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

@marjolica @jbenjamint in the Highlands there are no "alternative routes". There are very few roads at all, and many of them are still single track.

If you block it up, **nothing** gets through.

@marjolica @Wen @jbenjamint ... For those sufficiently privileged (and sufficiently profligate) to have a car.

@marjolica @Wen @jbenjamint The Highlands is not 'wilderness'. It's stolen land: intentionally depopulated land. The legacy of extreme environmental degradation for profit, of radical enclosure of commons, and of ethnic cleansing.

In the seventeenth century it was both populous and -- for the common people -- prosperous land.

#LandReform
#ScotPol

@marjolica @Wen @jbenjamint all of the Highlands is former forest. The treeline in Norway is well above the top of Scotland's highest hills. It is partly ship building, partly iron foundries, that have deforested Scotland. But it's mainly sheep.

@hellomiakoda I wouldn't trust it to come up from cold. I think the boot sector is long since corrupted.

Wanted to write some software today, but my brain just isn't functioning well enough.

But there are no good, rich characters in Rowling's world. By becoming rich, she became a Death Eater, or, as we call them in contemporary English, a #TERF

I'm still puzzled about how that happened. Was she a Slytherin from the start? I don't think so. The books read as sincere. I think she was the victim of what in software terms we'd think of as a #SpearPhishing attack.

#5/N

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