Mastodon: Where "Might Makes Right" comes alive.
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Mastodon: Where "Might Makes Right" comes alive. -
I'm listening to Unholy and they're talking about the deaths of the six hostages.Based on the media coverage, there's a huge swell of people who believe rightly that Netanyahu is unreasonable in his continued pushback against a ceasefire.
This is also because Israel, unlike may other countries, *does* negotiate with hostages. Israel has given up high ranking Hamas and large number of other military prisoners in exchange for hostages in the past.
So there's a large segment of Israeli society that knows that by not pushing hard for a ceasefire with hostages that Bibi is at the very least partially complicit in the hostage deaths.
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I'm listening to Unholy and they're talking about the deaths of the six hostages.I don't know how far up it goes, but the CBC's antisemitism is so well documented at this point that it's blatantly ridiculous.
I think the CBC needs a non-political oversight committee
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I'm listening to Unholy and they're talking about the deaths of the six hostages.I'm listening to Unholy and they're talking about the deaths of the six hostages.
I'm having trouble keeping it together.
What I think has been lost in the English speaking media is that these were not hostages that died in captivity; they were hostages that, when Hamas realized there was a rescue mission for them, killed them just before they were to be rescued.
They would rather the hostages, who had been tortured for 11 months, be killed, than let them go.
And we hear virtually nothing about it in the English speaking non-Jewish media, virtually nothing.
What I see on here, on Mastodon, is apathy or even glee at their deaths.
I have no words; I'm just sick of it.
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We Jews on the Fediverse have tried talking about issue of antisemitism as part of the larger values of anti-hate on the platform. It didn't work.Assuming you're not trolling me, go check out @endantisemitism or read the various posts with the #fediantisemitism tag, including the ones purposefully put there by antisemites to try to disrupt reporting of hate speech on the network.
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We Jews on the Fediverse have tried talking about issue of antisemitism as part of the larger values of anti-hate on the platform. It didn't work.We Jews on the Fediverse have tried talking about issue of antisemitism as part of the larger values of anti-hate on the platform. It didn't work.
We tried to contact instance admins directly to open up a line of communication. It didn't work.
We tried to join collections of instances and discussed what we've gone through. It didn't work.
We tried to use education to explain why things are antisemitic. It didn't work.
We tried to bear our souls about why things people are posting cause real harm to us, individually and collectively. It didn't work.
We tried to show how hate speech is illegal in many countries. It only works with German instances.
We tried showing examples of antisemitism on the Fediverse to highlight the problem. It only works a little.
Now we know that this network is very unsafe for Jews, many have left, and a few have resorted to making fun of the antisemites out of frustration. If that bothers you, take antisemitism on this network seriously.
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Kind of think if someone's sold you a bridge three different times already, we should be pretty embarrassed the fourth time the conversation is goingI feel like I'm missing context. I think it's a well known phenomenon that in many higher education institutions, research is given much higher value than teaching, despite the criticality of teaching.
While I'm sure someone will argue that I'm wrong, I can't help but notice the ways in which this mirrors/parallels the ways in which women are traditionally burdened with additional administrative and social labor in the workplace.
The other part, the "class at all or lecture class" part, I feel like I've missed some critical part of the conversation.
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Kind of think if someone's sold you a bridge three different times already, we should be pretty embarrassed the fourth time the conversation is goingI agree that there's a level of hype, cash grab, etc. around AI. The influx of VC money beings up a number of concerns.
That said, what gives me a good deal of pause in this article is the way in which Kahn's earlier attempts have been dismissed
The reforms he's argued for have been:
- Improve teaching teaching by empowering students to learn at their own page, with the ability to rewind when necessary
- Optimize classroom time away from lectures and focus on hands on
- Utilize out of classroom quizzes to quickly identify where students may be struggling to intervene
Where is the problem with this?
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?@davidcampey @BananaBarrow @jenniferplusplus
Also, I'm going to be a little bit of a stickler here... The Open Source movement has no ethical framework. That was its specific design goal, to divorce the ethical framework from the practical benefits of Free Software.
We certainly need a better, less toxic, more inclusive Free Software movement, but the important part there is to maintain a purpose, and Open Source's practical benefits only are great for getting people in the door, but it's Free Software's philosophy of helping the world that drove me, and I think drives many others.
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?@davidcampey @BananaBarrow @jenniferplusplus
I see my story as not inspiring, but important for a different reason.
More than anything else, I was lonely and felt unlovable.
Free Software gave me two keys things: Community and Purpose.
