Pocket Realities

Tiny Illustrated Sci-fi Stories:

It’s a shame this is on phony stark’s vanity site, I’d probably be into it.

Far-right group gives Ivermectin to kids with autism — and it’s making them sick | Boing Boing:

It’s bad enough when the Q-infused MAGA mob is in charge of the country. But put them in charge of children, and things get downright sick. At least with a group of hundreds of parents that meet on the far-right app Telegram, according to Vice, who encourage each other to treat their children living with autism and other disabilities with Ivermectin — a toxic medication meant to deworm animals.

Even when these children come down with severe side effects from taking Ivermectin — blurry vision, nausea, vomiting, pain, seizures — parents in this group, called “Learning to Fly,” are told to just have their kids push through it.

Monsters.

10 principles of disability justice | Boing Boing:

At the beginning, and throughout the first two years of the ongoing, yet to be over, COVID-19 pandemic, ideas pioneered by disability justice organizations were finally given credence by larger swaths of the population. This is no longer the case. Given the ongoing pandemic, and the disproportionate short and long-term consequences for the communities most directly impacted, the insight provided by people on the front lines of eugenicist medical policies should be revisited. Particularly with regards to health-based discrimination and social ostracization of at risk people with auto-immune or other precarious health issues.

America discovers the true meaning of ‘an armed society is a polite society’:

Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old in Kansas City, was shot when he knocked on the wrong door while looking for his twin siblings. Twenty-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed when the car she was in turned into the wrong driveway while looking for a friend. Two cheerleaders—Payton Washington, 18, and Heather Roth, 21—were shot when one of them accidentally opened the wrong door in a parking lot. Six-year-old Kinsley White, her father, and the father of a friend were shot after children went into a neighbor’s yard to retrieve a basketball that had rolled away.

All of these incidents happened in a week. In that same week, five people died and 32 others were injured in a shooting rampage at a Sweet 16 birthday party. Four men were shot when someone took offense to their painting over graffiti outside an ice cream shop. Four more were shot when an argument got heated on a residential street corner. And those are only a selection of the 14 mass shootings—those in which four or more people were wounded or killed—over that seven-day period.

The aphorism “an armed society is a polite society” is a frequently used saying among gun supporters on the right. It’s also been featured on banners, buttons, and T-shirts from the National Rifle Association. But no one ever seems to ask what it really means.

This is what it means. All of this. It means in a society with more guns than people, even the slightest provocation ends with someone getting shot.

The quote in question is a Heinlein quote taken WAY out of context and even in context it was part of a satiric viewpoint that wasn’t meant to be emulated… (Which acutally is a trend with Heinlein quotes)

Daring Fireball: If You Come at the King:

We still don’t know much about Humane’s device, as Wong’s colleague at Inverse Ian Carlos Campbell notes in this follow-up piece. But everything we do know seems positioned around the notion of relieving us of the burden of being tethered to our iPhones all day every day. The fundamental flaw in Humane’s entire premise, as I see it, is that people don’t feel burdened by their phones. People love them — especially iPhone owners. And those who are ambivalent or even downright antipathetic toward their phones surely aren’t the sort of people who are interested in a newfangled laser-projecting AI-driven chest-badge computer.

I wrote about this all the way back in 2010, in the era of the iPhone 4, when Microsoft debuted a high-budget ad campaign for their answer to the iPhone, Windows Phone 7. The ads were very entertaining — particularly this one — but the whole premise was fundamentally flawed. Microsoft’s message was that if you switched to Windows Phone you wouldn’t need to stare at your phone all the time. The problem is that people stare at their phones all the time not because they have to but because they want to.

“Finally, you can replace this thing that you despise” is a powerful marketing message. “Finally, you can replace this thing that you love” is not.

Most people who seem most exicted about this seem to be Android users who hate actually using their phones.