Why just today I was sat at my kitchen table, with my wife and 2.2 children. "What issues have you brought to our kitchen table?" I asked.
For a Scottish Socialist Republic Sometimes write for @bellacaledonia.bsky.social #AutisticLiberation Anwar Shaikh stan account Also found at https://mastodon.scot/@moh_kohn he/him
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Why just today I was sat at my kitchen table, with my wife and 2.2 children. "What issues have you brought to our kitchen table?" I asked.
It's not really a claim about metaphysics though, it's a claim about human rights. idgaf who is metaphysically a woman according to some rando, I care about whether trans people are allowed to participate in society as equals.
wait are labour trying to say electing a prime minister who could make everyone in the country's tits bigger would be bad? why does starmer hate big naturals?
Wow. This is quite remarkable from a Scottish perspective, where at one point we had a majority of Holyrood parties led by openly gay or bi people.
People who are like "Zack Polanski isn't my ideal leader", please remember who the last several prime ministers have been and who the other party leaders are right now. Scared he won't measure up vs... Keir Starmer and ***Kemi Badenoch***?
Demolition
Congratulations to the newly elected Leader of the Green Party of England & Wales, @zackpolanski.bsky.social
Better to imagine a person who feels uncomfortable when they see a brown or queer person but thinks polite society requires them to keep that sotto voce. For that person, the "racist working class" is an avatar of their own internal life, and potentially a way to get permission to be honest.
Too charitable imo
They think they are meeting the public there. Even if they know intellectually that's not true, the illusion is too powerful.
I keep underestimating how much damage Twitter is still doing, mostly because a handful of powerful people still think it is a source of truth about the world (even more so because it is presented as "hard truth")
As right-wing oligarchs were buying up mainstream and social media, the mistake everyone else made was thinking that these purchases were based on a normal assessment of value. Remember when Elon Musk โoverpayedโ for Twitter? They understood that controlling the message and narrative is priceless.
As the minority has rights, it is a conflict of rights. As there are more of the majority than the minority, their rights have to be given greater weight. That message, delivered by every paper and an array of billionaire-funded NGOs.
Trialled on trans people, now being applied to asylum seekers: if someone from the majority feels uncomfortable sharing space with a minority, that is a violation of their rights.
I am writing about this today. Transphobe logic is that trans people only have rights *until* they come into conflict with a cis person. And not just a cis person's legally defined rights, but a cis person's comfort or emotions (which are discretionary and not legally protected).
What's the most amount of red flags you can fit in a paragraph?
The only way to make Bond not-misogynist but still Bond is to make him bi and still just as irresistible to everyone.
In 1975's Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino holds up a bank to pay for his girlfriend's "sex change". It was based on a true story.
Edinburgh Council's response to increasing cyclist casualties? Spending thousands on ripping out the few bits of good infrastructure we have.
Have you seen Mr Robot? Somewhat unclear whether the lead is autistic or cptsd or both. While ostensibly about hackers vs evil corporations the show is actually about mental health. Big CW though, it does not pull punches.
It does not look like either "Zelensky's a warmonger it is funny when Trump humiliates him on telly," nor "Putin's a madman who lives only to destroy," these are signs you're reading propaganda aimed at the social bits of your brain.
Discussion about how to end a war looks like (eg) "Russia wants X and Y territory for their resources and this list of security guarantees; Ukraine wants to not give up that territory and needs a conflicting set of security guarantees. What process can bring the sides closer together?"
It is almost funny but actually horrifying how many people, including on the left, bought a "Trump can end the Ukraine war by bullying Zelensky" line that could not be more obviously manufactured by some influence operation or other. The personalisation is the giveaway. Like it was a soap opera.
Kind of amazing how many analysts and scholars wasted 100 000s of wordcount worth of credibility in taking the incoherent flailing of an incompetent administration that is rapidly paralysing the US seriously
A few days ago, Berlin opened a new stretch of urban motorway, with the stated aim to reduce congestion. Today, the stretch was temporarily closed because of too much congestion.
Induction stoves are quieter, cooler, and produce less toxic pollution than gas. On the other hand, they also cook better, as a growing number of professional chefs recognize.
Hear me out, a sphere of children surrounding the sun
"the marketplace of ideas" includes ideas like "you should assume this guy is lying or wrong because he is usually lying or wrong"
Wavefunction Collapse xkcd.com/3134/
![4-panel Comic. (1) STUDENT: If the wavefunction only collapses when I observe it, does that mean my consciousness affects the universe? (2) [Bad:] PROFESSOR: Yes, quantum entanglement proves that we all have souls. (3) [Good:] PROFESSOR: No, consciousness plays no role here. Itโs just physical measurement. (4) [Chaotic:] PROFESSOR: No. The wavefunction collapses when *I* look at it because Iโm a full professor. It wonโt collapse for an undergraduate.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreic2mhmdvsftki6qe275hycolgt22msekbwzdyqoujt56qzpcbm3hm@jpeg "Click to view full size")
That's just the jacobin house style
Do I misremember the part when EMI pulled out of financing the movie and George Harrison stepped in to actually get it made?
