Ted Lemon

Oude nerd uit de V.S. Mijn baan is bij een groot bedrijf in California, maar ik woon in Utrecht.

Ik geef advies over meditatie, ontwakingservaringen, en de problemen die darmee bepaard gaan.

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abhayakara_at_mastodon.nl@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-04-14 15:13:37 UTC

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Why do they need to be _here_? Why can't they be on their own instance that we don't federate with? Is it wrong for me to want to be able to read my site feed without being triggered? For wanting neighbors that I like?
I have "family" (not actual family, but effectively) who are MAGA. I don't want to not be in touch with them at all, but I really don't want to have to listen to them spew.

2026-04-14 14:45:18 UTC

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Spam blocking software is a _really_ bad model. I not want that here. Free speech has to be balanced with consent. If I do not consent to listen to some asshole spew hatred, I should be able to avoid hearing that.
Anti-spam doesn't accomplish this, because it's porous: assholes can keep changing their identity to get past the filter.
I should be able to simply say "no, I don't want to hear from random strangers." That's not anti-spam. That's consent.

2026-04-14 12:45:27 UTC

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How this relates to substack is of course still a matter for debate: there _are_ alternatives. But each of the alternatives I've found is (a lot) more work and has less reach, as far as I can tell.
Of the lot of them, Patreon is probably the best, but they seem to be wandering down the enshittification highway, so we'll see.

2026-04-14 12:43:29 UTC

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The only quibble I would make with this is that if you are doing what makes sense, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it.
I've been a U.S. citizen my whole life, and my country has engaged in many wars I find reprehensible.
Should I have renounced my citizenship? No. It's my country, no more or less than theirs.
Is there no alternative to Walmart? The alternative they closed for me was mine. I want it back, but meanwhile I have to live. It's not wrong to choose to live.

2026-04-14 10:24:43 UTC

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A lot of people I admire, e.g. Amanda Litman, Anand Ghiridaradas and Waleed Shahid, use substack. Why are you right and they are wrong?

2026-04-14 10:22:57 UTC

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I ask these questions because I know how easy it is to use substack, and also how easy it is to use alternatives like Ghost. I'm actually trying to decide what to do about this—this isn't an idle set of questions.
Right now, it feels a lot like not using substack is similar to not flying to conferences. Airlines are actively harmful in the world, but we don't really have a viable alternative. Should we silence ourselves by not flying?

2026-04-14 10:20:54 UTC

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A related question is, given that substack actually appears to work better than its competitors, how much does it cost us to not use it, both in terms of ease of use and in terms of reach.
And how much does it cost us to use it, in terms of the damage that their asshole users cause?
Suppose the answer is that the cost of not using it outweighs the cost of using it. Should we still not use it? If so, why?

2026-04-14 10:18:40 UTC

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I guess this is the Nazi bar analogy, and I sort of get that. But I have a few questions.
First, and I know this is a bit reductio ad absurdum, but bear with me, should we boycott comcast because they let Andrew Tate use their wires? If not, where is the dividing line?
Second, I guess the argument here is that they are platforming an asshole, and using their non-asshole bloggers as leverage. Why doesn't this work in both directions? Can't I plunder Andrew Tate's followers?

2026-03-09 16:34:43 UTC

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🦙 Animal #952 🐞
I figured it out in 14 guesses!
🟥🟥🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 14
https://metazooa.com
#metazooa
That was HARD! :)

2026-03-09 16:17:23 UTC

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Every time you post one of these it reminds me to go to https://lingule.xyz/ and do the puzzle there. I've never actually tried the animal puzzle. It's still kind of a fun bit of random parasocial solidarity.

2024-08-11 02:39:58 UTC

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Is this on the nuclear article?

2024-06-26 17:58:43 UTC

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Voting has been effective in changing things, but e.g. in the U.S. the electorate isn't organizing effectively, and so indeed voting feels pretty futile.
The point is that it's the organizing that matters, not the voting. You have to organize _and_ vote, but if you just vote and don't organize, nothing changes.
This is particularly problematic when a significant portion of the electorate is disenfranchised.

2024-06-26 17:56:49 UTC

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Again I think we are almost agreeing. What matters is the character of the people who are deciding how the laws get enforced. I think you are suggesting that we just get rid of them and then things will be okay, because there's nothing to enforce. I'm suggesting that we take effective collective action to change the way they are enforced.
I suspect that with the right society, either of these approaches would work.

2024-06-26 17:50:52 UTC

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All of their power comes from us.

2024-06-26 17:48:29 UTC

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No. But in their best sense (and I know that's not the only sense, don't get me wrong), laws are our collective story about how we think things should be done. The civil rights act was a good story, and it made a difference. Roe v. Wade was a good story, and it made a difference.
The problem is that we thought we'd made enough of a difference and that we could rely on just the laws, and that we didn't need to /do/ anything, and that's how we got here.

2024-06-26 17:43:45 UTC

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I'm asking you what, specifically, "stopped obeying the police" would look like.
I think it would look like a lot of things we saw during the BLM protests and the Occupy Wall Street protests and other protests we've already seen.
What these have looked like is a bunch of people getting the shit beaten out of them by cops. Dying from injuries received after being hit in the eye by a rubber bullet. Stuff like that.

2024-06-26 17:40:14 UTC

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We used to have the civil rights act.

2024-06-26 17:38:18 UTC

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From your picture I assume you've lived through the same years I have. As far as I can tell, things are quite a bit worse now in the U.S. and many European countries in terms of human rights than they were when I was born. Is that not also your impression?

2024-06-26 17:33:41 UTC

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What would that look like, specifically?

2024-06-26 17:26:49 UTC

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We’ve been saying no continuously for my whole life in various ways. It hasn’t worked very well so far. Just standing up and saying no is not a power move.

2024-06-26 17:24:32 UTC

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Also, you talk about the state like it’s some independent entity, but it is in fact an emergent property of our society. We are the hardware on which it runs. So it’s not so simple to say “without the state” things would be better. It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t really help, because it’s not actionable.

2024-06-26 17:18:47 UTC

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Indeed so. But it’s actually the exact same grift. The recycling grift is that we should treat each other as enemies on the basis of whether we recycle, rather than recognizing that recycling of plastics at least is entirely a propaganda campaign to get us not to address the problem at its source.
The police state grift is that we are responsible for what is supposedly done in our name. That we have agency that we do not have.

2024-06-26 17:13:47 UTC

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Taking ownership of it is actually not only a form of self harm, but also sadly tends to support the status quo, because it leads us to ineffective responses to the situation.

2024-06-26 17:12:10 UTC

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Maybe the thing to do now is stop taking responsibility for something that isn’t on you. I honestly do not know how to stop this other than enough of us saying no. Until enough of us understand that we need to say no, and do it effectively, we are stuck paying the vig.
None of us can do this alone. We are in exact the same place now that we would be if we were being robbed at gunpoint to support this. So we do not own this violence.

2024-06-26 14:20:59 UTC

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Right. So how is that end state better than the status quo?

2024-06-26 12:55:01 UTC

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I guess the question is, if those police and military budgets vanished overnight, what would all the furloughed soldiers and police do in their spare time?
This is a serious question.
Some would go do something useful. But I suspect some are in that business, and are abusive in that business, precisely because it gives them free reign to do so. And if they were no longer in that business, would they not just create it and find a new way to fund it?