Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

I've seen a lot of crap being put about on the idea of parents' rights. I want to reject this idea outright.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PARENTS' RIGHTS.

Parents do not have "rights" over their children. The children have rights; the parents have responsibilities to see that those rights are upheld.

In order for the parents to have rights, then necessarily the child does not have them. The only situation in which we have allowed one human to usurp another's rights was slavery; and I would argue children are not property.

If they're not property, then they're people, and if they're people, then they have rights. If they have rights, parents can't.

This is such a crucial distinction. The parents don't have a right to have their child educated; the child has a right to a good education. The parents don't have the right to participate in sport; the child does. And so on.

Once you reframe the idea like this, that children are human beings with their own rights, you see what a disingenous line of attack this is from the right wing.

Parents have an awesome responsibility: the care and management of the human rights of beings not able to assert them for themselves. But it must be clear that the rights belong to the children, and that they are being safeguarded, not owned, by the parents.

This simple conceptual shift shows that children should have full bodily autonomy, including their right to assert consent to being touched by anyone (think touch sensitivity), and including the right to present as the gender they want. The right to religion, or freedom from it if they want. The rights are theirs, and the parents should have no power to abrogate those rights without due care and consideration.

Yes, by the way, I am a parent, as well as a grandparent. I stand by this. My kids are not my property, never were.

hello welcome to my tutorial on how the JPEG file format works

So, I usually don't encourage people to write politicians because it doesn't do shit almost all the time.

This is an exception.

Nebraska Senators Megan Hunt and Machaela Cavanaugh have vowed to filibuster a bill that bans gender affirming care for children, and Senators Jen Day and Danielle Conrad have vowed to join them.

Holding out on a filibuster for three months against a lot of very angry vested interests is not an easy task, so please give them kind words and encouragement, because they are the only thing stopping this disgusting ban in Nebraska. Every ban affects all of us across the US and even the world.

Their email addresses:
Machaela Cavanaugh: mcavanaugh@leg.ne.gov
Megan Hunt: mhunt@leg.ne.gov
Jen Day: jday@leg.ne.gov
Danielle Conrad: dconrad@leg.ne.gov

Please boost.

Rui op en blokkeer, doe mee en doe meer!

https://peterstormt.nl/2023/03/29/rui-op-en-blokkeer-doe-mee-en-doe-meer/

"Ons antwoord op escalatie van de repressie is dus: escalatie van onze acties! Grotere aantallen blokkeerders, grotere aantallen demonstranten er omheen. Ja, ook een weerbaarder houding jegens de politie, en ja, ook andere, soms hardere actievormen dan het soort blokkades dat XR doet, want met die nauwelijks weersproken onaantastbaarheid van de heilige geweldloosheid in klimaatacties is echt iets mis. Plus: we blijven keer op keer blokkade-oproepen verspreiden! Opruiende oproepen in de ogen van het OM, oproepen om aan blokkades deel te nemen en er zelf ook toe op te roepen. Tegen de repressie: meer en grotere blokkades, en meer opruiing tot klimaatblokkades! Dus ik zeg het nog maar een keer: doe mee met de blokkade van Tata op 3 april. En neem deel aan de blokkade van de A23 op 27 mei. Rui op, blokkeer, doe mee en doe meer!"

#BlokkeerDeA12 #OpruiingIsNoodzaak

Being an ethicist of technology and of "a.i." in particular over the last ten to fifteen years is like watching someone about to walk into a pole or traffic or a brick wall because they aren't paying attention, so you shout "hey watch out!" and they shout "no!" and start running faster.

Folks, please do block brighteon.social from your servers. Looks like a US far-right misinformation/conspiracy site and they’re apparently ramping up with tens of thousands of bot accounts. Best to nip this in the bud now.

If you don’t run your own #Mastodon or #fediverse server, please ask your server admin to do it for you by reporting them.

(See https://mastodon.ar.al/@atomicpoet@mastodon.social/110107329975325472)

#fediblock #brighteonSocial

Give a person a program, frustrate them for a day.

Teach a person to program, frustrate them for a lifetime.

my mom just called me from city hall to ask if alien swarm: reactive drop runs on iphones

devtools-based social engineering tricks have moved on from self-XSS (as just about every big web service tries to protect against that now with large "if you don't know what you are doing here, this is a scam" messages) to "give me a screenshot of a request containing a cookie/API key" or "paste a curl cmdline of a request containing a cookie/API key"

Every
single
day

Every time I've listened to marginalised people on how to improve my events, they've got better.

The talks? Better. Attendees? More interesting. Volunteers? More enthusiastic.

So yeah, #nbpy will have a health and safety policy in addition to a code of conduct, because with that track record, why wouldn't we?

It turns out the greatest inaccuracy in Asimov's Robot series is that idea that AI companies would consider the ethics of what they're building and add safeguards to their systems, instead of chasing profits at all costs.

The likes of Verge will never cover those people because they're not in the spotlight; they're behind the scenes doing the real fucking hard work, taking out the trash, cleaning up the mess, getting their hands dirty instead of fucking around paying someone to make a button purple.

I don't care about a shiny interview with the 'mastodon ceo' in a mag that's only interested in who's going to be the 'next big thing'. That's tedious as fuck.

Give me takes from the people who are actually deeply invested in and stewarding the communities here. Who are setting up strong barriers around safe spaces and holding their ground. The server hosts who are making fedi more accessible by covering the tech for people like me who don't know that side but know about communities.

uh, excuse me?

"anthropology is when your furry friend apologizes for something"

--me