theropologist

theropologist, 2 months ago to random

Remember in Blues Brothers when they end up at the Nazi rally and the point isn't even that Jake really hates Nazis, it's that Nazis are about the biggest losers that anyone could imagine. They are portrayed as completely pathetic dead-ender assholes.

Or in the Rocketeer when the mobsters find our the Sinclair guy is a Nazi and join forces with the FBI to stop them because Nazis are clearly the worst thing.

Or when Christopher Plummer rips the Nazi flag in two in Sound of Music.

None of these films were making bold political statements. The Nazis were the bad guys because that was something that everyone in the audience could agree one. Dunking on Nazis was a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

When the hell did we stop agreeing on something so simple and self-evident as Nazis Are Fucking Losers?

theropologist, 5 months ago to random

Such a relief to learn that all of my problems are in my head. The thing that I am trapped in and can never escape.

theropologist, 10 months ago to random

You can ask me to act normal or act natural but please understand these are two entirely different things

theropologist, 6 months ago to random

Remember when Sony came out with the Discman and they were like hey remember all the things you love about the Walkman? Well now you can have all of that but with CDs! Yeah, all shiny like cyber rainbows from the future, and now you can take em with you! And we know what you're thinking, but relax, we've got you covered. This baby's got anti-skip technology, so you can go skateboarding, ride a bus, stand in a stiff wind—no problem! You just can't clip it to your belt. And it's too wide to fit in your pocket so don't even try. That would void the warranty anyway. And don't even think about trying to wedge it in your waistband. The way you kids are these days with your baggy jeans, there's no way that's gonna work. But don't even sweat it, you can just hold it! No of course it doesn't fit comfortably in your hand, it has to be larger than a CD, but don't worry about it! Everyone's gonna think you look really cool just holding onto it, wherever you go, preferably completely level and horizontal, taking one hand completely out of commission until you can find a place to safely set it down. Just hold onto it, kid. It's not that hard. People are gonna respect you for it. You might lose your balance occasionally, but just learn to roll toward your free hand. You can do it, champ. Just think of it like one of your stupid skateboard tricks. You're gonna look so cool.

theropologist, 11 months ago to random

Just a note for bored billionaires looking for thrills. Have you considered trying to actually improve the world? Seems like that would be pretty thrilling.

theropologist, 5 months ago to random

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

There have been a lot of questions about Threads and Meta lately, so for the record I want to say that yes, Beige Party has defederated from threads.net. This was not based on any particularly strong opinion about it on my part, but as a result of asking my users what they would prefer. The majority of responses were to block threads.net. Most of the questions and comments I've gotten in the past week seem to reinforce that previous decision.

Please keep in mind, however, that blocking threads.net only prevents communication through ActivityPub channels. Everything we post on Mastodon aside from DMs is public and can be used by anyone for pretty much any purpose. So if Meta decides to scrape all of our public data, blocking threads.net is not going to stop them.

The advantage that Mastodon has over proprietary social media software is that we don't collect your personal data in the first place. That means that whatever information you choose to share about yourself is entirely under your control. Just please keep in mind that everyone on the internet, including unscrupulous billionaires will be able to see it.

Thank you, stay safe, and Beige-bless :bb:

theropologist, 24 days ago to random

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

A word about antisemitism, the state of Israel, and the war in Gaza

The war in Gaza has brought a lot of issues to a head and for the most part I have remained silent about specifics because my personal opinions should not be relevant to my job as a moderator. However, things at Beige Party have recently crossed a line where I felt I had to take action, and I feel it is my duty to explain what is informing my decisions on this matter.

Just a warning, this is going to be an extremely long post, so if you just want to know about the moderation policy you can skip to the end. It actually turns out to be quite simple.

