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

@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.

@Lana It's worth noting in this context that Monopoly was based on The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by fiction writer and poet, engineer, stage actress and outspoken activist for the feminist movement, Elizabeth Magie.

Magie was a fierce abolitionist and proponent of social justice for African-Americans, and her game - based on the teachings of progressive era economist Henry George - was meant to illustrate the negative effects of land monopolies.

The original rules were anti-capitalist.

After WWII, fear stalked the corridors of power in Great Britain. Irrespective of partisan allegiance, the ruling classes knew that because so many had sacrificed so much for so few, it wouldn't take much to trigger a popular uprising. Hence the emergence of what historians call the "post-war consensus", a cross-party acceptance that nationalisation, strong trade unions, robust regulation, progressive taxation, and an expanded welfare state would be needed to placate the restive electorate.

1/4

In 1945 the democratic socialist Clement Attlee swept to power. A landslide against war leader Winston Churchill, who contrary to today's far-right mythology was widely hated by the working classes and armed forces, and expected to be a disaster for peacetime domestic policy. Attlee's government embarked on a radical programme of social reforms to safeguard all citizens, "from the cradle to the grave". There began two decades of year-on-year economic growth, the longest in the UK's history.

2/4

Thanks to British socialism, made possible by elite terror at the prospect of revolt, every citizen now enjoys financial protection in the event of unemployment or sickness, a state pension when they retire, standardised minimal living and working conditions, universal free healthcare and education, financial help with funerals...the list goes on and on. Attlee's bold achievements in improving people's lives caused a surge in upward mobility that led to the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

3/4

So don't let anyone tell you CEOs in America having to beef up their personal security, while feeling increasingly nervous and unsafe in their luxury hotels, gentrified blocks and gated communities can ever be a bad thing. That should just be the price of extreme wealth and power, and as the British post-war experience shows, and recent events in South Korea further highlight, all that's needed for concrete change is enough people refusing to accept less.

Then no more shots need be fired.

4/4

@AnarchoNinaWrites Funnily enough I'm rereading No Is Not Enough by Klein, and have Monbiot's Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order lined up as my next reread. It was less that four feet away from me when I saw your thread!

The book is a penetrating *diagnosis* of the many, overlapping and interlocking systemic problems now threatening us - US hegemony being a central focus.

It's hard to believe he hasn't privately reached the hard conclusion his own work spotlights and underlines.

@mttaggart @kims @mekkaokereke In terms of its UX the fedi does have a way to go.

But Bsky is "bad" 'cos it's a shady, billionaire-owned, VC-funded, data-hoovering corporate behemoth just waiting for its userbase to grow enough - and be entrenched and captive enough - for the next phase of the enshitification cycle.

Even if by every objective measure Bsky was the best social media platform ever, some would still rather throw all their tech in a compactor and go live in a ditch, than feed it. 🤷♂️

@AnarchoNinaWrites @craignicol

Also, there's the not insignificant fact that a lot of what's being pushed as "green" energy today, is not without its own, potentially huge environmental and human costs.

Of course you already know this, but some of your readers may not.

👇

https://mastodon.world/@ApostateEnglishman/113538244703215500

@cstross Oh, ferrets. Definitely ferrets! Giving us not one, but two opportunities to flex some creative muscle:

(1) By coming up with an actual, plausible scenario in which the escape rooms became inhabited by ferrets.

(2) By taking on the truly Hitchcockian task of making cute fluffy animals somehow scary.

@tuban_muzuru @rysiek @futurebird Depends on prior knowledge of the deck, because all shuffles (other than a tabled casino wash, but even that can be manipulated to some extent) are non-random.

Believe it or not, it takes around 2,500 standard overhand shuffles to fully randomize a prearranged deck! A sloppy riffle shuffle is more efficient, achieving this in only seven shuffles - but a perfect, card-for-card interweaving of the packets will restore the deck to original order in eight shuffles.