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Tim Walz: A public school teacher who was in the military and supported queer students in the 1990s while coaching a winning football team who talks about his own family's experience with IVF and can lay out attack line after attack line against his opponents while still talking about the importance of joy.
What a moment. What a pick.
The best EV ad I've seen.
Seriously, if EVs had been first to capture the car market, people would have laughed at the ICE.
@alexwinter Unless we make this whole business of people farming socially unacceptable, we have an uphill battle on our hands. And yes, that means even before a proto-fascist like Elon Musk ends up owning one. Why are we ok with building and profiting from the infrastructure of fascism as long as our (mild mannered neoliberal?) friends own it and only start to worry when the full-cream fascists take over? It’s a bit too late then, no?
More on the tech side of things: https://ar.al/2019/01/11/i-was-wrong-about-google-and-facebook-theres-nothing-wrong-with-them-so-say-we-all/
It’s always difficult admitting you’re wrong. But sometimes, it’s exactly what you have to do in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So, today, I admit that I was wrong about Google, Facebook, and surveillance capitalism in general being toxic for our human rights and democracy. You see, it simply cannot be true given how they are endorsed by some of the most well-respected groups and organisations in the world.
I see a lot of pundit speculation and debate that goes something like, “well, only the hackers and cybersecurity people are moving to Mastodon - and everyone else is just going to stay on #Twitter “, but the thing the folks saying this do not understand is that we are a canary.
We watched Twitter get rid of qualified #cybersecurity people who we personally knew. We understand the implications of privacy teams and lawyers being fired has on our data. We hollered about the way the new blue check system would be abused days before billions were lost by a couple companies. We understood the implications of rapid and haphazard terminations. The bottom line is:
1) We know our login data, DMs, and private posts really aren’t secure at all anymore due to lost competent staff and disgruntled employees,
and
2) Twitter probably won’t just shut down this month or next month, but it’s going to start having some serious and unpredictable financial and technical problems due to the people who were let go as well as Elon’s apparent instability and lack of checks.
So, we migrated. Other communities don’t necessarily have this inside baseball, and they understandably just feel like Twitter is too big to fail. We will see if stuff that happens over the coming weeks pushes more folks here, or to other social media sites. Depends a lot on our outreach and what we do with this community.
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Aral Balkan
Lesley Carhart 