'In the end, however, we must escape from the debris with whatever booty we can rescue, and recast our technics entirely in the light of an ecological ethics whose concept of "good" takes its point of departure from our concepts of diversity, wholeness, and a nature rendered selfconscious -- an ethics whose "evil" is rooted in homogeneity, hierarchy, and a society whose sensibilities have been deadened beyond resurrection.' The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin #nobot #noindex
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Last Notes npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Yet another "Torment Nexus" entrepreneur to worry about. I'm puzzled how she's described as starting so many companies that failed, and is apparently spectacularly rich. Where is the money coming from? -- ‘There is no way to stop this’: ‘Biotech Barbie’ Cathy Tie on her mission to genetically modify babies | Gene editing | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/30/there-is-no-way-to-stop-this-biotech-barbie-cathy-tie-on-her-mission-to-genetically-modify-babies npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…nmr0 This is all consistent with my sense of how Medea Benjamin and Code Pink have operated over the years. A lot of cultivation of an activist image (and frankly that image was embarrassing in itself), but superficial analysis that seems dependent on propaganda from states opposed to the US. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I could use some help with a math problem, for a computer game I'm playing, Space Engineers. The game uses a Cartesian coordinate system, with XYZ coordinates. I have a planet with known coordinates for the center, and the coordinates for a space station. I want to place objects at five other points, like the corners of a cube. I'd guess it was a simple math problem to get the point on the opposite side of the planet from the space station, but I don't know how to work out the other four points. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4j24 Part of what's strange here is that this is mature software, and given its purpose, they should be very cautious about adding new features. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Rimworld, the game that really makes you appreciate refrigeration. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…rtl5 I have to note I've gotten really tired of them absolutely definitely having completely defeated the Borg for good, only for them to come right back. "Oh, the Borg queen, who had total control over the Borg, was the last survivor, and she just applied for membership in the Federation." Next episode: "We're fighting the Borg again." npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…m7l3 Mine was much longer ago. I got an advertisement in the mail, and it was from the same people who'd sold yearbooks and class photos and class rings, and it was this disgusting mass of artificial nostalgia. Until then, I'd imagined class reunions as organized by the participants themselves, so, painfully awkward but at least authentic. But this just seemed to represent everything I loathed about high school. So I didn't go. I hadn't had any contact with anyone from high school in nineteen years and I saw no point in pretending they were part of my life anymore. I have enough trouble maintaining relationships with people who are in my life. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…nmr0 The "fact-checking" is just maintaining a different lie: that there's majority support for fascist policies, that it's all the fault of voters. Oh well, we did our job. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…nmr0 Arguably, "politicians are corrupt" because representational politics is based on a patron-client model, so it's intrinsically transactional and unequal. We'd need to move past representational systems to overcome that. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…f4r9 Oof. Markus Peterson and Mojang made me angry for how they treated the modding community, before I found out about Peterson's abhorrent bigotry. Ironically, I think that did teach a fair number of young people some important lessons. There may not really have been any teenaged hackers breaking in to Pentagon databases, but there were teenagers learning Java programming to reverse-engineer Minecraft and create mods for it. Come to think of it, a few years ago I was working with a 17 year old who'd re-written Minecraft in Javascript in order to bypass his school's computer software controls. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl A strange thing about playing Fallout: New Vegas again, was that it's a game from 2010, and I literally spent two days trying to get a set of mods installed to fix bugs and improve its performance as if it were ancient. There's something very strange about Bethesda's relationship to its fans, in particular that there's effectively a secondary industry devoted to fixing Bethesda games. I've gotten used to looking for omnibus bug fixes for prior Bethesda games, which was more than bad enough. Viva New Vegas involved more than 140 mods, many of them very complex with long detailed changelogs, all intended to just get the game to work the way it was intended to to begin with. I'm awed that Bethesda games get so much devotion, but also disgusted that Bethesda can just count on so much free labor to complete its commercially successful games. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…nmr0 @nprofile…4ndj Yeah, this is right. I find I'm often needing to point out that, until the early 2000s, popular discourse in the US was severely constricted and dominated by commercial media, which systematically censored any mention of leftist groups or ideas. Chomsky was about at the limit of what they'd tolerate, in detailing US atrocities and malign foreign policy, based on public records and mainstream journalistic accounts. Significantly, Chomsky would always deflect any questions about what alternatives he'd support, rarely going further than supporting abstract resistance. