The project known as "The Bad Space", connected with the Nivenly Foundation, is still trying to get other servers to block our server. kolektiva.social is listed as having a 60% "heat rating" indicating that 60% of their sites have silenced or suspended it, and is listed as having "Moderation issues, Poor moderation, abusive/harrassment behaviour". The sites that create The Bad Space list are:
Foundation looking to build a block list into Mastodon gets developers to release a block list that includes almost every major left and trans connected server. When people get angry about this, they accuse all detractors of anti-Blackness because the lead developer is Black. They refuse to apologize or change and just keep telling everyone that trans people are anti-Black and Black people are anti-trans.
ETA: Don't know whether you follow AnarchoNinaWrites: the emergence of The Bad Space was closely connected with her being called an antisemite for using the phrase "Pig Empire" to describe the U.S. and driven off her server to jorts.horse.
That said, the recent spam attacks show the need for more advanced tools for server admins and mods to share information. The call for such tools became a point of contention during the first twitter migration last year and the fediverse and mastodon missed out on the support of black users, trans users, and members of other groups targeted by bad actors due to was was perceived to be unresponsiveness and "free speech absolutism" by some of the big players.
I think that the fediverse is the top community for leftists, although not "left commentators" if that means influencers: the natural home for influencers of all kinds is Bluesky.
People suggesting block list sharing do have to take the history of the Bad Space project into account: a bad-faith project that attempted to block kolektiva.social and pretty much every other large leftist server, as well as a long list of servers favored by trans people. Bad Space supporters said that any pushback to the idea that one's server was going to be listed on a global block list must be due to anti-Blackness.
Religious beliefs don’t make people do bad things. They don’t make people do good things either.
Beliefs generally don’t make people do anything at all. That is, beliefs are not really causal to behavior. People tend to act like the people around them, the people they associate with and can observe (in person or virtually). We adopt beliefs primarily as ex post facto justifications for why we acted the way we did. They make it possible for us to live with our actions, but they don’t cause our actions.
Culture? Ideology? Religion? Not particularly useful indicators of how someone will behave.
One large problem with trying to compare consciously and unconsciously motivated behavior is when the person doing the comparing assumes that people unconsciously want to live. For a whole lot of people in our society, thanatos now outweighs eros and they unconsciously want to die (and to kill other people). Someone who is consciously nice and yet doesn't wear an N95 mask when asked is acting out of thanatos: they want to kill and die. People mistakenly trust many other people who they should not and who don't have obvious signs like torturing animals or being nasty to wait staff.
There’s a genre of person who can easily recognize the Holodomor as a genocide by the Soviet state against Ukrainians but will deny that the Israeli state’s starvation blockade of Gaza constitutes genocide.
There’s another genre of person who can easily recognize genocide in Gaza but will deny the Holodomor.
In reality, these two genres are just cheering squads for different states—people who have chosen to recognize or deny genocide based on the national identity of the perpetrators. To them, the world is a team sport and what really matters is whether their favored team is scoring points or not.
There are going to be genocides all over the world as climate change causes mass migration, and every one of them is going to have people saying that that genocide isn't like the other genocides because something or other is different.
my biggest complaint about AI is we didn’t ask for it. zero popular movements took to the streets to demand AI. no one sat around kitchen tables lamenting how hard life is without AI.
what people want is health care, housing, climate change solutions, etc We sit around kitchen tables wondering how to pay for college, get loved ones the psych and addiction support they need, or help the people on our streets who need homes
"it's a method of pattern recognition on a scale that the human brain can't replicate": this is still hype. It's a quick way to run a whole lot of correlations. Any correlation that it turns up is replicable by the human brain, which is a lot better at figuring these out and seeing whether they mean anything once one has been brought to its attention.
It's like saying that some automated process that crunches through arithmetic very quickly turns up arithmetic that the human brain can't replicate.
"someone can see the pattern once the compute points it out" is what I meant. The task is basically similar to every other task that we have automated with computers: the individual tasks are all tasks that a human being could do, and the only advantage of using a computer is that it can do routine tasks very quickly. That is not really "pattern recognition on a scale that the human brain can't replicate": it's running a whole lot of correlations so quickly that someone can afford to not even come up with a theory about which variables should correlate with which other ones beforehand.
This is what I meant by "this is still hype": no one and no tool can forecast large shifts in stock prices months later. I haven't read this paper (not linked) and I don't know what "seemed to be able to spot" means, but I do know that if you make an extremely complex mathematical grab bag and give it lots of tries one of its runs will magically match up to future data. No one will understand how it did this because it didn't do anything.
Once, when I was in my teens, I was talking to someone who was Christian, and I badgered her about her faith. I don’t know why she put up with my shit, but she did, and I smugly deconstructed her religion until all she could say was “it’s just faith, I just believe.”
I made her cry. She tried to hide it but I saw. I felt deep shame then and will remember that moment for the rest of my life. I remain deeply ashamed of that moment, that attitude, of the sort of person I was trying to be. Of making myself feel better about myself by making someone else feel bad about themselves.
