Notices by Xauri'EL Zwaan (xauriel@mastodon.nz), page 2

Anyone who scolds us for celebrating that Kissinger died gets stomped down hard. Genocidaires don't get soft-focus funeral portraits. Some people would be like "Hitler may have made a lot of bad choices but it's just bad taste to cheapen his memory like that, think about how his family feels"

Gee, they're really putting anyone who won't fall in line behind the narrative down hard this time aren't they

@AnthonyJK it could be argued that Robert Nozick or Friedrich Hayek have a point, but what is commonly called "libertarianism" is basically just an appendage of fascism at this point. It has been absorbed into the hodge-podge of ideologies conservatism has grafted onto itself over the years in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, much like mainline Christianity and classical liberalism. I sincerely doubt 1 in 100 self-professed "libertarians" have any principles left whatsoever.

The problem with being a visionary market-disrupting tech entrepreneur is that eventually you run out of other people's money

The problem with overleveraging your bank in the expectation that if you fail you'll just get bailed out to stop the economy from imploding is that eventually you run out of other people's money

The problem with using political campaign contributions to fund your many lawsuits and criminal defenses is that eventually you run out of other people's money

Scratch that last one, weird conspiracy theorists and alt-right rage addicts seem to have an endless war chest for some fucking reason

People bag on JKR for making up the lore as she went along but give Tolkien a total pass for the way the One Ring went from "fun magic item that makes the party rogue invisible" to "the high fantasy equivalent of an atomic bomb"

Of all the organizations I would have predicted would become handmaidens of trans genocide, the International Chess Federation is not one whose number I think would ever have come up

I guess we maybe should have foreseen this. The International Olympic Committee has already fallen, so it looks like elite competitive leagues of all kinds are probably now targets of fascism. Which kinda makes sense when you think about it

If you just etransfer your favourite band like $20 and then pirate all of their music, you will be paying them more than listening to them on streaming services and buying physical CDs combined

I'm personally very happy with the community I've found here, but making things happen on Mastodon takes work, and going back to the endless shitdump of birdville when I reach the end of the feed instead of actively going out and hunting some new content is just easier when you're tired, stoned, and not in the mood have to to work for your daily doomscroll. I feel bad about it but there it is is.

Unpopular opinion: Mastodon is always going to be too much work to have the kind of mass appeal that your twitters or blueskys do. I'm not saying that to denigrate; it's just a fact that the vast mass of users don't want to have to work very hard to understand and operationalize computer systems. They'll realize that Mastodon takes work to make it content-rich and they'll go somewhere that can hire people to do that work for them.

Capitalism does not "create new technology". *Workers* create new technology. Capitalism creates DRM, walled gardens, spyware, and subscriptions for heated seats

In retrospect, the idea that we should monetize our free time, spare space, and unused car through gig apps should have been repugnant even without knowing it would lead to an entire industry of unregulated taxis and hotels