing a Tae Kwon Do tournament, arguing with his parents, and going to the tower. Several years after being commissioned by Harper's, the original essay was published in an annotated version as The Lifespan of a Fact, with a credit to Jim Fingal. You might want to read the essay before you read on. Harper's rejected the essay because of factual inaccuracies; The Believer picked it up a couple of years later, and Jim Fingal was the intern assigned to fact-check it. The Lifespan of a Fact is D'Agata's original essay (not quite the same as the final version), with commentary surrounding a few lines of essay per page. Fingal checks facts and notes things D'Agata made up, bent, or simplified for the essay – there’s plenty of these, some minor, some impossible to verify, some pretty big – and D’Agata defends himself. Occasionally they argue. The book is billed as a meditation on the relationship between “truth” and “accuracy”, conveying D’Agata’s vision of the slippery nature of existence and the fictionality of fact. It’s not awfully good at this, though, because while Fingal is nitpicking, D’Agata’s defences are mostly pretty weak. He’ll argue that something sounds better, when the difference is tiny, and some of his assertions make him sound like an idiot. Having green eyes makes you more likely to kill yourself? No word in Latin for suicide? Not only is that wrong, but the next page describes sixth-century cardinals voting to outlaw suicide… Sometimes he calls things acclaimed and then admits he’s the one who did it, or makes contradictory arguments. At one point he defends using a Geocities website as a source for a weird legend about the origin of Tae Kwon Do. A lot of the time his defence is that he wants to present his view of things, which wasn’t great in 2003 but has aged, er, poorly. “Las Vegas is messed up” is one thing; what if his feeling was “weed makes you kill yourself”, or Tae Kwon Do does, or that Presley’s parents were to blame? And what’s the point of using facts if you don’t care if they’re accurate? It’s not that great an essay either, I think. It’s not that well written and rather clichéd and exploitative in the way it uses D’Agata’s and Presley’s real lives. There seems to be another layer to the book. The discussions seem rather stylised, and the pair are happy to publish the book together and offer joint thanks to their editor. How fictionalised is this layer of the book? I’m not sure, but there's an obvious artistic purpose to it and it doesn't make light of a boy's death; so if I’m right about this, it’s a better argument for bending the truth than most of what D’Agata says.
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Sep 10, 2020 06:15
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“CrossFit is my church” How fitness classes provide the meaning that religion once did. I thought this was interesting when it first came out two years ago, but now that I've seen QAnon emerge as a new religious movement I think maybe it's worth revisiting.
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Sep 10, 2020 17:36
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“I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation
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Sep 15, 2020 03:58
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Buying Myself Back. Trying to reclaim your own image.
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Sep 16, 2020 03:59
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Tony Abbott posted:You could drop me in the bush and I’d feel perfectly confident navigating my way out, looking at the sun and direction of rivers and figuring out where to go, but this! Hah! Why you shouldn't post pics of your boarding pass online
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Sep 17, 2020 06:10
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goddamn this was good.
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Sep 18, 2020 23:29
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FinCEN Files Show Criminals Moved Billions As Banks Watched
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Sep 20, 2020 19:59
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