What good did I do her? How did I make her life better in any way? I didn’t. I made it worse.
I wish I could say I stopped being a condescending asshole about religion in that moment but it took me years more to learn the lesson I should have learned in that moment—I have no business believing I know another person as well as they know themselves.
(It is no surprise that I am an anarchist. I believe in radical humility. I have no business telling anyone else how to live.)
She was an immensely smart person. She was perfectly capable of interrogating her own beliefs herself. I did her no good by hounding her.
To anyone who thinks they’re going to persuade me into being an anti-theist, I assure you there is nothing you can say that will counterbalance the shame I feel for that moment. I learned my lesson.
The whole concept of "comrades" is a fake category, frankly. People who are in an affinity group with you who you've worked with may be comrades. Maybe if you're strongly in a particular tendency and other people are strongly in that tendency. But mostly when someone calls you a comrade it's a signal that they plan to try to either con you or brigade you.
Anyways, so many people have childhood or teenage trauma about religion that you can't really talk about it in any sense and not expect someone to get really heated.
Internalizing when and how you can depend on people in the scene is an important part of preventing burnout. I was peeved at the following interaction sequence because it was so characteristic:
Peter Gelderloos links to an article that is vaguely about horrible people within the scene (Gelderloos has written a lot of important stuff for anarchism)
Anarcho Nina Writes gets progressively more angry about the piece Gelderloos linked to and denounces Gelderloos for being bad person adjacent in some way
One week later, Anarcho Nina Writes is denounced by incredibly hostile people like Welsh Pixie and the rest of the Bad Space supporters on various trumped-up charges, exactly like the people who Gelderloos warned about via the article he linked to.
It would be good if people would stop falling for and contributing to this stuff, but they are never going to so you have to expect it.
People get confused about this because of straightforwardly ideological reasons. For instance, the government could (and has) simply give or lend everyone some fixed amount of money and not pay for it with anything. This would be an extension of the government's credit, create real claims on the economy, create money etc. but the public has been taught that the government shouldn't do that because "that's socialism."
So instead banks mostly do it, except they don't do it for most people, they lend money mostly to moderately wealthy people because "that's capitalism." It's important for ideological reasons that money for enterprises be seen as mainly coming from banks (even though for the largest enterprises it actually comes from the government again).
(It's not actually socialism or capitalism in either case, which is why the scare quotes are there.)
As a poet I have to say that "assodon" sounds uneuphonious because the vowels are jammed together and that putting a Greek suffix on "ass-" makes no sense in any case because it has nothing to do with teeth. Better to treat "-todon" as a now non-Greek neologism suffix.
Isn't this kind of punishment for people who destroy worthwhile art, rather than a bog-standard "revamp" of a classic that almost certainly would have been worse than the original? Maybe the corp did humanity a favor by destroying it
Not really familiar with what Bellingcat does (except that every now and then I think it has cat pictures and I'm quickly disappointed). Doesn't it tell you how to detect Russian agents, or something like that? That's a core US liberal skill and I'm not surprised they charge a lot for it.
My sympathies in these cases are (unfortunately) always with the con man rather than the sucker. If libs want to be trained on how to ineptly detect Russian agents then having their disposable income go to people (I'm guessing, with knowledgeable sounding British accents?) who will take their money is probably better than anything else it would go to.
It kind of depends on whether "unhinged" includes "way more appeal to sexuality than anything on adult TV at the time" in which case 1976 Electrawoman and Dynagirl
Have you ever heard of Scott Eric Kaufman? He once had someone disagree with something on his blog and then wrote Emails to something like 50 people saying he should be fired. Sent them to all the professors in his department and a selection of local politicians and so on.
I always feel like the odd person out because Covid hasn't really ruined any phrases for me. One of the lessons I internalized from learning about the Holocaust is that a large majority of people are fine with letting other people die or even actively killing them as long as other people are also doing it.
If I had to pick a phrase it would be "even though the UN itself is powerless, UN agencies are still pretty good".
Usually I agree with the more anarchist side (in this case: saying that the deep problems with our societies are due to elites, not due to ordinary people) but this may be an exception. There never was a time in which ordinary Americans weren't committing genocide against indigenous people and owning chattel slaves, or, later on, reproducing these societal features as far as they could. Insofar as there can be local cultures, American culture is not an imposition from the top but rather a mutually reinforcing structure from the top down through elements of the bottom, concentrated among the petit b. as reactionary parts of society usually are.
Does that make any difference? Not much. The structure still exists primarily in order to enrich the people at the very top, even if the structures of domination also support some people further down.
I wanna surface this to my main timeline because it's kinda important to say out loud from time to time:
Businesses do NOT "have to" focus exclusively on their return to shareholders. Not legally, not morally.
That is the misguided OPINION of a 1970 essay by Milton Friedman, and the fact that everyone seemed to just hop on board that opinion is a significant reason why we switched gears into hyper-hell-capitaliam since then.