Notices by Aaron Ross Powell ☸️ (arossp@mastodon.social), page 2

@fediversereport @hnb This is 100% what I was looking for. Thank you! (And excellent work.)

The "you" in the thankful "You've made this dream come true" at the end of that Disney commercial is Congress for relentlessly and mindlessly extending the term of copyright beyond all reason, I'm assuming. #NFL #SuperBowl

It is genuinely weird how Americans don't find it weird that we ham-handedly inject nationalism and militarism into our sporting events. #SuperBowl #NFL

Political conservatives can never be pro-liberty, because liberty ultimately clashes with conservative goals. https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/liberty-upsets-patternsand-conservatism

"American politics is bad because both sides are unwilling to compromise" sounds nice and well-meaning in the abstract, but it sneaks in a false symmetry. If you're a trans person, for example, and the other side is calling you an abomination who needs to be shunned, deprived of health care, and kept away from all children—your existence not even acknowledged to children—it's difficult to see where the compromise could be, or why justice and civility would counsel it even if you could find it.

Every argument I hear from artists in opposition to generative #AI applies equally to other human artists. And if the objection is ultimately, "You shouldn't use a computer to do work as a substitute for paying a human to do it," I have bad news for you about basically every way you use computers in your daily life.

What is #liberalism? It turns out to be a rather slippery concept to nail down. On today's episode of the ReImagining Liberty #podcast, I'm joined by Emily Chamlee-Wright, president of the Institute for Humane Studies, who argues that liberalism is actually four distinct but overlapping ideas. https://reimaginingliberty.com/episodes/the-four-corners-of-liberalism-w-emily-chamlee-wright

I love that I have half a dozen #Mastodon client apps installed on my phone, they're all under active development, and they all have as many (or more) features as the official app. It feels like the early days of Twitter apps, but without even the possibility of the rug getting pulled out from under it.

It's my pleasure to announce that my #podcast, ReImagining Liberty—about the cosmopolitan and emancipatory case for radical social, political, and economic freedom—is now a part of #TheUnPopulist, the best online journal exposing and critiquing the illiberalism of the reactionary right. https://www.reimaginingliberty.com/p/reimagining-libertys-new-home

It's difficult to overstate just how morally corrupt it is to oppose immigration.

The proper response to seeing someone you don't like spend less time in prison than people you're more sympathetic towards is not to call for that person to get a stiffer sentence. It's instead to demand everyone else get a lighter sentence.

The way people think about the morality of art, ownership, and influence pretty quickly becomes contradictory—and even incoherent—when computer generated art is involved. Take this paragraph, for example, from a tabletop gaming website. ?https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2022/12/17/weekend-update-12-17-2022/

The Buddha, presumably discussing why one should leave Twitter for Mastodon: "This is the entire holy life, Ānanda, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship." https://suttacentral.net/sn45.2/en/bodhi

Protocols, not platforms. That we let ourselves get suckered into platforms over protocols is one of the biggest unforced errors in the history of the net, and if Musk makes that widely obvious, it will be a significant silver lining in his sophomoric conflagration.

@lain No, but Rothbard is wrong in his own ways.

I have a frequent frustration when reading #anarchist texts. They will have insightful things to say about the nature of power, and the operation of the state. Their analysis of relationships of influence and domination is important. Their moral claims are often obviously correct. But then (and this isn't *all* anarchists), they'll start in on how we should abolish private property, or how profit is always and everywhere unnecessary and harmful exploitation, and I roll my eyes.

@jeffjarvis
It's deeply frustrating watching my friends who ought to know better—journalists, tech policy people, etc.—acknowledging that Twitter's on the outs, but then getting excited about moving to yet another closed, proprietary platform.