I've talked about this before. It's something that you'll see me bring up over and over again.

If you are feeling aimless, a little depressed, and in need of grounding...

VOLUNTEER.

Find a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, a senior citizen center, a hospice, a charity, somewhere you can be in the service of others.

Something happens to us when we serve others. It takes us out of our heads. It centers us.

It just helps.

Trust me.

VOLUNTEER. Help yourself, by helping others.

i'll be real i'm not really good at using hashtags here yet and idk what hashtags people from the #SFBayArea are using to connect to each other (i've mostly just refollowed old friends), let alone people from other #earthquake-prone places, but i'd love it if people could help get the word out about #Quakestodon (coined in collaboration w/ @coolgrey).

it's a tag for checking in on people after quakes hit and/or figuring out if that weird shake you just felt was actually an earthquake or a particularly heavy truck rolling by. masto search doesn't work like twitter's, so it's not as easy to get to something like we used to have on earthquake twitter, but the hope is that with a standard-ish tag, we can have something like it for ourselves here. if you feel an earthquake, post to #Quakestodon and let people know!

DeSantis just appointed a fascist propagandist to the board of what used to be an excellent liberal arts college in Florida. Just an enormous FU troll move.

Rufo is the architect of the anti-intellectual and racist anti-CRT campaign. When Rufo was looking for an assistant he hired a guy who got in hot water as a College Republican for tweeting about the threat of “GloboHomo,” a combination antisemitic and homophobic slur generally only used in neo-Nazi circles.

An article from the January 6th committee's "purple team" on content that got left on the cutting room floor (from their final report) about the role of social media in motivating and mobilizing the January 6 attack on the Capitol: https://www.justsecurity.org/84658/insiders-view-of-the-january-6th-committees-social-media-investigation/

"One clear conclusion from our investigation is that proponents of the recently released “Twitter Files,” who claim that platform suspensions of the former President are evidence of anti-conservative bias, have it completely backward.

"The homes or offices of five elected Democratic officials in #NewMexico, including the new attorney general, have been hit by #gunfire over the past month, and authorities are working to determine if the attacks are connected."#news

https://apnews.com/article/politics-albuquerque-new-mexico-state-government-831e1d985a1795eea69ac6489f0698ed

Powerful piece of journalism by Lydia Polgreen for the New York Times. It's in the opinion section, but to me it represents everything opinion ought to be, but rarely is, weaving the story of a math teacher in Alabama who was forced to retire after Libs of TikTok targeted him for also performing as a drag queen into a reflection on where we are, how we got here, and how, as queer people, we need to resist the movement to strip our humanity away.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/opinion/lgbtq-rights-activism-alabama.html

Did anyone see this Hallelujah paragraph in the New York Times today? Here's the part we celebrate. (Context is the current melt down of the Republican party...)

"That ideology of destruction defies characterization by traditional political labels like moderate or conservative."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/us/politics/republican-party-leadership.html

Did you hear that? The Times politics desk is now admitting that "conservative" is not a good name for the MAGA forces overtaking the GOP.

And it only took 12 years!

#journalism #uspolitics