Long, Talking about the shooting, Lessons from Judaism not involving faith
Note: Also posted to Facebook, so some of this is worded carefully and using stories and references to avoid getting censored.
Something that comes to mind every time a high profile death like this happens...
And to be clear, this isn't a condemnation, but food for thought:
In Judaism there's a relevant lesson, that we're guided not to celebrate death but to celebrate the diminishment of evil.
It's such a tiny difference, but I think it does make worlds of difference in our lives and in how we behave down the line.
I'll spare the talks of faith or divine judgement, but I'll speak to the practical effects I think are in play.
The risk in celebrating the death itself is that you start finding joy in the death of those you see as wrong or evil... and that joy can turn into a lowering of standards, in finding excuses to celebrate death. Eventually you start saying "But that man was evil so it's a good thing he died".
But what does it mean to celebrate the diminishment of evil? It means seeing what harm they would have done, and celebrating the end of that harm.
It's not enough to just say "there's one less bigot and evil person in the world", it's to ask how many lives do you think will be spared from harm?
The reason my celebration at this will be muted is because I honestly don't know if his voice was unique enough, or that it will take any time at all for him to be replaced and echoed.
It's not as simple as the United Healthcare death, where there was an immediate (but unfortunately temporary) change, that for a while after people got healthcare that would have otherwise been denied... without a doubt, many lives were saved.
In cases like this I especially think back to the story in my faith of the drowning of the Pharaoh's army in the Sea of Reeds. To the fact that a single soldier's death would have done little to diminish evil on it's own... but that single soldier's death is a necessary part of the greater whole that greatly diminishes evil.
Everything is just too much, every minute feels like an incredible struggle both physically and mentally...
To start, I'm disabled, not that the government cares. My ADHD is really bad, especially when I'm exhausted and/or stressed (which is all the time), it's beyond incredibly difficult to start tasks let alone focus on them...
After that is my physical issues, of which there's little even figured out because the healthcare system is hell... I'm in constant pain, especially in my legs, moving or not. But when I move, every muscle has more and more over the years started to feel less and less flexible. My range of motion is shot, and every single movement takes more and more effort. (last suggestion from a doctor right before she left the practice, and I have no idea if it's at all accurate is she was thinking it might be fibromyalgia).
I'm not even sure if it's just an extension of that or something else, but I'm also constantly exhausted no matter how much rest I've had.
... and that's my fucking baseline...
I'm trans, not only in the US but in fucking Texas... so I'm dealing with all this government bigotry increasingly bearing down on me... and the knowledge that it's only a matter of time before they start arresting us just for existing.
I'm barely afloat financially, just short of a living wage... but after so long in poverty and so many instances of getting financially screwed I'm pretty much drowning in debt... Worst of all is the $5k a previous apartment complex wants because I was living with a sibling who had an emotional crisis, to the point of being institutionalized, and I have to leave because I couldn't remotely maintain the place by myself.
Thanks to the support of kind strangers and the people who love me I've got plans to get out of Texas to Washington state to be someplace safer... but the prospect is still incredibly difficult and painful because it means leaving behind the people I love and my support network...
The raw stress of all of this has me to the point where it's a major accomplishment to just do the fucking laundry...
Oh, and get this... the apartment complex I was looking at rejected my application because of that aforementioned landlord demanding $5k from me... because of course our lovely society thinks someone who has to leave a place because of poverty just miraculously has many times the rent to just hand over while they still try and find a place to live...
I've been crying and sobbing for weeks... even before this rejection...
And before anyone mentions: roommates just don't work out... I have only ever had one house where things have been remotely comfortable and stable with other people. Most of all because my mix of disabilities and autism causing conflicts with people... I can only really live alone it seems. (Those same problems that have made me struggle with employment my entire life)
... I'm just so tired of clinging on to life by my fingernails... I don't want riches and luxury... I just want to fucking exist...
I honestly wish giving up was an option on days like this...
I could probably use some words of encouragement right now... I don't even know if I'm able to process them... but I need something...
With the nonsense about gup.pe getting hijacked, honestly has me thinking again about secondary tools for the network...
Bright spot is that they probably can't imitate the server, as far as I understand it AP has keys for the servers to prevent that (which is also part of why you can't readily swap platforms, want to run something different you need to use a different domain).
Still, it has me thinking about maybe some secondary registry to track instance information. Maybe make these sort of events less disruptive.
This is entirely off the cuff idea, so think of this as spaghetti at the wall:
I was just imagining a signed file on servers that gave extended, non-platform specific, meta for the server, kinda like robots.txt.