First of all, I think it's important to explain where I'm coming from because this is a deeply personal issue for me. As a cis-hetero white male cloaked in all the undeserved privilege that entails I don't feel like it is my place to comment on most matters of identity, other than to recofnize bigotry where it occurs and enforce the site rules when something crosses the line. When I am unsure, I will seek out a trusted member of the affected community to get their perspective before I make a decision. In this case, however, I am a member of the community in question, and the issues of antisemitism, fascism, and genocide have informed my personhood basically since I have been a self-aware, thinking, feeling being, and have played a foundational role in forming my core morality and code of ethics.

I hate presenting this as if it were a set of qualifications, but I think it's important for you to know where I come from so you can understand my nuanced views on a very fraught and complicated subject.

I am part Jewish. I was not raised culturally or religiously Jewish, so I've never felt completely comfortable claiming that identity. However, I am Jewish enough for Hitler to have murdered two of my direct ancestors, and to have inherited the generational trauma of genocide. I am also part German, so I also understand the insidiousness of ethno-fascism and its inevitable consequences. There are a lot of words for it but ultimately, on a human level, it comes down to the murder of innocent people.

None of this is theoretical to me, or distant memories handed down to me over generations. I have a grandmother who is a living link to what it was like to grow up as a half Jewish girl in Hitler's Germany and to have a parent and a grandparent sent to a concentration camp to be murdered, and another parent jailed for trying to get their family out of a fascist country. This is all very real and present for me, and has been my whole life. It is in my bones.

Having said all that, let me go over some core principles that I have used to guide my moderation decisions when it comes to antisemitism and the actions of the government of the state of Israel:

Antisemitism is real and insidious and it has been for thousands of years. My definition of antisemitism is targeting Jewish people on the basis of their ethnic and/or religious identity. Like any form of bigotry it's targeting people based on who they are.

The state of Israel is a sovereign nation with all the rights and responsibilities of any sovereign nation that wishes to remain in good standing with the current world order. Disagreeing with the actions of the state of Israel or any members of its government is not antisemitism. Despite what the government of Israel claims it does not represent all Jews everywhere, and the very claim of ownership of an entire ethno-cultural group by a sovereign state is a mark of fascism. It's the very thing Hitler did to justify his crimes in Europe.

Zionism is a nationalist political ideology. It does claim religion as a justification but many political ideologies do. Nations rarly go to war over religion, but governments often use religion as a way to justify their wars. Being against zionism as a political ideology is not antisemitic, just as all Jews are not obligated to be zionists. Zionism as a political ideology dates to the 19th century. The first historical mention of the Jewish people dates back to 1220 BCE. Jewish people are quite capable of existing independently of zionism. They have for thousands of years.

Israel is an apartheid state. I think many will disagree with this statement, but there is no other way to describe the facts on the ground. They have kept the occupied territories in limbo for nearly 60 years specifically to disenfranchise the Arab population. The reality is that if you are born an Arab in Gaza or the West Bank you do not enjoy the full rights of a citizen of Israel, based solely on your ethnicity. That is apartheid. Acknowledging that fact is not antisemitism. The Jewish people are not responsible for this situation, the government of Israel is.

The state of Israel has, and continues to commit genocide. This is also going to be controversial, but I just can't see it any other way. International law is pretty clear on this. Even if an adversary is not abiding by international law, a state engaging in a military conflict has a responsibility to protect civilians. Collective punishment of the Palestinian people for the crimes of Hamas is a war crime, and it cannot be justified. Genocide was also committed in the initial wars of independence, where entire Arab villages were wiped off the map. This is not the same as saying Israel has no right to exist. I am an American of European ancestry, and as such, my very existence on this continent is the result of genocide. We can not hold people responsible for the crimes of past generations, but when we see genocide happening it is our responsibility as human beings to call it out. Doing so is not antisemitism. Again, these are crimes being carried out by the government of Israel, and despite what it claims, the government of Israel does not represent all Jewish people.

