jakke

And while we were doing that they were casually talking about how they're expecting a lot of trouble around Pride because the World Cup is in town and that means multiple continents' worth of well-heeled sports fans who fly around getting belligerently drunk and starting various acts of bigoted violence will be descending upon Seattle, and the gay bars are all in one concentrated neighbourhood and tend to have a lot of visibly eljibiddy people walking between them, and so they're all planning for Pride events to get disrupted by hate crimes. It sounded awfully fatalistic to me, but everyone who works there is a longtime industry veteran and typically unflappable in any kind of crisis, and they all sounded like they're expecting some heavy nonsense. Really hard to describe how much I hate this kind of big spectacle sporting event and the hateful kind of rich tourists it attracts and what it's going to do to the cities that host it, and really hoping this bar doesn't actually get a bunch of hooligans and ultras and barras bravas pounding down the door during Pride.

An organization that advocates for various progressive Democratic causes and does a lot of voting-related organizing in Ohio got raided. The FBI isn't saying what happened but this does feel an awful lot like they're just trying to disrupt nonprofits that might make it easy for anyone to vote for a Democrat in a somewhat competitive Senate seat? Anyway this kind of direct harassment of basic voter organizing has been very effective in entrenching authoritarian rule from one election to the next in e.g. Israel and Hungary and Russia (and obviously in the United States within living memory) so unsurprising to see it ramping up before the midterms.

Too many posts on here lately all "I miss the old Internet!" so here's a reminder of what the old Internet felt like.

This is so embarrassing. It feels a lot like when all those mayors were insisting that Black Lives Matter protesters were funded by the Russian government. Fully disbelieving that anyone can have an organic thought it's all just different governments whipping up the hoi polloi into a frenzy.

Anyway, pro-Trump Republican senators like this are realistically the only people who can offer serious meaningful pushback against Trump's impulse to invade Kharg. And I kind of expected their vision of the world to sound more like 2024 Trump, because his very loud denunciation of foreign wars was so popular, and because framing things this way will help Trump climb down from his recent impulses and not start a long awful unwinnable war that would kill a lot of people and (in terms that matter to a Republican senator who doesn't care about people dying horribly) wipe out the stock market, drive up gas prices, and imperil the party in the next election. But they don't really have a way to reconcile "no new foreign wars" with "no negotiating with anyone ever", and so I don't really think there's any way to stop Trump unless he spontaneously changes his mind or (here's hoping) It Finally Happens.

Like "you should aim to provide for those less able in your community" or "you should be aware of your emotional state and feel comfortable expressing it when appropriate" or whatever are great values for a functional society. But also nothing about them feels like something that should just be true of men as opposed to everyone? A lot of ~*~liberal positive masculinity~*~ cultural values also feel like they're meant to be coping with living in an economic system that requires everyone to constantly grind to burnout just to keep their heads above water, which seems interesting, but probably beyond the scope of the conversation.

All the companies involved have a ton of cash on hand, and they've offloaded a lot of the risk onto a few very specialized lenders, so the adjustment to reality probably won't be a drastic bubble pop and a big spillover into the real economy. It's much more likely that Big Tech will have some writeoffs for a quarter or two and a couple very specialized niche banks that do nothing but data centre loans will collapse, but most people won't notice this other than a dip in their 401ks as the stock market readjusts. When so many of the commitments to build Manhattan-sized data centres are just plans on paper, it's pretty easy to just decide not to build things, and capitalism will just keep on ticking.

Like obviously I was raised with a very If Half Your Hometown Wants You Dead You Need To Find A New Hometown culture (quite literally - I grew up with a pogrom survivor great-grandmother who was part of a whole scheme to get the extended family out) and so I have a very strong preference for helping people leave if they have the means to do so. And it's wild how the longterm decline in household mobility in the US has created this mindset of "this is my home and it's morally correct to stay here and leaving it would be abandoning a community in need" but like. You are currently drowning! You cannot help your community at in this situation! Get yourself to a place where you can feel safe and not consumed by anxiety and you'll be much more prepared to organize and advocate and donate than you currently are when you're actively under attack. People were so comfortable moving between cities and even between states for most of the twentieth century, in huge numbers, but the social norms have shifted hard away from that, and I don't know how to convince people that if have the ability to relocate yourself from a terrible situation you should absolutely do so and you'll be able to help everyone else more once you do.

And I kind of nodded politely, because this is someone who was protesting Vietnam back in the day and might just be out of touch with modern protest culture? But then I got information about an upcoming protest in Seattle, and it's about the typical unfocused litany of grievances that all get protested at once, and it really is kind of remarkable how nothing about wars or militarization or any other foreign policy ended up on that very long list. I think partially what's going on here is that there's an increasing sense that the big-tent left-wing coalition needs to coddle pro-war military veterans, and partially what's going on is that protest organizers see themselves as future Democratic operatives and don't want to rock the boat on both parties' favourite pastime, and partially that it's become easy to blame the external enemy committing atrocities (the Israeli government) rather than the US government that bankrolls it and sends it marching orders and also kills civilians indiscriminately itself. It feels like "stop bombing Iran" would show up on the protest plans, especially after the US military bombed that school and killed all those kids, but nothing about Iran (or Palestine, or Cuba, or anywhere else outside the US) made the cut. Anyway, didn't expect to be so in line with the irritable septuagenarian on Kids These Days having misplaced priorities, but here we are.

Look how good this brave noble wolf is

Platner keeps doubling down and trying to white-knuckle through this even though at this point there's really no trajectory towards him winning an election in Maine. Maybe he's holding out for some kind of think tank appointment or something and so he imagines he has some incentive to wait until the party is desperate? At this point though staying in the race and in the news is absolutely going to cost the party an extremely winnable seat.

From the investor calls I've listened to (and I highly recommend that everyone listen to Big Tech investor calls) a big part of what's going on is that the average tech executive sees the future editorial voice of their platform as a helpful friend who's scrolling through all these pictures and videos with you and is recommending you buy things along the way. Like, the idea is that you and a chatty pal are browsing the Internet together, and that chatty pal is actually a puppet with an advertisement algorithm inside of it, but as much as possible you should feel like it's someone you're chatting with as opposed to the Web 2.0 ideal of social media as a platform that lets people post things and gives other people tools to share or react to those posts, and so you should basically never see buttons and should always be reading (or hearing!) a friendly voice whenever you're in the app. And I'm very skeptical that users will ever learn to love this new mode of interaction, because it adds yet another layer of mediation on the already heavily mediated social media interactions, but I'm certain that it's absolutely terrible for security in a way that can't be mitigated.

Math and programming easier, concentration uninterrupted, zero meaningful lessons learned about the impact of sleep on overall quality of life. I've just unintentionally overloaded the past week with DMing D&D games and performing in improv shows and hosting friends from out of town and organizing picnics and going to music festivals in the park and having long niche kink sessions until I'm fully just losing consciousness without meaning to at the end of the day, because that way I'm reliably going to sleep at 12:30 or 1 and then waking up at 8. This past week has been so full of time with friends and progress on projects and general feelings of life fulfillment, but at the end of the week I'm going to visit my parents and experiencing three days of their heartbreak with how I've turned out, and that's going to tank my mood for the next few weeks, so currently feeling like I'm flying towards a brick wall.