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl A simple lesson of the Epstein Files is that the US ruling class is literally a group of people who have each other's names in their address books and invite each other to parties where they chat about how to oppress people. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…euty @nprofile…nmr0 I think right wing disruption of online conversation goes back almost to the beginning of things like Usenet, but as far as I know, that was the beginning of centrally coordinated disruption. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…euty @nprofile…nmr0 In the "blogosphere" of the early 00s, it came out that there were email lists devoted to organizing right wing attacks on liberal blogs. Bad faith questions and brigading were actively planned and coordinated. Republican Party staffers were involved. About the same era, Frontpage Magazine, often referenced by conservative blogs, was organizing training sessions for Young Republicans on how to physically disrupt campus left organizing and threaten college professors. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…puh7 The key part of the cyberpunk stories I enjoyed was that someone found a surprising way to resist, and that's the part I'm missing. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…6nav All the debt repayment does is remove money from the economy. It serves no purpose except to oppress former students. I've seen it argued that a college education has long since ceased to be a marker of middle class status and has become a marker of working class status. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…n7x3 A movie involves a large number of creative people, so just because the director is a white man doesn't mean that there can't be significant contributions from actors, set designers, writers, etc. It really ought to be understood as a collaboration. I hate the "auteur" theory, the idea that there has to be a singular unifying vision from a single person. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I enjoy reading OSR books and adventures, but I find it's not the style of gameplay that interests me; I tend to think of puzzles, combat, etc., as prone to becoming distractions from the narrative. I tend to skim through action scenes in fiction that drag on too long. I see less advice on how to approach narrative and storytelling games, however, and what there is seems to focus on how to bring in more "crunch", which isn't what I want to do. #TTRPG npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Second day unemployed. In theory I could be working on some of the projects I haven't had time to work on. Or reading a novel. Or playing a computer game. It all feels futile. I've applied for half a dozen jobs so far this morning, but that's a farce. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I usually avoid referring directly to former employers by name, but I'm making an exception. Fuck you, Pyramid Consulting. They sent me a recruitment email for a job as a network administrator for $16/hour. That's a job that usually gets around $40-50 per hour. The minimum wage in the area is $16.30. They previously pitched a job for $15/hour, well less than minimum wage. They've been texting me, demanding I call in to an "AI" interviewer for screening. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…mrzh One of the fundamental issues I have with "prompt engineering" is that it's literally the opposite of engineering, and I'm shocked more engineers don't say that. It's an assault on the sciences and the humanities at the same time. Management and economics students are, by and large, parasites who deal in pseudoscience. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…n7x3 The recent movie or the original novel? npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Our quality of life has generally improved over the last 2000 years. But do you think your fundamental human needs are 19 times as great as they were for a person in 0 CE? Or even twice as great? -- Global average GDP per capita over the long run https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-capita-over-the-long-run npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…d7yh The element that most jumps out at me is the idea that as a last resort, you should just skip an unfamiliar word. That's an incredibly bad idea. No, if you can't figure the word out, you stop reading and ask for help, or look the word up in a dictionary. A single word can change the meaning of a sentence. Writers know to be sparing in their use of unusual words, so if there's an unfamiliar word, it's likely to be the most important word on the page. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…p594 Because dystopian science fiction is generally about rich people leveraging technology to oppress people in new ways, and that's *exactly* what techbros want to do. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…dwxz I've occasionally seen interactions with minor celebrities that I respect, in which they clearly get irritated with what would be a normal interaction with someone who is not a celebrity. They seem to expect a degree of deference, and I've wondered if from their point of view it's a necessity, because they're used to one-to-many communication. But I don't like the anti-egalitarian tone of it. