Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Do I always have my emotions under perfect control? No - nobody does, we're all human, and that includes me.

Do I mean what I say when I'm direct about my disapproval of someone's words or actions? Yes, absolutely. I fully understand how it will come across, and it is *intended* to be abrasive - it is a warning shot cautioning you to reconsider what you are doing or saying, and usually a friendlier one than you will get from many others if you continue with it.

If I tell you off about something, there is an intention behind that, and I ask that you do not try to wave it off as "they must be responding impulsively", but treat it as seriously as I am conveying it.

Because they're like oppression lootboxes.

The liberal viewpoint is not one of intersectionality; they might sound very progressive and recognize one or more types of oppression, but do not (wish to) recognize the way these interact, or the structure and patterns that underlie all of them.

This means that it's only a matter of time before I hear them say some extremely shitty and/or bigoted stuff about a topic that they don't recognize as a form of oppression, but I can't know upfront which topic it will be, or when it'll happen.

With my intersectional friends, I could then just point out that it's a form of oppression, and they will take it seriously, introspect, and work (over time) to understand it. Mistakes happen, but they will try to learn. All I need to do, is remind them.

With liberals, however... they do not recognize it as another occurrence of the same thing, and so I am left having to "prove" from whole cloth that yes, it really is a form of oppression, before they are even willing to put in *any* effort to understand the problem.

Every time this happens, it takes hours of my time, and energy that I do not have to spare.

I am already running on fumes most of the time, and I honestly just don't really want to hang around people who put that sort of price on not being shitty.

(Leaving this here as a FAQ since I get this 'question' entirely too often.)

Because every single time I engage in a discussion with an XMPP proponent, it takes less than 5 minutes to get to "XMPP is fine, you just need to adjust your expectations/requirements", and this FOSSbro attitude is *exactly* why I jumped ship from the XMPP community years ago.

A reminder that if you are on hackers.town, mstdn.party, or mstdn.social (and a couple other less common instances), I will not see your replies!

These servers are silenced here because while there are a fair amount of nice folks on there, they *also* have moderation issues or a set of policies that's just not compatible with that of pixie.town.

If you want to make sure that your replies arrive here, I would recommend moving to a smaller instance with better moderation and vibes :) Preferably one where you (can get to) know the people running it!

#introduction:

I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".

But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!

While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!

Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!

If the choice is between Trump and Harris, I think it's very important that Harris get elected, despite all the problems with her, because the alternative is significantly worse.

Likewise, I am somewhat excited about the renewed enthusiasm among Democrats to actually do anything at all, and go (relatively) on the offense. In that light, the fundraising success is a good thing! I hope she succeeds at winning the election, despite my misgivings about the political system as a whole.

HOWEVER.

At the same time, there are people on here, in *your local community on fedi*, that are literally starving, with their mutual aid requests going unanswered for sometimes months at a time. *Your* virtual neighbours.

And in that light, I also think it is a good thing that people who donate to Harris but not to mutual aid requests are being made very, very uncomfortable by angry folks, including 'polluting' the Harris hashtags.

There are sometimes situations where people need a reality check, to stop living in their political bubble where if they just find the right political strategy, everything will magically be fixed. I often say this in the context of anarchism, but it applies just as much to Democrats and their supporters.

This conflict is exactly that. It is people in poverty telling Democrat supporters, to their faces, that they have neglected to care for their neighbours despite clearly having the means. Confronting them with the harsh reality of their politics. That their supposed political ideals are worth nothing if they are not put into practice. And that is a very important message to convey.

If you are a Democrat, a liberal, however you identify, this is something you should be listening to. It's going to be uncomfortable, and it is *supposed* to be; it is meant to shatter your illusion that poverty is a hypothetical thing that happens to Other People Far Away, and drive you into constructive action.

You can deal with this either by stubbornly insisting that these 'annoying beggars' are in the wrong, or by learning from what you are being shown and taking action to rectify it to the best of your ability.

The choice you make will tell other people a lot about your politics.

#MastodonForHarris #MastodonForKamala

So here's a question I've been wanting to ask: is anyone doing daily digests of still-active mutual aid asks, by any chance?

So here's a 'fun' fact: low-stakes scammers, so the kind that goes for hundreds or thousands of dollars rather than millions, are disproportionately folks in poverty who have resorted to scams as a way to pay the bills.

So even *if* there were scammers in the MutualAid hashtag (and that's unlikely), *even then*, giving to mutual aid requests would *still* support people in poverty.

List of Apache Software Foundation projects, a sacred tome which no mere mortal has ever been able to read in its entirety within its fragile lifespan

... and the 'get help' page links to a Google Group that was banned for violating ToS in some unspecified way.

That's not promising.

Ehh...