Proposal for an Isekai: "A California leftist visits king arthur's court"
Goes back, is immediately shocked that King Arthur is just an anglo saxon male and not a little black girl
Expects to find a utopian society since America isn't invented yet, finds out that historical life is terrible in many ways compared to modern life.
Advocates for immigration, gets all cut up by norman raiders
advocates for modern gender theory, gets taken behind the woodshed and beaten by all the women who don't much like the sound of any of that
Shocked to find nobody much cares about blacks or arabs but they all hate those gits in glencousterburyshire next door
Goes back, is immediately shocked that King Arthur is just an anglo saxon male and not a little black girl
Expects to find a utopian society since America isn't invented yet, finds out that historical life is terrible in many ways compared to modern life.
Advocates for immigration, gets all cut up by norman raiders
advocates for modern gender theory, gets taken behind the woodshed and beaten by all the women who don't much like the sound of any of that
Shocked to find nobody much cares about blacks or arabs but they all hate those gits in glencousterburyshire next door
I'm not too familiar with Mastodon because when I was first looking up what to use it seemed sorta heavy for the roadside sign parts I run my sites off of, but I bet the option to export is in there somewhere. Pleroma can definitely import a csv file of your contacts if you can export it from mastodon.
In the immortal words of Dr Ron Paul, "you need to shut your whore mouth and follow the Constitution"
"And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!" - Dostoyevsky, Notes from the underground
I've seen it: men are wired to have a life's work, and a life's struggle. Take way their productive struggles and they will often turn towards unproductive ones. The same happens with dogs who, lacking a productive outlet for their energy, will dig up the yard, tear into the furniture, and bark at every passing leaf.
Now, that doesn't mean that a person's only life's work can be slaving away for a megacorp, but there's something to be said for the idea of a man going out and gathering resources for his family so that his wife can toil away making the home a place worth living, and they can work together towards raising the children to be good people worth carrying the family name into the future.
The great existential crisis of my generation seems to be that we have rejected all of the old answers without having any answers to replace them with.
I've seen it: men are wired to have a life's work, and a life's struggle. Take way their productive struggles and they will often turn towards unproductive ones. The same happens with dogs who, lacking a productive outlet for their energy, will dig up the yard, tear into the furniture, and bark at every passing leaf.
Now, that doesn't mean that a person's only life's work can be slaving away for a megacorp, but there's something to be said for the idea of a man going out and gathering resources for his family so that his wife can toil away making the home a place worth living, and they can work together towards raising the children to be good people worth carrying the family name into the future.
The great existential crisis of my generation seems to be that we have rejected all of the old answers without having any answers to replace them with.
If it's true that there's a bunch of FBI agents working at twitter, then it's time to disband the FBI and refer a whole bunch of them to local law enforcement for prosecution.
Forget about the political side of things for a minute. Twitter is in the middle of a lawsuit right now where they refused to take down child porn. They are actively defending refusing to take down child porn. If the FBI has infiltrated an organization at the same time that that organization is actively refusing to remove child porn, and is defending lawsuits to defend its right to not take down child porn after it's been reported, then those FBI agents are either complicit or actively colluding to make it happen.
Forget about the political side of things for a minute. Twitter is in the middle of a lawsuit right now where they refused to take down child porn. They are actively defending refusing to take down child porn. If the FBI has infiltrated an organization at the same time that that organization is actively refusing to remove child porn, and is defending lawsuits to defend its right to not take down child porn after it's been reported, then those FBI agents are either complicit or actively colluding to make it happen.
And another thing! (sorry)
If we cared as much about public transportation and sustainable transportation as we pretend to, we have another 100 year old technology that worked just fine forever -- the electric streetcar. for places you don't want to install tracks, another 100 year old technology: The trackless trolley. Not only could we make these relatively cheaply, we could do it using non-exotic materials we can get from the countries we live in instead of using slave labor to mine rare earth minerals in dictatorships!
