Loukas (They/Them) 🏳️‍⚧️

Journalist, teacher, Londoner, Stockholmer.

Deputy editor, Freedom news (London)

Writing about autism, ADHD and disability.

Profile image description: me on a balcony
Background image description: dry grass reviving after winter

Pronouns: they/them
Location: Stockholm

Public Key

npub1qcm64q2sys5fg9764wky5y7tfcv3qmvz550l8ru2szy2pdstqnyscy5mnx

NIP-05 Address

loukas_at_mastodon.nu@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqvda2s9gzg2y5zld2htz2z095uxgsdkp228ln379gpz9qkc9sfjgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds52vtc5

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1qcm64q2sys5fg9764wky5y7tfcv3qmvz550l8ru2szy2pdstqnyscy5mnx

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Last Notes

2024-08-08 15:34:18

JD Vance goes to an Ikea in Stockholm
- Hey, I wanna buy a couch
- I am sorry sir. All our couches are slut sold.
- [licks lips] yeah I bet they are

2024-08-07 07:43:37

Hey people who use screen readers, could you help me with something?
Should I camel case the word antifascism?
Does it sound better like number one?
#antifascism
Or number two?
#antiFascism

2024-08-07 05:11:21

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This is the kind of thing I was talking about in this thread.
https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/919/016/151/277/734/original/3e5d29cfa686a662.png

2024-08-06 09:50:03

I'm sure if you went back to 2010 and described today's politics to centrist journalists, politicians and academics and asked what they would do in such a world, I'm sure you'd hear lots of rhetoric about joining the resistance and opposing fascism to the last breath.
Instead we got normalisation of fascism, by most of the people who see themselves as the independently-minded.

2024-08-05 15:55:42

Let's all hold hands and watch bitcoin and AI crash together.

2024-07-23 11:18:39

Well it seems like I was very over optimistic about how twitter would be affected by the US election campaign.
Two years ago I was very hopeful that the campaign would be a mask-off moment for Elon Musk, and this would trigger a mass exodus from twitter as he revealed himself to be a total Trumper.
Unfortunately I was only half right.

2024-07-22 12:42:51

Hey do any of you work with dogs? How do you get a start in that kind of work? Someone in my family would like to do this.
Boost for more replies, please!

2024-07-21 07:37:18

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yes, I think they're trying to just shuffle the cards really fast and somehow get a different result. It's just interesting how, as you point out, the contradictions are going to lead to either more state fiscal intervention, or more regulatory intervention...or financial crisis.

2024-07-21 07:23:27

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so...the Treasury ends up underwriting the pension funds in the hope that the few times they fail will be outweighed by the boost in investment and economic growth? This sounds like MMT with extra steps ;) Or they could force the companies to eat all the failures and make it a low-fat Meidner plan!

2024-07-20 09:40:18

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Friends in Bangladesh say they can't communicate with their family, the internet has been off for two days. People don't know who is alive and who is dead. I wish we had ways to get around this.

2024-07-20 09:32:30

Let me know if you see any good accounts here who are following or involved in the protests in Bangladesh https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5xye1d285o

2024-07-20 08:30:26

My 13-year-old tells me that whether I'm posting on Mastodon or BlueSky it's still a 'tweet', daaaad.

2024-07-20 07:53:04

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tell us some!

2024-07-20 07:20:01

Swedish people I am begging you to remember that 'lust' in English is a very different word to how you use it in Swedish.
I've seen highly-educated people, including authors and CEOs, use it wrongly in front of English audiences.
My theory is these people are so important no one around them has dared to correct them.

2024-07-19 15:12:05

Without cheating can you name any of the top-ten Facebook pages?
I try to follow some big Facebook pages so I get an idea of what's popular there. But I just looked at the list of the most-followed pages, on Wikipedia, and I am surprised!

2024-07-18 12:52:11

What's your favourite open source tool for calenders and other sharable planning tools?
I'm setting up a planning system for [@Freedom_Press](https://kolektiva.social/@Freedom_Press ) and I want to avoid Google calendar and documents.

2024-07-17 12:01:15

A friend of mine is feeling very bad and I'm reacting by sending them memes. Please drop your absolute guaranteed belly laugh memes and cartoons here so I can keep my supply going!

2024-07-16 07:55:13

I wonder what the rates for speakers guessing other languages are. Swedish guessing Norwegian must be about 95%
'Seibert (1945) found high rates of success (around 70 per cent) in intensive guessing with learners who knew French guessing Spanish words in context.' (Nation, 2022)

2024-07-14 16:49:55

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we must hold the line against the waffle invasion!

