huge congratulations to drugs for continuing to win the war on drugs

From: The Workers of the World To: Capital

COPE

having mutuals who i think are really cool and get like. starstruck when they interact with me. is so weird. like why am i reacting like this. we’re literally both on tumblr

i’m like a baby clown sitting in a circus honking my little nose and then sometimes a REALLY COOL CLOWN who has inspired me in my own clownery and who i bother regularly in hopes of friendship sits down and claps as i honk my stupid little clown nose. but the thing is that we’re still both clowns in the same circus

It did just genuinely look like a Nazi salute to me (in motion. Obviously it does in photos but it also does in motion).

There are some context clues available however: Elon has burned political capital trying to keep immigration open, and also literally every time I've heard a democrat calling something Nazism, they've been wrong about it.

a few days after the questionable salute he took a zoom call with AfD saying that multiculturalism was "diluting" Germany, I mean he might not be a nazi but he is 100% an asshole

Oh he is for sure an asshole, I don't doubt that at all.

However, on the specific thing about Nazism

It did just genuinely look like a Nazi salute to me (in motion. Obviously it does in photos but it also does in motion).

There are some context clues available however: Elon has burned political capital trying to keep immigration open, and also literally every time I've heard a democrat calling something Nazism, they've been wrong about it.

been watching too much british TV, I should rewatch all of USCSB's videos again before my accent becomes unsalvagable

January 20, 2025. The "Britain in the EU video," from BBC's youtube channel.

Extreme sarcasm and dry charm severely damaged garmbreak1's language stores. Words of uncontextualized malice sunk into his foundational vocabulary, requiring many people nearby to shelter in place.

But where was management?

a lot of you people try to apply newton's third law of motion to social dynamics and come away with some incomprehensible takes.

no see if there's a TRANSphobia then there must also be a CISphobia.

Racism (which as we all know is when someone is just individually mean to another person about their skin colour, and not, say, a broad set of social forces meant to disenfranchise groups of people for the benefit of another group) is just as bad when it happens to White People as to Black People!

for every misogynist, there is an equal and opposite misandrist!

Newton's Third Law is actually a pretty spot-on analogy: When you hit a nail with a hammer, the nail hits the hammer back with exactly the same amount of force.

When the hammer does it, the nail goes into the wood.

When the nail does it, no one notices.

And the force the nail is exerting is entirely due to the hammer.

So, like, yeah: of course minorities fight back. Of course they come to hate people who resemble their oppressors. Of course they engage in stereotyping and sloppy thinking. Being a minority does not make you magically morally pure.

But all of that force is basically nothing, on a systemic level. It's just a reflexive action from being hit repeatedly by a hammer.

It’s not nothing on a systemic level if it gets used to allocate vaccines away from the elderly.

You've been reading the VaccinateCA war stories too huh?

Surprise! Tumblr just got turned into an epic fantasy RPG, just like [your favorite appropriate media franchise]. And the Tumblr RPG's plot needs to have all of its characters covered, in roles both large and small.

That means that you are assigned to a stereotypical RPG role inside our new fantasy world. Spin this wheel to find out what you are now doing for a living.

Assigned Poster By SpinnyWheel :D

BRB finding an adequate rantsona

You'd be surprised by how garbage the results are for "wolf rantsona" image search.

Or maybe you wouldn't idk I'm not your therapist

Easily my most controversial technology opinion is that people— even most tech people— do not care about decentralization or federation. Lots of starry-eyed enthusiasts keep thinking people do, and they always get proven wrong.

This opinion is still very controversial among "tech people", especially when you go from just idly tossing it out there on social media to actually taking it seriously and incorporating it into real decision-making. Moxie Marlinspike used this opinion as the philosophical starting point for the design of Signal and a decade later still gets reams of intense hatred for it.

Make Moldbug cry why don't you

sometimes that’s the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning

I keep saying that decentralising something makes it strictly worse in almost every way, unfortunately

The best thing about decentralization is decentralization itself. You have to value it in and of itself. Language about platform lock-in and censorship and rugpulling just doesn't resonate with people who don't already think of those things when they hear the term "decentralization"

But decentralization doesn't actually fix any of the things you mentioned. Take Mastodon for a perfect demonstration of what I'm talking about:

You can "fix" these by picking a mega-instance like mastodon.social, but then it's not decentralized.

This is the thrust of my problem with "decentralization": the claimed benefits almost never appear in practice, while the drawbacks are incredibly real and burdensome. And in practice, in all ostensibly-decentralized tech systems, most people respond to the problems by migrating to a centralized abstraction layer on top of the platform (Gmail, mastodon.social, cryptocurrency exchanges), at which point decentralization has solved nothing.

yeah, so far as i can tell, there's virtually no real examples of working "decentralization" that are actually getting the claimed benefits. like, i can't name a real example that works and isn't either fictitious or basically an oligopoly or something.

open source

federalism

email

Email was my first thought too.

Okay now set up your own email server that can actually deliver mail to gmail and hotmail. Note that it needs to send outbound TCP port 25 traffic which is blocked by most ISPs and cloud providers. Once you do that, it has no delivery history, which automatically makes it look more like spam. If you do deliver a message and one person marks it as spam, now a huge percent of your mail is marked as spam so good luck getting another message through.