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…n7x3 At the time, I think there was also a norm of regimented behavior for children along with the neglect, so that the idea was that kids would be delighted to be on theur own for a while. There's also the thing near the beginning where the boy asks for help tying his shoes, and later he's creating Rube Goldberg contraptions. There was a popular idea that children were helpless because they were coddled, and would learn quickly on their own. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4q78 Fate Worlds, Volume 1, Worlds on Fire, has a Fate scenario for role-playing as firefighters, "Fight Fire", by Jason Morningstar. I was impressed how detailed it is, about the different roles of firefighters in a team. It makes a lot of use of the concept in Fate that anything can be represented as a character, and that fires are often described as like living things, with life cycles. https://evilhat.com/product/fate-worlds-worlds-on-fire/ npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl My partner sent me a photo of a poster she saw in San Francisco that said "STOP AI". I did a little checking and it turned out to be a small group afraid of superintelligent AGI. I'm not sure whether they're dumbasses or astroturf. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…3gck @nprofile…n7x3 Incidentally, the opening chapters of Dawn of Everything, by Graeber and Wengrow, talks about how much Enlightenment arguments for democracy were initiated by European contact with North American cultures, who had quite sophisticated and insightful critiques of European social structures. The book talks in particular about the Wendat diplomat and orator, Kondiaronk. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…yjf2 @nprofile…n7x3 I don't want to be naively enthusiastic about local governments, but, there are examples of local governments trying to fill the gap left by SNAP. It's not quite the full radical possibility shown by "disaster communism", but I think a few instances of, "Well, we've got all this food, so why don't we just give it to people, and figure out the bookkeeping later", may shake things up a bit. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…n7x3 "Nihilism" was my word, trying to summarize what I remember being said. I can't seem to find the original. I think they were also complaining about criticizing things without offering an alternative. Which, c'mon. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…n7x3 I wasn't sure whether to mention it to you, but someone reacted to a thread of yours -- basically that both US major political parties share responsibility for the current state of affairs and neither can be trusted -- by complaining about leftist nihilism, and then they compared it to a 9/11 conspiracy theory. It can be hard to imagine systemic change, but I'm still astonished when people can't seem to understand it as an implication. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…998y There's some discussion how "management", as in MBA programs, is taught as a set of skills abstracted from any concrete application, and this has led to managers who see their job as telling people who know the concrete specific details that they're wrong. I wonder if something similar is happening with designers. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Apparently it's Wolf Awareness Week (in the US anyway), October 19-25. https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/430/894/523/093/984/original/955ab2b568c657c2.jpg npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl At work, I overheard people from another team, talking about how hard it is to be on an HOA board and deal with people who don't keep their lawns short and allow "invasive" clover to grow. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl It is true both that the US has always been profoundly unjust, and that it has recently gotten much worse, and emphasizing one of those two points should not imply a denial of the other. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…03hd We may be overcautious about imagining eutopia. We have a collective broken heart. One of the things that rattles me when I look at old Stalinist stuff is that a lot of them were sincerely idealistic. I've thought the difference between eutopia and dystopia is coercion. I also think a lot of fiction relies too much on ending with an undefined hope for a future. You can suggest what you hope for, without proclaiming out an immutable perfection. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl There's a phenomenon with prolonged ideological conflicts, like Cold War scenarios, in which one side is defeated, and thereafter people criticizing the side that won imagine that the losing side was better than it actually had been, rather than try to imagine something new and better. People who yammer on about dialectics, but who only mean the "Hegelian triad", will gesture at somehow we should learn from both sides. But in practice I find that they further reduce the triad to a dyad. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl US imposes sanctions on Palestinians for requesting war crimes inquiry | Trump administration | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/04/us-sanctions-palestinian-human-rights npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…ps99 I think US police procedurals have a distinct history from detective stories. Detective stories weren't originally about police, but rather about outsiders, who are in a position to query people from all social classes. Police procedurals were literally invented in the 60s, as a public relations effort by the Los Angeles Police Department. Gene Roddenberry got his start as a scriptwriter while working for the LAPD as a speech writer and liaison with radio and TV broadcasters. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Franny, 20 years old. #Caturday https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/039/172/557/887/370/original/03bfe66b756276b9.jpg npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I suspect a lot of the current wave of opposition to porn is because a lot more of it these days is produced by women, with some degree of independence. And patriarchy doesn't want women telling their own stories about sexuality. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4lh8 @nprofile…3g2f There were church groups that would occasionally show up at my high school and scream that fornicators would burn in Hell. They were never subtle about it. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…3g2f "Christofascists aren't anti-porn"?! How on Earth? That's like one of their primary talking points. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Are there any books with advice on how to be better at anticipating how you might affect your partners feelings, how to compensate for some obliviousness in that regard? #ActuallyAutistic npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Does anyone else get anxiety attacks after eating, specifically, Oreos? npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I feel like a ghost. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl ICE Admits Collusion with Far-Right Blacklists to Target Pro-Palestinian Voices – AJP Action https://ajpaction.org/ice-admits-collusion-with-far-right-blacklists-to-target-pro-palestinian-voices/ npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Public Assemblies Strengthen Community Resistance to Rising Authoritarianism | Truthout https://truthout.org/audio/public-assemblies-strengthen-community-resistance-to-rising-authoritarianism/ npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Is there a term for something like the opposite of a flow state? Like, I'm trying to settle down to focus on developing an idea, and all my creativity evaporates, and eventually I'll feel like I just need to power through it, and I end up producing something dull and lifeless? npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…args @nprofile…3lvc I was a young adult in the 90s and I was astonished how much push back there was against the idea of consent, of openly discussing boundaries. Camille Paglia and Naomi Wolff and other pundits complaining how it spoiled the sacred mystery. Sit-coms playing it as a way to mock literal-minded nerds and over-earnest college students. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4lh8 Oof. That sounds like you're going through a rough time. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4lh8 There's certainly boorish toxic masculinity, but a lot of wonderful people have sanguine temperaments and enjoy sports. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4lh8 "Jock" masculinity. It was quite a long time before I heard anyone articulate a criticism of "nerd" masculinity. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I grew up feeling like I desperately, urgently wanted to reject a popular concept of masculinity, but still felt I was a man. I didn't even feel gender nonconformant, strictly speaking. A trope in a lot of movies and TV shows of the 80s and 90s was to contrast "sensitive guys" with men who were "macho" or "jocks", and I identified with the "sensitive guys". There were some ugly elements to this: it was mixed up with class and social ambition, entitlement, and an exaggerated sense of martyrdom. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…args @nprofile…8ndz I've thought Buttigieg had some good moments, and then he'd go out of his way to show how he highly values bipartisanship. He's just fundamentally not on our side. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…03hd A lot of my experience of being cishet was being told that gender is "natural" and sexuality "comes naturally", and finding none of that was true. Being around people who cannot fit the cishet norms can lead one to question whether those norms are as "natural" as we are told they are. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…uhjq Squatting as a political tactic was a thing in the 90s, though marginal. But that was before decades of waves of construction of housing, kept off the market to inflate asset valuation. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I hate how often getting away from urban areas requires a car. That's part of what I want to get away from. Also I can't drive. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Just spoke to a job recruiter about a job I don't really want in a difficult place to commute to for a corporation that's probably going to implode and create an economic black hole over Silicon Valley. I probably didn't sound very keen on the phone. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl My current thinking about a #TTRPG I'd like to run: * The worldbuilding at the start is limited, and done with the players directly involved; * The world is developed largely through play and with randomization tools, and we let themes develop; * Fate Core as the basic system; * One of two general concepts: - Exploring a weird subterranean world, using Downcrawl 2 for generating places and problems; - Rogues and misfits on a starship, using Traveller-like tools for generating worlds, etc. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…5gqy I continue to be astonished that people don't understand that most people in the IT industry are contractors, so that when a company talks about their employees, they're talking about a minority of their actual employees. Duolingo replacing contractors with AI means they're firing most of the people that work for them. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I must have followed this link from someone on here but I can't find it. Anyway it's an interesting piece on how polarized opposing factions of feminism were each reductive and flawed. -- This Is How You Lose the Sex Wars https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/this-is-how-you-lose-the-sex-wars/ npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl It's a cliche, and a harmful one, that great art is born of suffering. But it does point at the fact that oppressed groups tend to create a lot of moving art. I wonder if it's not so much that suffering enables art, as that identifying with oppression inhibits creativity. Control is brittle, as Nemik said. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jun/22/trump-black-arts-culture-crackdown npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…528n @nprofile…q48a @nprofile…cnmq I'd initially assumed the point was to replace the DNS roots, which are controlled by different branches of the US federal government. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl These are the covers of 1966 paperback editions of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, published by Ballantine Books. Does anyone know the artist who did these covers, and where I can find more of their work? I've always loved these covers. https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/642/808/913/546/714/original/76f3dcded758deaf.jpg https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/642/809/430/315/587/original/c35b991e06ffdc89.jpg https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/642/809/892/042/320/original/d10b07680f60aad0.jpg https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/642/810/488/063/873/original/560a29c79f9e1ef1.jpg npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…uhjq This is called the "dual power strategy". npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4lh8 I think it has to do with the establishment of medical doctors as an organized profession in the 19th century. I've read that part of that process in the US was criminalization of abortion. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl One of the horrible things about reading 18th and 19th century history is that after a while it's surprising when a woman does *not* die in childbirth. I have to wonder if early modern medical care made things dramatically worse. Also I wonder if reading period literature contributed to my sexual hangups when I was a young adult. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl I'm at the airport in San Francosco, and saw the entrance to an art exhibit about Afrofuturism. I was excited. Then I looked at the "signature" of the image at the entrance, announcing it was produced by generative AI. Yet another instance of exploiting Black people. Assholes. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…zwgs The backsliding on IPv6, and treating NAT as a security feature, have been irritants for some time. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…4yw8 If they didn't have a warrant, it's kidnapping. (If they have a warrant, it's also kidnapping, but it's harder to convince people of that.) npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…r5de @nprofile…4ey9 @nprofile…0xyd I met my partner through OKCupid (in the early days when it sucked less). She told me that I wasn't the highest match score, but I was the highest who wasn't a right wing asshole lying his ass off. The strange part is that the lying is immediately obvious. But then, I suppose their model of relationships, transactional at best, puts no value on honesty. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…q5wq @nprofile…exnp https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/shy-radicals-hamja-ahsan-world-our-corner npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Frederick Douglass, "West India Emancipation", 1857. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…qz4x It would be helpful if you would put something more informative than "Long thread" in the content warning, like maybe the title of the column, or even just the date, so I can tell if this is something I've read before. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…zwgs I've only ever seen it suggested as an alternative to overriding browser settings to allow self-signed certificates. The override seems like a lot less work. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…3sf2 It seems like a variant of normalcy bias where they assume a norm that no longer exists. Like they're imagining protests as just an overreaction to a trivial aberration. They don't perceive an entire sociopolitical order in active collapse. They imagine a center will inevitably reassert itself when that center is gone forever, and the only choices are to take the risk of moving left, or move right and be sucked to its inevitable self-destruction. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…cg79 Around 2015-16, I'd see people reacting to photos of massed, heavily armed police, backed up by armored fighting vehicles, and ask why USonians tolerated it. We didn't. We were the ones those forces were massed against. Why didn't we fight harder for the Democrats? You mean the politicians who lavishly fund the police and order them to assault demonstrators? The difference between Democrats and Republicans is only the rate at which things get worse. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl My understanding is that the classic definition of a political party is an organized social force attempting to take state power in order to use the state to suppress opposing forces. My theory for some time has been that in the US, the Republican and Democratic Parties converged into a single party after the US Civil War. I think this is a general pattern in liberal states; what are now called parties show the vestigial features of their historic origins but have fundamentally changed. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…szyy Scientists in Russia struggled, against state persecution and siege during invasion in World War 2, to create the world's first seed bank. Many of them gave their lives for it. The Tragedy of the World's First Seed Bank https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/the-tragedy-of-the-worlds-first-seed-bank/ When the War Came - The Decemberists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJHOiQ2uniU npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…qz4x There's been some enthusiasm for "AI GMs" for role-playing games. It is pretty common, in published role-playing games, to roll on a few tables and get a prompt for some situation that a GM can flesh out, like you've encountered goblins with a stolen artifact. AI GMs can produce an entire scenario out of that. But it will be a generic one, not reflecting a human GM's interests or style, or the other players' interests or style, or the tone of the campaign. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…d2rl @nprofile…ulaf Also, since generative AI, at best, just reproduces the superficial qualities of its dataset, it has a built-in bias towards conservative, conformist imagery. I've felt guilty about enjoying some of the early products of generative AI, but it was weird and obviously artificial, so it was clear that any meaning was added by the audience. As generative AI has "improved", it has become less weird, less obviously artificial, and so better suited to fascist uses. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…uk9d I was partly overreacting to changed defaults in NetworkManager that I found out how to change. But more broadly I've been surprised how little support I see for IPv6, either in business or personal contexts. Everything still assumes IPv4 by default if it supports IPv6 at all, and NAT seems to be understood as a security tool, not a hack originally meant to work around ISPs trying to allow one node on an account npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl So at some point the standard for IPv6 address assignment seems to have changed so that it changes randomly, eliminating the primary purpose of IP addresses, so IPv6 has been rendered useless. It's like we're so used to technical shortcomings of IPv4 being treated as security features, that we've effectively disabled IPv6, despite the problem of IPv4 address space exhaustion. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…6fay Is there a source for this? Someone told me they want it on a tee-shirt and I want to surprise them. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…r26y @nprofile…33sy @nprofile…r7ps Fuck you. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…r26y @nprofile…33sy @nprofile…r7ps Brave is actively dangerous to its users. It's got cryptocoin mining built-in and it's injected affiliate codes into URIs. Founder and CEO of Brave is Brendan Eich, a homophobic bigot. Do not use Brave under any circumstances whatsoever. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl What's going on with the plan to increase our instance's character limit? #SocialCoop npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Another thing about 2020: the stimulus payments we received were the first time in generations there was any general support for living standards. Small as it was, it was a slackening of the tension in our chains, and I think it meant many people felt more able to risk active resistance. This shows how much tension people in the US have been under, and why, and how little it might take to unleash a social transformation. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl People keep complaining about how USonians aren't actively resisting fascism. They seem to have forgotten there were several years of escalating conflict from 2015-21; in particular in 2020-21 we had significant riots and street battles in several cities through the year, with Democratic Party politicians often backing the police terror. Militants were exhausted. That's part of the problem. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…uhjq The fact that it's a DUNGEON LASER is of course nothing to worry about. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Now I'm thinking of J.D. Vance's speech about "ordo amoris", and his explicit prioritization of the family. But then, we've got a couple of centuries of accumulated critiques of family structure and how it inhibits authentic relationships among members of a family. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Incidentally, it's hard to miss how enthusiastic "incel" culture is for AI, how the emergent fascist dictatorship in the US is led by people who are overtly incapable of sustaining meaningful relationships and who appear to have no interest in doing so. They are actively opposed to human relationships. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl Two thoughts I'm working on: 1. So-called AI is an inherently fascist technology. Technology is not neutral; it's not just a set of tools, but the whole set of social practices that create, maintain, and use those tools. 2. The intended purpose of AI is the total elimination of human relationships, commodity fetishism carried to its ultimate nightmarish end. This is why fascist technologists are so fixated on destroying writing and art, which are about creating and sustaining relationships. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…nkff Dictators will make absurd demands as tests of obedience. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…wctj WTF. So they're *deliberately* corrupting data. npub10qmm0765mkrra6au99l25eva9weznhtesj8ts7qk3hhqygqc25hqp2gu2w FoolishOwl @nprofile…9ag4 Part of the threat of RFK jr is the assumption that autism should be eliminated. Many of us are just beginning to appreciate the benefits of acceptance and open discussion of neurodiversity, and we're facing that acceptance and discussion being shut down, with the threat of eugenics in the wings.