I like this. 👍🏼

We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful.

We are all well aware there are Nazis out there right now, and text is more than sufficient to convey reminders of that.

I think it’s also worth noting that a lot of media pictures of Nazi/ Christofascist/ RWNJ marches use photographic techniques (e.g. low-angle shots) for dramatic effect to drive clicks, rather than a more direct and undramatic approach, and it’s hard to see that as anything but giving them exactly the kind of attention they want.

Charlottesville was a great example of this.

Likewise, one article about the Ohio march showed the Nazis through a cafe window, as people inside looked on, with the camera set low against a table. The photographer was trying to convey a juxtaposition of Nazis against people living their “everyday lives”, but if they’d just taken a picture of the 10 assholes at face level, walking down the sidewalk, it would have better conveyed the reality of them being a tiny group of Nazi cosplay losers.

“We’re coming to your neighborhood” is the message that Nazis want to sell, and media is doing it for them for free half the time.

When these crappy "AI"s finally do displace my job, I will become a fireman, but in the Fahrenheit 451 sense, and it’ll be servers instead of books.

They wouldn’t lift a finger the past 4 years to actually put procedural guardrails in place to fight the rising tide of authoritarianism in the GOP, but they’re going to in the next month-and-a-half? Please.

It depends how you want to use it. This isn’t strictly a NAS controller, it’s also running the Jellyfin server. If I was going for a “pure” local NAS, I’d probably just set up Samba.

Technically, for this project I actually used an rPi-like, the FriendlyElec CM3588, so it’s a little beefier than a normal rPi. It’s got the 4 M.2 SSD slots, which let’s me RAID the drives if I want, as well.

• Getting over a pretty debilitating flu that lasted 4-ish days
• End of this week I take a 2-day train ride, which I’m looking forward to SO MUCH, so I’ll have senioritis at work all week
• Finished up a couple different hands-on projects that all went amazingly
  • dremeled a non-safety-cut P365X-Macro frame for thumb and magazine safeties all by eye
  • finished assembling a rPi NAS for my dad’s place that has spotty internet, so he can have a local ‘streaming’ service with movies and tv shows

I want to pay them for Bloodborne on PC, but Sony won’t let me! Sounds like that’s their choice/ problem.

Yeah, this one was wild. A bunch of our ballot measures went badly, including the heavier sentencing for drugs one getting overwhelming support, even among Democrats. The minimum wage increase also get rejected.

This was apparently the election where people decided to be their worst selves.

Honestly, I’d love to see a month-long pause on discussing the presidential race itself.

State-level stuff, ballot measures, etc, no problem, but IMO there’s not going to be any productive discussion of the presidential race right now; there’s still too little information, too many emotions, etc.

That aside, (because that’s not the kind of thing that should happen without the community agreeing to it) I know that I’m probably part of the problem because Politics is where I tend to comment the most, and I’m going to stick to discussions of what to do next rather than wasting any more energy on litigating what went wrong at this point.

I have my suspicions about what happened, but that’s all they are as of right now, same as anyone else. But I do know for sure that I’m pissed off, and I know that I’m not going to be able to keep it from affecting how I engage with people if we get into an argument.

I’m just glad we all have this community, because it’s definitely an anchor-point for me right now (and thank you, mods, for all your work maintaining it).

She had a huge surge in media popularity, but how many of the eventual sit-out voters would still have sat out from day 1, we’ll never know.

Either way, the DNC has to go, because their choice to back Biden and delay everything until the last possible moment created this entire situation in the first place.

Ooph that’s rough… :(

I wish I could at least believe it was about principles, but my gut tells me otherwise. This gap looks too similar to Hillary’s in 2016.

If there’s a ~20% drop in your voters every time a woman is up for election, you’ve got a problem.

My nephew is trans, with an openly hostile anti-trans father (my POS Trumper brother, who luckily does not live with his kids), and lives in a swing state that went red last night. Very worried for him and every other trans person in this shit hole.

I’m also pissed off that, based on the numbers we’re seeing, this is the second time that Democrat voters across the country have sat out rather than elect a woman. Honestly, I shouldn’t even be surprised anymore.

Stay strong, everyone, things are gonna get rough.

15+ million Democrats sat out compared to voting for Biden. I suspect this was less about Harris not being progressive enough, and more about sexism.

I repeatedly heard Democrats tell me they didn’t think America was going to elect a woman president, and it looks like what they meant was they wouldn’t elect one.

The genius of these tactics is that these campaigns aren’t making anyone racist, they’re just giving people an opportunity to feel safe showing it. Conservatives long to return to a time when they could just be like, “yeah, if you’re in this town after sundown and you’re not white, we’re gonna hang you” (which it’s important to note, was still a thing as recently as the 1980s).

