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
Sven Slootweg
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Tokyo: where your gps is a magic eight ball and your watch always thinks you’re on an indoor walk
Sven Slootweg
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@eniko I will forever stand 100% by what my favorite professor once said:
“The more symbols I see on your paper, the less interested I am in reading what you have to say. If you can’t express your idea in plain simple words, reevaluate what you’re trying to say. Ideas are meant to be conveyed, not deciphered” (paraphrased a bit because this was like 4 years ago)
Sven Slootweg
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people always tell me "mathematical notation is just like jargon, its just more efficient." no, mathematical notation is not like jargon
1. jargon are words. anyone can put a word into a search engine and find a glossary of terms explaining what that jargon word means in some context. you can't do that with math notation unless you already know math notation
2. jargon is almost never overloaded like mathematical notation is. the same letter or piece of punctuation can mean wildly different things in wildly different context or even can vary based on the *font the symbol is displayed in*
imagine if someone in software engineering used the symbol ⍼ instead of "garbage collector", except it only maps to "garbage collector" if it's written in sans serif. if it's written with serif, it means "compute shader" instead. but if its in comic sans it means "SIMD divide"
and also 98% of the time they used the ⍼ symbol it was inserted as a picture, not a copy/pastable unicode glyph. *that's* math notation
Sven Slootweg
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anytime you hear "no politics", you're hearing the oppressor
Sven Slootweg
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genocide
They talked a lot about the cognitive dissonance that people are feeling, and how this might explain some of the truly bizarre behavior people are displaying. People whose opinion of Israel is clashing with what they're seeing are experiencing real stress
That's true, but it's also true that making the whole discussion about that is insulting and ridiculous.
You *should* be feeling mental discomfort as you process these feelings. But people in Gaza shouldn't be starving
Sven Slootweg
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You should always be running the latest version of any software program.
…
…
Sure, until #accessibility for disabled users goes down the pisser and they're left feeling frustrated, upset, worried and confused as to how long it'll take for the shit they rely on every day to be usable again.
Sven Slootweg
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I rely on subtitles for everything, it feels so fucked to put an accessibility thing behind a paywall
evergreen subtoot
If you're blaming the most vulnerable people for the failure of your movement, that doesn't actually make you insightful, it just makes you the asshole
Sven Slootweg
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A moderator of a FB group I frequent has fallen headlong into the “politeness” trap, insisting that participants observe “civility” and “manners” when they post.
Many of you probably already recognize that #politeness is a trap. It is a tool used by aristocrats and the powerful to silence dissent, by protesting *how* the oppressed choose to cry, instead of dealing with *why* they cry. Southern slaveowners were probably the most polite bunch of folks you’ll ever know.
Focus on what’s important: kindess, empathy, respect, tolerance. And tell politeness to go fuck itself.
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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?
Sven Slootweg
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If you're just going to call anything that uses electricity "electronics" then I'm going to call anything that uses gravity "gravitronics".
My drip coffee maker?
Gravitronic coffee maker.
That grandfather clock?
Gravitronic clock.
The slide on the children's play set?
Gravitronicly-powered play.
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
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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
- 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