I was just thinking information like: * My IP is static, so if the IP changes without an updated signed file, then it's not safe (or it's dynamic, so don't worry if it changes) * Remember my nameservers and do the same if the nameservers change * Here's a moderator email for reporting posts (because the system mastodon has for sending reports to other servers is non-standard and not universal... I have to find moderator emails on about pages when I need to report something...) * Maybe some tags if someone wants to make non-platform specific server directories * Some flags like robots for nicer more compliant services, like bridges allowed/denied
And then maybe a dns middle-man service to toss on your server that checks these things periodically. So if something happens like with gup.pe there's a notice to admins and maybe it doesn't get cut off immediately, maybe letting admins give some final notices in more permanent situations.
The U.S. Department of Justice is looking into ways to limit transgender people's right to possess firearms, @CNN reports. This would be predicated on the idea that trans people are mentally ill. The idea has gained currency in conservative media since last week's school shooting, which police say was carried out by a trans woman, but the vast majority of mass attacks have no connection to transgender people.
Resharing this again, because I need the help and it's what it takes to get it.
Current update on things is that I've just gotten over nearly a solid week of sobbing... I'm struggling hard physically and mentally just to function at a base level right now.
The state I live in is just about to pass a bathroom bill, and it's a minor miracle that the drastically worse bills didn't move forward this session, but they're coming.
Until I have enough funds to feel remotely confident that I can afford the costs of the move all I can really do is just keep putting one foot in front of another.
They're trying to spin a version of things that suddenly claims that most or all mass shooters are trans, despite zero evidence of that fact. And why are they doing that? Because it gives them an excuse for platforms like this...
This asshole is literally calling for me to not only be arrested, but experimented on!
Note: this is a copy/paste because I am so incredibly worn out emotionally I've been sobbing since Sunday over the whole situation. But what use is having a gofundme if I don't get it in front of people.
I hate spamming this out, but it's the only way this works, especially on AP-Fedi.
Gist is I need to get out of the state for my safety, and that's easier said than done with my disabilities, debts, and other limits.
My lease is up in mid-October, I really want to be able to just go straight from here to Washington State and even 2/3rds of this goal will make that happen... but the clock's ticking.
I've got to move to someplace safer, but it means leaving behind most of my chosen family.
I know we'll stay in touch... but with everyone being poor that means the vast majority of them I'll never see again.
I don't want to fucking go... but I see the writing on the wall, and I remember all those stories from Jewish history of people who thought "It's not going to get that bad" right up until the gestapo kicked down their doors.
A part of me just wants to say "fuck it all" and stay, let them strip me down to nothing and kill me slowly and painfully... but for just a few more days with the people I love... but I also know they worry about me and it'll break them if I don't try to keep myself safe, so I've got to push through this.
I rely on them to push me to take care of myself often, I trust them and I know the urge to give up is partially rooted in my own fatalism toward my life... but dear god if this doesn't feel like preparing to amputate a limb...
If anyone wants to help make it a little easier... can't change the pain but can change how difficult the task is that I'm dealing with alongside this pain...
@cstross I was a student network tech at university and was helping a new student name T. Este get networking setup. Once successful, they asked if I could also do anything about their unfortunate email prefix, teste2 (they weren't the first teste!). I told them that I could not, but they were welcome to take it up with the university president, David Hardesty. Or... dhardest.
@justindz @cstross our student logins at my middle school were the first letter of your first name plus the first three letters of your last name, which was very unfortunate for C. Unterberger
@potpie @cstross @justindz In undergrad the default was first initial, last name, and you couldn’t change it. Poor T. Watkins went a couple weeks before someone told her. She ran into the IT office just bawling (I knew people there). They made an exception and changed it.
@justindz @cstross we did first initial last name, falling back to first two if there was a collision. There was already a cjones, so Ca... Jones got the fallback.
She did manage to convince them to use another username, though.
in the UK civil service, documents were changed/approved with the initials of the first two Christian names and surname. So my Dad (Henry William Preedy) signed HWP. His friend, Peter Ian Gowans, wasn't so lucky...
I hate spamming this out, but it's the only way this works, especially on AP-Fedi.
Gist is I need to get out of the state for my safety, and that's easier said than done with my disabilities, debts, and other limits.
My lease is up in mid-October, I really want to be able to just go straight from here to Washington State and even 2/3rds of this goal will make that happen... but the clock's ticking.
