Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Just a personal heads-up for everyone I interact with: we've reached a point where if I see you in *any* way aligning with Trump or Musk, you are immediately going on my mental 'fascist' list with no further discussion and I will not speak to you anymore.

I don't care if you "didn't know how bad it is". The time for learning that is well past, so if you still "don't know", then I'm going to conclude that you didn't *want* to know and decide accordingly.

Time for the - I guess yearly by this point... - toot again:

No, I will not be at #38c3. I *could* have squeezed it into my schedule despite an upcoming transplantation, but they have *once again* failed to implement any COVID safety measures.

A few days of Congress is not worth the risk of brain damage or (in my case) severe illness or death.

If you want to see me at your event, push for appropriate safety precautions like sufficient ventilation/filtering and (particularly where that is not possible) mask distribution and ideally masking requirements.

#CovidIsNotOver

If all goes to plan, I will be receiving a kidney transplantation on November 12 (2024), followed by an unknown recovery period. What to expect:

After the transplantation, I will not be around online for a while; this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on how well (or not) the surgery goes. Even after I return, I will likely be avoiding stress for a while, which also means I may drop out of things unannounced.

In the time leading up to the transplantation, I will become less and less consistently available, and you may see me around less, as I deal with the preparations for the surgery.

I'm receiving a kidney from a living donor, under pretty much best-case circumstances (no dialysis), so the chance of success is high, and the chance of complications is low, but it is not zero. Likewise, survival chance is high but not 100%.

If the transplantation succeeds, I will be able to live a mostly normal life, but I will be on immunosuppressive medicine for the rest of my life. Among other things, this means that you're probably only going to see me at (hacker) events that take sufficient precautions against COVID and the like.

So if you want me and other immunocompromised folks around at those events, ask organizers to take those precautions! Ventilation/filtering and CO2 measurement is a good baseline.

If you have any questions about all this, feel free to ask, but I may or may not have the spoons to answer them.

Because they're like oppression lootboxes.

The liberal viewpoint is not one of intersectionality; they might sound very progressive and recognize one or more types of oppression, but do not (wish to) recognize the way these interact, or the structure and patterns that underlie all of them.

This means that it's only a matter of time before I hear them say some extremely shitty and/or bigoted stuff about a topic that they don't recognize as a form of oppression, but I can't know upfront which topic it will be, or when it'll happen.

With my intersectional friends, I could then just point out that it's a form of oppression, and they will take it seriously, introspect, and work (over time) to understand it. Mistakes happen, but they will try to learn. All I need to do, is remind them.

With liberals, however... they do not recognize it as another occurrence of the same thing, and so I am left having to "prove" from whole cloth that yes, it really is a form of oppression, before they are even willing to put in *any* effort to understand the problem.

Every time this happens, it takes hours of my time, and energy that I do not have to spare.

I am already running on fumes most of the time, and I honestly just don't really want to hang around people who put that sort of price on not being shitty.

#introduction:

I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".

But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!

While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!

Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!

Well, I have a 39 celsius fever now, which is Not Good. It's very likely I caught Covid too, which fucking sucks given that I am immunocompromised.

Yep. Covid has entered the house.

Did you notice how Trump and Musk, in several weeks time, managed to convert pretty much every single punitive government system and structure into something oppressive that furthers their personal agenda?

If you are not in the US, please learn from this for your local politics. This is why you want to avoid having punitive systems (and systems that otherwise control or restrict people) as much as possible. They are like catnip to authoritarians; they're a big cannon that they can point at anyone they don't like.

That includes prisons, border control (yes, even tourist visas), intelligence agencies, cops, and so on.

A healthy governance system is built out of systems and structures that *lift people up*, that take care of them, that encourage positive contributions to society. Those systems cannot be as easily subverted, and they also produce consistently better outcomes (just look at basically any research on this topic).

Build systems that support and inspire, not systems that restrict and control, and then your government won't be so vulnerable to the first ambitious authoritarian that happens to pass by.

It's really only a single small step from "keeping out illegal immigrants" to "deporting all Jewish/Black/trans/disabled/etc. people". You've already built all the infrastructure for them.

how it started: https://x.com/leojr94_/status/1900767509621674109

how it's going: https://x.com/leojr94_/status/1901560276488511759

If you want people in your community to post more nuanced in-depth takes, then banning flippant rhetoric and thought-terminating cliches is a pretty good first step to take.

Because if a flippant response is the only thing you ever get in response to a carefully written argument (and you will; because flippant responses are trivial to write), you're going to stop writing those carefully written arguments very quickly.

This toot inspired by a comment section on a particular website, but applicable in many places.

I realize that it's "just" a pastebin and there are many others of those around the web, but something feels very on-the-nose here about what Mozilla has become over the past years, both in the action and in the phrasing

I find it fascinating how many "no code" startups there are, that are basically just a reincarnation of the now-dead Microsoft Access but with much less flexibility