Google is quickly approaching a fucking unusable state
So I started using duckduckgo a little over a year ago. At my research job I was advised to be careful about what I googled (versus looking up in reference documents), because Google is data mining all of us and the company is concerned that Google might sell data on what we are searching about to competitors. Which is its own level of creepy cyber dystopian hell.
Anyway I figured Iād just bypass that entire problem by using a search engine which didnāt datamine me, a thing which apparently never occurred to our data security team because Google has sunk its claws into every aspect of our lives. And at first it felt a little bit clunky because it has different searching priorities than Google and I found myself having to relearn subtleties of search term optimization and how to parse results which I never realized were unique to Google in the first place. Meanwhile at home I was using Google and duckduckgo in unequal proportions because I hadnāt really committed to making the switch you know?
And this means I got to be the frog with one foot in the slowly boiling water and one foot in a nice bath of room temperature water for reference as Google rotted from the inside. I donāt know how long this process has been going on and how much I missed. But from 2022 to 2023, Google has gone to hell. It is almost unusable compared to what it was a year ago.
Nonsense pay to play search engine results now consume more than half of the first page, which we all know, but the stuff below that has gotten less and less useful too. Itās gone from duckduckgo being a slightly less powerful search engine (with a bit of a learning curve that compounds the effect) to being objectively head and shoulders better than Google, and itās not because duckduckgo has gotten better! In just over a year!
I feel almost crazy because I donāt think I would have noticed it if I hadnāt had one foot in and one foot out of Google like I have, simply because of how often we all use Google and how slow that makes the enshittification process from search to search. But itās real! Google has gotten so much worse! It is eating itself alive!
At least seven bodies of forcibly displaced Palestinians, including children, who were āshot point-blankā, were recovered at the Shadia Abu Ghazala School in north Gaza
ā Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) December 26, 2023
while gaza is much bloodier, gaza has journalists reporting daily. as a journalist you will be targeted viciously but itās a delayed risk because the enemy isnāt on ground. your enemies are cowards who plot and kill you from afar.
in sudan itās impossible to report anything because the enemy is walking down your street (if not in your house) like rabid dogs. you will be shot on sight. itās an immediate risk. there is no time to capture or comment on anything. whatever information you put out will be your first and last.
in sudan, the updates come from the warring factions filming themselves, not from civilians. and you can imagine the bias and inaccuracy of their egotistical daily vlogs and official statements.
which is why itās more imperative than ever to follow Sudanese creators and journalists who do report on the little information that does come out.
disclaimer: palestinian press also deal with immediate risks when confronted with IDF on-ground.
Girl same. Thatās how every Sudani feels.
But the reality is that theyāre fighting the civilians. Both factions have the common goal of a mass exodus in Sudan so they can regain power and leave us too tattered to ever think of rising up again (I.e. 2019 revolution that ousted the 30 year dictatorship).
But the 2 factions are nothing without their sugar daddies (USA, UK, U*E, KSA, Israel)
The best we can do is raise awareness to pressure them to stop the fuckery. Same as Palestine, the road to liberation is one. Protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and making politicians face reality.
“Blank is not a zionist, they just acknowledge Israel’s right to exist!” Acknowledging Israel’s “right to exist” has ALWAYS been the definition of zionism. Yes, even if you’re “critical of the government”. Yes, even if you “feel sorry” for Gaza.
The reason zionists (who claim they aren’t zionists, they just support Israel’s right to exist) are suddenly bending backwards and doing incredible mental gymnastics to try to convince you that zionist doesn’t mean what it has always meant and that instead it purely means “people who are cheering on the genocide” is that these zionists are trying to put distance between themselves with the “racist, bloodthirsty ones” because they don’t want to confront that they are and have always been complicit in this genocide by acknowledging and normalizing the establishment of a settler-colonial project, by seeing ANY “right” to this ethnostate, by claiming there is any worth or good in apartheid. You ARE a zionist, and there’s blood on your hands.
Being anti-zionist means you acknowledge that Israel does NOT have a right to exist. Full stop. You cannot say you’re anti-zionist and say anything that implies that Israel can and should exist either now or in the future.
And yes, this goes for every single settler-colonial regime around the world.
^Exactly so. There is no non-violent version of Israel. Whatever “nice” Israel you’re picturing still exists on stolen land that was acquired through ethnic cleansing and forced displacement. Every inch of it. Israel’s existence is inherently violent.
By justifying its existence, by arguing that there’s any way for Israel to exist without harming the land and its people, you paved the way for what is happening today and what has been happening for decades.
I really thought refusers were doing like Hard Time; like draft dodging in the US was 5 yrs and fine, so I thought refusers were itsnotreal were doing AT LEAST that to deserve all this oohing and aahing… 30 days. A month. Um.
People are on Twitter yelling at a Palestinian woman for not being impressed by an “ally” whose son served in the iof. The plot! It’s missing!
Itās good that 18 year old denied service and Iām crushed that theyāre being imprisoned but like. Iām not leaving anyone over here in America for not shooting marginalized people, like. Yay, youāre a person with a moral compass.
30 days in prisonā¦that sucks but um. Girl idk. We shouldnāt be worshiping and idolizing white people for doing thee bare minimum
Someone pointed out that calling refusers āheroesā is a round about way of returning to the āwell they were just following ordersā mindset and like, yeah!
Looking through Twitter and being Horrified at people being mad at Palestinians for not sucking the dick of everyone with basic human decency
It is fuckin insane the sheer disregard everyone has for covid and how utterly bizarre it feels to be actively losing credibility in people’s eyes just because I take it seriously. Everyone thinks I’m being “silly” but I literally was in the middle of getting a degree in microbiology when this shit started, I was literally taking immunology and virology courses when the pandemic hit, it’s not like I have a poor understanding of the topic. I’ve been watching the death rate and keeping up with the new variants and vaccines and symptoms and I can bring up all the sources I want but it feels useless, nobody wants to hear it, nobody gives a shit.
Literally today a friend did not come for Xmas dinner because we asked them to test before coming and that “minor cold” turned out to be covid. “I feel well, I’d have never guessed covid unless you’d asked me to test!” And that’s exactly the issue. It is NOT a cold. It affects the body in a very different manner but people are equating ‘not feeling too bad’ with ‘not really doing any harm’ and this is Not True.
even asymptomatic infections can cause permanent damage. COVID kills T cells like HIV, in addition to brain damage and multi system organ damage.
ALT
