Notices by Preston Austin (gl33p@mastodon.social)

@gemlog
I feel that, fairly viscerally. Added a note to the OP that it is, I believe, a work of fiction. Something about it's realness and and/or how I shared it made it seem otherwise to a few people so far. And maybe it is biographical, but I think it's a story not a report of events.
@requiem

» "You are feeding them sludge," I say, my voice rising. "And because they are starving, they eat it. And then you tell them sludge is what food tastes like" «

https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-colonization-of-confidence/

“Once the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Camp East Montana is made up of six long tents at the Fort Bliss Army base outside of El Paso”

“the facility holds around 3,000 detainees who are living in harsh conditions: They lack sufficient food and often go without proper medical care, according to AP’s review of 130 calls made to 911. Those calls took place in just about five months—from when the tents were quickly constructed”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/03/at-largest-ice-detention-camp-staff-bet-on-detainee-suicides-ap-reports/

“Dorothea Salo [ the awesome @dsalo here en la fedi ] a cybersecurity expert and UW-Madison professor, says Dane County’s data sharing agreements add another layer of concern”

» “They can’t promise that [data won’t be used for immigration enforcement] if they’re sharing the data with anyone, unless there’s a contract with every single organization they’re sharing with” «

👉🏻 “You can’t stop that third party doing whatever the heck they want, including sharing with ICE” 👈🏻

https://isthmus.com/news/news/does-ice-have-access-to-flock-data/

Everyone's use of LLMs provides cover for these uses of LLMs. All of it

Careful use isn't _more responsible_ than this use, the aggregate of careful use is _responsible for_ this kind of use. It's hair in fascism's beard

This is what the cute "it has legitimate uses" stuff contributes to the world. Well done more open minded than thou* LLM experimenter, this is the future you're helping the worst men on earth win. Far more and far worse consequences for far more people

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/19/doge-bros-grant-review-process-was-literally-just-asking-chatgpt-is-this-dei/

2026-01-09 "Congressman Shri Thanedar will introduce the Abolish ICE Act, legislation that would dismantle the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and end its current enforcement authority."

“The tragic death of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old mother fatally shot by an ICE agent, shows that ICE cannot be reformed and must be abolished. The Abolish ICE Act is a step toward justice, accountability, and a more humane approach to immigration policy.”
https://thanedar.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-shri-thanedar-to-introduce-abolish-ice-act

South Carolina raised a confederate flag over its state house in the 1960s to show contempt for desegregation and Black Americans pursuing civil rights.

Four decades later they moved it to a flagpole at a monument to men who died fighting to preserve chattel slavery.

On 27 July 2015 Bree Newsome scaled that 30ft flagpole, removing that hateful flag. In just days the state decided to take it down permanently.

Sunday is the 10th anniversary of Bree Newsome's essential, moral, courageous action.

"Nothing about us without us" is perhaps the most impressive bit of small d democratic rhetoric ever crafted, and it is increasingly relevant in the current era of centers of capital and power processing information to manipulate and impose controls on "us"

And I do prefer that information and its processing include nothing about me without me involved.

But increasingly I want such stuff to include nothing about us. I'm so tired of power and money coercing input.

Nothing about us.
Without us.

“The world you move through was built by people who thought sideways”

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-robert-f-kennedy-jr-who-thinks-my-daughter-is-a-tragedy

Another driver ran their car into my friends' coffee shop (Mother Fools).

That's twice in under a decade.

As far as I know nobody was hurt, so that's good. Hopefully that's true.

Cars man. They just suck. They make people suck. They wreck cities and whole regions. Great system. Grrrr. Argh.

“when you engage in the collaboration, you actually encourage them to do even worse stuff.” concludes Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University

Robert Kuttner, co-founder at The American Prospect agrees:

“Universities are hiding in self-censorship...Former diversity offices have been remained offices of “Belonging” or “Collaboration,” as the University of Colorado calls its former diversity program.

Collaboration is all too apt a name.”

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-03-24-columbias-capitulation-wesleyans-pushback/

Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University:

“that’s the classic collaborationist dilemma, right? ... you collaborate with authoritarians who you know are in the wrong, in order to keep them from doing worse stuff”

“Like I have a restaurant and if I collaborate with the Nazis and don’t let any Jews eat here, then the guys who wash dishes will still have jobs. As you know, that slope is very slippery. Appeasement doesn't end well.”

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-03-24-columbias-capitulation-wesleyans-pushback/

“...how Fascist dictatorship works: first make an example of one person or institution, that will cow the others who will keep their mouths shut and hope they won’t become the next target.”

“What Columbia is doing is deeply shameful, but so is the silence of its peer institutions.”

“there has been zero support of any kind from other institutions”

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14435

@selzero That's like the setup for a zombie movie 🍿

We switched to decaf once by accidently buying the wrong beans, and for a few days we thought maybe we had COVID before we figured it out.

@dalias Indeed. The whole "Look at them, having fun having power and not giving a fig about our notions of value consistent behavior." aspect of it is also...not great 🙄

Skewering right wing hypocrisy is at its absolute best an amusing waste of time. At its best. But wasting time is OK! It's good to have hobbies. And efficiency is, as everyone is learning, a false god.

But...when skewering hypocrisy: try not to run the sword through the social goods the baddies are supposedly hypocritically abusing.

People depend on welfare. It's a public and moral good. And spreading conservative framings of such goods and their beneficiaries into folks' brains? It's neither.

We do not know why folks think tossing public goods under a rhetorical bus to create clever English that fails to pin hypocrisy to oligarchs and conservatives is good.

We do not know who built this cognitive trap.

We do not know why getting out of it is impossible for so many.

We do not know when we will be able put this gross practice behind us.

We only know that that day is not this day over at forbes dot com /sites/alanohnsman/2025/02/21/elon-musk-is-a-billionaire-federal-welfare-vampire/

The opposite of harm and destruction isn't resistance or building. It's mending and care.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, don't let the bastards decide what you harden yourself to, or what you can care about. They can make it expensive, and they will make it more and more so, but they can't choose for you.

Hard things beget adjacent hard things. Being pushed by fascism is also being pushed to be fascist. To do its work.

Resistance shrinks what anyone can care about. Whiteness works to ensure one's cares harden them into a tool its violence can work with.

To my sweet siblings in left and liberal whiteness: Feel this being done to you. En la fedi. At work. In politics. By friends. By family. Know what you're supposed to care less about.

Lots of machines can kill fascists. Caring can kill fascism.

I fairly deeply hate the term "homeless camp" since generally speaking, they're not camping. Each "camp" is made of people's homes.

So when the monstrous need to "clear" a "camp" boils over among nice white progressive homeowners nearby, we owe them plain language about what we demand police and city employees, who should serve them equally, do to them for us.

We ask them to violently destroy a group of people's homes because we hate how they and their homes look, and what that says about us.