The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan 📚 This is one of my favourite books. So much of what is wrong with the world is within the pages of this book. Nostradamus would have been proud of Sagan. “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

I'm reading "Not Your Rescue Project: Migrant Sex Workers Fighting for Justice" There are books that I get a hold of that I have to read more than once, and this is one of those books. "When most people think about migrant sex workers, they think of them not as humans, but as objects of grave moral concern. Not as powerful and capable community members, but as social problems."

I’m working on new social media priorities, using the POSSE (Post on your Own Site Syndicate Everywhere) scheme. You can read about it [here](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon). The focus is bringing back social media out of the hands of big corporations. Judging from the way people jumped from Twitter to Bluesky, it will take a while for people to get away from being the product. So, this is a strategy to leverage the social media platforms that are out there, but keep the ultimate focus local.

After the shooting of United Health's CEO, this image has gone viral. Like most people, I saw it, and laughed and moved on. But after seeing a remix today of it, and I was curious about what the underlying context of it was. Alice Thomson is a journalist, as is her husband. A quick google search reveals the journalist's squalid living conditions: "Chevithorne Barton" was taken by Alison Day and licensed to use under Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 2.

Hi, my name is Marti Abernathey and I’m an American that’s settled in the UK. I’m happy here, but lately British politics and the thinking around it from the general public is gas-lighting me. From Davie Moo’s TikTok: @daviemoo Replying to @Glen Forde #fyp #foryou ♬ Cool modern chill out, 10 minutes(1001927) – 8.864 Did anyone else notice political shifts to the right around the world?

I’m quite amused at the moderation of my Mastodon instance. I’ve been reported by exactly two different factions: Zionists, and Democrats. That just about tracks. Silencing, for having opinions contrary to the narratives of both factions, is a tactic that’s been disastrous for both Democrats and Zionists. But I guess when it’s all you have, that’s what you go with.

My initial reservations about Bluesky were that it is algorithm-based, it is a closed platform (you can’t run your own Bluesky server), and it was first created by Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey. Reading Cory Doctorow’s Bluesky and enshittification I had many questions. Simple questions centered around Bluesky seem hard to answer. They are hidden under layers of complexity. A question like, “can I run my own Bluesky instance?” is an example.

I haven’t seen too many people talk about one angle of the Donald Trump win. They did awfully after getting advice from the Labour Party. You can never tell how much advice they actually listened to Labour advisors like Jonathan Ashworth, but the advice he gave publicly: He said Democratic operatives were “interested in how we made the arguments [on border security], because they intend to make the same arguments as well.

I’m an American living in the UK, and my wife is Brazilian. in both the UK and in Brazil, I’m seeing people say they can’t believe that Trump won the election. This is an extremely myopic view. Fourteen million voters picked the Reform party in the UK just a few months ago. Many Brazilians would vote for Jair Bolsonaro if they could (he’s been barred from running for political office until 2030).

Since the election of Donald Trump in the USA, there’s been a resurgence of the 4B movement online. From Wikipedia: 4B (or “Four Nos”) is a gender critical, radical feminist movement. It first emerged during the South Korean gender wars during the mid-to-late 2010s on the misandric website Womad and related subcultures on Twitter. The name refers to its defining four tenets which all start with the Korean bi 비, roughly meaning no.

I woke up yesterday morning in my bed in Southeast England. I realized the country of my birth has elected Donald Trump again. I wrote this post in 2016 talking about the many reasons the Democrats lost to Donald Trump. Over the four years after the election, many individuals were blamed. Yet, the blame did not fall on the Democratic National Committee. Today I’m already seeing the blame laid at the feet of black/Latino men, Arab-Americans, and third-party voters.

I woke up yesterday morning in my bed in Southeast England. I realized the country of my birth has elected Donald Trump again. I wrote this post in 2016 talking about the many reasons the Democrats lost to Donald Trump. Over the four years after the election, many individuals were blamed. Yet, the blame did not fall on the Democratic National Committee. Today I'm already seeing the blame laid at the feet of black/Latino men, Arab-Americans, and third-party voters.

I’ve experienced two kinds of people in my life: introspective adjective Inspecting within; seeing inwardly; capable of, or exercising, inspection; self-conscious. Similar: self-conscious Involving the act or results of conscious knowledge of physical phenomena; — contrasted with associational. Examining one’s own perceptions and sensory experiences; contemplative or thoughtful about oneself. Introspectives are people like Socrates, who said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. These people self-reflect constantly. They engage in reflective judgment.