Nooooo, we need some special super sexy battery bus with seven figures of fancy metals we have to mine with child slaves on the moon because who wants to use practical, proven technology when we can pretend the past didn't exist so we have to create everything using technology that may someday be there if only we just invest another 6 trillion dollars!
If we cared as much about public transportation and sustainable transportation as we pretend to, we have another 100 year old technology that worked just fine forever -- the electric streetcar. for places you don't want to install tracks, another 100 year old technology: The trackless trolley. Not only could we make these relatively cheaply, we could do it using non-exotic materials we can get from the countries we live in instead of using slave labor to mine rare earth minerals in dictatorships!
Nooooo, we need some special super sexy battery bus with seven figures of fancy metals we have to mine with child slaves on the moon because who wants to use practical, proven technology when we can pretend the past didn't exist so we have to create everything using technology that may someday be there if only we just invest another 6 trillion dollars!
The problem with "transitioning" is that it's all for show. These people don't care about the environment. If they did, they'd be pushing for the solutions we know work today. Instead they're chasing magic environmentalism boxes that don't work but "if only we could pour more money into this bet, maybe we'd win someday!"
If they cared, there'd be a hard push for hydroelectric in places that have the geography for it. Instead, there's been a hard push against hydroelectric.
In Canada, every province has geography that can support massive hydroelectric. British Columbia, Manitoba, and Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador are exclusively hydroelectric. Those four provinces have incredibly low power rates such that people don't bother burning fossil fuels to heat their homes, and a lot of industry that would otherwise burn fossil fuels for energy can use carbon neutral renewable electricity. Not only do these provinces create enough electricity to make it cheap and practical for themselves, they usually export green power to surrounding jurisdictions! Imagine that -- so much renewable power it spills into places around it that would otherwise be burning fossil fuels!
Meanwhile, Ontario has been chasing expensive and impractical solutions for decades. First nuclear which does provide electrical power but it's very expensive and there's lots of asterisks next to that "Carbon Neutral", and then wind and solar. Electricity rates have shot up so high that electricity is not an option at all for heating one's home in many cases, and many people who have electrical heat have installed fossil fuel burners in their homes. The "Global adjustment charge" that is paying for all this wind and solar has massively driven up power to the point that there's a huge boom in in-situ fossil fuel powered electric generators because it's cheaper to run generators at times than to pay the global adjustment charge.
"Maybe Ontario doesn't have the geography for it?" That's dumb (person in my head who argues with me sometimes). Northern Manitoba and Northern Quebec are extremely similar to Northern Ontario(incl. Northwestern Ontario), there's tons of places we could build dams. They just don't want to, because it's not a politically exciting solution.
But making people's lives better and installing proven century-old technology and making the whole world better thereby is boring, and magic environmentalism boxes get us butt pats from southern California, so to hell with it -- more solar!
If they cared, there'd be a hard push for hydroelectric in places that have the geography for it. Instead, there's been a hard push against hydroelectric.
In Canada, every province has geography that can support massive hydroelectric. British Columbia, Manitoba, and Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador are exclusively hydroelectric. Those four provinces have incredibly low power rates such that people don't bother burning fossil fuels to heat their homes, and a lot of industry that would otherwise burn fossil fuels for energy can use carbon neutral renewable electricity. Not only do these provinces create enough electricity to make it cheap and practical for themselves, they usually export green power to surrounding jurisdictions! Imagine that -- so much renewable power it spills into places around it that would otherwise be burning fossil fuels!
Meanwhile, Ontario has been chasing expensive and impractical solutions for decades. First nuclear which does provide electrical power but it's very expensive and there's lots of asterisks next to that "Carbon Neutral", and then wind and solar. Electricity rates have shot up so high that electricity is not an option at all for heating one's home in many cases, and many people who have electrical heat have installed fossil fuel burners in their homes. The "Global adjustment charge" that is paying for all this wind and solar has massively driven up power to the point that there's a huge boom in in-situ fossil fuel powered electric generators because it's cheaper to run generators at times than to pay the global adjustment charge.
