Notices by The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)

I don't know which is scarier, that an actual FBI director is suggesting the UFC should train its field agents, or that the media is largely taking the proposal seriously.

MMA is a sport with strict rules for that specific arena, not a complete fighting system suitable for chaotic situations with no time to limber up, civilian clothes (!), no rules and no referee. Many of the moves you'd need to escape such a situation are banned from UFC!

Plus who trained the elite commando units, Mike Tyson?

When SpaceX launched a Telsa into space, the "mission" had no scientific value. There were no instruments on-board sending back data. There wasn't even a destination, it was car-shaped space junk flung haphazardly into the void.

Nothing but a publicity stunt to inflate Telsa's stock and make Musk even richer. So it sure would be a shame if everyone helped make Telsa a radioactive brand, and Musk had to default on any loans collateralized by its stock value.

Today, Telsa is his Achilles heel.

@crazybutable @petrillic @ColesStreetPothole "Freedom of speech" has become race- and sex-coded. It's a dogwhistle for "absolute right of white, cishet males to dominate public discourse without fear of contradiction".

Similarly, "cancel culture" is code for "people with the temerity to publicly disagree with me", and "woke" is code for "non-white cishet male perspective or anyone who thinks other perspectives matter".

As you say, it's reactionary culture war bullshit.

Hundreds of locals are currently kettling a small disorganised collection of right-wing groups, including Nick Tenconi, in Manchester, England.

The police are standing around not taking sides.

Today in Manchester, England. An apparently spontaneous gathering of hundreds of antifascists are blocking UKIP and Parents Against Grooming from entering Piccadilly Gardens. The police have so far appeared clueless as to what to do about this unexpected show of public resistance.

#AntiFascist #ResistEverywhere

Remember when Kurt Cobain with Nirvana did their truly soul-chilling, off-key cover of Lead Belly's song, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" on MTV Unplugged?

Awful fact: Lead Belly - among Kurt's biggest influences - was also responsible for the earliest audio recording of the phrase "stay woke", in a spoken afterword to the 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys", recounting the tragic story of nine Black teens and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931.

#BlackHistoryMonth

This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's breakdown of what it can gain access to via subpoena from the various "secure" messaging apps. As you can see, if you're using Signal even the FBI can only see when you first registered and when you last logged in. That's it.

Use Signal.

@mastodonmigration @heliomass It's a big improvement, but wouldn't prevent the scenario of being *offline* for a few hours, only to return to 200+ notifications from strangers all spoiling for a fight because some large account whipped them up by QTing you out-of-context.

At that point, the damage is already done regardless of whether you withdraw the QT.

But if you catch it straight away? Yeah, that would stop the abusive behaviour in its tracks. So I guess the answer to you is, "yes and no".

@mastodonmigration @heliomass These details of implementation are in that category of ideas so simple and obvious, no-one has thought of them before!

The whole opposition to QTs comes from control being with the QTer, thus opening up a vector for coordinated harassment. I know what it's like being bombarded with aggressive comments because some 5-figure follower account has rallied their minions with a QT.

Even as someone who isn't vulnerable, it still raised my stress levels through the roof.

There's a nationwide day of protest at noon on February 5th (Wednesday), planned for all 50 states of the USA. Those wishing to help in this visible push-back against tyranny should assemble at their local State Capitol building.

My advice as a lifelong activist is to be mindful of those who are more vulnerable than you are. If you're fortunate to be from a demographic less likely to be targeted by police, spend some of those privilege tokens and position yourself accordingly.

#StopProject2025

@nullagent I am loving watching this tech bubble collapse like a flan in a cheap oven. It's glorious. 😆

Irony is dead.

What interest might the Trump admin have in Greenland? Clearly, the President himself couldn't point to his own country on a globe, but what about his handlers?

Open the attached image and zoom in. It's from The Greenland Mineral Resources Portal, "an entry point to all available information about mineral resources and occurrences in Greenland".

As you can see, the island is a veritable treasure trove for extractive industries, with resources including zinc and nickel.

https://www.greenmin.gl/

Not sure why some are surprised that in these dark times, it's Teen Vogue stepping up to deliver the adversarial journalism that the NYT, WaPo etc. won't. It was after all Vogue Magazine that in July 1945 first published, uncensored, Lee Miller's shocking photos of the bodies piled high at Auschwitz, in a piece titled simply, "Believe It."

There's going to be a lot of heroism from unlikely places in the coming years, so keep your eyes and ears open, and be ready to boost the bejeezus out of it!

My heart is anarchist - in the properly-understood sense exemplifed for me by the likes of David Graeber - and always has been. My head is some sort of demsoc, mainly because it still can't figure out how to get There from Here without bloodshed.

But every inch closer we get to fascism, I become more radicalized, and I don't like it. I don't want it to have to be this way. It hurts my soul.

But people gotta eat, and needs must.

@AnarchoNinaWrites Explain shit to me. You have the floor, and my assurance that I won't interrupt.

@notroot @atomicpoet I had a similar thought when I read mine: I hardly ever post about my main hobbies because there's no community on the fedi that shares them, so it's not worth my time and energy.

But I don't want to update my bio because regardless of what I actually post here, it's accurate. 😆

Bored of the lazy trope about how "Mother Nature" will survive this current mass extinction. Between 1970 and 2014 alone, there was an average 60% decline in mammal, bird, fish, reptile and amphibian populations, and there have been comparable declines in invertebrate populations as well. The possibly permanent end of all sentient life, let alone life capable of contemplating its own existence, would be a tragedy beyond imagining.

If by "Mother Nature" you mean bacteria...perhaps. But so what?

The US Crisis Project, an effort by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University, exists solely to collect and analyze data on protests and political violence in the US.

It looked at data from all 50 states, and found that 93% of racial justice protests after George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight and on camera by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, were peaceful and nondestructive.

#MAGA #Jan6

@feditips Controversial opinion, but I've grown to prefer the austere 500-character limit. Collapsing my ideas down into tiny, bitesize chunks (each shareable on their own) helps me to clarify my own thinking, and also stops me ranting into the wilderness before I've taken the time to consider sparser, more disciplined and impactful sentences.

Because some folks hate epic threads, I always aim for a maximum of four installments. So far, my longest has been five.