The government of Israel is sliding increasingly towards facism. It is ruled by a far-right nationalist coalition that is bent on consolidating power and dismantling democratic rule. Not only does the government of Israel not represent all Jews, it doesn't even represent all Israelis, as we have seen with protests against the legislation to weaken the supreme court. Again, as an American, I can relate. There are many things my government does that I don't agree with and there's very little I can do about it directly. Directing hatred against Israeli citizens for the actions of their government is wrong, as is holding the Jewish people as a whole responsible for those actions. However, being against the actions of an increasingly fascist state is not antisemitism.

Hamas is a terrorist organization that murders civilians to achieve its goals. It claims to represent the Palestinian people but it has no problem with putting them in harm's way to achieve their ends. The events of October 7th were reprehensible and should not be celebrated by anyone. Hamas saw their increasing irrelevance on the world stage so they committed genocide so that they could not be ignored. Part of their calculation was that the response by the government of Israel would be so severe that Hamas's crimes would quickly fade from the public discourse. They were right, and in doing so they offered up the lives of the people they claim to represent as an acceptable loss for their larger goal, which is the destruction of the state of Israel. Acknowledging Hamas's crimes does not negate the crimes of the state of Israel, both are responsible for their actions and there is no moral high ground here, only death, destruction, and the perpetuation of human misery.

That said, the facts on the ground are what they are. Israel exists and so does Palestine. Both have a right to exist because the people exist. Normal, everyday people, who want the same thing that anyone wants: Safety, security, the chance to just make it through the day and maybe the opportunity to improve their lives a little bit. Any government, organization, or ideology that simply wishes one of these groups of people out of existence is not operating in reality and is morally bankrupt. Furthermore, they are doing a disservice to the people they claim to represent by further perpetuating conflict, death, and human misery.

So that's a lot of words, and plenty for many different people to have problems with at least some of them. As a moderator I try to keep my personal beliefs and opinions out of moderation decisions and just stick to the rules as written. So much about the situation in Gaza has warped the discourse into a tangled mess, but ultimately I think the rules as written are sufficient to handle it.

Really, it's very simple:

1. Targeting people based on who they ARE is against the rules

2. Disagreeing with what people, organizations, or governments DO is not

3. Advocating for violence against anyone for ANY reason is against the rules

In any cases where the rules seem to come in conflict with one another, my overarching principal is asking who has power in this situation, and who is in need of protection. When in doubt I always defer to those in need of protection.

I invite your thoughts on this subject, but please keep it civil and respectful. I am never one to claim that I have all the answers. Like most people, I am just trying to make sense out of a terrible situation so that I can hopefully do the right thing, or at the very least not cause more harm.

Thank you, and Beige-bless :bb:

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

The most effective propaganda perpetrated by the right over the past 40 years has been creating a world so mind-numbingly shitty that even progressives can't imagine a brighter future anymore

theropologist, 11 months ago to random

Nextdoor is fun because it's like "You know all those fascist lunatics on Facebook? Guess what! They live on your street!"

theropologist, 9 months ago to random

Every man should watch the Barbie movie if only for the scene where Barbie and Ken first arrive in the real world and are both receiving a lot of attention, and the very different experiences they have being the object of the male gaze. It is certainly no spoiler to say there is an undercurrent of implicit violence in Barbie's experience that is completely absent from Ken's.

This is something that took me a long time to really understand as white cisgendered heterosexual man: that in every space we occupy we are an implicit threat to everyone outside of that group. And truth be told I can't fully understand it because I haven't had to live my entire life with that weight bearing down on me and that fear pulsing in my bones. What I can do is look at myself and how my presence and actions are perceived by others, regardless of how good my intentions might be.

I'm not saying that white cisgendered heterosexual men need to feel guilty about this (though we probably should a little), but we need to recognize that for us, as with everyone else, to be is to be perceived. For those of us handed privilege that we didn't deserve, that means being perceived as an instrument of that same corrupt and violent system of oppression that bestowed that privilege upon us and denied it from others. Did we ask for that privilege? No. Do we benefit from it at the expense of violence inflicted on others every single day? Absolutely.

