Notices by Sam (samuteki@ohay.ooo)

I used to be a pacifist, I think.
And then I learned how my people freed themselves from slavery.
I stopped being a pacifist after that.

An unfortunate consequence of social media comment boxes is that everyone feels 1) the right to reply to whatever they want (whether they understood it or not) and 2) the need to chime in on complex topics in less than 400-ish characters.

How are you thinking/feeling about Masto/Fedi recently?

It's tempting to describe racism as mental illness (though I know of no voluntary mental illnesses):
racism demands a feverish, desperate adherence to beliefs that drives the racist further and further away from reality while insisting that they are closer to reality than anyone else.

When you witness the lengths to which people will go to protect their racist beliefs, you could even be persuaded that it's the fever of racism that made them say that ugly thing or do that harmful thing—but it's probably closer to the truth to say that the fears of having been wrong all along or having to give up total power are the true driving forces behind all of this inhuman behavior.

"NFT" didn't have any hooks in our cultural consciousness, so that's why when people started kicking the tires, the hype quickly died down.

"AI", on the other hand, is something we've been promised (and warned about) for decades. Also, the term is being misapplied to all sorts of commercial products, some of them that existed before the ChatGPT hype which is confusing the uninformed person because since now "AI" means whatever the company says it is, they can over-promise and under-deliver, as long as they deliver *something* sometimes.

Anybody know of any left-handed keyboards with programmable keys that are budget-friendly?

All you have to do is *be* *Black* *online*.
That's it.
That's all it takes to make a racist angry.
No—that is not hyperbole.
And if you don't get it, it shows.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/24/24227672/telegram-ceo-pavel-durov-arrested-ceo

"French authorities believe that the platform’s lack of moderation has “allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.”"

Why is this "weird" thing working?

The type of person who responds to someone complaining about racism by asking them to draw up a detailed incident report is not the type of person who really wants to help anyway.

If UBI was a thing, far from having no motivation and doing nothing, I would be so productive that people would be telling me to take a break.

The difference is I would (have the time and freedom to) be doing the things I *want* to be doing.

Some of you all are the most far-right leftists on the internet I swear to God.

Every single time someone talks about improving Mastodon software for the sake of inclusivity towards Black people, *every single time*, the comments grow a bunch of concern trolls that are like "Everything's fine (for me)! Let them go make their own thing!"

And that's why Black people don't fuck with this place.

Black person on Fedi: *breathes*

White person on Fedi: Now this is just my opinion and I know people are gonna jump down my throat for this but if you just breathed a little differently maybe you wouldn't get so much hate...

You could put "BLM" in your profile...
OR
... you could actually boost and support some Black people 😇😇😇

anytime you hear "no politics", you're hearing the oppressor

I struggle to get to the core of this idea, and I've been trying to for weeks or months, but the fascist/oppressor can change their philosophy like you change your shoes. Whatever fits best for the current situation.

A reality built on lies will eventually buckle under the gravity of the truth, such that the more obvious the truth becomes, the more outrageous the lies become to balance with the truth.

It feels like the ruling classes of the world (and the wide swaths of people they keep under the illusion of being their peers) are coming dangerously close to not having any more lies to tell.

The most racist, fascist people in the world are starting to sound like people I know as freedom fighters and revolutionaries. They *insist* that someone is out to get them, they insist that their rights are being threatened. They step on our necks and cry out that they can't breathe. They burn our cities down and cry out that their homes are in danger.

It is difficult to find hope these days, when the news seems so hopeless—but this bold-faced, upside-down relationship that the fascists have with the truth comes from a place of desperation. Not strength.

The whole world is watching. And you can fool some of the people some of the time...