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

Dear cis-het people.

When a member of the LGBTQ+ says something to you about how recent events are making things difficult or scary don't then explain things to that person as if you are the authority on it. Especially when your understanding of the topic is very limited and just wrong.

Yes even if you mean well.

The correct response should be

"How can I help?"

Or if you can't/ don't want to help

"I'm sorry you're going through that."

People from an oppressed group aren’t a monolith, they WILL have diversity of opinion among many other things.

Something I had to unlearn myself is picking members of that group you who aligns the most with a position that’s the most comfortable to you and treating it as the general opinion from that group and dismissing all the others.

Concrete example "Blackface is okay because [this Black person] said it was, you don’t want to contradict a Black person do you?"

A friendly suggestion to reporters and editors: How about avoiding wording that implies the price of things like drugs is just a fact of life?

It is International Workers’ Day every single day.

It is workers’ labor around the world that makes everything possible.

The ruling class is nothing. Because of this, they have always exploited the laborers. They are now clawing in desperation as they perish.

Support those whose entire existence challenges theirs. It’s the workers y’all.

It has always been the workers that dismantle regimes.

ADHD is a disability, folks can struggle with prioritizing the right thing at the right time. Issues can create mental health problems as well as friction between friends and family. Many folks can appear to be highly functioning, at the expense of something somewhere else.

Did you know that the US national park system is still giving out lifetime free national park passes for the disabled? Did you know that ADHD and other mental disabilities qualify?

A few days ago, I sat down to explore the cost of garbage generation, and found surprising results - at least, surprising to me. I live tooted my discoveries, as I usually do, but halfway through I figured: this is worth a blog post.

So I present to you: The cost of poison

I have more to say and share, and this is kind of a followup to A season of iocaine anyway, but in old Hobbit tradition, this little byrding wanted to give you all a little present of his own making today.

It's a frightening time to be trans, intersex, or nonbinary.

But when you stand up for trans+ people, you're not just helping protect us – we can also see you doing so.

Support makes us *feel* safer. It shows us we're not outnumbered and alone.

That means more than a single post can express.

🏳️‍⚧️💞

#trans #nonbinary #intersex #lgbtq #solidarity

Christopher Nolan's filming of Odysseus has finished 2 weeks early. Yet another example of him straying wildly from the original story.

so in addition to the eight separate occasions Apple lied under oath, the court also just casually finds them to be doing accounting fraud on the App Store as well

lol, lmao even

If you're doing tech stuff for local activists, ask yourself this: Can I, right now, pass this whole thing on to someone who knows basically nothing about how any of this works?

And lest I sound like some kind of scold: I have not always done this, and I'm not sure I'm doing it right now.

But it's a variation on the first rule of activism: If you're not finding most of it super boring, you're probably doing it wrong. Tech folks want to be clever, but in this space, you want to be doing something that feels slightly beneath you. And you really need to have it so well laid and well documented that they don't actually need *you* to do it.

@sramsay This is particularly relevant for tech people, but true for everyone involved in voluntary work:

create structures that work without you!

If that means giving up control and status, that's a good sign you are on a sustainable path of avoiding burnout.

one of the rare greatest moments of the fediverse is how enough small instances can come together to allow people who are normally treated as a minority to act as a majority and put social pressure on an instance full of people who have never once experienced not being the majority in their life, into a position where they have to consider that they have cruised through life without serious principles.

the resulting implosion is often that they cannot accept being a minority for even a second.

As this is labour day, I would like to remind us all that if everyone who is not mega rich would stop cooperating with the mega rich, their wealth would mean nothing.

Money is only a tool that we made up to make trading easier, but somehow we elevated it to an ends, instead of the means it was meant to be, and if we all collectively decide that the mega rich's money is no good for us, their power will greatly decrease if not disappear.

This is why the rich and powerful put effort in keeping us divided, for instance, by sponsoring and endorsing nazi parties around the world.

It's because their biggest nightmare is that we, the lower classes, will realise that no matter the colour, gender identity, sexuality, etc, we have more in common with each other, and that the real cause of our issues are the people hoarding wealth like they're fantasy dragons.

if you keep referring to the exposure of fucked up power dynamics and fashy assholes as "drama" you're just doing bigots' work for them by raising the social costs of speaking up about it

people with an incredibly shallow understand of the politics of a situation who are doing their best to remain ignorant 🤝 bigots who have a stake in downplaying their own bigotry in public so they can keep perpetrating their bigotry on their targets in semi-private

calling everything "drama"

Like, dude, you have not *remotely* endured the kind of suffering that warrants a response like that, and maybe you should get off your fucking ass and do something about it instead with that privilege you're holding?