2024-07-14 15:28:15

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ohhh get her hyacinth bucket with her lattice fries meanwhile Americans are like WAFFLE

2024-07-14 15:22:42

Ok, so I think I know that in America they're waffle fries.
Is there a different British name, so my London relatives don't laugh at me? https://mastodon.nu/@Loukas/112785508013177737

2024-07-14 15:17:56

I've only ever encountered this kind of chips in Sweden. What's the English name for them, if it exists?
https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/785/503/641/019/411/original/b11500a290d8923d.jpg

2024-07-14 10:49:25

What am I doing online right now? Well my doctor says I should do more activities that raise my heart rate.

2024-07-14 10:24:53

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A related point: if more new people start to turn up here because of Musk overtly backing Trump please try to be more welcoming and less scolding.

2024-07-14 09:43:40

Something that's interesting about BlueSky and Mastodon is a lot of us are stuck in our twitter behaviour. When you have a potential audience of 100m including most politicians and corporations then yelling is sometimes a useful political activity.
When you're in a small forum with thousands of people who mostly share your views already then different kinds of activity are the useful ones.

2024-07-14 09:04:01

The idea that the Secret Service are kind of bad at their job is more plausible to me than the idea that they are so good at their job they could stage a convincing fake assassination.

2024-07-14 08:30:28

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in the 18-29 age bracket more voted Reform than voted Conservative. There may be some room for a different kind of right-wing politics for that age bracket, but it'll be a minority politics sustained by donors rather than something which can rely on mobilising the base https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49978-how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-general-election

2024-07-14 08:13:46

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but young right-wing people, usually men, are overwhelmingly motivated by radical anti-feminism and racism. The available audience for a more centrist kind of right-wing politics doesn't exist, so any project that starts off centrist will tend to be pulled to the far-right by its base.

2024-07-13 15:54:31

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I thought it was so upsetting in the first film how her dad's emotions were all just different versions of rage 😥

2024-07-11 16:09:47

If England wins on Sunday then UK GDP will grow by another 0.4%

2024-07-11 10:24:09

I've decided to try to collect all the fantasy books by Hugh Cook that he wrote in the 80s and 90s.
I was in my local secondhand SF bookshop today, and despite me giving the game away about the books being rare they let me have their sole copy at a very reasonable price.
Thank you SF Antikvariat at Skanstull!

2024-06-21 16:35:58

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I can't remember about York, but I know the Last Drop in Nottingham claims to go back to the early crusades. How old is Stonewall claiming?

2024-06-21 16:32:54

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knowing Lancaster, I hope there's an actual medieval or early modern stone wall.

2024-06-21 13:01:44

"many U.S. police departments have gotten smaller—and the violent crime rate is still plummeting"
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/police-crime-minneapolis-george-floyd-blm-brutality-defund.html

2024-06-20 12:53:30

Anti-racism isn't a separate struggle from the class struggle. It's the same thing.
"BLM was the (non-union) movement influence that was most widely cited by those workers who initiated union drives in 2022."
https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/can-anti-racism-spur-labor-organizing

2024-06-19 13:09:54

I got a lot of really good answers to this question about Finnish and Estonian! #language #linguistics #finnish #baltic #estonian #languageLearning https://mastodon.nu/@Loukas/112633440781024058

2024-06-16 13:09:12

https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/626/453/875/046/332/original/0676d1bdc92b7fc4.jpg

2024-06-16 11:37:48

#language #multilingualism #memes
https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/626/090/990/175/728/original/91392bd0597a1f7b.jpg

2024-06-15 17:25:33

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Dead Kennedys are from California, right? :)

2024-06-15 17:17:05

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This reminds me of how British ska and post-punk bands in the 1980s often had white racist skinhead fans. The best bands made it clear they wanted those fans kicked out, and sometimes helped to do it themselves, like Joy Division did.

2024-06-12 12:07:12

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So the Republican party and similar fascistic movements have convinced themselves they are fighting for the soul of western civilization and capitalism against the antichrist and the whore of Babylon.
Not because Joe Biden or Kier Starmer are actually trying to destroy capitalism, but because capitalism and western civilization are having their own crises and this search for existential enemies is an attempt to marshall followers behind a failing system.

2024-06-12 12:02:52

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(And then the ironic thing is that once the military and church leaders had launched a bloody coup in 1936 this did lead to major threats to landowners and clerics, because of the popular wave of uprisings that responded to the coup.)