Since this is spreading pretty aggressively, just going to stick my gofundme here. I hate spamming it but I really need to get out of Texas for my safety: gofundme.com/f/assist-a-jewish…
I hate spamming this out, but it's the only way this works, especially on AP-Fedi.
Gist is I need to get out of the state for my safety, and that's easier said than done with my disabilities, debts, and other limits.
My lease is up in mid-October, I really want to be able to just go straight from here to Washington State and even 2/3rds of this goal will make that happen... but the clock's ticking.
All the constant of self absorbed people who are convinced that the ideal network is one hostile to regular people and considers bullshit ideological purity a higher priority than actual connection or accessibility...
I'm seriously considering just shutting down this server and moving to Bluesky proper because apparently a massive corporate network has a lower self-absorbed douche quotient than here...
I desperately don't want to be stuck on another fucking corp network destined for enshittification... but why fucking bother when every single effort to make AP fedi more accessible is met by mass hostility of people who are terrified that it'll become less of a social clique catering to their egos...
Seriously, AP-Fedi is democratically self-enshittifying...
@Cory Doctorow honestly, just curious what your thoughts are... I know you favor AP and pretty much for all the same reasons I do... but what about things like the hostility to any large entity connection, any large migration of users, bridges, and basically any effort to open up things so people can experience less friction in their connections when they join (ie. being able to just choose AP-Fedi platform over a place like Bluesky and not having to split their friendgroup because they picked one or the other...)
Like I feel like features are enshittified here by users who believe that the fediverse must conform to their ideals, that all new users even on servers other than theirs must bend to their expectations. Hell, the fact that there are many who will literally tell you they're actively against the network growing and they work hard to sabotage anything that contributes toward growth...
I know it's not quite the right usage of the word, but frankly it feels like a worse version than the corporate bullshit... fucking me over for profit honestly starts to feel better than fucking me over because of a demand for social control and ideological purity...
@pluralistic I don't think you can create a place according to your ideology of carte blanche openness without implying an equal amount of hostility. I'll take the fedi brand of hostility any day. People having great ideologies is attractive to me. Expecting everyone to love me is delusional IMO.
@rood @Cory Doctorow I don't expect people to love me, and it's not carte blanche... it's just an overwhelming amount of mass hostility to regular people being able to join.
Like the Bluesky bridge is the biggest example to me, the guy got dogpiled hard when he started talking about it even though he was building it using the same methodology of all other bridges pretty much as long as there have been bridges. He was outright bullied into making the bridge drastically worse by making it opt-in only... and all those people who dogpiled him? all those servers blocked it anyways because they weren't going to be happy either way... so the bridge became drastically worse for the people who wanted to use it and the people were upset weren't affected either way.
And their primary complaint the whole time? Their privacy... of their public fucking posts on a federated network. It's like putting a sign in your yard and getting pissed that someone driving by could see it.
So for me it's like pulling teeth to connect with my friends and family who went with Bluesky because of a bunch of jackasses who were never going to be affected by the whole situation anyway. And people I try to convince to join the fediverse? Bridge is basically useless as an accessibility tool... they go to Bluesky because that's where other people went and the bridge is a useless argument.
There's having differences of opinion, and then there's mass open hostility.
@Cory Doctorow @roodall I want is to just be able to not be fucking isolated from my friends and family and at the same time not be under the thumb of a major corporation.
I FUCKING HATE FACEBOOK AND ALL THE CORPORATE NETWORKS but they're infinitely more worthwhile because THAT'S WHERE PEOPLE ARE.
And any effort to get people out is met with open and broad hostility like the fucking fedipact bullshit.
@Cory Doctorow @rood also ftr, this is brought on by someone judging people still on facebook as supporting fascism... someone I know is one of those server ops blocking bridges and thus making it harder for people to leave fucking facebook...
I think it's fair to have strong ideas about design, and also to have aesthetic preferences for certain affordances, but the problem comes when people mistake these consumption choices for being matters of ideological significance.
It's the neoliberal fetish for personal politics, curdling in on itself:
*All those people having fun on Bsky are making bad consumption choices, and moreover, making good consumption choices requires them to have the same aesthetics as me. I may be a humanist, but people who make bad consumption choices due to their poor aesthetics are sabotaging our only hope of making things better (because things only get better as the result of aggregated individual consumption choices, not because of regulation or policy or power or politics) so they are the enemy.*
I think the answer to Bluesky being a fun place at risk of corporate sabotage is to remove that risk (by making Bluesky federation and bridging real), not by convincing people that they don't really like Bluesky and they should use the Fediverse instead.
