Izzy

@isajk

The World's Only True Green Day Fan™, but also the world's *actual* only 24 fan. Interests: maths & physics / rugby and soccer / languages. There is an ongoing genocide against trans people in multiple countries. Please don't forget Gaza. She/her

228 Folgt366 Follower1.517 Posts

Bluesky

trans

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir isajk.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Izzy@isajk· 7d

I never found out because the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I'd be right in there, on day one. We're talking secondary school level here, by the way — and even then I don't think I'd have dabbled much below year ten [...].

Izzy@isajk· Jun 21

"Please use easy words in your books/fics"

Bugs Bunny wearing a condescending expression saying "no".

Izzy@isajk· May 20

This party is too stupid to live.

Polling from YouGov published on Wednesday suggested that more than half of party members say they want the same or more restrictive immigration policies. Just 26% said they wanted a more liberal approach, 44% backed Mahmood’s changes and 18% said they would prefer an even tougher approach.

The poll shows roughly half of Labour members believe the party faces a greater risk of losing votes to Reform. Just 15% think vote losses to the Greens are the bigger issue, and 27% said both pose an equal threat.

Izzy@isajk· May 19

David Graeber, in his essay "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit" no less, argued that one key reason for this is that the neoliberal, bureaucratic model of funding science is handcrafted to stifle scientific advancement and innovation as much as possible.

If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out largely by individuals, with minimal overhead, one can only imagine how much worse it is for physicists. And indeed, as one physicist has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences, even when one does emerge form the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else's flunky, one can expect one's best ideas to be stymied at every point.

"You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work."

That pretty much answers the question of why we don't have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense dictates that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone for a while. Most will probably turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something completely unexpected. If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover.

That's pretty much the system we have now.

Izzy@isajk· May 12

A tweet by Jonathan Lis (@jonlis1), dated 1 November 2022, is shown. It reads: "I would gladly swap the entire population of Albania for the putrid bigots on the Tory benches".

Izzy@isajk· May 9

The picture is a drawing of a man in a field of grass with his eyes closed wearing a contented expression; the caption reads "Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well."

Izzy@isajk· Apr 21

www.owenjones.news/p/it-was-alw...

Izzy@isajk· Mar 13

Words cannot express how pathetic this is. You lived in a big city and it turned you into a stupid, hateful shitbag? You're a gutless fucking weakling! You're a giant fucking baby! I would die of shame if I admitted this aloud.

"Kaschuta is more wry and abstract. She was born in Romania and studied in London, where she lived for a few years, she says, in a "really, really tough neighborhood." That was part of what sent her "careening towards the right-wing," she says. "I saw a lot of crime, and I saw a lot of things that were really not addressed by the police: stabbings, drugs, and so on."

Izzy@isajk· Mar 8

It's 2022. The US President is prolonging a war which is set to cause ruinous inflation as a way to soothe his ego over his failures as a leader. It's 2026. The US President is waging a war which is set to cause ruinous inflation as a way to soothe his ego over his failures as a leader.

A blue humanoid is sitting on a purple rock on a pink rocky planet whose sky is just space illuminated by stars. The humanoid is looking straight at the viewer with a dismayed expression.

Izzy@isajk· Feb 18

A post by dylanh763 that reads:
"Why are y'all so afraid of socialist ideas?

Oh no, staying housed when you're sick!
Oh no, workers rights!
Oh no, livable wages!
Oh no, ending corporate greed!
Oh no, affording food while unemployed!
Oh no, spending time with your family!
Oh no, accessible education!

Like - what kind of society are you even trying to strive for?"

Izzy@isajk· Feb 17

A highly-pixellated Kermit has an arm wrapped around a low-resolution picture of Xi Jinping; he is saying "Ima keep it real with you President Xi: fire when ready".

Izzy@isajk· Jan 27

What a delusional, mendacious cunt. I hate the Labour Party and its every member so much. What ever did we do to deserve having to endure them?

Richard Hermer, the attorney general and a close friend, told a regular private meeting of MPs: “What we are achieving as a government is radical, deeply principled and nothing short of an attempt to rework the state so it is fairer and more equal for all.