Since they can’t do that quite as openly now, they look to any kind of news reports they can to use our American sense of “justice” (meaning retributive, where we tend to collectively dehumanize criminals) to shield them expressing racist views. When those reports aren’t there, they just make them up.

I’m always interested to see exactly what is included and excluded from their definition of reading. On average, most adults actually read more today that we did in the 90s, if you’re purely talking words of text consumed. Are graphic novels being included in these stats? Short stories? Social media threads? Most people even watch videos/tv/movies with subtitles they read now, which was not something that was an option before.

The actual article text never says the word “book” once, but I strongly suspect that is all that’s being counted.

Not to take away from the importance of voting Harris today (or hopefully, prior to today), but this:

We can eventually have that conversation as a nation, but in the '90s, when I lived in Germany, it was still considered gauche to be proud to be German. Is that the 50 years you want going forward here?

feels out of touch. It’s already gauche in most progressive circles to be proud to be American (What are you proud of? The settler-colonialism? The Imperialism? The choice to back genocide? The still-haven’t-abolished-slavery-ism?). Lots of us know that this supposed “eventual” conversation will never actually come. We’re never going to get the country to move to RCV or abolish the electoral college, if we forever stick to the parties who directly benefit from the status quo.

Vote Harris today if you can, people, because it’s too late for anything else this cycle, but we have to stop this spiraling descent rightwards by adhering to a party that would rather lose Leftists than “Centrists”. As people who care about social justice and progressive politics, we should be abhorred that our platform is palatable enough to Dick The-Fucking-War-Criminal Cheney to get his endorsement.

For every person claiming that we’ll eventually totally have the conversation about the party platform, there’s another Centrist Democrat who is saying, “No, actually, the party doesn’t need to move leftwards… It’s always been a lesser of 2 evils choice… Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good by drawing hard lines like not supporting genocide…”.

Republicans unshackled themselves from their Centrist arm of “respectable” anti-social-justice goons to fully embrace their white supremacism in the open, and those goons have now taken up residence in the Democratic Party in response.

If we’re just fundamentally unwilling to consider unshackling ourselves from them, we’re never going to stop the rightward-shift happening now. We didn’t move Leftwards in the 60s because our politicians led us there, people protested and rioted and made people uncomfortable until they acquiesced and got off their asses. And unless Citizen’s United gets overturned, that route isn’t going to work within the Democratic Party, because the police are now powerful enough to keep protesters from actually making politicians feel uncomfortable enough to choose their constituents over their corporate donors.

At the risk of not be(e)ing kind, unless you can give me a timeframe for when “eventually” is, you are part of the problem, providing cover and excuses for our rightward shift as a country.

We got Bush instead of Gore because of 700 votes for Nader in Florida.

No, Gore likely had more votes (if they had performed a statewide recount). We had Bush (and Cheney the now-Democrat) because SCOTUS stepped in to stop the recounts, and the Democratic Party chose to “keep the peace” instead of fighting it. Just like they will every time.

Not friendly enough when talking to customers? Bad employee.

Too friendly when talking to customers? Bad employee.

This is just about 1) creating an algorithmic justification for the racial profiling that managers already do, and 2) keeping employees in fear of termination so they put up with bullshit.

Side story about how shitty retail management is:

When I was working retail years ago (big box electronics store), our management employed a system of getting every new employee to 3 write-ups as fast as they could (I’m talking, within a month of starting), using literally any excuse they could, so they could hold the “one more write-up and you’re fired” over their head.

“AI” is definitely going to become a new tool for employee suppression.

As much as the US is an imperialist colonial state, they also keep the other ones (Russia, China) in check. Both of them were subsumed by state-capitalism, and became just as expansionist and xenophobic as the US is. I don’t want any of them around, but all 3 breaking up ain’t in the cards right now, and unchecked imperialism is exactly what made the US so dangerous to the “margins of the world” for so long.

Nah, and I say this as an ansoc who would love for the US to break up, but there’s just no appetite for that at any scale large enough to actually cause this.

Even at the time of the Civil War, it was only when state governments decided to secede that things kicked off, and no states now- no matter how “blue” they are- are going to try that. It would be up to individuals, and there’s just no organizational capability for that at the scale needed to force a civil war. The closest we might ever get is a bunch of individual attacks or small-scale violent mobs.

Cozy up to? Adams is a cop. He is a fascist. His entire tenure has been a series of anti-poor, anti-unhoused, and cop-funding policies.