@Cory Doctorow thank you so very much for replying, I really look up to you and your voice on topics, plus I know alot of people on the fediverse respect you... so it's really affirming while I'm in a mini-meltdown over the whole situation.
It's been really really hard lately being a disabled trans-woman in Texas whose disabilities keep her very socially isolated. And it's so painful and hard to push for better and seeing people rally behind "You're a fascist if you don't cut off your friends and family and everything that gives you a reason to live"... like I run my own server here because I believe in it that much...
So thank you very much for making me feel a little less alone.
PS: with the way things are these days, with all the fascism and likely holocaust 2 I'm constantly recommending Little Brother as an accessible introduction to secure connection and opsec.
So last night, for the first time, I've heard the label Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM), and through it also found Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory (OGM)... both of which are labels for something that's distressed me for a long time...
While it doesn't make it any less distressing, it does make it easier to communicate, find other people with similar experiences, and just generally make it less a vague thing I'm dealing with.
In my own words: I don't really feel like I keep my life... I struggle with individual memories, and where I do remember things it's vague and more a third person academic understanding that it happened. I don't relive those moments when I think about them, I just kinda know they happened.
It feels like every day is page one of the story and my whole life prior is exposition rather than something I was really there for...
Definitions as I understand them: SDAM - Memories are impersonal and without detail, described in some places as "third person perspective". This means you can remember an event happens, but when remembering you can't see much detail and can't relive feelings.
OGM - Instead of recalling specific events, it means you mostly only recall general memories like repeated events or things that span over extended periods. ie. with someone you talk to often being able to remember "how the conversations go" but you struggle to communicate specifics about any one conversation.
This is the first I hear of OGM.... and it might actually help explain the other side of my memory... I thought those 2 things would be the same but it's good to know they're not...
@Gwen, the Fops yeah, made last night into a double oof for me. At first I thought they were maybe different terms for the same thing but dug a little deeper and it's two completely different things that together basically leave you one step away from amnesia 😅
Cette maxime est difficile à retracer, car elle peut s'exprimer de multiples façons. La première correspondance connue apparaît dans une lettre de 1874 du poète et romancier allemand Berthold Auerbach, qui attribua cette maxime à l'homme politique allemand Heinrich Simon.
«Il n'y a pas de mauvais temps, il n'y a que de bons vêtements», disait le grand esprit Heinrich Simon, noyé dans le lac Wallensee, dans son proverbe, et cela s'applique aussi à moi.
I have a task reminder on my phone for showers because I don't really feel it until it gets grimy (and my sense of smell is kinda broken). Plus I had to dish out a subscription to one because it's the rare task app that does relative deadlines (ie. instead of every 3 days for a task, it's 3 days since the task was last completed), because time blindness and memory issues means if I miss a reminder I can convince myself I just did it yesterday when it was actually a week ago. But a reminder where I actually did it yesterday just leads to me ignoring the reminder. On top of all that is the executive dysfunction where I can get distracted and just not do things until I don't have the spoons to do them.
State of my apartment is painfully shameful and is a reflection of my stress and depression... I simply don't have the spoons to keep up with all but the most critical of cleaning. It's a lot of executive function spoons to start cleaning in the first place, let alone juggle the array of things to clean. That's before even getting to the physical exhaustion and pain of standing and bending all coming from my physical disability.
... If you've visited me in my home, know that I'm ashamed and just swallowing it because the isolation is worse than the shame.
La première occurrence trouvée pour ce "proverbe" date de 2011. A l'époque, il était décrit comme un proverbe chinois. Cependant, il est inconnu en Chine. Il ne s'agit pas non plus d'un proverbe amérindien. Il s'agit d'une citation anonyme.
Ce "proverbe" est apparu en France, un peu avant les années 1970, sur une affiche de l'École des études orientales de Paris. Il a ensuite été repris dans le monde anglo-saxon. Il est une déformation d'une parole attribuée à Bouddha dans le Shurangama Sutra, volume 2.
Extrait du Shurangama Sutra, volume 2:
Le Bouddha dit à Anand : «Tu écoutes encore le Dharma avec un esprit conditionné, et ainsi le Dharma est lui aussi conditionné, et tu n'obtiens pas la nature du Dharma. C'est comme quand quelqu'un pointe la lune du doigt pour la montrer à quelqu'un d'autre. Guidé par le doigt, cette personne devrait voir la lune. S'il regarde le doigt et le confond avec la lune, il perd non seulement la lune, mais aussi le doigt. Pourquoi ? Parce qu'il confond le doigt pointé avec la lune brillante.»
