I just ordered business cards. What next? Will I send a fax? Will I receive a memo in a pneumatic tube?
Right-wing terrorists, led by Trump, are making death threats against local government officials, FEMA workers and even TV weather people in Florida and North Carolina. It’s part of a rising idiocracy.
Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political. Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality. If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is. This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.
— I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is, by Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic
I went door to door to get out the vote for the Democratic Party this afternoon. I did 15 out of 47 houses in the neighborhood. I would have done more but I got into conversations with the neighbors. We have many Harris/Walz signs in front yards.
Antitrust is having a moment.
People understand that corporate looters – not “the economy” or “the forces of history” – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.
— Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party – and America, Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr
Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops. “Digital IDs make it tempting to leave your driver’s license at home – but that’s a dangerous risk.”
No matter what, teaching people they can add their IDs to their phones means some people will inevitably leave the house without physical ID, and that means creating the opportunity for cops to demand phones — which you should never, ever do. Technical details of your digital ID aside, handing your phone to a police officer grants law enforcement a lot of power over some of your most intimate personal data.
Jamie Zawinski: Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today:
According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the “What’s Cool” button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca’s Smut Shack.)
Rereading replies on Bluesky I now see that I was wrong to compare Florida’s extremist religious government to the Taliban, because it implies that what Florida is doing is un-American, rather than an official action by the third most populous state in the nation.
I’m being called a fuckhead on BlueSky for comparing Florida’s forced-birth extremists to the Taliban.
Apparently, this is offensive to the Taliban.
I’m OK with that.
Harris faces new urgency to explain how her potential presidency would be different from Biden’s.
Bullshit. “Urgency” from whom?
This is an issue for the journalists in the Washington press corps who have been locked in a room smelling each other’s farts for 25 years.
For the rest of us, the choice is clear: One choice is someone who we can hope will be a transformative President — a Roosevelt or Lincoln — someone who can lead the rebirth of a declining nation.
Probably not.
She’ll probably govern as a conventional politician and avoid burning down the house for another four to eight years, at which time we get to do it again.
The other choice is a violent psychopath who smears poop in his hair, along with his couch-fucking sidekick.
So yeah nobody gives a shit if Harris is different from Biden.
Florida’s Taliban government is threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that air an ad advocating repeal of the state’s fanatical abortion ban. Republican claims to support free speech and Constitutional originalism are cynical lies and always have been.
“The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
The pulpy fun of Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children”
The book is about a group of long-lived people who have been living secretly pretending to be just like everyone else.
They reveal themselves, are persecuted, flee in a spaceship with a newly invented FTL drive, and have adventures out in the galaxy with aliens. The book is dedicated to E.E. “Doc” Smith, it’s the most pulpy thing Heinlein ever wrote, and it’s really surprising what outright fun it is to read. I never think of it as being one of my favourite Heinleins, but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of reading it.
— Pulp adventure and nothing wrong with that: Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children. Jo Walton at Reactor.
Like Walton says, I don’t think of this as one of my favorite Heinleins, but it’s a great read. I haven’t read much super-science from the 1930s, but “Methuselah’s Children,” published in 1941, is a throwback to the era when sci-fi writers were tossing stars around like snowballs.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.
Bill Wells, the Republican running to unseat my Congressional Rep, Sara Jacabs, is going hard for the deranged MAGA vote. Wells has a powerful Florida man vibe.
Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control . I was curious what “crackergate” is. Now I know.
I am baffled by journalists and influencers who were burned by Musk and who ran for shelter to another service run by an amoral billionaire.
This has nothing to do with my politics or ethics. I use Google and Apple products, shop at a chain supermarket, buy from Amazon, and so on. But I don’t stand on a rug when somebody at the edge is waiting to give it a good hard pull.
I’ve reactivated my Mastodon account after a brief experiment suspending that account and using Micro.blog as my primary Fediverse outpost. While Micro.blog is great, Mastodon is better at being Mastodon, and it turns out I like both.
Also, I’ve suspended my Micro.blog ActivityPub support. I continue to use and like Micro.blog, but not for that.
If you’re reading this from Mastodon, this has been nearly invisible to you. Mastodon and Micro.blog let me easily move followers between accounts.