I'm once again begging people to understand dog whistles. In the year of our Unix Epoch 52, any time you find someone who is an Online Champion of Free Speech, pull off the Scooby Doo mask, and it's someone demanding their right to spew racism, transphobia, antisemitism, homophobia, and any other fascist garbage.

You don't need to play devil's advocate. The devil has more than enough advocates on the internet. I don't need to hear your nuanced take about how freedom of speech protects marginalized people too. I know every time I've invested emotional labor into trying to listen to yet another impassioned free speech whine, it turns out to be someone defending fascist viewpoints. It doesn't take Agatha Christie to figure out they're really only interested in the freedom to protect those who want to preach hate, and will mysteriously be nowhere to be found whenever a marginalized person is being dogpiled for existing.

If you choose to associate with "free speech" people, understand when marginalized people don't trust you.

#antiracism #freespeech #transphobia #antisemitism

I don't know who needs to hear this but

The postal service exists to deliver letters and parcels to people
Not to make money for shareholders

The transport system exists to move people to where they need to go
Not to make money for shareholders

The water, gas, and electricity supplies exist to provide people vital utilities
Not to make money for shareholders

The healthcare system exists to ensure (and that's ENsure, not INsure) the health of the population
Not to make money for shareholders

Shareholders in vital public services are a vampiric drain on those services

Capitalism is a disease

RT @[email protected]

mind blown by a YouTube comment of all things

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/bgsprung/status/1591497637680799745

I need to borrow my 4 year old’s attitude. I’ll often hear something like, “I’m good at jumping!” Then he’ll demonstrate. And it’s not an especially brilliant example of jumping. But he completed his objective: he jumped. And he had fun doing it.

If I applied the same attitude to my writing, I think I’d feel a lot better about it. As in, the words themselves don’t have to be prize-winning. I just have to do the thing - write - and have fun with it. I reckon if I do that, I’m “good at writing”.

#writingcommunity #writing #auswriters

It's dead.

No it's not.

One of the reasons we don't put *loads* of hashtags on our posts, and try to keep it to 1-4 (unless it's something like an introduction post where you're listing all of your interests), is also an accessibility thing. Imagine you're reading a post with a screen reader, and there are ten hashtags at the foot of a post, and before every one of them it says the word 'hashtag' (or on some screenreaders, 'hash').

Now imagine that those hashtags are scattered inside the body of the post. (...)