... I've got to love that I occasionally find myself in deeply technical discussions with people who probably make 2-4 times as much as I do doing just these things...
And here I am struggling because...
... it's a rare workplace I don't have a personality clash with, regardless of how hard I try to mask...
... I have no capacity for marketing and too much anxiety for the inconsistencies of contract work...
... and too much workplace instability trauma to move from my current job unless forced...
I wish UBI was a thing so I could just dive in to open source projects and not spend most of my time either working or recovering from work...
I've come to accept I'm a good, if unpolished, programmer. (Not that I have the confidence to feel like I'm good) I really only program in python now, but I used to routinely learn new programming languages.
I've come to accept I'm a really good linux admin.
... and I work in billing for a barely afloat trucking brokerage making $22/hour.
Cette citation n'est pas de Confucius, mais de Louis-Ferdinand Céline extraite de l'entretien qu'il a eu avec Jacques Darribehaude en 1960.
Extrait:
J. D. - Avant la sortie du livre? C. - Oui, juste. Oh, il aurait pas aimé... Il était jaloux, en plus... il ne me voyait pas du tout écrivain, et moi non plus d'ailleurs, on était d'accord au moins sur un point... J. D. - Et votre mère, elle, comment a-t-elle réagi devant vos livres ? C. - Elle a trouvé ça dangereux et méchant et que ça faisait des histoires... elle voyait que ça allait se terminer très mal. Elle avait l'esprit très prudent. J. D. - Elle lisait vos livres ? C. - Oh, elle ne pouvait pas, c'était pas à sa portée, ça lui aurait paru grossier, puis elle lisait pas de livres, c'était pas une femme à lire des livres. Non. Elle avait aucune vanité. Elle a continué de travailler jusqu'à sa mort. J'étais en prison, j'ai appris sa mort... Non, j'arrivais à Copenhague, quand j'ai appris sa mort... Un voyage abominable, ignoble, oui, l'orchestration parfaite. Abominable... Mais il n'y a d'abominable que les choses d'un côté, n'oubliez pas, hein... Ben, vous savez... l'expérience est une lanterne sourde qui n'éclaire que celui qui la porte... et incommunicable... faut garder ça pour moi... Pour moi, on était autorisé à mourir, on entrait quand on avait une bonne histoire, à raconter. Alors on la donnait, et puis on passait. Mort à crédit, c'est symboliquement ça. La récompense de la vie étant la mort... vu que... c'est pas le bon Dieu qui gouverne, c'est le diable... L'homme... la nature est dégueulasse, quoi, il n'y a qu'à voir, la vie des oiseaux, des bêtes.
Ce "proverbe" vient du roman «Trois Frères» (三兄弟) publié en 1984 par l'écrivain Shu Yuanjun (舒源骏, né en 1945):
«穿鞋的不知光脚的苦，你当我愿走?我是要脸的，我不能叫人指着脊梁骂我是个叛国犯。»
«Ceux qui portent des chaussures ne connaissent pas la douleur d'être pieds nus. Crois-tu que je veuille partir? Je dois préserver ma dignité. Je ne peux pas laisser les gens me montrer du doigt et me traiter de traître.»
Why drugs are wreaking havoc on the prison system – Channel 4 News
Methods the drugs are coming in include drones & being thrown over the wall. I can see the possibility of prisons needing to be covered by netting. channel4.com/news/why-drugs-ar…
Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new breakaway party will only boost Nigel Farage, Neil Kinnock warns | The Independent independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli…
😱 *Smile 2* is a chilling sequel that dives deeper into trauma, fame, and fear. Naomi Scott is outstanding, and the scares are smart and relentless. Creepy, stylish, and intense—definitely worth a watch. To Get More Detail Review Visit The Blog...
When it's really bad... depression feels a lot like freezing to death...
Things becoming more and more sluggish, slowly shutting down... you start losing feeling in the outer edges of yourself.
Even if you're not suicidal... it still feels like it'll eventually kill you, like one day you'll lose everything you are and just become an empty husk...
Even the incredible love of my family feels like curling myself around a small candle for warmth at times...
And when it gets really bad... you're faced with the overwhelming urge to just lay down and fall asleep, regardless of the consequences.
I know I'll make it through the other side... but sometimes I wonder how many (metaphorical) fingers or toes I'll lose before I get there...
Lauren 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈🇨🇦
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