Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
politics, leftism
@sindarina That would be a perfectly fine argument if this had been merely about ways to improve things within the radical left. Because there are certainly problems - like I said, I'm usually the one working on building bridges. I frequently *am* criticizing internal problems within radical movements, and finding ways to address them.
But when you set the stage by claiming "our biggest enemy is ourselves, because we attack anyone not sufficiently radical", without any introspection about what those "attacks" actually are or why those criticisms are levied, then you already *start out* by framing this as an "us vs. them" issue, and then I'm not sure why you wouldn't expect a response that pushes back on that framing - which is what my reply was.
By all means, express actionable criticism about the radical left. But you don't need to throw the radical left under the bus in the process, nor do you need to imply that this is *the* singular or even primary cause for the failure of leftism (because it most assuredly is not).
Blaming the radical left for a broader movement failure does not improve anything; all it does is contribute to the exact same thing you are decrying here, it's just purity culture by a different purity metric.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Devs: You know what? Fine! I'm outta here. I realize now that I never should've taken this deal. I'm gonna make my own Torment Nexus. It's gonna be better than this one too. And it's gonna be totally free! So people don't have to depend on big corporations like this one. I'm gonna build tech that let's people choose when and how to torment themselves! That's the world I wanna live in.
-Fin-
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Devs: We've finally got the thing that's definitely not a Torment Nexus up and running.
That's awesome! We're gonna make a ton of money from tormenting people. They keep asking for it for some reason.
Devs: Speaking of money, I think I deserve a raise.
Absolutely not! Did you even do any work? Also, this thing requires the power of a small country to do even a small amount of tormenting. It's costing us billions. We're gonna have to let you go.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Devs: Ok, I'll help you build Torment Nexus. Just so we're clear, you can't just lay me off after we've get the thing up and running.
Oh, we're definitely gonna do that.
Devs: That seems harsh. Then I don't want to be blamed for it when it starts hurting people.
Well who else would we blame? You built that damn thing! And if I'm not mistaken, a bunch of people warned you not to. I'm afraid this ones on you champ.
Devs: Fine! Can I at least get an office with a door that closes?
lol, no.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Will you help us build the Torment Nexus?
Devs: What?! Absolutely not!
What if we paid you $1 million a year?
Devs: It's not about the money. My reputation is at stake!
You could tell people you had no choice.
Devs: I won't be responsible for building the Torment Nexus. It's evil!
Oh... well you know it won't look like a Torment Nexus until much later. Right now it's just a cool toy that makes up answers to silly questions.
Devs: Haha, this thing is cool. Wait, what were we talking about?
politics, leftism
@sindarina I mean, if that is your response to a number of concrete points of disagreement with supporting reasoning, then it is definitely proving *a* point, yes...
politics, leftism
@sindarina (Sidenote: even just numerically speaking... if the radical left really is so relatively small, which we both seem to agree on, then it does not make much sense to me to attribute coalition failures to the smallest party of the two, with the least negotiating power. If the institutional left cannot push for progressive policy without the active support of radical leftists, that seems to me like an indictment of the institutional left more than anything.)
politics, leftism
@sindarina As someone who frequently *is* the one trying to build bridges and understanding, I think this gets a key thing wrong: it's not actually the radical leftists who are the source of left coalition failures.
Consider: pretty much every radical leftist you will run across, will have at some point in their life believed or been involved in 'institutional' leftist ideology, the kind that is espoused by nominally socialist political parties.
Yet the inverse is not true; institutional leftists rarely have much or any conception of what radical leftism actually looks like, and often repeat right-wing narratives about it. Why is that?
When actually *talking to* radical leftists, I pretty consistently hear the same story too; they tried to get things done through institutional leftism, but at some point they got backstabbed by their supposed fellow leftists; who made a compromise before it was necessary, refused to give up on their own ableist policies, and so on.
It's not that radical leftists have not given the institutional left a chance; it's that they *have* done so, and discovered that any 'broad leftist coalition' was always going to be on the terms of the adversary (right-wingers, generally), and no matter how much effort they put into the cause, they could never depend on receiving any support for their needs in return, and the only actual solidarity can be found with other radical leftists.
The institutional leftists would always be the first ones out the door when things heated up, both literally and metaphorically.
In that context, why would you expect radical leftists to *want* to build coalitions with an unreliable coalition partner that ultimately simply will not care about the people on the margins? Someone they cannot rely on to have an actual spine and push for change? A coalition partner that declares the job done once a weak compromise has been made?
Ultimately, the first step for this is going to have to come from the institutional left; acknowledging that radical leftists are also people with legitimate grievances and needs, that need to be accounted for in the process as well. Until that happens, institutional leftism simply *will not* yield the incremental movement towards progress that it professes to provide, merely a superficial appearance of it.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Reposting something here that I wrote for a conversation elsewhere. It's not going to provide any new insights here, I'm just happy that I finally managed to put it all into one coherent point. Edited for punctuation.
--
I have a real problem with the normative culture of "having an opinion about everything", especially from white dudes - at no point do people ask themselves "am I actually qualified to cast an opinion on this, or should I defer my judgment to someone who is materially affected by it and who will be familiar with the details?", instead it is just assumed that "everyone" (read: white men) have a fundamental right to Have An Opinon, and do so loudly, and that it should be taken into account regardless of qualifications or skin in the game.
