Notices by Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen (mxchara@seattle.pink), page 2

There's reasons for the disdain. Decades of exposure to corporate #Internet, not to mention #entertainment designed to normalize bigotry and abusive relationships like #SouthPark and copaganda shows, have destroyed the general U.S. sense for propriety and courtesy. There's ever so many people who think it's a citizen's duty to rain bomb threats and slurs and "kys" on powerless strangers.

As I've said, journalists are not broadly liked for U.S. #conservatives in common with the #IDF all want journalists in the hands of firing squads. They're seen as mere wreckers. Do I have to mention that Ayn Rand's favorite villains were poison-pen journalists?

(cont'd)

If there's going to be any counterpoint to the rubbish "techno-optimism" of Elon Musk and his #tech cronies it's got to come from the mainstream media. But a profoundly craven and sneakfaced thing has happened because of the #Internet. Basically it's this: because the Internet and #socialmedia especially exist in part to maintain a flimsy premise of social equality among all persons, U.S. journalists have gotten to thinking that it's enough for Elon Musk to be hated on the Internet. To them, that's more than enough.

After all, those journalists are also loathed for their cowardly reporting and their obvious corruption, so all those @arstechnica etc. technology reporters are on Musk's side anyway. They loathe the general public and regard us as inferior beings.

(cont'd)

"Work", to them, is two things, two contradictory things but never mind that. The #tech barons and #finance scammers and #crypto addicts all think that whatever they're doing is "hard work" of course and it must be exhausting in that sickish dissatisfying way in which idle pursuits can still deplete a person, particularly if they're inclined to anger and impatience. As ALL of these people are. And they think of "the working class" in terms of soldiers and cops mostly and a few idealized trades like oil-drilling and ranching.

Clerks in shops aren't workers of course. Government clerks are mere leeches to them no matter what vital service they provide.

(cont'd)

The CEOs and even the #investment punters who do nothing all day but hope their portfolios go up as if by magic, they're the "builders" and "creators". Abundant pro-business pro-#capitalism agitprop have cemented the impression that there's something intrinsically creative about "building wealth" even if it's all in electronic funny-money maintained at enormous social and economic cost.

One tries to tell them they're swindlers, one tries to get them to understand what actual labor is like and WHY it's laborious and "boring" to them, something they've actually become terrified of.

(cont'd)

The one ambition that any of the techlords have that can be construed as aspirational is #space but I've already gone into how grim is their notion of space colonization and resource-extraction. It slots right into their notion of eternal wars over space empires: the only possible way they can keep their war machine churning over the long haul is by pushing off Earth.

They're getting extremely antsy about this and they must have a lot of dismal economic forecasts coming in from their pet intellectuals. The "population crisis" chatter hints at the problems they want solved double-quick.

(cont'd)

It's not JUST a racist thing, although of course it's very much a racist thing. It's a familiar story with #fascism: they've pared down human imperatives to the smallest little cluster of fascist mores, chief among them the need to expand and fill the maximum possible space with the maximum number of fascists.

U.S. "pro-natalism" is congruent with Italian fascism's "fecundita" and with the Third Reich's motherhood obsessions, a mainstay of their propaganda imagery just as babies are a propaganda weapon in U.S. #media.

(cont'd)

@steter Alan Moore could imagine an all-American corporate dictator who thought he could fix all the world's conflicts at once by cooking up an alien invasion. But we're stuck with this pallid nonsense as a substitute. Meanwhile, hasn't the Trump administration simply abandoned the Perseverance rover, seizing the funds intended for its return mission? I am so intensely and thoroughly sick of these people.

Gawd. I wanted to write a story about Alexander Alekhine's cat once because I liked the idea of the cat being somehow the real world champion of #chess instead of the boozy, unpleasant Alekhine. There he is at the 1935 world championship which I wished to make into the setting for the story; I even started to research the match though I found no better account of it than the abbreviated treatment (but a helpful one) from Garry Kasparov's My Predecessors.

That's Max Euwe, the spectacled fellow, sitting at right on the Black side of the board, while the cat (who might be a Siamese, I'm not sure) sitting with front paws on the board and a harness round them. Alekhine stands at left, with his right hand petting the cat, whom some sources give the name of Chess or more likely Caissa. I think Hans Kmoch might be the background figure closest to Alekhine, the fellow with thin hair and round spectacles.

RE: https://seattle.pink/@mxchara/116792801904158663

Ugh I petered out last night when writing this. I'll have to reconstruct what I thought I was getting at in the long run with this burbling. I was attempting to describe the concepts necessary to understand J. D. Vance's particular sort of Christian extremism and why his specific type of extremist—the "sedevacantist" Catholic or "traditional Catholic" as they've learned to call themselves—has become so specifically important to U.S. right-wing politics. ~Chara

@mos_8502 Rust really irritates me for reasons that are difficult to nail down. partly it's the fannish community, partly it's that annoying habit of coming up with new names for old things (e.g. "crates"), partly it's the feeling like you can't EVER trust the language actually to settle down to a final form

@oldladyplays the eternal paradox of the racist: in their mind they're naturally superior and better at everything and, for some reason, that's exactly why they never achieve much—they're perpetually dragged down by the scum class, whose ability to foil the plans of the master race is always construed as somehow deeply unfair and even a contravention of reality

@Owlor @ireneista I've always been dubious of the concept of "computer literacy" as a necessary skill for life (more important than literal literacy, too!) but, practically speaking, as someone with altogether too much schooling, I've tended to think that a modest degree of ability to use and program (or at least script) personal computers is a baseline achievable thing for general education.

But that old ethic seems to be vanishing. We are being discouraged from regarding our computers as complex programmable devices but as mere vessels and pipelines for "generative AI", except perhaps for an increasingly elitist stratum of specialists. It's remarkable to me, stunning. Humanity really has not digested the personal computer sufficiently, not even remotely, and so we're poised on the brink of an attempt to pacify the majority of the population with mere...Happy Boxes, really. Ask the AGI what you want and it will create it for you. Everyone gets their own special flavor of The Stuff™.

How did we get here?

@skinnylatte oh gawd if there is real-life food on this Earth that has negative "mana" as a gamer might say—some peculiar ability to lessen one's lifeforce or joie de vivre despite nominally satisfying hunger and appetite—McDonalds food is that thing. Holy heck.