Notices by Xauri'EL Zwaan (xauriel@mastodon.nz)

Never mind punching fascists, we can't even be *mean* to fascists now without libs calling us the "dirtbag left". They're going to high-road us all into the fucking showers

@GossiTheDog wait, are you telling me that DOGE just fired the federal government's cyber-security department?

All of that right-wing hand-wringing about how are they going to be able to shrink down Big Government, what with all the unions and bureaucracy and deep state and such. Turns out you can just hire some random ketamine addict to fire thousands of civil servants with no consultation or oversight and they'll just let you do it. I mean, planes will start crashing into each other, but you can do it. So easy! What were they all worried about?

Next move for Orange Mussolini: Start firing any judge who disagrees with him or is willing to hold him accountable. Is it within his power to do that? If not, he'll just do it anyway and dare them to defy him. (He could just appeal these decisions to the SCOTUS who are already in the tank for him for a last fig leaf of legality, but I'm betting he doesn't have the patience)

LOL, now Mush is going after the SEC. The Roaring 20s are back, in that stock fraud and dangerous investing practices are going to become common again

I see so many people on facebook (yes, I know, don't @ me) being like "DOGE is hunting down government waste, why are y'all so against that? 🤔 " and I'm in want of a punchy and effective way to tell them "What DOGE is actually doing is stealing all of your most private data and unilaterally revoking funding for anything an out-of-touch idiot on ketamine offhandedly imagines is a waste of money"

I'm going to be taking some community organizing training through the Democratic Socialists of Canada over the next month and a half. Because I am sick as fuck of being an internet leftist who does nothing to organize in the actual real world

So it turns out that if you build public food pantries and just let people take what they need out of it, the world doesn't end. It doesn't even have to cost anyone loads of money as restaurants and grocery stores throw out huge amounts of food they can't sell. This could be the world we live in if we didn't allow high-functioning sociopaths to run everything

Like all media, take Wikipedia with a grain of salt and form your own opinions. However, tearing down a knowledge resource 99% of which is reliable and uncontroversial because you don't like the ideological bent of the other 1% is the fucking *definition* of the nirvana fallacy. And I promise you, if Wikipedia were to disappear one day, you *would not like* what came along to replace it

(sigh) so I got a comment on bluesky about how Wikipedia is evil because it's not progressive enough

and like

yeah, Wikipedia is edited by literal millions of people every day. Its inevitable bias is probably not going to perfectly reflect every attitude you wish it would

but what's the alternative?

does our human knowledge base fracture like all the rest of our media?

we get a Conservapedia, a Leftopedia, a Centristpedia, but no basic knowledge base most of which we can agree on?

@dev for some reason, "if you make public transit better more people will ride it" is an equation that many planners fail to comprehend, especially in my city. It's always "we need more ridership before we invest in improved transit", which is absolutely ass-backward to how reality operates

Conservatives: Your kind are predators corrupting the youth, degenerate vermin who do not deserve human rights. We should pass laws that make being like you punishable with prison terms. Our nation will be strong and pure once we get rid of you

Trans People: I don't think I want you to be part of my life

Conservatives: How intolerant, can't we still be friends even if we disagree? Would you really cut off your own family over something as petty as politics?

I don't even want to vote in the civic election now. What's the point. It doesn't matter who's the mayor if the country goes fascist. And I don't like any of the candidates anyway, even the "progressive" one is a slick media snake with a career in politics as long as my arm

Being able to use violence to get your way doesn't make you strong, and having to use violence to get your way makes you weak

Non-toxic masculinity means strength without violence.
Non-toxic masculinity means being able to solve problems with things other than fists and threats.
Non-toxic masculinity means being able to inspire feelings other than fear.

Toxic masculinity means faking strength because your interpersonal skills have been deliberately mutilated for the sake of the power of others.

"Privatization" is, like, the definition of crony capitalism, and "public-private partnerships" are not far behind

People who wear glasses are disabled, BTW. We need disability aids to function as an active part of society. If you wear glasses, you are disabled; your disability is just one that happens to be highly (if not totally) accommodated. It is generally considered reasonable to insist that you need your glasses and cannot cope well without them, and glasses are readily available and prescriptions for them not heavily gated. Touching or taking them without your permission is considered rude and cruel.

There's a reason people poison the well about fact checking, and it's not because they're concerned that they are being unfairly targeted. The liar doesn't have to get you to believe their lies; all they need is to get you to give up on being able to know what's a lie and what isn't

I'm still enough of an unreconstructed Enlightenment rationalist that I respect the idea of free speech and believe that even people I strongly disagree with should get the chance to make their case in the public square. But it's not censorship to point out that the corporatized media system saturates the public consciousness with self-serving propaganda which serves the aims of fascism, a process that has only accelerated with the algorithmic reinforcement of social media and content platforms

It's actually kind of fucked that the concept of self-care is now being sold to us as "you deserve the right to spend money on consumable luxuries like bath bombs" rather than "capitalism is destroying us mind, body, and spirit and will always ravenously devour all time and space we have marked out for the maintenance of our own health and sanity"