Victor Ganata

It’s basically Deep Space Nine.

There are plenty of cynical/doomer ways to interpret this, but I choose to Pollyannishly interpret this to mean we really do have a common cause with Southeast and South Asia

…and that various people with various degrees of power within the corporation aren't communicating and are running around like a chicken with their head cut off

In the absence of evidence, instead of concocting a coherent reason for why a multinational corporation with literally over a thousand subsidiaries worldwide would do something that seems hasty and not well thought out, consider the fact that a corporation is not a unitary entity…

If they're going to nail you anyway eventually, you might as well make it as difficult and irritating for them as possible

On one hand, yes, if they really wanted to nail you, they wouldn't need a pretext, they'd just cook up some "evidence" with an LLM and railroad you. On the other hand, why are you making their job easier by giving them info they don't have to fabricate?

I can't help but feel like any advice predicated on the notion that this regime will act like laws actually bind it and that they won't weaponize laws to harm you is prima facie going to turn out to be bad advice

Some dudes really aren't cut out for allyship, I guess

My mom who left along during the brain drain because she was working as a nurse and could only really afford a cup of rice for breakfast everyday? My dad who barely got out right after Marcos declared martial law? All useless bullshit that doesn't count and won't help in the dark times ahead of us?

Wait, so the stories passed down by my (very recent!) ancestors don't count as knowledge? Like my granduncles who were subjected to the Bataan Death March? My grandfather who got recruited by Philippine guerrillas who was promised benefits from the U.S. but then got denied by the Rescission Act?

Feels like people gotta start letting go of that American Exceptionalism. "It can't happen here!"

Bro, are you absolutely sure about that, especially since lots of stuff we thought couldn't happen here are in fact happening here?

At this point, why be afraid that "they're looking for a reason" to murder us when it's clear they never needed a reason—they'll just do it—and they don't need to wait for any evidence

The thing is—the right doesn't need a cassus belli. They've been conducting a war since January 20, escalating with the deployment of the National Guard *and* U.S. Marines against unarmed civilians. Sure, this is pouring gasoline on the flames, but that fire was already burning

"You're the window to my wall You're the sweat that drips down my balls. Skeet skeet."

Feels like the appropriate place to repost this

Some day historians will point out that the strategy of "enact Republican policies but try to be less outwardly cruel about it" was the stupidest strategy that helped lose elections and hastened the fall of the U.S.

But a lot of people don't realize things *have* been falling apart for decades now. You can never really know when an empire is in its death throes

The Roman Empire didn't fall all at once (despite what pop culture says) Collapse takes decades (and in the case of the Roman Empire, centuries) to hollow out what made a place prosperous

I am almost 50 years old and I only recently accepted that my experience as a Filipino American and as a Filipino of the diaspora is completely valid

I know it's a year late, but there's no reason why we still can't have the Bell Riots

My wife having to explain "I have one daughter" to me multiple times because I had such a hard time understanding it is the closest to Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra I have ever felt

Fear is the mind killer, y'all

A person who doesn't know what it feels like to start something new and unfamiliar that they suck at, to have to start with the basic unsexy boring stuff instead of skipping past that, is a person who is going to suck.

The thing that's especially wack is that even if a doctor plus AI is better at detecting cancer, we have no idea if this combo actually leads to better outcomes. Meanwhile, doctors are straight up lobotomizing themselves

…then quickly followed by the other client saying "The only thing I hate more than racism is allegations of racism" 🤣

It's the day after I read this and ended up reading a summary of the press conference and I still can't get over "[My client] is being misconstrued as racist" quickly followed by "[My client's account on Twitter that posts racist material] does not count" 😂

Yes, I know LLMs are not meant for counting and that they're merely another tool that can be used for certain things, but maybe it's valid criticism that they can't count when they're being marketed as "artificial *general* intelligence" meant to replace humans who typically can count just fine

"Why do you bring up race all the time?" I just walked into the room, motherfucker 😂🤷🏽‍♂️

As a testament to how much my PoC conservative relatives had drunk the Kool-Aid and were well on their way to fully gaslighting me about U.S. exceptionalism when I was a kid, I didn't realize until embarrassingly recently that apparently just *having* too much melanin was inherently political

Standing up for the smallest of minorities is important because when you accept the premise that one group are expendable because small or ‘insignificant’, you have accepted the idea of the expendability of human life in general, and the enemy will use your acquiescence to pick off yet more.