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

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"

The fundamental message of the phrase "Blue Lives Matter" is that police need to be allowed to extrajudicially execute marginalized people because they'we so scawed

One of the greatest disappointments of my life was realizing that there is a non-negligable fraction of the population who, if some douchenozzle on youtube told them that woke liberals want them to stay out of active volcanoes, would immediately go jump into one face first while screaming "THE LEFT CAN'T MEEEEME"

One thing I was never adequately prepared for about late-stage capitalism is how fucking ridiculous it is, and how hard it tries to normalize that ridiculousness. Like not long ago a toy-manufacturing megacorporation sent menacing thugs to a guy's house for too enthusiastically giving their products free advertising, and we made a big serious thing out of it as if it wouldn't have shamed the most vicious poison-pen satirist to have written it. Absolute clownshoes ideology

Techbro: Behold my brilliant new invention, the Child-Mangling Machine!

Us: This is worse than useless, it is actively dangerous

Thought Leaders & the Media: The Child-Mangling Machine will revolutionize every aspect of how we live our lives!

Us: Nobody wants this, please stop

Corporations: We're rolling out plans to put a Child-Mangling Machine in every supermarket

World: It's impossible for a country to be too authoritarian and too libertarian at the same time

USA: Hold my beer

The more I think about it, the more deeply immoral I feel like celebrity culture is. It's gross to want to know such personal and private information about someone you have no intimate relationship with. Parasociality is just fundamentally creepy, like a kind of stalking. It's a form of mass voyeurism that I can't imagine it's pleasant to be subjected to

Men: I don't understand why repeatedly subjecting women to my vivid fantasies about them being eaten alive by bears is not making them feel safer around me