All I can say is that Albert Memmi was right about a lot of stuff josie.zone/the-jewish-p...
With the far right raising England flags, itโs worth asking what the cultural associations of other countries standards are, and whether Englandโs can be reclaimed: abolishwestminster.substack.com/p/what-do-ot...
i'm the guy spending seventy two pounds on a first class ticket to perth from glasgow. i alone subsidise scottish railway travel for the rest of the country and i am millions of pounds in debt
My mountain climbing game, Full Send, is crowdfunding right now! If youve enjoyed any of my previous games, especially the ones using tarot cards, please give it a look. We are over 60% of the way funded. www.kickstarter.com/projects/lau...
I feel like everyone (including Canada) is just waiting for the US to time machine itself back to sanity instead of getting on with the reality of today and probably some time to come.
Gee whizz, how fortunate for Britain to be governed by people who have the correct answer to hand
Fuck this. ยฃ152m now. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
It's pretty clearly about the UK government's newly announce subsidies for electric cars, and my belief that the money would be more efficiently spent on subsidising electric bikes. That is radically different to saying that nobody ever needs a car.
I haven't proposed a one size fits all solution, that's something you're making up and attributing to me to be mad for some reason.
I think if Britain colonised your country of origin you should get free BBC iplayer.
The future!!!1!
the suicide encouragement machine now offers a handy suicide-by-cop feature
I remain very proud of what we built in the independence referendum, nothing is ever perfect but we could easily have none of this and things would be much worse for it.
Polling from @Moreincommon_ on Lucy Connolly More than half think her sentence was too lenient or about right. Only a third that it was too harsh. Only 18% think politicians should associate themselves her, while 51% think they should actively distance themselves from her.
The problem is it's not "both", active travel is treated as an impossible expense and car subsidies as natural and inevitable.
This is far from the only study to show strong evidence for ebike subsidies in carbon reduction, it's just one of the first examples I found to make the specific comparison with electric car subdidies transportforqualityoflife.com/wp-content/u...
A study of France's ebike grant program found it saved about twice the carbon per euro spent, compared to electric car subdidies.
Mr Robot has basically the only accurate hacking on tv
I think that's taking it a little far, the trust is more like they can handle the majority of urban journeys for most people.
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What people don't yet understand โ what I am just coming to understand โ is that Trump is not acting irrationally on climate & energy to "own the libs." Trump (and the GOP) are protecting the trillions of assets held by their fossil-fuel cronies, which would be utterly devalued if we decarbonized.
ยฃ3750 grants for electric cars - could get 4 very capable ebikes for that money, or one high end cargo bike. Incredibly wasteful policy.
Eliminating through-traffic reduces crashes. Injuries and deaths fell14% at intersections within London's Low-Traffic Neighborhoods after through-traffic was diverted. findingspress.org/article/143455
Thinking back to a couple of years ago when I got mobbed in a leftist podcast comment section for arguing that social media platforms are politically important and we needed to get people off X. They thought I was insane! Ha well who's laughing now? Not me, it all sucks.
I keep expecting medical professionals to have even a basic grasp of neurodivergence and it's so very rare that they do
A common feature of popular anti-immigrant and anti-trans sentiment is that, having established a procedure which mandates jumping through hoops in order to acquire a legal status, the public is then outraged that people who haven't acquired legal status yet are being allowed to jump through hoops.
From this weekโs Beano.
The CIA kidnapped people to torture them in hidden prisons in the 00s!
Update: it got funny again
Lmao delicious A+ (with alt text)
Let's build an entire economy around mistaking data for information and keep doubling down on it no matter how miserable it makes everyone.
Notably I too had never managed a permanent switch away from windows, mostly because of games. I do pro audio work which I moved to a refurbished Mac, although if I wasn't so locked into Ableton I would have switched to Bitwig which has a Linux version. Windows audio and midi is horrible!
I still have a windows partition and if I boot it for some reason it is this screaming horror of things popping up and clashing designs
Oddly the major UX/retraining issue is that windows users are habituated to downloading software from websites rather than the app store ๐ฑ
Windows is just a worse user experience than Linux now. Gnome is every bit as slick as OSX. Uncle Gabe fixed gaming. The remaining software gap is the Adobe suite and some pro audio software. If you're not using those you'd be happier on Linux.
