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Trans rights are human rights. None are free until all are free. The existence of billionaires is a failure of society. Free Palestine. Under the streets, the beach.

🇿🇦 but a long way from a patriot. Also a former resident of ANZ but my phone doesn't know the Tino Rangatiratanga flag emoji.

Climate pessimist. Revolution optimist. Lifelong pacifist. Data engineer by trade. Has been hating Musk since before it was cool.

If you want to follow me, be warned: I boost a *lot* of stuff.

Pronouns: He/Him
Main Org: Industrial Workers of the World
Rugby: Western Province
Rugby (UK): Wasps

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Last Notes

2025-06-22 09:08:47 UTC

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Every hyperwealthy person in existence has been hitting "DEFECT" on the prisoner's dilemma, over and over, from the moment they became an adult. We shouldn't expect them to behave any differently now. This is what money does to a mf.
Patriotism is just a lie they tell us to distract us from noticing.

2025-05-09 05:30:27 UTC

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I'd argue that it's not useful to see it as the Right adopting a Left position. Rather, I'd argue that the way to see it is that extremely low upper-rate taxation is a uniquely Centrist position, and when Right-wing regimes abandon it, it's a sign that they are abandoning a compromise with the Centre.

2025-03-03 07:19:56 UTC

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My understanding is that it's a mixture of the two and with a third factor too.
Russia is a cheaper country than France or the UK, so money spent there goes quite a bit further. You can pay more Russian salaries with $1m than you can French salaries. So Russia does have some advantage there, but if you add together European spending then it's still much more.
There's a third factor:
C) Defence spending is a bad measure of military power. This is because defence spending is mostly (in most countries) used for purposes other than winning wars. For example, military bases in rural towns are often used as a bandaid for rural unemployment. Weapons manufacturing is often carefully spread across politically-influential districts to win the support of their representatives. A lot of it goes straight into the pockets of corrupt well-connected contractors and consultancies. The money says "defence" on it but it's really being used for rewarding loyalty or shoring up the cracks in the system.

2025-03-02 09:49:02 UTC

Here's an experience I've had multiple times and I chuckle at:
A non-fediverse comrade asks me to post a callout for their event. This callout is usually formatted for Signal/Whatsapp/Insta, which is to say that they have come up with text and then typed that text onto an image.
I repost this image on fedi. Because I'm not an asshole, I type the entire contents of the image, manually, into the alt-text. I then copy-paste that alt-text into the body of the message. As a result, the original text now exists as text once again.
I don't mind doing this, I support accessibility, it just amuses me that the image is an almost unnecessary interim step of transmission which adds annoyance and the possibility of human error in transcription. It's like the opposite of a compression algorithm.

2025-02-01 09:30:02 UTC

Every day that a billionaire, a fascist or a landlord wake up, they voluntarily choose to continue being a billionaire, a fascist or a landlord. Every morning, they have the option to turn over a new leaf and stop being shitty.
If you meet one, therefore, you're meeting someone who's made an uninterrupted string of decisions to continue being shitty.
Treat them appropriately.

2025-01-18 09:17:03 UTC

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I read a fantastic article fifteen years ago or so which I am certain I can never find again. It made this exact argument about pornography: pointing out that while there's more pornography being made than ever before, the ability to make a living from it has disappeared. Once upon a time you could make good money from performing. Nowadays, those who are making a living from pornography are either a few lucky performers who made it to the very top, or those who don't perform but are the managers and gatekeepers of the industry.
What made the article stick in my mind is that it predicted that the same would happen to other industries. It posited opinion-journalism and music as the next places where this would happen, one of which seems to only kind of have happened and one of which is the point you make here.
I wonder which other industries it'll happen to next?

2025-01-16 17:40:37 UTC

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Is it not "beep beep"? Or is this a Mandela Effect thing?

2024-09-21 07:43:41 UTC

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Yeah I think this is worth emphasising: the cops murdered a Black man, and a huge number of White people went out and fought cops about it, because the plague meant that they had been given permission to care about other human beings regardless of income or race. All it took to lessen the effects of systemic racism was for the pressure to not care about others to be relieved for a moment.
I suspect we're not going to be given that permission again any time soon. I for one don't feel that I need permission.

2024-09-05 05:57:40 UTC

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I don't feel that you're disagreeing with one another. The state's ability to carry out violence freely is something that can only exist if there's widespread acceptance of it.
My city has one cop per 200 people. The only way they can possibly intimidate us into obedience is because 199 of those people are willing to look the other way while the cop beats up the 200th.
When this changes, then society can change very quickly and in very exciting ways.

2024-08-31 05:38:40 UTC

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This isn't a precedent. The precedent was set with jihadi websites more than two decades ago. This is simply that precedent being applied to people who were until now privileged enough to not have it applied to them.