"Maybe Ontario doesn't have the geography for it?" That's dumb (person in my head who argues with me sometimes). Northern Manitoba and Northern Quebec are extremely similar to Northern Ontario(incl. Northwestern Ontario), there's tons of places we could build dams. They just don't want to, because it's not a politically exciting solution.
But making people's lives better and installing proven century-old technology and making the whole world better thereby is boring, and magic environmentalism boxes get us butt pats from southern California, so to hell with it -- more solar!
Southern Ontario is the only reason the balance of powers in Canada looks like it does, and to me Southern Ontario is culturally not Canadian, but New York.
It would be funny if they either taxed corporations like they taxed people (almost all income is income, pay for essentials with post-tax dollars), or if they taxed people like corporations (only the money left after paying essentials is taxed).
Most people act as if global digital communications started with the Internet, but it didn't. Prior to the Internet being widely commercially available, there were a number of commercial networks one could sign up for. The biggest were Compuserve, Prodigy, and America Online. They were proprietary, and if the stuff you wanted on one wasn't there, you'd have to just subscribe to another.
The Internet ended up growing in popularity, and the world wide web made things more accessible starting in 1991. Now, everything would live on one network.
Having a standardized platform that ISPs could compete on price, service quality, and so on caused a revolution such that today most people have numerous Internet connections. It was great for the consumer, and the companies made out OK, but they never had a chance to become massive world monopolies on Information.
I feel like this is analogous to where the Internet needs to be going in terms of services now. Instead of having massive monolithic platforms owned and operated by one company, we should have a shared protocol like ActivityPub that allows people to choose whichever service they desire, and then instead of competing by locking away content or users, sites would have to compete on UX, speed, brand, business model, or even moderation(There's no reason why the same AI moderation done to users couldn't block messages coming through the activitypub pathway just the same).
Yes, it means that you can't become the world's largest company by monopolizing a section of the population, but as we saw with the Internet, it means a huge explosion in overall investment and innovation since you can't just rest on your laurels just because you're self-sustaining.
The Internet ended up growing in popularity, and the world wide web made things more accessible starting in 1991. Now, everything would live on one network.
Having a standardized platform that ISPs could compete on price, service quality, and so on caused a revolution such that today most people have numerous Internet connections. It was great for the consumer, and the companies made out OK, but they never had a chance to become massive world monopolies on Information.
I feel like this is analogous to where the Internet needs to be going in terms of services now. Instead of having massive monolithic platforms owned and operated by one company, we should have a shared protocol like ActivityPub that allows people to choose whichever service they desire, and then instead of competing by locking away content or users, sites would have to compete on UX, speed, brand, business model, or even moderation(There's no reason why the same AI moderation done to users couldn't block messages coming through the activitypub pathway just the same).
Yes, it means that you can't become the world's largest company by monopolizing a section of the population, but as we saw with the Internet, it means a huge explosion in overall investment and innovation since you can't just rest on your laurels just because you're self-sustaining.
I'm also aware that if you're going between platforms you can export your user list as a csv file and import on the other side. I did something similar when I migrated from friendica to pleroma.
We've seen time and time again that people assume that their ideals are the majority so they call for democracy because they think their ideals would be the winners if everyone got to vote on it.
The hard part about freedom is accepting that others have it, and the hard thing about democracy is that a lot things you'd like done aren't what most people want.
It takes real grit to realize these things and call for real freedom and democracy anyway.
The hard part about freedom is accepting that others have it, and the hard thing about democracy is that a lot things you'd like done aren't what most people want.
It takes real grit to realize these things and call for real freedom and democracy anyway.
lmfao The tool for rebels and those challenging authoritarianism?
There's nobody twitter hates more than the common man just wanting to be left alone to live their lives without someone walking past and sticking a knife in their back because someone who looked like them stole a sheep 200 years ago.
There's nobody twitter hates more than the common man just wanting to be left alone to live their lives without someone walking past and sticking a knife in their back because someone who looked like them stole a sheep 200 years ago.