So how do we reconcile that? We can't. It's just a bare fact. I can't say that I'm one of the good ones and exempt myself from responsibility for the damage it causes. What I can do is look at my own life and think about times when I might have made people uncomfortable, times when I was thinking more about my own experience and what I thought I was owed by women more than the woman's experience and what effect my actions had on that experience. We're all the good guy in our own head, and the protagonist of the story. We need to try to step outside of that false perspective to see the full picture.

If your first reaction to reading this is saying "not all men," you're missing the point. This is not a contest of who can be the best and most enlightened. It's just as absurd as saying "I don't have a racist bone in my body." Of course you don't, but you do have racism in your mind, I guarantee it. We are humans so by nature we are messy, flawed, contradictory creatures. For those of us with privilege it is our duty to recognize that our human flaws can have a greater effect on those around us than we might expect, because society amplifies those flaws—it has been designed to weaponize them.

We can't be perfect, so all we can do is try to do better. This is an ongoing process and not a destination. You can't work on yourself for a while and say you are done. If it feels oppressive to constantly have those second-guessing thoughts in the back of your mind, think of those who have had to live with actual oppression, second-guessing everything they do, without the luxury of ignoring those thoughts because the consequences of doing the wrong thing could be violence or death. Even if it's not always that severe, the threat is always there. Yes it's ugly. It's about the ugliest fucking thing that humans have ever created. But not looking at it isn't going to make it any prettier.

theropologist, 9 months ago to random

Here's what I did on my last day as a 41-year-old

A steep rocky trail going up the side of a mountain. There's a few scattered conifers along the sides. A tiny hiker is further up the trail ahead.
An even steeper trail of mostly loose dirt. My hand clutching a rope that's been strung along the trail to prevent hikers from sliding down the steep grade.
Me, an out of shape middle aged white guy with a beard who hauled his happy ass up 2,100 feet over 2 miles to the top of this godforsaken rock. In the background is a a pretty blue lake that curves in a crescent around another mountain. It's called Lake Crescent and the mountain is Pyramid Mountain. The one I'm standing on is called Mt Storm King which is a pretty badass name. The sky is brilliant blue and busy with fluffy white clouds. In the upper right, Canada is photo bombing me in the distance.

theropologist, 10 months ago to random

Do not try to solve the trolley problem—that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: There is no trolley. General Motors bought them all up and had them dumped in the ocean.

theropologist, 8 months ago to random

Working from home is great because I have the flexibility to take a break from work stress whenever I want so I can stress about all the things I need to do around the house

theropologist, 2 months ago to random

It does wear a body down, being constantly at the mercy of so many motherfuckers.

theropologist, 7 months ago to random

Storming off downstairs to sleep on the couch just doesn't have the same dramatic flair when you've got to unplug your CPAP and take it with you

theropologist, 2 months ago to random

Algorithms are not magic. They are neither good nor evil, but they also aren't neutral. They are just math recipes written by regular ol' dumb human beings, and so they don't absolve us of our responsibilities as human beings. If anything, they amplify them. If you make a bad batch of enchiladas, that's really just a problem for you. If you program a computer to make unlimited batches of bad enchiladas, well now you are assaulting the entire world—the whole enchilada, as it were.

theropologist, 7 months ago to random

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. So are those who learn history, but at least they have enough context to appreciate the irony of it.

theropologist, 1 month ago to random

I was reading up on the xz backdoor and found a pretty good rundown on it here:

https://thenewstack.io/linux-xz-backdoor-damage-could-be-greater-than-feared/

A couple of thoughts on this. First, the scary thing about this on the surface was that the malicious code was intentionally introduced by a trusted contributer who had worked on the project for over two years. This was a supply chain attack, but also a bit of social engineering of the OSS community. Prior to this new contributer showing up out of the blue, xz had been languishing somewhat under a single maintainer who appeared to be less and less able to keep up with it. In short, he was looking for someone to pass it on to and Jia Tan seemed like the perfect candidate—apparently by design. So when we say he was a trusted contributer, we really only mean that he gained the trust of the original maintainer. You con the right person and show you are helpful and competent for a few years and you are handed the keys to the kingdom. And since the kingdom is a boring compression utility that most people don't think about, there's not as much scrutiny on it as you might think, or more accurately, hope.