When I see so many people, especially a lot of young men, who are lost in society, and they get caught up in hate movements, or Incel, or any of those- what I see are people who weren't able to find a good community or good purpose, so instead they got caught up with really bad people instead.
There's so much lost goodness with these folks, but when you're lonely and you feel like no one loves you, and no one can love you, you're going to gravitate to people who show you care, especially if they present it as "it's us against them".
Society needs to do a much better job for these folks.
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?@davidcampey @BananaBarrow @jenniferplusplus
Eventually these friends helped me get my real first job, working for Ralph Nader, doing what I felt at the time was good, important work. I was making the world a better place.
When I graduated college, I was able get another job working on FLOSS as well, mostly because I'd run a LUG at my school and met a guy who took me to a drinking event with sys-admins.
That gave me a job, something I don't think I'd have been easily able to get without those friends and connections.
Free Software saved my life, more than once.
4/4
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?@davidcampey @BananaBarrow @jenniferplusplus
Knowing Linux was great, but when I learned about Free Software, and that whole ideology, it changed my life.
There was a multi-page article about the movement in Forbes, with a cover of Linus Torvalds, and images of RMS, in *Forbes*, talking about the philosophy of Free Software.
It wasn't just software, it was a new way (for me) of looking at the world, of ethics, of societal structures.
It felt like I saw a way out of the nightmare I'd written about...An alternative world, of freedom and empowerment.
I became obsessed with Linux and Free Software. I had a purpose, a reason to live.
I went to LUG meetings, I made friends. Yes these friends were in their 30s, but they were friends.
I had a community of people, and a philosophy to live by, and a reason to keep going.
I was part of a movement that was at the cutting edge of the (new) thing called the Internet, and the way it would transform people's lives.
3/
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?@davidcampey @BananaBarrow @jenniferplusplus
I wanted to learn Linux/Unix, so I bought two books, "No BS Linux" and "Teach Yourself Unix in 24 hours". The 24 hour book was really 24 1-hour lessons, so I decided to do one lesson a day over the break.
I studied the book every day more intensely than any textbook. I struggled with the concepts. I tried things that I could, and what I couldn't, or what left me confused... I went to bed angry. I woke up angry too, but determined.
I had to get it done. It drove me, like an obsession, like a purpose.
Eventually when i got back to the dorms, I worked on my PC, getting Linux on it. Back then it wasn't so easy, even with the "easy to use" Red Hat 4.1 disk that No BS Linux came with.
I broke my computer's install so many times, and reinstalled, and broke it and reinstalled.
But by the end of winter break, I knew the system. I really felt I understood it.
I learned Unix!
And then came the second part...
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?@davidcampey @BananaBarrow @jenniferplusplus
The very short version is that I was very depressed. I felt worthless, I had only a couple of friends, and my girlfriend, who I had felt was the only person who could love me, had broken up with me before college.
On top of that, both because of neudivergence, and because of the depression, I didn't socialize well. I didn't say hello, I would blurt things out in a blunt and thoughtless way, etc.
It made it even harder to make friends- and basically impossible to meet, nonetheless have meaningful connections with women.
In the winter of 1997, I learned about "Linux", in part from a friend, and in part from a homeless man who slept in the computer lab I worked at.
I didn't go home that winter break. I stayed in the dorms. For part of it, I wasn't even allowed to return to my own dorm room, having to be in a temporary dorm. My computer was too big to lug, so it stayed in my dorm.
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?Half the students were president of the US, CEOs, etc.
I told the professor that my essay seemed more probable then theirs.
I was a jerk[1] but I was right. Aside from the fact I'm not in that position and it's not raining acid rain that's too toxic to touch, the rest isn't off.[2]
[1] I was a jerk, but I was also deeply depressed, and suicidal for pretty much my entire college career. There's a second story on how Unix and the Free Software movement saved my life.
[2] I didn't anticipate the fires that made the sky orange. I assumed that would be from industrial deregulation.
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Do you ever get sad because the cyberpunk dystopia we're living in is so much stupider then the one we were promised?In my freshman year of college (1996) I was asked to write a fiction about my life after college.
I wrote a story about a dystopian future of a destroyed environment, consolidated corporate power, surveillance capitalism (before there was a term for it), and an underclass of hackers who thought they were free, but had to trade lives of convenience for their freedom.
The teacher gave my draft back to me saying "Where are you in this story?"
I wrote that I was the first person protagonist, the alcoholic peeing in an industrial park.
The actual assignment was "My life after American University" so I added one line to my final copy, "It all went wrong after American University." I got a C-
I'm not an alcoholic, but I think the rest isn't that far off.