Izzy@isajk· Jan 15

Solicitor supremacy 😤

A post by David Allen Green (screen name "dag", handle @davidallengreen.bsky.social) is shown. In it, he says:
"We have a winner.

The answer is David Lloyd George.

There have been many barristers, from Asquith and Attlee to Thatcher, Blair and Starmer. But only one real lawyer.

(Replies now disabled.)"

Izzy@isajk· Jan 14

Not only are trans women real women, they're the realest women. They put in the work. Pull themselves up by the boobstraps. Cis girls are just born into it. Nepo ladies.

Izzy@isajk· Jan 11

"It's beautiful. I've looked at this for five hours now."

Izzy@isajk· Jan 3

Everything that needs to be said about Governor Polio was said here (www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-offici...), and I've enclosed screencaps of the section about him. The only new things are that he's kissed RFK Jr.'s ass in the name of antivaxxism, hence the name.

Now, here’s a change of pace. For most politicians placed at the bottom of a ranking like this, it’s because of one reason: electability. That’s certainly the case for the two figures listed behind this point, and it’s a problem for several after it. It is not, however, a problem for Jared Polis, the man in question here.

Polis is one of the more experienced politicians on this list. He’s served in public office almost continuously for two decades: first on the Colorado State Board of Education, from 2001 to 2007, then as a U.S. House representative for Colorado’s Boulder-based 2nd District, from 2009 to 2019, and most recently as the Governor of Colorado, from 2019 to the present. He is also, quite notably, one of the most prominent openly gay politicians in the country, becoming the first out gay man in American history to win a gubernatorial election with his victory in 2018. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of his career from the perspective of this article is how he has presided over the complete domination of Colorado politics by his party. After Hillary Clinton only carried the state by a mediocre five-point margin in 2016, Polis swept his Republican opponent by 11 points in 2018, a result that flipped the state Senate and gave Colorado Democrats a trifecta. But his moment would truly arrive in 2022, when he won re-election by a crushing 20-point landslide that rivaled the margins seen by the likes of Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis.

Under Polis’ tenure, Colorado Democrats have won control over all of the state’s elected offices for the first time since the Great Depression. They won a supermajority in the state House of Representatives for the first time in 50 years and are just one seat shy of holding one in the state Senate as well. His coattails have helped them at the federal level, too: without Polis winning by as much as he did at the top of the ticket, it’s likely that Democrats never would have managed an upset in Colorado’s newly formed 8th District or come close to defeating Lauren Boebert (whose district Polis won) in the state’s 3rd District. There’s really nothing to complain about here. Even if Polis did benefit from very favorable demographic trends and issue environments in the state, the ability to harness those advantages should not be taken for granted. And, in any case, his numbers still overperform expectations.

So why, then, is Polis ranked so low? The reason is very simple: his ideology. While Polis’ electoral record might rival, or even surpass, the best of this list, he lacks any commitment whatsoever to even a mainstream left-liberal agenda. He is a committed libertarian in all the worst ways, with a record that includes support for private schools, unregulated cryptocurrency, and abolishing his state’s income tax. In the U.S. House, he was a member of the Liberty Caucus, a Tea Party-aligned group that not a single other Democrat joined. While these eccentricities have led Polis to be ahead of his time in the past—most notably on LGBT issues, drug policy, and some aspects of foreign policy—he is hardly alone in his stances on those issues in the Democratic Party of today. As it stands now, his leanings are nothing but massive downsides that could work to a very negative effect in an office as powerful as the U.S. Presidency.

Polis is also seemingly unable to legislate. As successful as he has been at getting Democrats elected alongside him, he has not proven very capable of leading them, often opposing his own party from the right on issues ranging from unions to public housing. And at the same time that other Democratic governors were passing entire agendas off of one-seat majorities, the 2023 Colorado legislative session was an utter debacle. Despite their expansive majorities, Colorado Democrats outright ran out of time before they addressed several major issues, and Polis, seemingly disconnected from what his legislature was up to, would issue a record 10 vetoes against his own party. Given that nothing less than masterful legislative management will be required for any Democratic President to get something out of the inevitably small majorities they will be forced to work with, his performance this year is hardly a promising sign.

