• 16 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The lesson to be learned from Daryl Davis is that bigots should be ostracized, ignored, and de-platformed. Once their movement has been defanged and members isolated to their anti-social groups, you can more safely reach out to those groups to deprogram the people on the margins, if that’s what you want to do with your life.

    The story would be very different if the KKK still held social and political power. A black man who didn’t support the KKK’s mission attending a KKK rally would not last very long. No one should give these people a platform, or treat them civilly when they’re spreading their brain worms in civil society.



  • I don’t think he’s trying to amend for past misdeeds – I think he’s just trying to live his life. If we lived in a restorative justice society instead of a punitive one, I’d have different expectations of him. We are a society ruled by war criminals who have never seen a day of prison. Things are hard enough for people who’ve survived incarceration, it’s a shitty thing to throw his past at him. Especially since the people who tend to do it are acting in bad faith, and whose actual beef is that he’s not simping for genocidal dictators.






  • A lot of these people are small operators; most don’t have storefronts, some sell online, and a few through farmers’ markets.

    This is part of a movement astroturfed by Gab and Truth Social to create a market for goods and services that caters to trumpist producers and consumers. None of these businesses are capable of growing past their trumpist market. When they make enough capital to get noticed by journalists, their growth is going to crater like MyPillow due to the political backlash.

    Here’s an example vendor. She’s going to be making overpriced unhygienic peanut butter in her kitchen for less than minimum wage and taking advantage of her children’s free labor until they all burn out. If by some miracle she got the capital to buy the machines needed to make peanut butter to USDA standards and at scale, a proper boycott of her distributors would bring it all down.

    They’re rubes, offering their depressed labor to their cult leaders in order to take a small chip out of a corporation’s bottom line. The Budweiser boycott is a great example of this - when a culture war exercise got out of hand, Republican thought leaders shut it down to avoid hurting one of their major donors. They make them think they’re going to build a thriving business, but the masters will throw them aside if the corporations pay the appropriate bribes.


  • They don’t work. It’s total bunk.

    I’ll go one further - they can never work. AI is trained using a system where an artist system generates art, and a gatekeeper system gives a confidence rating of how it looks human. The artist system goes through a training process until it can consistently fool the gatekeeper system. If there was a system that existed that could identify currently generated AI art, it would become the new gatekeeper system, and the artist system would only get better.









  • Admin post from Kolektiva:

    🚨 Kolektiva.social SECURITY ALERT 🚨

    This is an alert for Kolektiva.social users. Please read this post in its entirety!

    In mid-May 2023, the home of one of Kolektiva.social’s admins was raided, and all their electronics were seized by the FBI. The raid was part of an investigation into a local protest. Kolektiva was neither a subject nor target of this investigation. Today, that admin was charged in relation to their alleged participation in this protest.

    Unfortunately, at the time of the raid, our admin was troubleshooting an issue and working with a backup copy of the Kolektiva.social database. This backup, dated from the first week of May 2023, was in an unencrypted state when the raid occurred and it was seized, along with everything else.

    The database is the heart of a Mastodon server. A database copy such as the one seized may include any of the following user data, in this case up to date as of early May 2023:

    • User account information like the e-mail address associated with your account, your followers and follows, etc.
    • All your posts: public, unlisted, followers-only, and direct (“DMs”).
    • Possibly IP addresses associated with your account - IP addresses on Kolektiva.social are logged for 3 days and then deleted, so IP addresses from any logins in the 3 days prior to the database backup date would be included.
    • A hashed (“encrypted”) version of your password.

    🚨 👉 As a precaution we highly recommend that all users on Kolektiva.social change their password immediately to a new, unique, and strong password.

    We sincerely apologize to all our users and regret this breach. In hindsight, it was obviously a mistake to leave a copy of the database in an unencrypted state. Unfortunately, what would otherwise have been a small mistake happened to coincide with a raid, due to bad luck and spectacularly bad timing.

    We understand that our users and other people on the Fediverse will have a lot of questions. We will try to answer them as best we can, but please be patient and bear in mind that we may be overwhelmed with messages, and may be delayed in responding or unable to provide answers to certain questions for legal or technical reasons. As a security culture reminder, it can be extremely harmful to the individuals charged and to our community to openly speculate on the Internet about alleged criminal activity or about what law enforcement may be able to do with seized data. Our present awareness is that the seized Kolektiva data is unrelated to the federal investigation and prosecution and we are exploring legal avenues to have the seized data returned and copies destroyed.

    Thank you for your understanding and solidarity :black_sparkling_heart:

    👇 Please see our replies to this post for additional information (1/?) 👇





  • If you can’t convince people to vote in mass, how are you going to convince them to protest or strike?

    I agree. If you convince people that voting is the path to political change, you play into the elite’s hands; but if people are politically engaged enough to protest and strike, voting is an afterthought.

    I’m not advocating some violent minority storm congress. I’m saying if enough people agree on change and organize, they can make the edicts of politicians irrelevant. I wasn’t referring to the Jan 6 coup attempt; I was talking about the historical revolutions against autocrats that replaced them with republican systems. The more democratic a system, the less violence it needs to use to rule; and less violence is likely to come back on it during a revolution towards a more progressive system.


  • I’m not saying marches alone, obviously; I mean mass mobilization, and all the tactics that makes possible. It’s always nice to have politicians that concede earlier; but it’s not a “need” type of thing. In the past, when people couldn’t move politicians, they raised guillotines. The people always come first, and the minute the leaders of a movement sell out the rank and file for access and clout, they’re playing the wrong game. If you think your political responsibility ends at the ballot box, you’re part of the problem.


  • As an anarchist, I’d like to repurpose a comment I made a while back to connect with people who are genuinely surprised and disappointed by this development.

    Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement’s demands. It wasn’t sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements’ economic and social power. It’s a common trope that revolutionary groups’ sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as ‘more pliable obstacles.’ For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don’t know how to work the system.

    Politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians’ potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.

    The most effective method of creating change will always be in the street.