2024-08-28 21:45:30 UTC

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About ten years ago I had an especially crooked landlord and I looked into asking the council to do this. I was unofficially told that while they had the power, it's something our council would never imagine doing: it basically guarantees a long and costly legal battle with the landlord, with no financial benefit to the council to balance that cost.
I can't think what this landlord did to piss off Merton Council. It must have been something well and truly unusual.

2024-08-25 12:06:33 UTC

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I would make a joke about single crop economies, but while I'm not an economist I'm not sure this even qualifies as one. Single crop economies still require workers to make things, while this is just a case of treating a city as a storage vault.
Then again, if I recall correctly you're from a former textile-weaving part of the world? If so, if an economist pops up to tell us that this does count as a single-crop economy, then you can tell us what happens when that single crop stops being viable.

2024-08-25 11:47:53 UTC

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Honestly a lot of it feels like the UK is less of a functional state and more of a nightwatchman outside a bank vault.
The world's hyperwealthy have been storing their money in the London real estate market for decades now. That market has been advertising itself as one of the best long-term stores of value and one of the safest places to offshore a fortune.
This means that if the state takes actions which lead to the collapse of London real estate values, then the Scary Bonesaw Oil Billionaires will be very upset. Meanwhile if the populace of the country starve, then at worst we might break a few windows and fight some cops, but that's not nearly the same degree of scary.
The state knows what its purpose is: it's to keep that store of wealth safe. Running a viable economy is just a nice-to-have.

2024-06-27 10:02:33 UTC

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Let me try again.
You said "we shouldn't make assumptions about people even though we disagree."
My response is, we can still classify people's ideologies broadly even if we disagree. I used the example of fascism to illustrate this. If you see a person wearing a swastika and a high-and-tight haircut talking about the need to raise the birthrate, you probably wouldn't stop to ask them about their ideology. You'd cross the road to avoid them, or punch them, or whatever.
This is especially the case because you often won't get a straight answer.
If I'm applying for a new job, and my boss asks me if I'm an anarchist, then of course I'll say no. But if he notices that I support non-state solutions, I engage in transformative justice, I'm active in a mutual-aid local, I regularly put my safety at risk to oppose fascism in the streets and I have an IWW card in my wallet, then he might reasonably conclude that in fact I am an anarchist.

2024-06-27 09:42:35 UTC

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I'll be honest: I dislike that strain of thought because these days I generally hear it from fascists.
"Just because I disagree with you, and just because I believe that we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, doesn't mean I'm a fascist. You're using it as a blanket term."
If something walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and it eats seeds like a duck, then it's fair to start suspecting it of duck-related activities until it shows us that it's actually a goose.

2024-06-27 09:05:22 UTC

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The term comes from 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, when the USSR was faced with mass popular dissent in its satellite states, and responded by sending in tanks.
It shocked a lot of communists, who until then had thought that the USSR - a socialist regime - would behave better than an imperial one. Instead, to quote Bertold Brecht, they massacred the people in the name of The People.
A few communists still tried to defend the USSR, either by denying the atrocities or by making the absurd claim that they were necessary. The rest of the communist community were disgusted with these people and came up with the pejorative "tankie" to describe them.
Communism developed a lot after that: partially through the growth of eurocommunism and third-worldism, partially through various currents within Trotskyism and Left Communism, partially through involvement in the ecological, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, and partially through reactions to the rebirth of anarchism in the 1970s.
There were individual communists, however, who idolise brutal repressive regimes if those regimes are covered in a coat of red paint. There are still such people to this day. A lot of those people are just campists. A lot of them also seem to be creepily into the brutality and repression, as if that's a turnon for them and not a turnoff.

2024-06-24 06:21:21 UTC

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Hah, I am awesome, but in this case it's just that I happened to be in the right place at the right time.
My guess is that if a three-year old thread resurfaces and a whole lot of people end up pressing like and retoot, that can degrade one's experience of using mastodon. Taking action against that by hiding a thread is fair enough.
Or it might just be the weirdness that fedi has for multi-year-old toots. I dunno.

2024-06-24 06:05:34 UTC

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Because I forgot to mention it: the user who wrote it is Dan at @ ifixcoinops @ mastodon.social (adding spaces because I don't know whether he wants to be tagged into the discussion.)

2024-06-24 05:59:29 UTC

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The game is called Improbable Island. I was reading the same thread.
Fedi handles really old toots quite badly, especially if they're on a different instance, so yeah it's annoying and easy to lose references to.

2024-05-29 06:40:48 UTC

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My understanding is that it's also due to the Political Compass originally having been created by Right-libertarians in an attempt to persuade people that Right-libertarianism isn't actually just Right-authoritarianism wearing a funny hat.

2024-05-29 05:38:46 UTC

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It has been pointed out numerous times - and this is yet another good example - that for all intents and purposes the two-dimensional Political Compass is a misreading of how politics works. In practise one sees a single trend line from antiauthoritarian Left to authoritarian Right, and almost everything sits somewhere on that trend line. Apart from a few outliers, it's a one-dimensional axis.