But wait, you might say, isn't the whole point of open source that you have many eyes on the actual source code so that malicious code and vulnerabilities are discovered essentially through crowd sourcing? Yes! That is indeed a huge advantage of OSS. And if the actual code that was in the repo for everyone to see was actually being used by the package managers of major Linux distros, this would have never been a problem. Which brings me to point number two, which is far scarier to me. Apparently most distros prefer using manually built upstream tarballs over pulling git sources directly. Including boring old stable Debian, where the malicious code was first detected. To be clear this was in Debian sid, and the malicious code never made it to a stable release, but then again it was only found out because a software engineer at Microsoft decided to investigate why an ssh login was taking 500ms too long. Which is way too close for comfort in my book.

So why is this so shocking? Well, the malicious code never made it into the git repo where all of those crowdsourced eyeballs would have had a chance to catch it. Instead it was embedded in a build script in the upstream tarball that nobody was looking at. Instead of trusting the collective wisdom of the open source community, distros installing via this tarball were trusting only the person who signed the tarball. In this case Jia Tan, and that trust was extended only because the original maintainer trusted him and allowed him to create and sign the tarballs. So basically, because one person was conned, the entire infrastructure of the Internet was put at risk. To me, that's what we should really be worrying about.

Time and again, technology has promised to eliminate the need for personal trust. Mechanisms are created so that everything is in the open and can be verified, but those mechanisms only work as long as people understand them, and are paying attention, and the problem is that's a lot of work, so we fall back on ad-hoc systems of personal trust, which are a lot easier for our primate minds to understand. They feel more real than something as abstract as the collective wisdom of the open source community.

Or, to take another recent example, people want to get into crypto but they don't want to have to learn about blockchains and public and private keys so they trust conmen like SBF to do it for them because they saw a slick commercial with Larry David in it. Once again we use personal trust as a shortcut to gain access to the shiny new object that is only shiny and new because it's supposed to eliminate the need for that trust in the first place.

This is not to say that person-to-person trust is not valuable. As the admin of a small Mastodon instance I rely on building and maintaining that trust with my users. However, meditating that trust through technology doesn't make it easier or more secure, it just makes it harder in a different way. By the way I'm including systems of government and finance in the broad definition of "technology" here. If we develop systems to replace personal trust we need to understand that they are not a solution in and of themselves. The systems themselves must be maintained and understood, and we need to keep in mind that our brains are poorly suited to innately understanding the abstractions they produce. In short, technology doesn't obviate our need to think critically—it in fact makes it all the more critical for us to do so.

theropologist, 1 month ago to random

After having to figure out how to do some minor plumbing repairs around the house I have come to appreciate the humble gasket as the only thing separating civilized society from utter chaos

theropologist, 29 days ago to random

Look man, the kids are listening to Steely Dan and plotting crimes against Capitalism. I think they're gonna be just fine.

theropologist, 11 months ago to random

This just in: Mastodon continues to fail at being the thing it wasn't trying to be in the first place

theropologist, 6 months ago to random

I'm at the age where my misremembered memories are more interesting than my actual memories

theropologist, 2 months ago to random

So much of getting old is like Hey you know that part of your body that you barely gave any thought to? Now it's the only thing you can think about.

theropologist, 6 months ago to random

In preparation for the long winter I am slathering my body with butter but for some reason my butter churn is feeling snugger than it did last year and don't tell me that's not how butter churns work or that snugger isn't a word I have to live my life on my own two buttery feet

theropologist, 6 months ago to random

At this point I'm surprised that nobody has decided to just do the Stanford prison experiment as a reality show