Notices by Simon Brooke (simon_brooke@mastodon.scot), page 4

So what happened? Well, life imitated art. Rowling became extremely rich. She became extremely rich on the backs of books bought, of movies watched, by an audience which contained, I believe, a statistically significant excess of #ActuallyAutistic, #Trans, and trans-curious young people. Young people who hero-worshipped Rowling, as the writer who had written their stories, for them.

#4/N

Our heroes are poor and/or outcasts. Potter himself is an odd, troubled kid brought up by a dysfunctional foster family. Grainger is a Muggle-born, a despised class within the magical community. The Weasleys are hard working and conscientious but poor.

The whole arc of the story (because each book essentially recaps THE SAME story) is of the triumph of the underdogs through unity and collective action.

#2/N

So I'd like to cast your mind back to before Rowling came out as a raging TERF. I know for a fact that #ActuallyAutistic kids tended to identify with Potter and co; I'm guessing that #Trans and trans-curious kids did as well.

As uncomfortable outsiders, they had a lot in common with the position that Potter and Granger had in the fictional world.

#3/N

Hear me out, friends. I'm going somewhere.

In the #HarryPotter universe, there are few or no good, rich characters. The rich wizards are all Death Eaters; those with political power (the Ministers of Magic (at least until 2019), Dolores Umbridge) are all stupid or evil or both.

#1/N

‘even if all recyclable goods were recycled, which is unlikely as many goods are simply too difficult or costly to recycle, global recycling rates would only reach 25%, meaning that consumption must be slashed in order to tackle a growing global waste crisis.’

https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-myth-of-reduce-reuse-recycle-why-only-mass-action-can-curb-the-climate-crisis/

@amszmidt @shinmera I *think* that it's recursion. Of course, Common #Lisp does not particularly emphasise recursion, but Portable Standard Lisp (which is where I came in) did.

@shinmera I can (just -- it's a very long time ago) remember how strange and difficult I found #Lisp when I first used it.

It is a whole different way of thinking. It didn't come naturally, at least to me. For me there was pretty much one break-through moment, after which understanding built quite quickly -- but before that moment, it was a struggle.

@amszmidt no, seriously, they're not. You can build the logical equivalent of a COND expression with an unwieldy and unmanageable tree of IF... ELSE... THEN expressions, but the COND form is much more compact and readable.

@amszmidt ...

1. there is no COND (there is IF...ELSE...THEN but this is much less powerful);
2. EXECUTE is roughly equivalent to EVAL but I *think* there is no separate APPLY;
3. There's no built in CAR, CDR, CONS but they are trivial to implement;
4. There's sort-of EQ (you can compare pointers) but it does not seem to be idiomatically used;
5. A reader is implicit in INTERPRET but I'm not sure that it's explicit.

@amszmidt Lisp has all of

* APPLY
* CAR
* CDR
* COND
* CONS
* EQ
* EVAL
* READ

The exact names of these functions are not important but their semantics are. I'm not now familiar with FORTH (I last used it more than 40 years ago), but...

"It addresses, albeit to a tiny extent, one of the great democratic deficits of our time: that capital operates globally, while voting power stops at the national border. Without global measures, in the contest between people and plutocrats, the plutocrats will inevitably win" -- George Monbiot

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/31/brazil-global-tax-billionaires-super-rich

@GeofCox @seb321 @petealexharris we have developed a professional political class, all of whom have far more in common with one another than they have with ordinary people. Consequently, ordinary people feel alienated.

Because we are.

The parties have a consensus around the things the big donors want, because the same big donors fund all the parties. So they all support private ownership of the means of production, of services we all need, of housing, of fossil fuel extraction, for example.

OK, the first thing to say about #GeneralElectionUK 2024 is this: #Labour lost, and lost badly. They lost, in fact, HALF A MILLION VOTES compared to their 2019 result.

All the major parties, including the #LibDems, lost. Labour just lost less badly than either the #Conservatives or the #SNP.

#UKPol
#ScotPol

@fkamiah17 I hate admitting the #Tories are right about anything, but, when the #SNP came into power fourteen years ago, they could have, and should have, reformed local government taxation. That's ae been a #Holyrood competence. The size of the taxes they could justifiably have levied on Scotland's big landowners is practically unlimited: they could have solved the local government finance problem.

And they bottled it.

@massonpj @ow2 Most #OpenSource software is produced by software engineers and enthusiasts in their spare time as an act of curiosity, generosity, or social conscience: a contribution to making the world a (slightly) better place.

It is neither 'product' nor 'by-product' but conscious #gift -- and this is a good thing.

Viewing open source as something produced primarily by industry and academia is not merely wrong: it's missing the point entirely.

#GiftEconomy

@chaosmonkey @massonpj This is why I use the @fsf' General Public License #GPL on most of my projects. I build them so that other people can use them, yes -- but I don't build them so that companies can lock them into proprietary products and then gouge profits out of them.

#SoftwareLibre
#OpenSource
#FreeAsInFreedom

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html

@ShredderLivesOn Note that what she accuses Soros of is supporting the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood. Behind the whole anti-#Trans campaign is a determination to return all women to 'Kinder, Küche, Kirche'.

Trans rights are the current battle ground in the wider struggle for womens' reproductive rights, and rights to engage in civil society at all. We must defend our Trans comrades.

Destroying the planet we live on -- the only planet we can live on -- is of course totally legal and even supported and subsidised by governments around the world (including #Scotland's).

But PROTESTING against destroying the planet? That's illegal. That's very, very illegal. Don't even think about doing that.

#ClimateEmergency

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/23/alarm-as-german-climate-activists-charged-with-forming-a-criminal-organisation

@fedops @CloudyMrs Less hellish this morning, thank you. I think that I must take it *very* gently through today, but last night I was extremely rough and this morning not nearly so much.

@CloudyMrs Thanks. I'm drinking an ocean of tea.