I am aware of the problem.

And yet, there is no Tsar of Email - it is a decentralized system and it's working pretty ok - and it's the first draft of the system, I have a quarter of a sketch for a successor system with none of the the disadvantages and all of the advantages (except the most important one: users).

huh Sacramento has a defunct nuclear power plant that used to power the city until it was closed in 1989 to switch to natural gas generation and more recently, solar:

the decommissioned cooling towers are surrounded by panels!

and goats.

sheep!

sheep!

sheep!

@thephantomderp

Easily my most controversial technology opinion is that people— even most tech people— do not care about decentralization or federation. Lots of starry-eyed enthusiasts keep thinking people do, and they always get proven wrong.

This opinion is still very controversial among "tech people", especially when you go from just idly tossing it out there on social media to actually taking it seriously and incorporating it into real decision-making. Moxie Marlinspike used this opinion as the philosophical starting point for the design of Signal and a decade later still gets reams of intense hatred for it.

Make Moldbug cry why don't you

sometimes that’s the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning

I keep saying that decentralising something makes it strictly worse in almost every way, unfortunately

The best thing about decentralization is decentralization itself. You have to value it in and of itself. Language about platform lock-in and censorship and rugpulling just doesn't resonate with people who don't already think of those things when they hear the term "decentralization"

But decentralization doesn't actually fix any of the things you mentioned. Take Mastodon for a perfect demonstration of what I'm talking about:

You can "fix" these by picking a mega-instance like mastodon.social, but then it's not decentralized.

This is the thrust of my problem with "decentralization": the claimed benefits almost never appear in practice, while the drawbacks are incredibly real and burdensome. And in practice, in all ostensibly-decentralized tech systems, most people respond to the problems by migrating to a centralized abstraction layer on top of the platform (Gmail, mastodon.social, cryptocurrency exchanges), at which point decentralization has solved nothing.

yeah, so far as i can tell, there's virtually no real examples of working "decentralization" that are actually getting the claimed benefits. like, i can't name a real example that works and isn't either fictitious or basically an oligopoly or something.

open source

federalism

email

Email was my first thought too.

same as it ever was

That Which Does Not Want To Be Named

There is a Thing of many names and none, which used to be called D&I, standing for "Diversity and Inclusion", later DEI with the addition of "Equity", later DEIA with the addition of "Accessibility", sometimes also "Office of Multicultural Affairs", and more names too, including sometimes "affirmative action", and called "tokenism" and "quota hiring" by its enemies too.

Trump has ordered an end to the Thing. One of the reactions by Thingists has been to generate more new names to hide behind, and then say they're not doing the literal name Trump tried to ban. This reaction was probably anticipated, as Trump's executive order included the following instruction:

Okay, I know it's bad form to post under someone who I've blocked, but this is total horseshit right out the gate.

Imagine someone saying,

"There is a *thing*. Sometimes that thing is called "Nativism" and sometimes it is called "blood and soil" and sometimes it is called "nationalism" and sometimes it is called "racism" and sometimes it is called "border control". The Democrats are against the thing, and proponents of the thing keep inventing new names for it to hide behind."

You would immediately see how fundamentally dishonest that argument is. Even if you grant that all the things I just named spring from the same source (Itself immediately debatable), "border control" is a real function of the government that cannot simply be conflated with nationalism.

DEI, affirmative action, and critical race theory are all specific things. Do they spring from the same source? Yes. Is there a general effort to prevent people from coming up with a name for that source? Also yes.

But it is appalling to respond to intellectual dishonesty with more dishonesty. Affirmative action has been gutted by the courts and DEI initiatives are attempts to market towards people who don't like the fact that actual affirmative action policies are largely illegal in this country. If you throw accessibility on the back-end you now have to address the fact that the ADA mandates certain accessibility policies.

Quotas are an actual thing! Colleges tried explicit racial quotas in the late 70s and the Supreme Court slapped them down!

The people who conflate all these things are deliberately crippling their ability to reason about what is happening in the country, and particularly their ability to coherently understand their own victories.

There is a thing like that! Pure creationism, then "Teach the Controversy," then "Intelligent Design." There are many things like that!

And if you think there is no similar thing around DEI, you have been looking away.

A flock of sheep in a snowstorm, 1912 - oil on canvas — Joseph Farquharson (Scottish, 1846-1935)

Surprise! Tumblr just got turned into an epic fantasy RPG, just like [your favorite appropriate media franchise]. And the Tumblr RPG's plot needs to have all of its characters covered, in roles both large and small.

That means that you are assigned to a stereotypical RPG role inside our new fantasy world. Spin this wheel to find out what you are now doing for a living.

Assigned Poster By SpinnyWheel :D

BRB finding an adequate rantsona

Surprise! Tumblr just got turned into an epic fantasy RPG, just like [your favorite appropriate media franchise]. And the Tumblr RPG's plot needs to have all of its characters covered, in roles both large and small.

That means that you are assigned to a stereotypical RPG role inside our new fantasy world. Spin this wheel to find out what you are now doing for a living.

Assigned Poster By SpinnyWheel :D