A country born by old white men which will die by old white men. Begins with a revolution to sever ties with a monarchy, ends with a coup to bring it back. We are truly coming full circle. 🤡

Asked if anything could convince him that he was on track to lose to Trump and should step down, Biden responded with a smile: “It depends on if the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me that, I might do that.”

Sir, the Lord Almighty better come down and take you back with him. Take Trump too, while he’s at it.

After that debate and all the things he’s said since, Biden’s image is at an all-time low. As ableist and ageist as it is, people think he’s a senile old man in the late stages of cognitive decline, with no business running a government. I doubt he or his campaign are going to do what they need to do to overcome that perception, and I doubt the Democratic Party will make the right calls either. “Decades of civil service” and “somewhat better than Trump” etc. are not going to be enough.

damn, who could’ve possibly seen that coming? 🫥

saddam hussein is in there twisting my bones. i should be gripping rat

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I don’t think people there love love her, but something something owning the libs something.

Many USian voters are entranced with the idea of having a firebrand provocateur on their side, someone who is able to get a rise out of their political opponents (not even totally excluding myself as it can be entertaining sometimes). And others just don’t care as long as the other side doesn’t win – to them, keeping the other side out of power is more important than putting a competent person in the seat.

When I saw this this morning, I laughed so hard I almost fell out of bed 😭

Yikes to the fact that Jasmine Crockett received PAC donations from crypto and voted with other Dems to provide military aid to Israel, but at least there’s some entertainment in watching her eat up Republicans like MTG whenever they pull some bullshit like that.

finally getting more time off from work versus the 60-70 hour weeks i was pulling before, so i started participating in a game jam and trying to have a presence on fedi again.

There is no should or shouldn’t, they’ve always had and been entitled to that choice. People who develop and host those platforms can make whatever choice they want.

ActivityPub/the Fediverse is only a protocol. If you philosophically disagree with how a platform makes use of that protocol, then you can (theoretically) just use another platform.

not so hot because things are tense around my house, but i’m moving out towards the end of the week so hopefully it’ll be over soon.

Genuine question: what happened last time?

Yup! If the software supports it, instance admins can usually add relays from their control panel.

It does work that way, but Mastodon and some other microblogging software like Firefish (fka Calckey), Pleroma, etc. can also use relays to populate their federated timelines.

What’re they mad about? 🤔

What an audacious request. I hope it’ll be rejected — this just has “bad idea” written all over it.

Respectfully, how on earth did this design get cleared? 😭

What; if anything; are you doing to prevent the instance from becoming an echo chamber?

Like the linked post discusses, Black queer people are the recipients of a lot of harm. They’re perfectly entitled to a space where they won’t be harassed, doesn’t matter if that space is an echo chamber or not. The moderation and community of that instance can decide for themselves how they want to be structured — it’s not really anyone else’s decision but theirs. If we, as remote users, don’t like how they do things, no one’s forcing us to use their site, federate with them, etc.

I’ve noticed a lot of black first instances tend to fall victim to the same traps of racism and hatred that instances that center on other races do.

What exactly do you mean by the phrase “same traps of racism and hatred”? I’ve seen few if any instances centering on other races, so I can’t really establish that there’s any pattern there.

Liberals, including some POC, white allies, and white “allies,” are quite keen on representation as diversity. At the end of the day, representation can be superficial and only partially satisfies the goals of social justice. Yes, we — ‘we’ being people of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized people — should receive the same opportunities as our privileged counterparts. That’s representation.

But putting us at the helm of oppressive systems doesn’t end those systems. The point isn’t to have a Black police chief, or a woman CEO, or a queer head of state, etc… I liken this to putting a Pride flag on a nuclear warhead. It’s a symbolic action which, alone, isn’t entirely subversive of the system’s destructive nature. Such representation allows oppressive systems to flourish. We can’t obtain freedom by becoming oppressors ourselves. Justice shouldn’t be the cession of oppressive power to marginalized hands, but the cessation of such power.

When people see such simple representation as the means to an end, they show their reverence for oppressive power, that:

• they still have some measure of respect for it and its legitimacy,
• dismantling power isn’t that important of a mission for them, and
• they’re fine living with an oppressive system as long as they can go on living their life, have their sensibilities appeased, and still benefit from it

I’ve gotten a lot of guidance from this quote by Audre Lorde:

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

— Audre Lorde

These are just my personal feelings, so others may have conflicting thoughts or may want to provide their own insights. I’m not an authority on this or anything, but the main point for me is that I’m against how DEI as a framework is being appropriated to, as Angela Davis said, “guarantee a more efficient operation of oppressive systems.” I see this happening in academia as well as in Hollywood, US politics, and so on, where DEI is being deployed as a smokescreen to give new life to oppression and make it look less harmful.

Cloaks are really a cool idea and I miss them, not that I was ever alive for them being en vogue haha

A great look despite the obvious hazard of them getting caught on things

omg happy belated birthday!! 🤠🥳