Hey now, that’s no solution at all.

If they’re too scared to leave their homes, they’ll be harder to assassinate.

Blue cross just backflipped on time limits for anaesthesia, so

Translation:

It’s morally wrong to fight back against your abuser, lest he take it out on your kids as well. Just lie back and try to enjoy it.

It’s funny how voting for a pro-genocide government was trolleyish and so had a moral imperative, while approving of this killing meant that people were irredeemable monsters.

I never used twitter, I tried to use mastodon about a year ago and hated it, I joined bluesky a few weeks back and love it.

Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween. I never found anyone I wanted to follow while sifting through screenfuls of firehose, so I didn’t bother.

Bluesky has nice UX, the posts on Discover are mostly engaging content, there’s a bunch of people i’ve heard of over there, tags are encouraged via feeds, the starter packs are nice and the blocklists are amazing.

Will it enshittify eventually? Sure.

But then you just move on to the next free trial.

It took me a week to find a bunch of lefties, journalists and shitposters on bluesky; whatever comes after it will doubtless be just as quick. They’re a fungible commodity - if I can’t find the same specific set of people on the next one, ehh.

The 1970s was going on.

I just browse subscribed-only.

aw hell yeah, that ruled back in the day.

Might be challenging to get it running in a modern environment, but I admire your taste in the classics :)

I know you’ve heard it, but seriously, the biggedst hurdle to learning programming is having a solution looking for a problem. You can learn all kinds of stuff in the abstract, but your brain will either handwave over it or bounce off, if it can’t contextualise the knowledge into a problem-solving tool.

A source of small but genuine needs is the scarcest resource.

I know the world has moved on to big cosy high-level languages that let you think semantically about everything but honestly I’m still a big fan of starting with C; it is something of an austere discipline, but it gives you a boots-on-the-ground view of the problems you’re working with, and I think that really helps shape your understanding of what you’re dealing with.

(you could do a fair bit worse than the game ‘human resource machine’ for a slightly gentler introduction, then pick up some exercises in C, then move to python or similar - it will let you appreciate the cosy high-level stuff, and have a better feel for why you’re doing stuff)

An empty worthless gesture that costs nothing and achieves nothing, after over a fucking year of gargling Netanyahu’s balls.

Recognise Palestine as a state.

Cut off all aid and arms (and arms parts) to Israel.

Impose sanctions.

Last fucking year, you worthless pieces of shit.

Only kind I go to these days.

Super chill places. Utterly and completely un-sexual - and that’s the entire point.

You can walk past someone with your balls waving in the breeze, and they don’t even blink. Someone can walk past you with their tits akimbo, and you don’t even blink. It’s a bit like seeing someone breastfeeeding their baby: yeah, boobs are great, but we’re not doing that right now. And that’s just a really comfy headspace to be in.

Yes, there’s going to be old people. Excellent. 85yo woman pottering around stark naked, living her best life and not giving one single shit about anything. Fuck yeah, you go girl, that’s awesome.

If you want to ogle people, there’s the internet. If you want to take the day off from playing the game at all, go to a nude beach.

And of course, swimming naked is just stupidly better than swimming in clothes. Imagine if you’d been showering with your socks on all your life, and finally got to try it without. You’d never want to go back, would you?

One dollar worth of sand, teleported into the lungs of my choice.

youdontsay.jpg

Nobody’s going to upvote shit takes, obviously.

If someone’s being an asshole or an idiot, I’m going to downvote them.

If someone says something that needs saying, or that’s interesting or funny, I’m going to upvote it.

It’s not the unusable firehose that mastodon is, and it’s a lot less fediverse-stanny. (it’s not actually federated yet).

I kind of like it, it feels like the right level of engagement, and there’s a culture of just block the assholes, grownups are talking.

It’s worth a few days to try it out. Nice place.

Amazingly, nobody’s happy that the dems decided to sacrifice the whole country rather than budge on exterminating the Palestinians.

Spoken like a person who isn’t forced to use JIRA

Yelling at voters doesn’t help, neither does educating them.

These things only affect individuals, and there’s hundred of millions of voters out there, in a constantly shifting cohort.

You may as well try to bail out the rising tide with a teacup. You can expend unlimited resources on the task, and you’ll achieve precisely dick.

It doesn’t matter how wrong people are, how stupid people are, or how fucked-up their reactions to things are. You cannot effectively change that at scale, except via constant, persistent social engineering over years or even decades.

If the opposition is offering free pizza, then it doesn’t matter how much healthier and better your free salad really is. Don’t waste your time on trying to convince people, don’t waste your energy on it, don’t waste your emotions on it. People are going to choose the pizza, and you damn well know it.

If you want them to take your offering instead, you need to come up with something that hundreds of millions of people will think is tastier than pizza.

Now sure, you can try and sell people the idea that the pizza guy doesn’t wash his hands after taking a shit. You can put up giant posters of the cockroaches crawling all over the stall, and sure you might make a dent.

But when the alternative looks like a bunch of dry bitter rabbit food to them, no matter how tasty it actually is, you’re fucked.

You need to address the actual concerns of the voters (no matter how stupid), and you need to show them that you’re addressing them, in a way they’ll actually notice and appreciate.

Not ‘ought to’. Will.

What it needs is some angry people who will get up on their hind legs and fight for the working classes. It needs people who are loudly and visibly sick of the status quo, tired of the bullshit and ready to rip the face off anyone who gets in their way.

Not the fucking charity-auction Moira Schitt ghouls schmoozing up to $LARGE_CORPORATION while laughing about the dirty poors, or smirking about how bombing Palestinian children is the only moral choice.

(Seriously, Trump ought to hire Matt Miller and Vedant Patel - they did more to undermine the Dem campaign than anyone else. The optics were an unmitigated disaster.)

“Am I out of touch? No, it’s the voters who are wrong”

You talk about this kind of thing ahead of time, duh.