This is so culturally embedded that even people who do not *intend* to disrupt discussions still end up doing so by displaying the above behaviour, detracting from the subject matter experts, and refusing to ever trust anyone's word on anything unless *they, personally* feel that they fully understand and agree with it. And this happens at such a scale that it is almost impossible to defend against.
That problem makes an appearance in the discourse for just about every marginalized group in some form or another, *and outside of that too*, down to things like technical conversations where people get irritated by people chiming in with useless commentary that wasn't asked for while someone is trying to figure something out.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Reposting something here that I wrote for a conversation elsewhere. It's not going to provide any new insights here, I'm just happy that I finally managed to put it all into one coherent point. Edited for punctuation.
--
I have a real problem with the normative culture of "having an opinion about everything", especially from white dudes - at no point do people ask themselves "am I actually qualified to cast an opinion on this, or should I defer my judgment to someone who is materially affected by it and who will be familiar with the details?", instead it is just assumed that "everyone" (read: white men) have a fundamental right to Have An Opinon, and do so loudly, and that it should be taken into account regardless of qualifications or skin in the game.
This is so culturally embedded that even people who do not *intend* to disrupt discussions still end up doing so by displaying the above behaviour, detracting from the subject matter experts, and refusing to ever trust anyone's word on anything unless *they, personally* feel that they fully understand and agree with it. And this happens at such a scale that it is almost impossible to defend against.
That problem makes an appearance in the discourse for just about every marginalized group in some form or another, *and outside of that too*, down to things like technical conversations where people get irritated by people chiming in with useless commentary that wasn't asked for while someone is trying to figure something out.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Once the new footbridge is open in Zwolle, it will be a magnificent location to watch the performance of “Knoop Zwolle”. It is a very dense program where every half hour 10 trains are connecting to each other and the reason why Zwolle is the starting point of the Dutch train timetable.
@smveerman Never a good sign when they need to say that explicitly
(Such high-investment infrastructure could theoretically be built *without* the support of such a large entity, but not in a capitalist world, and that is the one we live in, so)
A thought: the "public-private" tendering model where governments put out contracts for specific tasks makes certain types of public infrastructure impossible to have in a way that is often missed even in critical analysis of capitalist models, because it eliminates the kind of high-investment infrastructure that can only come to exist from a government-scale entity saying "we need to have this thing and we do not care how much it costs", something that is fundamentally impossible for the incentives in a tender process to support.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Na de zoveelste non-profit of goed bedoelende site vol trackers en cookies moest ik dit toch echt even kwijt. Want het hoeft echt niet. En probeer vooral eens uit te zoeken wie in je organisatie iets zou DOEN dan met al die tracking data. Goeie kans dat er niemand naar omkijkt maar je wel het surfgedrag van je gebruikers verklikt aan adverteerders:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/of-je-doet-geen-cookies/
Sven Slootweg
boosted
people: its like im sick all the time now. i would give anything to make it stop
me: you could wear a mask
people: no not like that
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Hiya fedi, I need your knowledge! The family wants to digitise a big collection of old photographs, negatives and photo slides. I know there’s services we can send the material to that do this for a living, but grandpa is afraid to hand them off for fear of them getting damaged, lost etc. So I need to figure out how to do this “in house” as best I can.
I’ve figured out there’s specific photo scanners, instead of a flat bed scanner, that should be able to handle the negatives and the slides.
But what I don’t know is about good software to scan and archive them properly, what things to watch out for when doing this and what kind of software exists that could help restore and enhance the digital copies.
It doesn’t matter if this is a slow going process, there’s no deadline here.
If you have any recommendations for hardware equipment, software or documentation and protocols to read I’d be very grateful. I would prefer to do this using open source software but if there’s proprietary software that makes a meaningful difference I’m happy to consider it.
(I know how to search the web myself, so I’m looking for advice from folks with practical experience, not just a Google search hit or whatever an LLM misgenerated.)
Boost would be appreciated since unfortunately I’m short on folks with this type of knowledge in my own social circles.
olympics, evictions
Article is from last year, but here is your reminder that every installment of the Olympic Games ends up displacing thousands of people from their homes, and severely disrupting the remainder of social life, all for what is functionally an exercise of nationalist propaganda to make the hosting country look better on the world stage: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/migrants-roma-evicted-squats-ahead-paris-2024-olympics-2023-12-22/
The Olympics should not exist as an institution.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
In Europe, flying is cheaper than taking the train.
It's an embarrassment, and a major problem: we have to stop flying for silly short distances. Realise that the overheads of flying (reaching the airport, awaiting 2 hours, the flight, the unloading, reaching the destination) largely cancel out any time gains of flying. And the carbon costs are utterly untenable. Not to speak of the modern, dire conditions of the whole flying "experience".
Another embarrassment is that train connections can't be guaranteed when across countries or companies. They aren't even coordinated. As if those who commission and set the schedules didn't travel by train themselves, at least not internationally. In considering how tiny most European countries are, it's frankly bizarre.
There are so many destinations one could travel by train to, yet in practice, it's not sensible. A disgrace.
The upside is that it can be fixed.
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
