#protoslacker

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Paul Wellstone

* * * *

My apartment building has coin-op laundry in the basement, and on the shelf where people store detergent there are also just enough quarters to start one load in the washer. This is the collective “oh shit I forgot my quarters” bank that anyone can borrow from to start laundry without having to climb all the way back up the goddamn stairs first. These quarters have been steadily used and replaced for multiple years now, and every time I see them I think about how upon such small foundations rests all of human society.

protoslacker

[protoslacker]

Sarah Roberts on Mastodon, “seize the means of your social media production.”

After all these years I am still very ignorant about computers, so slow to learn. There isn’t much to joining Mastodon. I followed a bot that serves cat pictures right away and that improved my sparce feed a lot. I rarely tweeted, but did come to rely on Twitter for “news, ” at least my peculiar notions of what consitutes news where journalists were but a part. I am happy to find many journalists signing up at Mastodon.

“You can follow any Mastodon account  via RSS simply by adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile URL” (via Fedi.Tips). This s opens up possibilities that I haven’t really explored. I use The Old Reader which is owned by a private company. The team is committed to open web standards. I can use it, so  it easy, that recomends itself to me. One could organize all the journos in a list educators in another, authors in another, and so on. 

As much as I mourn Elmo’s Twitter-fail, that so many are flocking to Mastodon seems really a postive development. 

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@protoslacker

[sumo1414]

Why you abandon me like animal John?

[dk-thrive]

A writer could put people in hell who weren’t even dead yet.

When I came back to Buffalo, I dropped out of school. I was seventeen. My plan was to stay home and read plays but my mother said, You’ve got to get a job, so I worked at a library and that’s where I first read James Baldwin. I think it was Notes of a Native Son. It stopped me cold. I had never seen a black guy that could do this. When I was a child, I thought literature was written by lords and knights and stuff. You know, these people living in these great estates wearing beautiful clothes. Baldwin showed me something different. Then I discovered Dante, man. That really turned me on. My parents thought I had lost my mind. I would go up to the attic of our house in Buffalo and play a recording of John Ciardi’s Inferno while I followed along with the book. I read Dante and realized how much power a writer could have. A writer could put people in hell who weren’t even dead yet.

—  Ishmael Reed interviewed by Chris Jackson in The Paris Review (Fall 2016). Ishmael Reed, The Art of Poetry No. 100 (via protoslacker)

[jron]

I was tagged by @dadnerdrants to answer some questions, then to tag others I’d like to know more about. Here goes:

Last song: “Quite Contrary,” by Parker Millsap. I think. Or it was “Keep Me In Your Shake,” by Tricky & Nneka

Last film: Space Sweepers

Current read: The Unspoken Name, A.K. Larkwood (just started it after finishing Brandon Sanderson’s latest Stormlight books)

Watching: Star Trek TNG (didn’t watch tv most of the 90s, so I skipped it when it aired), Avatar with my daughter, Great British Baking Show S5 with the whole fam, Falcon & Winter Soldier, Queen’s Gambit

Craving: bread. Just really good bread.

I tag (& I agree with him that this is the hardest part): @flowisaconstruct @protoslacker @jackwanchor @henrygamage @quasi-normalcy @annajonzin @foxmonkey @captainsingleton

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions. When does silence become complicity? What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president’s sense of decency, but of ours." — Mariann Edgar, Budde Randolph Marshall, Hollerith Kelly Brown Douglas speaking from Washington National Catherdral. Have We No Decency? A Response to President Trump (via protoslacker)

There is never a shortage of people who stand by in silence. 

[kenyatta]

This is the information revolution. We have taken it very badly so far. Information seems to be getting in the way all the time. Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. Our most enthralling and sometimes terrifying guessers are the leading characters in our history books. I will name two of them: Aristotle and Hitler. One good guesser and one bad one. The masses of humanity, having no solid information to tell them otherwise, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one. Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads. We must acknowledge, though, that persuasive guessers–even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in Russia–have given us courage to endure extraordinary ordeals that we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, wars, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead–the guessers gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we would all have surrendered long ago. But in fact, the guessers knew no more than the common people and sometimes less. The important thing was that they gave us the illusion that we’re in control of our destinies. Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long–for all of human experience so far–that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on, because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they want standards, and it isn’t the gold standard. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Your Guess Is as Good as Mine - Kurt Vonnegut (2005)

h/t @protoslacker

[narrativetherapy-blog]

The price of endless war is beyond calculation. As our wars continue to morph and roll on, the costs – financial, emotional, and in blood – only pile up as the men and women who have been welcomed home as if it were all over continue to be torn apart. The nasty conclusion on the scales of moral injury: that our endless conflicts may indeed have left our society, one that just can’t stop itself from making war, among the casualties.

— Peter Van Buren at Tom Dispatch. Whistleblowers, Moral Injury, and Endless War, Was Chelsea Manning Motivated By Moral Injury? 

(via protoslacker)

[heavyweightheart]

“The challenge to places like Lowndes County is not to restore existing public infrastructure, as Trump has promised, because there is no public infrastructure here to begin with. Flowers estimates that 80% of the county is uncovered by any municipal sewerage system, and in its absence people are expected – and in some cases legally forced – to provide their own.

Even where individuals can afford up to $15,000 to install a septic tank – and very few can – the terrain is against them. Lowndes County is located within the “Black Belt”, the southern sweep of loamy soil that is well suited to growing cotton and as a result spawned a multitude of plantations, each worked by a large enslaved population.

The same thing that made the land so good for cotton – its water-retaining properties – also makes it a hazard to the thousands of African Americans who still live on it today. When the rains come, the soil becomes saturated, overwhelming inadequate waste systems and providing a perfect breeding ground for hookworm.”

