Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

#hello

They teased you when you were young, because you didn't fit in. But you've grown up now, and you were never an ugly duckling; it turns out you were a horrible goose.

Make them pay.

Some of y'all here would see a story about someone's experience with genocide written on Google docs or discussed on Zoom & attack those bringing this story to the fore for using the wrong platform.

Makes you look so incredibly privileged & out of touch.

The priority can be to reach as many people as possible using platforms that are easy for them to use, rather than proving that one is against Big Tech.

Same attitude that makes some of the most vulnerable people not want to use Mastodon.

Sometimes I feel like my difference with nihilists is basically asthetic.

I remain commited to life and hope. But I don't have hope for a cultural revolution, at least not in our lifetimes. I don't have hope that climate change or the ecological polycrisis can still be stopped. It's more like, I have hope that I get to kiss girls and punch Nazis before I die, and I already achieved both so 💅

My position is best articulated by the Nac Mac Feegle from Pratchett's Discworld:

> 'You mean . . . you think . . . that you sort of died somewhere else and then came here?' said Tiffany. 'You mean this is like . . . heaven?'
> 'Aye! Just as advertised!' said Rob Anybody. 'Lovely sunshine, good huntin', nice pretty flowers and wee burdies goin' cheep.'
> 'Aye, and then there's the fightin',' said another Feegle. And then they all joined in.
> 'An' the stealin'!'
> 'An' the drinkin' an' fightin'!'
> 'An' the kebabs!' said Daft Wullie.
> 'But there's bad things here!' said Tiffany. There's monsters!'
> 'Aye,' said Rob, beaming happily. 'Grand, isn't it? Everythin' laid on, even things to fight!'

My hope isn't material but spiritual. It's not based on evidence or material conditions; it's more of a trust in myself, or rather in the structure of existence herself; that whatever conditions I find myself in, I'll be able to find reasons to keep living, or if even that fails, that I will face death the way Louis Lingg or Louise Michel faced the death row, with a grin on the face. I recently had the opportunity to talk to some elders of the kind of group that shouldn't be mentioned online. I asked how did they find the strenght to endure imprisonment, separation from their loved ones; to risk the actions that they did; to choose to cover for their comrades; to face consequences head on. "It is due to the strenght of our political convictions", they said. "We know we did the right thing. We draw strenght from that." The interpreter oscillated a bit before settling on "conviction"; the first word that came to their lips was, "faith". Taboo word among anarchists but I find it worming its way in my vocabulary.

I have hope, or trust, or faith, that no matter how bad the situation gets I will get to draw strenght from the companionship of weeds by the roadside and little bugs, my friends since childhood. That even if I am arrested or deported or tortured I will find a way to go down like a diva. Maybe we'll even find the opportunity yet to gang up with some other crazy fucks in a ruined corner somewhere and do some bigger damage before going down. The silver lining of a crumbling empire is that the emperors get their attention elsewhere. Climate mitigation might be hopeless but there's still time for climate revenge.

My faith can be summed up in that famous saying, that lady luck is a woman and she's into wild-ass bitches. Lady luck has been implausibly generous with me so far, but I know that she's like to ghost me when I least expect it. If you hook up with that kind of girl, you know what you're getting into. And at that point I will die, either killed by the enemy or by collapse or, increasingly unlikely, by old age. But we knew from the start that our time at the arcade is limited, so why not just enjoy the game any way I can. I'm probably some 40~50% in of the maximum playtime, and so far I find it a pretty cool game. There's even nazis for you to kill.

The particle effects of the fire are so pretty.

In the end I share with the nihilists the methods, the goals, the strategy, and the criticism of the general Left scene. As an insurrectionist, I find nihilists to be good companions, as shown by the fact that they welcomed my provocations here when the mainstream anarchist servers wouldn't host them. It's just that I'm not sufficiently materialistic to believe in a Nyx that doesn't mother an Eros, that doesn't have a Chaos; it's just that I love life and colour and people and noise too much to long for the silence. It's just that I'm not much into doom metal--I like music that lets me vogue.

sometimes i find it hard to do computer things while also having the flourishing of the possibility of all things be a core value because i think that it should at least be possible to make things up and be wrong about things and mildly break things as long as it doesn't cause material harm

Oh my god we've been joking for years that if you got rid of all the transit cops you could make trimet fareless, but looking at the last adopted budgets I think it's literally true that the salaries of the "safety personnel" are roughly the size of the fares collected from riders

It's a little hard to figure out because it was 53 million from riders estimated, and 59 million for safety and emergency personnel which does include more than cops but give that it's gone up by over 40 million in the past three years when they started hiring cops as fast as possible it's clearly mostly cops

so, yeah, it really is true that if we tossed transit cops we'd basically save enough to not have fares without changing anythine else about the budget

wild