Also, he is a redditor who plays League of Legends.

Izzy@isajk· Dec 21

The Spanish word for "party" in the sense of a political organisation is "partido", while the word for the sense of social function is "fiesta". Confusing them is a pretty rookie error to make, right? Except the bloody President of Colombia did! He uses both words for the same sense, even!

A tweet by Gustavo Petro (@petrosgustavo), the President of Colombia, is shown.

The original Spanish is: "Este resultado le daría la victoria en Reino Unido a Jeremy Corbin, amigo personal del progresismo colombiano, y su partido "Su Fiesta" seguido del Partido laborista, los conservadores de últimas. La humanidad necesita ese resultado."

It translates into English as "This [polling] result would mean victory in the United Kingdom for Jeremy Corbyn, a personal friend of Colombian progressivism, and his party 'Your Party', followed by the Labour Party, with the Conservatives in last place. Humanity needs this result."

Izzy@isajk· Dec 17

This is the post in question btw.

Izzy@isajk· Dec 15

Reminds me of the first season of 24. For seventeen episodes, they dance around the painfully obvious fact that David Palmer is a Democrat, until the writers decided "Fuck it" and had his wife say it out loud. It felt a lot more dignified for them to do that than keep up the pretence tbh.

David Palmer, a character from the TV show 24, is shown. He is a black man with short hair wearing a shirt and red tie; he has his arms folded and is wearing a faintly bemused expression. The subtitle, spoken by his wife, who is off-screen, reads "You are the Democratic Party's candidate for president."

Izzy@isajk· Dec 15

And the rest of the things you say are completely orthogonal to the thesis of the article. This a pretty poor show, if I'm being honest. If you're going to be a professional opinion-haver, the least you could do is the bare minimum due diligence on what you're commenting on before commenting on it.

For young Paradox fans during this period with left-wing politics—they did exist, I was one of them—exposure to these kinds of game designs and discourses didn’t really change much about how we thought about the world. We were never going to seriously consider a historical framework that understood states as homogenous entities and wrote off the importance of non-state actors, so we were able to easily (and correctly) conceptualize the depiction of history we saw in the games as intentional abstractions made for gameplay and/or commercial purposes. While the games have had a real influence on left-wing political culture—one can actually map the resurgence of the Industrial Workers of the World this century pretty cleanly onto the popularity of Kaiserreich, a Hearts of Iron mod that prominently features the union—it’s very difficult to construct an argument that they changed things about the way young left-wingers perceive the world. If they did, we wouldn’t have seen progressively-minded modders attempt to add internal complexity to the titles as soon as they learned how to use modding tools.

Izzy@isajk· Dec 15

I mean, could we trouble you to actually *read* it before critiquing it? "Apparently he doesn't even mention that you can play as literal Hitler in HOI4" this is literally said four separate times; see the screencaps.

You probably have a certain idea of how the rest of this article is going to go. After giving you an anecdote that connects the topic of Paradox games to something that’s a) concerning, b) topical and c) related to the Trump administration, I, as a left-wing political writer, will now go on to give a description of Paradox games that is as minimally informative and maximally fear-inducing as possible. With an inelegance that immediately tells Paradox gamers that I have never played any of the titles, I will give a rough, largely incorrect, and hostile overview of grand strategy gaming that presents the entire genre as nothing more than a digital radicalization factory that turns impressionable young people into fascists. It’s not as if I will have a lack of material to work with—not when the company’s most popular title is a World War II simulator that lets you literally play as Hitler. I will then close with some vague handwaving about how fucked up the internet is, imply that the games shouldn’t exist, and then go about my day having provided absolutely no useful information to anyone anywhere.