The Times editorial line: "sieve" the entire population so we can put 100s of thousands of people into camps. "Removing a cityโs worth of people would be an extended exercise. Identity cards would be a must if the population was to be sieved into legitimate and illegitimate camps" archive.ph/78dcP
Friend of mine used to tell American tourists at his hotel that they should try tequila "Irish style", which meant snorting it
There really is a group of people in Britain who have wildly radicalised themselves to the extreme right on Twitter dot com. Disastrously for everyone, it is MPs, newspaper owners and editors and political commentators.
Cannot help but compare the diamond hard resolve with which Starmer & the McSweeny gang purged the Labour Party of such world-historical monsters as socialistgran47182 to this pathetic display of acquiescence.
Victories build power, outcomes only intervene periodically. Brexit didn't just take us out of the EU, it gave crucial momentum to a hard right seizure of civil society.
The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good
This absolute queen got officially voted in today. I'm overjoyed. Lithuania gets the most left-wing PM of any post-Soviet country. A new generation of rad, new left trade unionists. International support and coverage is a must, she's such a beacon of hope. ๐ www.politico.eu/article/poli...
Witkoff: "There's only one thing I wish for: that that Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since that Nobel award was ever talked about."
I really hate the term "sideloading". I preferred the original term, which was "installing software on a computer that you own"
The IRA was surprisingly effective at spurring investment in green energy. Where it failed was making it *politically* sustainable by delivering immediate tangible benefits to the public. In that sense, the Green New Deal was, in retrospect, the more prudent and realistic approach. on.ft.com/4n4Ayra
Imagining the least sophisticated ancestors who could have done X seems to be a habit, probably on good scientific method grounds, but then it gets turns into "we think that" rather than "the most we can prove is that" and becomes silly.
So, what is the plan for next swearing in day at the US Congress. You're going to have huge demonstrations right? It's your only hope imho
Had not heard of UHH, thanks for the pointer! This was the video that sold me on Dolmenwood youtu.be/hL_YAarvB5U
It's a fairy tale / folk horror setting. It has a campaign book with a page of content each for all of its 200 hexes. Rules wise it is modded version of 1981 Basic Dungeons and Dragons, but there is a thread on the Shadowdark discord for people running it with that system instead.
The last stretch of the wait for Dolmenwood ttrpg is going to kill me. I am so excited for this thing. Over a year late, all my Kickstarter bits are in the country. WANT TREAT NOW.
Just got to the bit in the history of Rome podcast where the profits of empire have caused vast wealth inequality that means the whims of oligarchs matters more than the political system
drawing people i see in the city (51/?)
more than that, he *just does* the messaging rather than vaguely gesturing to "kitchen table issues" in general or scolding other coalition members for supposedly not doing it
BREAKING: Award-winning Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty has been arrested after wearing a T-shirt reading 'Genocide in Palestine, time to take action' Police arrested the I, Daniel Blake writer in Edinburgh this morning
The 80s wasn't about your parents screaming at you to get off your phone; it was about your parents screaming at you to stop watching telly. The way things were meant to be.
I have been quietly identifying it in some conversations already, and this is a huge proof of it - peak digital activism / paid social media ads etc is OVER. The future of the most effective political marketing will involve an IRL element. And so it's happening.
Called it guard.io/labs/scamlex...
Down with lore, immolate the wikis
Waiting for a reform government and then letโs see what happens feels like an extremely bad strategy for virtually everyone
I want to be careful there, because obviously having climate data is better then not, and having data about homelessness is probably better then not, but data conceptually has taken on a kind of totemic position that is very deeply embedded in modern thought and I think we need to move beyond it.
Repeat after me: all political projects wield state power. Wielding state power is not inherently left wing. You can wield state power to far right ends, which is what they are doing.
If I see one more American brand a fascist government merging itself with private corporations "communism" I am going to blow a gasket, my god. If you nationalise industry and (claim to) put it in service of the workers or people, that might be communism. This is not that.
It is quite good at that, that's the best use I have found for it. Still having to be super careful nobody mistakes that for shippable code.
This is why everything is "software as a service" now: you can lock you customers in on long term contracts billed per seat, rather than having to make a good product that people like to use
Also - it is great that we have accelerated making demos and toy projects but DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA what a 1 million line codebase looks like and how careful and precise you have to be to prevent disaster?
Politics has been a slow-motion car crash since well before the financial crisis because our leaders have no ideas except โeverything must stay exactly like this, with us in charge, at any costโ, and they have achieved it by working with the press on increasingly extreme projects like this one.
A racist hatemonger, released on licence till she's finished her sentence for a crime she admitted, is well into her "I'm the real victim here" media tour. And the entire UK media is lapping it up. Is any outlet going to give similar profile to the people targeted by the mobs she helped incite?