Notices by L.J. is reading the Daodejing (ljwrites@rage.love), page 2

@lumpley I am told it's surprisingly readable by laypeople! Not sure how much of that is the style of indictments in general and how much is the drafters trying extra hard to get public understanding and buy-in, given the subject matter. @FredKiesche

Can people stop invoking Martin Luther positively as though he weren't a virulent antisemite (yes, even for "his times" so get out of my face with that excuse) who called for synagogues to be burned and Jewish homes to be razed, rabbis to be executed and Jewish people to be pressed into forced labor or expelled?

@MordecaiMartin that's very nice to know! That gives everyone time to figure out a surgery schedule that works for the wee one without undue rush :blobcat_hearthug:

@MordecaiMartin Awww, adorable bebe! Are they feeding without trouble?

@MordecaiMartin You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
- Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, On Children

@Are0h actually it's about ethics in federation!!

@MordecaiMartin My husband told me it was strange and wonderful watching how I love our child, the joy and gentleness of that love, and I've similarly discovered new aspects of my husband watching him interact with so much patience and humor. Being parents together is a different dimension to the relationship yet again from being married, and got us to know each other all over again in our depths and limitations as we grow as parents alongside our child.

@MordecaiMartin Chances are they're going to LOVE the garbage truck in a couple more years!

@MordecaiMartin awww that's adorable and also a very good way to get bebe settled & attached, they remember your voice from the womb!

I wonder if people recognize the Buddhist influences throughout this thread lol. Because it's not about avoiding sin which is a very Western Christian thing, *laughs in white atheist leftists and techbros obsessed with wrongdoing and purity* but rather about being conscious of reality as it is and not suffering unnecessarily from unrealistic and contradictory desires.

Like do you use corporate social media that's operating at a loss to grow its userbase and farm data? Cool, do what you like, but if you don't want to get burned be aware it's going to get cashed out at some point and not to your benefit. I can't and don't want to control what you do, all I can do is warn you of the consequences and hope you prepare for them.

People are free to repeat that cycle over and over again if they want to, of course. And hey, as long as they recognize the built-in impermanence of quote-unquote free platforms and use these tools as the deliberately breakable toys they are, more power to them!

What I can't deal with anymore is the denial of reality, the toxic illusion that tech corpos have our best interests at heart, or that these eleventy billion incidents that all follow the same pattern are the product of individual bad actors and not a fundamentally broken system.

So I'm not saying don't use corporate media ever, or that if you do so you're tainted or a collaborator or whatever techbro puritan talk I could care less about. I'm saying: Have a plan. Don't invest your entire connections and attachments into one corporate media platform, and for God's sake don't trust it to be there for you long-term.

Build a personal website. Get your people's contact info outside social media. Back up your data. Build community and support a fedi instance, if that's your pace. Heck, maybe build a fedi instance. Whatever you do, be ready to be able to function without the tech companies' "generosity." Because they sure as hell don't care about you.

What I will say is that we can't keep doing the same thing and expect different results. When BlueSky does it, when InstaThreads does it, when Tumblr does it, when LiveJournal did it, Facebook did it, Twitter is doing it etc. etc. Of course they did and of course they will. It's been going on for decades. Why would anyone be surprised?

The social media VC model was always unsustainable and always predictable. Social media that works in the long term was always going to be difficult, expensive, janky, and messy. It was always going to take work and community.

That's where we are now with the fedi, and that's why comparisons of how it measures up to Twitter or whatever all fall wide of the mark. Try to be like Twitter and it will go the way of Twitter. Again, these patterns are not new or surprising, and while I can understand why some might want to deny reality, for my own well-being I can't indulge these illusions.

The hypothesis/provocation: The history of online platforms has been a history of users being handed infrastructures far beyond their financial reach or even that of the operators. These companies in turn were happy to provide the illusion of infinite free resources at a financial loss in the hopes of cashing out on the user base. When usability and the user experience are predictably destroyed by those plans going into effect, the users repeatedly go :pika_surprise: and rush to the next thing, where the same cycle repeats.

None of this is to say users are in the wrong, or that the loss of their connections and communities are their own faults. Often they *had* no other choices for connection and reach. Obviously the VC investment mechanism created this situation by preying on user needs, and big social media operators made the situation worse by drying out the digital commons.

Tumblr management calls it "outdated" to show users posts on their feeds only from users they follow, and I gotta say I have never been happier to be outdated https://www.tumblr.com/staff/722477242948747264/tumblrs-core-product-strategy

@MordecaiMartin you're winning at life so hard rn

@MordecaiMartin Let's hear it for hearing! 👂️ 👏

Disability thinking and discourse have helped me even though I would not be categorized as disabled by any official metrics and hesitate to call myself such. I still learned and was helped by disabled writers, educators, and friends that it's okay to accept my limits, that my comfort is important, and to take care of myself in a world that values beings only for what they produce.

For instance, I used to be ashamed that I don't want to leave the house most days or interact with non-family people face-to-face. That's not what Real Adults are like, right, we're supposed to go out there and be productive members of society... right?

Writings and conversations on disability helped me recognize that this was a one-size-fits-all, ableist assumption. Like there was no way I could moralize the expectations productive adulthood without devaluing and infantilizing people who can't leave the house, or have difficulty doing so. Even if I excused it as "Well that's different--they have no choice, I do!" I would still be saying they are basically derelicts who are excused by their conditions. And I didn't want to be like that. In order not to be a bigot I had to be kind to myself, too.

The realization forced me to change my ingrained notions of adulthood and acceptability, and to confront hard questions about my energy and comfort levels. This process, too, was helped by watching my disabled friends manage their lives and energy, with the underlying philosophy the point was not to meet outside expectations but to do what worked for them. It changed my life and helped me release a lot of internalized shame.

None of this is to say disability discourse, thought, and action are for abled people. Disabled people are the ones disproportionately harmed and targeted by our systems of oppression and exploitation, and they should always be at the center and the lead on issues that affect them.

Ironically, though, abled people benefit when we respect, center, and act in solidarity with disabled people. We are all harmed by systems that make us exploitable and vulnerable. That makes us allies, not in the sense that abled people are doing disabled people favors out of the goodness of our hearts, but in the sense that we have a common enemy in this social machinery of death and a common interest in ending it.

Okay doing a little research into procedural text generation and was greatly amused by this actor-staged script snippet by SAGA II, a 1960s software that wrote Western screenplays for TV. CW firearms, alc, death, and incredibly hacky acting (no hate to the actors--I respect them just for not bursting into helpless laughter). https://youtu.be/dmwI-PshiPA