Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social), page 3

It's a rotating roster of credit, proportionally allocated by donation amount, so it can be a weird little easter egg to see what sponcom decides you "sponsored" in a given month. Like, for example, this week, friend of the show @jacob apparently sponsored this helpful little improvement to internal maintenance documentation https://github.com/glyph/Pomodouroboros/pull/69/commits/03c0179753b9a58306152462fc8dcec5d9b70030 and also… for the best example of why this is not intended to be taken too seriously, whatever this mess is https://github.com/glyph/Pomodouroboros/pull/69/commits/7e7ab79f43773856de2f7078f7a7a375f02aaa6e

I also try to give credit to my sponsors using this weird little tool I wrote <https://github.com/glyph/sponcom>. These typically only show up in commits on repos that I personally own (including private repos, for the purposes of the intermittently-published high score leaderboard) since I still feel a little weird about the etiquette of including promo on other orgs' commit messages.

If you would prefer, I am equally happy for you to sign up via Github Sponsors at <https://github.com/sponsors/glyph>, which I guess I *should* want you to prefer, since they have no payment processing fees and thus I would hypothetically get more money that way, but I started with Patreon and haven't quite figured out how to bridge everything.

Obviously this week a lot of what was sponsored was unleashing my unhinged posting-through-it energy to promote https://superswingdistricts.org (which is within $1k of what I think is its final goal!) but political activism is not usually my main wheelhouse.

it often feels like I'm not doing enough, that in the face of a resurgent nazi[1] party in the US *nothing* would be enough, and it's a perpetual drain on my mental health that requires constant management.

so thank you Jeff Bezos[2] for the brave example showing how someone with so much more power could do so much less. now, for the next week and change, if I'm feeling down, I can just think "at least tens of thousands of my own subscribers aren't calling me a disgusting coward"

#USPol

This is a silly pet peeve but I just keep seeing it so I just gotta say it: do not simply write “minors DNI” or “🔞” in your bio. The thing about minors is that they are inherently less knowledgeable about things than adults. You are attempting to cover your ass in a completely useless way, because the minors you want to caution will not necessarily know what “DNI” means, that “minors” refers to them, or that the symbol which clearly says “no eighteens” means “no people *under* eighteen”

Okay, time to properly launch this: SUPER SWING DISTRICTS! https://superswingdistricts.org

This is a slate of Democratic candidates calculated for maximum impact for your donation dollars.

National campaigns receive a ton of money, but can't always deploy it locally in the places that the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and … shenanigans mean it needs to be spent. But figuring out which local campaigns *can* use it is a lot of work. This site is the output of that work.

#USPol #SuperSwingDistricts

Godwin's law looms over all discourse so I try not to bring this up constantly but *I* am constantly thinking about it when looking at the news.

My great grandparents' names are on that list I just linked. And when we were learning about what the other kids in school would call "the holocaust", my grandmother would often speak about her experience using french words and phrases, because, you know. It happened to her, and when it happened to her it happened in french.

#USPol

2020 was our Beer Hall Putsch. It failed. Remember when Hitler failed seize power? Conservative elites allowed his rehabilitation, his poisoning of their institutions. It was years until he could do "deportations". And—I cannot stress this enough—*that is what they called it*. "Deportations".

This is what a record of "mass deportations" looks like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_deportations_of_French_Jews_to_death_camps

We are past "it could happen here". It *IS* happening here. It just hasn't all happened *yet*.

#USPol

Going to take a break for a few hours from talking about #SuperSwingDistricts but I did want to talk just a *little* bit about the stakes.

In 2016… almost 8 years ago… I wrote this: https://blog.glyph.im/2016/11/what-are-we-afraid-of.html

If you're convinced, this is not an article for you to read, but it is an article for you to share, if you know someone who is not convinced that this is *serious*.

I was early, but I wasn't wrong.

In 2016, nobody had "mass deportations now" signs. In 2016, there were guard rails.

#USPol

And that's the word she would use, in French. "Déportations". As in "mémorial des déportations", which is what a lot of holocaust museums are called in France.

For me, the phrase "mass deportation" has a visceral resonance more like "fucking kill your whole family" than "fiscal policy".

Which makes me feel absolutely insane when horse-race pundits say it. "Will fucking killing your whole family reduce housing prices? Fucking killing your whole family is very popular among men 18-34."

#USPol

@powersoffour "parasocial (non-derogatory)"

Whew. Going to take a moment now just to close my eyes and take deep breaths and imagine, because this is definitely also within reach, that in a few weeks Trump loses, slowly loses the rest of his appeals, is jailed for his existing convictions, and begins to fade from public memory.

There will still be years of work to do, gradually breaking the power of the ghouls who made him and are complicit in his crimes. But what an amazing feeling that would be.

We can still make it happen.

#USPol

(If you are not familiar with the term, it has a specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking)

Everything is going to be way more expensive and slow and uncertain than it needs to be, even in the case of a massive, spectacular win for dems. And it would be nice if more campaigns in critical places were flush with cash to ease *whatever* procedural nonsense crops up.

gonna keep this off the main super swing districts thread here https://mastodon.social/@glyph/113347385643868594 because I can't predict for sure that this is how campaigns use money, but one reason that I personally think that it's important to give to smaller campaigns—even, or maybe especially, this late—is ratfucking. The republicans are engaged in a truly staggering amount of ratfucking in this election and a lot of candidates are going to be blindsided and need to pay legal fees to defend spurious, inane challenges

Untitled Goose Hammer 40k

I will be posting more about it as I fill out candidate bios and more information if you're interested, but the high-level pitch here is that (as you know) gerrymandering and the electoral college fuck up the democratic process, making certain elections matter more than others, and (also as you probably know) high-profile federal candidates raise a LOT more money, and can use it less effectively than downballot races which are often more consequential but starved for resources

This has been delayed by logistical issues and various COVID infections so the site is somewhat half-baked right now, but the slate is done and you can donate so if you want you can just go ahead and do that right now: https://superswingdistricts.org

I will be working on adding a bunch of additional information to the site over the next day or so, and when I've done that I'd love it if somebody could put me in touch with the folks who were doing the "Mastodon for Harris" campaigning earlier, to see if we can have the fediverse punch above its weight here