Mastodawn

I get email notifications for everything that happens on both of my Mastodon accounts.

The beige.party notifications are sent from "Beige Party Admin". Unfortunately this immediately makes me think that I am being punished or reprimanded or that my content has been blocked for some reason.

Why? The word "Admin". Thanks to the popularity of authoritarianism on the internet, I instantly associate "Admin" with "Petty dictator on a power trip who is about to punish you or censor you so they can jerk off to their power a little more".

It's exactly like when there's a police car behind you with their lights and siren on. You may know that you've done nothing wrong. But you still get that terrified sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.

#mastodon #authoritarianism

Quasit 9h ago

Abhijit Menon-Sen 1d ago

I just saw a poll about whether you have the right to "poison" yourself with alcohol (and other substances). I was always strongly in the "you can do what you want" camp until I came to live in a rural area that's ravaged with alcoholism, and understood the extent to which the burden falls disproportionately on the women and children in families, and the resulting generational trauma that affects young people's lives.

I don't imagine that banning alcohol (which many people advocate for) is the solution, but I can see that "do what you want" just doesn't work, and *some* solution is needed.

(I actually find the "your body belongs to the nanny state" framing of the poll quite offensive in this light, but maybe that's just me.)

Quasit 12h ago

I still can't decide if I should be posting my book recommendations from my beige.party account as well as kolektiva, but I'm guessing I probably shouldn't. I don't want to annoy anyone by showing up in their feed with the same post twice!

As far as I know, nobody is following me on beige.party who isn't also following me on kolektiva. So I'll just note that the new book recommendation is available here: https://kolektiva.social/@Quasit/116587615500424349

I do try to include download or IA loan links for the books I recommend whenever possible, and luckily the Internet Archive has a PDF of it freely available for borrowing. It's a very, VERY funny book!

Quasit (@[email protected])

Quasit's Daily Book Recommendations: "Superstoe" (1968) by William Borden I found a LOT of treasures in high school. One of my favorites was "Superstoe", a bitingly witty novel of political black humor. It's the story of a group of extremely eccentric professors in North Dakota who decide to take over America and reform it. Their approach is the obvious one, combining clandestine germ warfare, manipulating one of their former students who became a US Senator, and murders. "We'll join Knutson's staff," Superstoe continued, "and elect him President. He'll appoint me Secretary of State. Then we'll kill him, the Vice-President, and Congress, and I'll succeed to the presidency. Or Ben—you're the oldest. It's your prerogative. We'll have him appoint you Secretary of State. Then we'll reorganize things, and we'll be the first council of philosopher-kings to rule in America. Or anywhere." You might call it The Revenge of the Intellectuals—which seems particularly appropriate in this particular day and age. In any case the intrepid revolutionaries are soon in the halls of power and on their way to reforming the USA...and the world. The book is absolutely PACKED with brilliant, prescient ideas; for example, the internet is effectively predicted along with its use for direct democracy by the public. But one notion that really stuck in my mind was this: "The prison-reform bill provided for the building of new prisons, which would not be known as prisons but as rehabilitation centers. Prisoners would live in comfortable, colorful, fully furnished cottages. Their families or girl friends could live with them. Prisoners would be given vocational training and psychological counseling. Most important, however, would be the facts that the environment would be pleasant and natural and that the members of the communities—as the prisoners would be called—would be allowed to satisfy their natural hungers: enjoy a pleasant shelter, wear ordinary clothes, eat home-cooked meals, and fulfill their sexual needs. If anyone did not respond to this rehabilitation, he would undergo an operation on his brain." And if you were wondering, that operation was a frontal lobotomy. If you have a dark sense of humor, find politics infuriating and like to laugh, I'd definitely suggest giving this book a try. Sadly it's out of print. Amazon 🤮 is listing a used hardcover copy at $1,096.00 (!) plus $3.99 for delivery. Biblio.com has two copies at the moment for $61 and $155. No ebook version was ever released, for some insane reason. But the Internet Archive loans PDFs of the book for free. And you can find PDFs on high seas as well. https://archive.org/details/superstoe00bord Happy reading! 🤓📖 #Books #Bookstodon #Humor #BookRecommendation #QuasitBookRecs

kolektiva.social

Quasit 18h ago

Erika 23h ago

My turn to do an #introduction

My name is Erika, and I'm a programmer and general fan of computers. Currently, I'm most interested in all things #kubernetes, #rust, and #linux. I'm an avid Linux ricer, who's fallen in love with #niri and writing my own shell.

In my free time, if I'm not tinkering with my computer, I practice #taekwondo, in which I also have a black belt.

By day, I'm a software engineer working on cloud-native microservice architecture in software supply chain security

Super happy to be part of the fedi!

Quasit 18h ago

Max Leibman 3d ago

Every AI Bro: We are here to save humanity. We will start by making electricity, water, and electronics more expensive in order to build a machine to put you out of a job. You may begin showering us with gratitude now.

Quasit 23h ago

Oksana 🇺🇦1d ago

Ich glaube, ich habe die Formel für ein perfektes Wochenende gefunden 🐈📚

#CatsOfMastodon #reading #books

Quasit 23h ago

Quds News Network 23h ago

QNN NEW DOCUENTARY | Why Did They Kill Refaat?

"If I must die, you must live to tell my story." - Refaat Alareer

We are releasing a short film telling Refaat's story as he wished, through the voices of his loved ones. The renowned Palestinian professor was assassinated by Israel in December 2023.

For student bodies and organizations interested in screening the documentary at pro-Palestine events anywhere, coordination is open.

Let Refaat's kite fly high on every hill and every mountain.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Palestinian

This!

Also worth pointing out: LLMs are essentially "love bombing" their user. A technique (among others) used by cult leaders to isolate their marks from their social framework.

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: LLMs are cult indoctrination machines. They're short circuiting mental fault detection mechanisms that evolved for purpose of breaking cognitive feedback loops. LLMs create, amplify and steer cognitive feedback loops.

Quasit 23h ago

So I'm supposed to be upset that the Supreme Court is basically taking away the right to vote from Americans, particularly black ones but really also non-Republicans.

But Democrats are just Republicans in drag anyway. So what exactly are we losing here?

If the Democrats had given Americans a national health care system, guaranteed vacation time, labor rights, housing, ANY of that, they'd have been guaranteed electoral dominance for the next hundred years.

But they didn't, even when they had overwhelming majorities and supermajorities. They wouldn't even give something as lame as a public option for Obamacare, the Democrats' gift to the health insurance executives.

Why do you think that is? Why haven't they done a single meaningful thing for working class Americans since 1980 or before?

Could it be that the oligarchs don't WANT Americans to know that the government can serve the working people of America, rather than the billionaires?

Voting Americans are basically abused spouses—no, more accurate to call them domestic servants—who keep coming back to the sociopaths who've been continuously beating the shit out of them and raping them for the last 45 years.

Past a certain point it's hard to feel sorry for them anymore. But I feel sorry for the kids.

#politics #democrats #dnc #trump #fascism #revolution #GeneralStrike #shitlibs