While I have more than my fair share of my issues with the games, I really do like them a lot, and I do not regard them as far-right schemes meant to drive young people to love Hitler and hate Muslims. That sort of framing may be easy, but it is wrong, and it says nothing about what the popularity of these games among politically-inclined young people actually means.

nstead of a strong, ideologically coherent leader, the right of the late 2010s had Donald Trump, a failing president who hardly seemed to know what he even believed in himself. In the face of all of this, teenage right-wing losers looked inwards and found direction in their greatest passion: spending thousands of hours pretending to be Adolf Hitler in a game that presented him as just another strong world leader.

Despite being a far more recent game, Victoria 3 has never come close to matching Paradox’s Hitler-themed golden goose in players

Izzy@isajk· Dec 11

No dirty deleting the most ridiculous fan fiction of 2025 for you!

A skeet by Tiffany-GreenEyes (@tiffany-greeneyes.bksy.social), dated 11 December 2025, is shown. It reads: "Sort of, it's more like everybody's belongings and everyone's. In true communism, the collective owns and produces everything. There are socially accepted things like, "that's where Fred sleeps, and those are the clothes Fred wears," but if Fred decides to move, that house and those clothes stay...". The screenshot records 84 replies, 46 quotes, and 1 like attacked to this skeet.

Izzy@isajk· Dec 4

A picture is shown of a middle-aged man with a large moustache wearing a green hat, which is emblazoned with a big letter L. He is wearing an expression of tiredness and dismay, and the caption is "FBI guy watching me download my eighth terabyte of mayonnaise slapping noises named "How to make a bomb 101" forcing him to listen to all of it".

Izzy@isajk· Nov 4

Just gonna tap the sign.

A post from my Mastodon account is shown, and it reads: "If a poor person defrauds the British government out of £1 million in benefits, that poor person is a hero, whereas if a rich person defrauds the British government out of £1 million in taxes, that rich person deserves to go to prison. I don't make the rules."

Izzy@isajk· Sep 25

Does this cunt have a single opinion which isn't completely worthless? Why does our society keep paying people to be wrong as a profession? The kakistocracy in action.

An icon for a Financial Times article entitled "Europe's necessary appeasement of Donald Trump" by Janan Ganesh, with an image of a hand reaching up to a mobile of gold stars.

Izzy@isajk· Aug 4

Reminded of that time Thought Slime summarised Yudkowsky in one image, four words, and four symbols.

On the right-hand side of the image is Eliezer Yudkowsky, a white man with short dark hair and full facial hair and glasses; on the left-hand side is written "Scientist? Researcher? Philosopher? Smart dude?" each with a question mark and a red X next to it.

Izzy@isajk· Jul 22

A figure of a torso is shown with the face of the England women's footballer Michelle Agyemang. The torso is wearing a blue and gold rosette bearing the text "Brought it back again award".

Izzy@isajk· Jun 26

The Financial Times is reporting that *some* ministers are using existential rhetoric, but apparently not Starmer himself. A government of morons, but the King Moron is ever so slightly sharper. Oh well, it was nice thinking about it while it lasted... www.ft.com/content/aa52...

'Ministers were calling signatories of the amendment on Tuesday warning them that the vote next week will in effect be a confidence vote in Starmer's leadership, according to several MPs, as they seek to convince would-be rebels to think again.'

'One Labour MP said a senior minister had called them on Tuesday to say that a major rebellion next week "would cause a fresh leadership contest" and that "this could be the start of the end for Keir".'

'Another Labour MP said ministers and whips were telling MPs that a major rebellion next week "will result in a general election being called" and that "it's going to bring the government down".

'The person said this argument did not phase them. "I would be happy to see a leadership contest. I think perhaps it's time for change," they said.

'Starmer said publicly on Tuesday that the second reading next week was "nor a confidence vote". The government has not been expected to call an election until 2029, the final year of the current parliament.'

Izzy@isajk· Jun 6

"40+ years" is DEMENTED. He's 54 in about 3 weeks, so 40 years hence would put him at age *94*. That would be a tall order for anyone, but has he seen himself lately?? His body is a wreck! He looks like he has one foot in the grave already! The cunt might not make it another *4* years let alone 40!

Elon Musk tweets "Oh and some food for thought as they ponder this question: Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years ..." and the date is 5 June 2025.

Izzy@isajk· Apr 18

Martin Nie-blöd-er