2024-06-12 12:01:36

When I studied the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War something that struck me was how the military leaders launched their coup against an incredibly moderate liberal-left government that was planning some very timid reforms of church and land ownership.
The fascists managed to convince themselves that a slight change in their utter privilege was an existential threat. It feels like the far-right in the US is doing the same. Very basic capitalist reforms are seen as 'communism.'

2024-06-11 06:35:40

Just a reminder to Americans that the Daily Mail is about as reliable a news source as Breitbart. If it's true, you'll find it elsewhere.

2024-06-10 08:24:39

Hey do you have a blog or website that publishes history stuff?
I swore never to add to my old Substack because of Nazis and terfs, but I want to publish an article on my 'king of the beggars' baron Nieroth investigation and I don't have the spoons to set up anything new.
Please boost to help me find a place for a guest article 💚

2024-06-08 06:48:46

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is most of the revenue from the physical shops?

2024-06-06 14:18:34

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i think the dubious results come from how a person with a strong ethical code can be 'lawful' because they prize clear standards, but that still leads us into conflict with 'the law' which is often inconsistent and unethical.

2024-06-06 14:02:38

I'm such a bad anarchist. What alignment are you? https://www.idrlabs.com/moral-alignment/test.php
https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/570/042/984/196/768/original/c591ea4e7b8933c5.png

2024-06-05 15:11:10

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it does sound like a book version of that far-right "hard men make good times" meme.

2024-06-05 15:01:04

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has he written good stuff in the past that made you think it would be worth reading?

2024-06-04 14:56:52

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https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/558/931/592/078/426/original/166d6397817dd084.jpg

2024-06-04 14:18:37

https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/558/780/027/852/485/original/0d6c63c84888e468.jpg
https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/558/780/427/420/497/original/1ce7328675e4aafa.png

2024-05-29 05:10:49

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I see what you mean. The SNP plan depends on a very slow and sensible path involving a slow building of public opinion and devolved power, plus negotiation with a reasonable Westminster government.
Another factor is that EU is going to become more markedly fascistic-influenced after this June's election so leaving a UK for that will become less attractive for Scottish voters.

2024-05-29 04:40:15

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I was thinking about this yesterday. The SNP probably hope this is a momentary Labour swing as part of people wanting Tories out, and being sick of SNP in government for so long. The SNP will just want to wait for Starmer to do unpopular Englandcentric things and see their voters return. But you think that won't happen?

2024-05-27 16:50:10

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it is. Germanic is just one language separated by squabbling cousins.

2024-05-27 09:52:07

Swedish is like Linux. It's quite obvious how the language works, and you can make your own words if you care to.
French is Apple. Try to make your own modifications and they will SEND YOU TO JAIL.
English is your grandparents' PC. We have no idea how it works. Where did all these weird plug-in words come from????

2024-05-25 06:53:24

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It's incredible. Although Labour had a terrible defeat in 2019 Starmer did represent continuity with the Corbyn party. He was high-profile and experienced. Who could be the same post-defeat leader for the Conservatives?

2024-05-25 06:00:58

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the drugs back then at techno parties were just that good

2024-05-14 08:11:46

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Important context in this BlueSky post from Matt Steinglass.
https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/438/430/134/200/791/original/61294bad6892ede7.png

2024-05-14 06:18:50

Half a million displaced by floods in Brasil. Half. A. Million.
We're going to keep seeing these numbers and we're going to get numb to seeing them, and it'll be the new normal. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/persistent-brazil-floods-raise-specter-climate-migration-2024-05-13/?taid=6642658ec92493000158bfd7&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=twitter

2024-04-27 10:28:01

Several thousand have gathered in a snap demo against the Nazi attack in Stockholm last week. The leaders of the Left Party and Social Democratic Party were there.
https://media.mastodon.nu/media_attachments/files/112/342/702/750/299/325/original/45438a63d888230d.jpg

2024-04-25 11:37:41

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
- George Orwell (1945)

2024-04-03 09:41:21

If you see a long German or Swedish word, first of all, don't panic. It's more scared of you than you are of it. Secondly, take a closer look and you'll see it's actually just three normal words in a trenchcoat, huddling together to deter predators (French and English).

2024-03-27 11:14:47

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Yes and I would date that change back to Kinnock or arguably even to Callaghan taking the IMF loan in 1978. Labour and other social democratic parties mostly run on a platform of make neoliberalism great again through superior management skills.

2023-07-06 11:34:57

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gmail blocks lots of email servers? So if I set up my email tomorrow on my own server I can't reach people on gmail?