Post AaQ2UcXdb2Gs98MGdU by graydon@canada.masto.host
 (DIR) More posts by graydon@canada.masto.host
 (DIR) Post #AaQ2URivohlkayYdDE by graydon@canada.masto.host
       2023-09-30T10:00:22Z
       
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       Free yourself from the burden of abstraction.Ours is an age greatly informed by computing machinery, information theory, and amplification. That doesn't change abstraction from a tool into a virtue, a necessity, or a fact. (Abstraction can get you to facts, but abstractions are not facts.)Yet here we are tangled up in abstractions.
       
 (DIR) Post #AaQ2UTbunlLSRnI3YO by graydon@canada.masto.host
       2023-09-30T10:01:28Z
       
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       "What happens?" and "who does it happen to?" are more useful questions than "why does this happen?"  "Why?", at scale, approximates theology; things cannot be known on human scales. Yet the events happen now, to specific people. Pay attention to the facts of events.
       
 (DIR) Post #AaQ2UVQe2dWC5Q25GS by graydon@canada.masto.host
       2023-09-30T10:03:11Z
       
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       "Good" and "bad" are judgements, and they're the judgement of posterity, people with more knowledge in a future time.No one now alive will be judged good by whatever posterity may survive the ongoing end of the world.  Free yourself from any need to think of yourself as good. All that's doing is obscuring right action.
       
 (DIR) Post #AaQ2UXB7XKHxVqmiLQ by graydon@canada.masto.host
       2023-09-30T10:06:07Z
       
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       The idea of listening to someone because of who they are instead of what they have done or the responsibility collectively granted them is inherently anti-democratic. It's the appeal to authority made flesh.The media is mostly not about balance or clicks; it's about using balance and clicks as tools of establishing authoritarian norms where the only thing that matters is who you are, not what you've done nor what responsibility you've undertaken to whom.
       
 (DIR) Post #AaQ2UYy4sn2n3yhKIC by graydon@canada.masto.host
       2023-09-30T10:08:04Z
       
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       Anyone who constructs authority as freedom, or as anything, really, other than a burden and a terror, is going to be a hazard with power.Power must exist (we're a band forming primate; if the band exists, there is power, and if the band doesn't exist, we don't, either). How authority works is going to matter, we can't abolish it. We can insist on creating it collectively.
       
 (DIR) Post #AaQ2UamS8yvwgVH4S0 by graydon@canada.masto.host
       2023-09-30T10:13:30Z
       
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       "White supremacy" is a euphemism for "everything is mine" AND "I exist in perpetual sleepless terror".The attraction of piracy is sudden wealth; the detriments of piracy are the impossibility of stable community, because you mistook wealth for an outcome, rather than a side effect. (People do the same thing with happiness and love.)Addressing white supremacy has to start with the idea that it was always incompetence, it didn't magically become incompetence once the loot ran out.
       
 (DIR) Post #AaQ2UcXdb2Gs98MGdU by graydon@canada.masto.host
       2023-09-30T10:15:10Z
       
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       One consequence of that ought to be that expressing supremacist ideas at all, ever, disqualifies you from any position of public trust whatsoever. It ought to be like getting up in public and insisting that innumeracy is no barrier to bookkeeping.