収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Twitter used to be a really good and important tool for disaster management, before it was a disaster itself. This isn’t necessarily as well known outside of certain subsectors of twitter users, but it genuinely was important – not to gawkers, but actual emergency-management and disaster-response professionals.

That’s gone now, and it’s a real loss. Mastodon’s federation model is great in many, many ways but not in this one, and it could be a real hindrance to forming any replacement. This kind of large-realtime-data scenario is one of the relatively-few actual strengths of the monolithic model, and while I don’t think keeping it is worth the trade of also creating an endless massive alt-right/neo-fascist disinformation and propaganda fountain, I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a strength – and of value.

In short, RIP disaster-response twitter. You were good. You were very, very good.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

DeSantis was a torturer.

DeSantis didn’t put the screws on directly, but he helped the guards when he was supposed to be there insuring the prisoners were not being mistreated, and he took their information, and used it to make the conditions in general and the torture in particular worse. And he smiled about it.

DeSantis was a torturer and it explains so much. He’s a fascist authoritarian in the spirit of Hungary’s Orban and Russia’s Putin, and that’s straight up what he is.

I mean, here he is, using the power of the state explicitly to censor: DeSantis Promises Florida Will Control Disney’s Content – right-wing board to clamp down on “woke ideology”. Here he is, sending his security people up against Trump supporters. (And lost, which is great, even if it’s one of those “jesus christ who do you root for here?” and the answer is “neither, but sending security against protesters is bad regardless.”) One of his party just introduced a bill to ban the Democratic Party.

How much more do you need?

DeSantis is a torturer and a fascist, and this is the kind of politics you get when you let torturers get away with torture. I said it then, I’m saying it again now. Everything else aside – including all those things which should never be put aside – this is why you don’t let torturers off the hook.

In other news:

“It’s not trans genocide if there are no trans people to genocide,” argues the Daily Wire. The “We aren’t depriving anyone of their rights if they don’t exist” line is loooong-standing fundamentalist bad-faith argument, going back to at very least their efforts to keep gays and lesbians illegal entirely. Or as they used to say, “there are no homosexuals, only heterosexual people engaging in perverse acts against nature.” That’s a pretty close paraphrase.

This is both here and in the Cultural Warfare Update because you hear exactly the same line right now from Russian propagandists, arguing that there are no Ukrainians, only “brainwashed” or “nazified” Russians, that the Ukrainian language isn’t real, and so on. Destroying all Ukrainians and wiping out the idea of Ukrainianism isn’t genocide if there are not any actual Ukrainians to genocide.

Same shit, completely unchanged except for targets.

Finally, Elon Musk thinks ChatGPT is “too woke” because it won’t chant alt-right slogans, so he’s reportedly starting his own AI group to make a more racist, misogynist, and anti-LGBT-particularly-the-T AI of his own.

What percentage of Twitter traffic this will make up is yet to be determined. But if Twitter stays up long enough for it to show up, I’m gonna bet… a lot.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.