I've experienced two kinds of people in my life: introspective adjective Inspecting within; seeing inwardly; capable of, or exercising, inspection; self-conscious. Similar: self-conscious Involving the act or results of conscious knowledge of physical phenomena; -- contrasted with associational. Examining one's own perceptions and sensory experiences; contemplative or thoughtful about oneself. Introspectives are people like Socrates, who said "The unexamined life is not worth living". These people self-reflect constantly.

I see countless videos on TikTok and YouTube saying things like “is sex work, work” or “is sex work empowering?” without platforming sex workers themselves. If sex workers respond in comment sections, content creators often block them. If they make response videos, they often get deplatformed. I’m not a sex worker myself. But I am not trying to build a platform by speaking over sex workers for clicks and views. They are considered debate topics, rather than human beings with lived experience.

I see countless videos on TikTok and YouTube saying things like “is sex work, work” or “is sex work empowering?” without platforming sex workers themselves. If sex workers respond in comment sections, content creators often block them. If they make response videos, they often get deplatformed. I'm not a sex worker myself. But I am not trying to build a platform by speaking over sex workers for clicks and views. They are considered debate topics, rather than human beings with lived experience.

For flowers to grow again This is a great post above speaks to where we are politically at this moment in time. There’s only one paragraph I have issue with: The only way forward is peace – and that means negotiations with the people who we’ve seen doing and saying evil things. If you think Israel continuously saying “let’s bomb our way to peace” is stupid, remember that cuts both ways.

phantasmagoria noun phan· tas· ma· go· ria (ˌ)fan-ˌtaz-mə-ˈgȯr-ē-ə  an exhibition of optical effects and illusions a: a constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined b: a scene that constantly changes a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage A trip around the Blue MAGA Fediverse this morning wielded an odd conglomeration of posts: and The absurdity of demanding that the media cover Biden and Trump the same, when they obviously are different, is a special kind of gaslighting.

When it comes to the sex work industry commentary on social media, it seems like the critics are big on speaking about the dangers of trafficking (many times conflating trafficking and sex work) but very quiet when it comes to the underlying causes of why the most toxic parts of it exist. I really can't give much space in my head to those who voice their concerns about coercion in sex work but refuse to acknowledge the primary pillar of that coercion.

As I listened to Vermont Movement News’ podcast about a transgender woman, Aunt Jenny, that was a trans mother to many people around Philly (and on the internet via IRC), it reminded me of all the people that time had forgotten. Many people around the world, like Aunt Jenny, have taken in trans people in crisis. The folks that ran places like Transy House (and many others around the world) were collectives that supported trans people, who many times were at the end of their rope.

A couple of things have been stewing in my brain for a while, and I can't stop thinking about them. First off is a term that describes people who don't believe in the right of individuals to make decisions about their own lives and bodies. Radical feminists (TERF or not) don't think that sex workers have that right, in much the same way that US Republican conservatives. Whether drug use, transition care, sex work, assisted suicide or abortion, the resistance to it being allowed in society is that the person doing it cannot or should not consent.

When I was younger, I hung around musicians. I wanted to be one. Music was the one place I could escape to that gave me a sense of peace. I tried every rock-based instrument, including singing. But I knew early on that wasn't my thing. I was good at writing poetry and songs, which should have taught me that my talents were more literary than musical. I enjoyed English and History classes in high school, but my biggest struggle was math.

I'm an American living in the UK for the last six years. When I lived in the United States, I was involved with Democratic politics on a state and national level. Reflecting on that experience has made me conclude that the Labour Party and the Democratic Party share many of the same traits. In the USA, it's "vote blue no matter who", and in the UK, it's similar, "Anyone but the Tories"

When I was a small child, the local morning television children's shows often had events where they would read children's stories or sign autographs. In 2019 when I started writing this post (it's pretty much sat in my drafts since then), there was a problem with performers reading to children. Well, it was only a problem if they're drag queens. Now it's gotten to the point where people are calling parents that take kids to these events "

I just started listening to a podcast called The Deprogram. You can find them on Twitter too. This episode of the podcast is about American Exceptionalism. American Exceptionalism Many Americans have never travelled outside of the United States meaningfully. They don't see how people in other places live, work, and thrive. I contend that those that don't travel outside the USA rarely travel out of their state. So they depend on their view of the outside world, the media they consume, and what they've learned from their schooling.