[link from @protoslacker]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A View of Galveston, the Birthplace of Juneteenth. This image of Galveston was taken by the Expedition 67 crew aboard the International Space Station as it orbited 224 miles above. Though President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, many enslaved African Americans remained unaware of this executive order for an additional two and a half years. On June 19, 1865, Union troops read out General Order No. 3 at several locations throughout Galveston, Texas, announcing the end of legalized slavery and spreading the news of freedom. That day of liberation became known as Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. This image of Galveston was taken by the Expedition 67 crew aboard the International Space Station on June 20, 2022, as it orbited 224 miles above. Photo Credit: NASA :: [Robert Scott Horton]

* * * * *

Notably, in the 1936-1938 federal Slave Narrative project, emancipated freeman and San Antonio-born Felix Hayward remarked: "There wasn't no reason to run up north… All we had to do was to walk, but walk south, and we'd be free as soon as we crossed the Rio Grande."

Felix Hayward quoted in an article by Isaiah Reynolds at Insider. In the mountains of Northern Mexico, descendants of formerly enslaved people have celebrated Juneteenth, or 'Día de los Negros,' for over a century

protoslacker

[protoslacker]

Twitter

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is important news but it’s a struggle to make sense of it.

There are some folks like Rebecca MacKinnon, Jillian York, Cory Doctorow, Ethan Zuckerman, and many others who have been thinking hard about the Internet for a long time. I  wish I had paid more attention! 

Dave Winer keeps the longest running Blog on the Internet, Scripting News.  So much as happened in re Twitter in a week that November 5 seems ancient histiory, but I have revisited Winers posts from that day  and revisited them. The burning questions are What do we want? and How do we get there from here? Winer points to a post he wrote in 2007, Twitter as coral reef that rings true for me.

Yesterday he wrote:

Anyway, when ActivityPub and RSS merge we will have a fantastic social network along with the news reader of the world, as an open system that the Bigs will never break. We will have the online system we've been waiting for. Now we just have to do everything right. 😄

When it comes to all things computer, I am so slow on the uptake. But this vision I like a lot.

I joined Twitter in 2007 and never Tweeted much. I am protoslacker at Mastodon and probably won’t post much there either. I am on the other hand a promiscuous follwer.  One consequence of Elon-Twitter may be serving as a catalyst for a thriving federated social Web. 

[wordswilling]

protoslacker replied to your post: protoslacker replied to your post: I’d seen this...

Oh man old folks like me are loosing it. Google: Chris Brogan’s “The Rise of the Junkweb and Why It’s Awesome or At Least Inevitable: :) I think links are important, but Brogan’s point is that WHO shares is as important as why.

Whenever you share resources, I take it as important. I'm really grateful for a contact like you on Tumblr! I think that's a good point. We always tout "how" and "why" as the higher order thinking questions, but "who" becomes increasingly important as people trail so much information and perspectives behind them on the internet.

I guess "The Death of the Author" is kind of dead, huh?

[littlehorrorshop]

protoslacker replied to your post: All of the urls I have saved

Have you seen openanthcoop.ning.com/?…

no, I haven't.. I really know very  little if not nothing about Anthropology. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

David Michael Kennedy :: Thank you Bruce Fertman and El Rito Studio.

* * * * *

"yUdjEhanAnô sô KAnAnô," Grounds remembers saying to the bison when he came face to face with them in Denver. It means "We, the Yuchi People, are still here." They, like the bison, survived colonial efforts to wipe them out, but were physically separated after being forced from their homelands in what is now the southeastern United States.

Richard Grounds quoted in an article by Kaitly Radde at NPR. After nearly 200 years, the Yuchi Tribe of Oklahoma reconnects with bison

Yuchi Language Project

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

20th anniversary of the sea to sea flag. 1.25 miles of PRIDE on Duval street in Key West. This year is the 45th anniversary of the original rainbow flag designed by Gilbert Baker.

* * * *

“We declare that human rights are for all of us, all the time: whoever we are and wherever we are from; no matter our class, our opinions, our sexual orientation.”

— Ban Ki-moon

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Corporations Churches and Civic Groups as well as Professional Organizations need to speak out in the strongest terms against the targeted right wing hate campaign against LBGTQ people. The fading right wing radical minority is using every dirty trick, every gerrymandered state legislation, to attack vulnerable people. They will continue to do it until they are held accountable and punished for their hate-mongering.

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As the Republican “culture war” has turned into a full-fledged battle against basic human rights, the political media’s continued insistence on covering it like just another political tactic is enabling it.

That’s right: Journalistic restraint is aiding and abetting the dehumanizing of gay and trans people by a bunch of evil fanatics.

Dan Froomkin at Press Watch. During Pride month, journalists should be ashamed

[thanks to protoslacker]

[protoslacker]

Alan Watts - How To Figure Out Where You Are Meant To Be

Spiritual Mind

In this talk Watts begins with the disparity of our we understand ourselves in the universe and how using the lens of science we understand ourselves. Then he discusses three traditional theories of nature. The Western theory holdsthat world is an artifact, made by God. The Hindu theory holds nature as a drama. And the Chinese which holds nature "of itself so."

Something that jumped out which is around the 18:00 point is the notion that "the goody goody is the thief of virtue. In the Chinese view of nature virtue is human-heartedness. Good and bad all mixedup. Watts observes that wars for booty and women are restrained because the object of the war is to preserve what you want. But war based on moral principle is unrestrained and ruthless.

The problem with billionaires is they are goody goodies and unrestranined in their ruthlessness. This is written by protoslacker.