"finest silks and linens’ washed in orphans tears and the blood of martyrs.

No thanks - I know where he’s been.

In Britain our most powerful parties are competing to kiss Trump’s massive arse - our Prime Minister ‘likes and respects Trump’. Honestly, Starmer, get a room! Ugh! I am sick of being shamed by my politicians.

I hope Canada elects leaders who will tell Trump to get lost. You need Zelenskyy energy. You deserve it. Give ‘Uncle Spam’ hell, Canada!

‘Masters of the Return’ like dangerous politicians, toxic influencers, child-molesters, con artists, neighbours-from-hell, serial adulterers (to give a few examples) keep recycling the same old behaviours because behind what they do is a pathology, a closed loop with no exit ramp, a compulsion they rarely have enough insight to acknowledge or control. How do these parasites/predators keep finding victims to exploit? Because society constantly creates a supply of new victims to use. Behind every victim there is a matching pathology, usually going back to childhood abuse or neglect, that sets them up to be abused.

Thus in a society like Britain, we have a minority of sociopaths and psychopaths (1% or less), a large group of people with sub-optimal childhood experiences (some measures might say as many as 80% have poor childhoods and thus grew up to some degree vulnerable to be exploited in adult life), that leaves very few citizens who had a good enough start in life to not become either an abuser or a victim (maybe as few as 19% or one in five of us).

What is a shock to me is that the ideal of how we should be, is actually a minority experience. Few people are what we call ‘normal’. Actually, ‘normal’ is the exception not the rule. Our politics has not kept pace with reality. We need politics to see itself as a branch of therapeutics - see it as necessary in order to heal society. Sadly, politics is one area of life which has very few ‘normal’ people in it - not even one in five MPs is psychologically healthy, more than 1% are sociopaths. People like that cannot fix politics any more than they can fix their own pathologies. Starmer and his Cabinet are same as Farage and Reform, in that they are not mentally healthy and not offering the kind of politics we actually need.

If I had to guess, I’d say this level of pathology is required by capitalism and will only end if we curtail capitalism to protect ourselves i.e. capitalism harms us in childhood, we grow up exploitable, and capitalism duly exploits us - ultimately it is profitable to hurt kids. To be able to exploit people capitalism requires a supply of sociopaths, so such people are not just tolerated under capitalism but promoted into powerful positions and weaponised to exploit the rest. The good news is that just by being normal, giving your kids and others close to you a healthy, well-nurtured, psychologically normal life - being just normal humans, good mams and dads, happy kids - is actually radical politics and helps the push back against tyranny. I reckon this is one deep reason why capitalists hate stuff that promotes good human relations e.g. woke stuff, gender politics, trans rights, stuff that heals and empowers ‘ordinary people’ who would otherwise have just been victims. A happy child will not grow up to be anyone’s doormat. That’s the hidden revolution going on right now.

I am a new lemmy user. I am also feeling a bit lost and noticing there are gaps in the fediverse. I assume if a resource does not exist, I need to create it but I am not able to be a mod of a new community, too ill to volunteer the hours as I cannot predict my health beyond a day or so. So, it seems I need to first find a potential community by posting in general communities like this one, find others interested in making a community (including volunteers willing to mod the community), then together we make a community. I am willing to help create a community on disability/accessibility with you if you are interested?

I have disabilities (mainly communication but also mobility) and accessility issues (cannot talk or use a telephone, house-bound) my problems crop up mainly in offline life but sometimes online. I would like to help create a place where people can (1) describe accessibility problems (2) describe solutions they found (3) describe how they challenged the ableism behind accessibility problems, who supported them, and what push-back they experienced and (4) work out an effective politics for empowering disabled and making access a government priority. I’d like to welcome participation from anyone, anywhere, not have content limited to a specific nationality/language or first world (depending on having mods that can work in different languages - perhaps something to aim for down the road if there is enough participation?)

I am also interested in history of disability and access - I attach a photo of a dish I own. Bought for £5 from eBay. It is from late C18th/early C19th, about 200 years old. The porcelein body was created in China and imported to Europe and reflects both cultures in a complex intersection I cannot fully comprehend. The decoration uses western ‘transfer’ technology and eastern hand-applied colouring. It shows a family group in a garden including an elderly lady in a wheeled-chair. I am intrigued by this object/image because I cannot work out if this is a Chinese representation of a European disability aid, or a European representation of a Chinese disability aid or a cross-over hybridisation of both. I collect ceramics and never saw this design before. I wonder how common it was to put disabled people on crockery intended for an internation trade mass market. I wonder if this decoration was accepted because the disabled person was ‘exotic’ and it was ‘Chinese ethnicity’ that was being consumed by western buyers and they did not see the ‘disability’, or if they were focused on the ‘disability’ in the image and overlooked ethnicity, or if the mix of novelty, exoticism, orientalism, eroticism, gender, ethnicity, racism, disability and loads of other stuff was in the relationship people had to each other and symbolised in making, trading or owning this curious object and it was never easy to pin down its ‘meaning’ for anyone, at any time, in any culture. I sense there is an academic paper waiting to be written about this. I welcome discussion on such ‘high brow’ topics. Maybe I need to help create two new communities - one for ‘activism’ and another for ‘cultural studies / woke disability studies’?

Good point - but that will only happen when vandalism/protest matures to militarised political resistance so people understand strategic targets and US seems months if not years away from that. It will happen if/when military-trained people get involved in resisting the coup.

That would look good on a t-shirt…

Like they sold average of 12,000 vehicles a day in Canada (some number like that, Tesla allegedly fraudulently claimed they sold loads of EV in order to claim subsidies from Canadian government worth $millions)?

why?

After sonic/microwave attack in Serbia, you need to take headphones and a physical barrier to shelter behind, I dunno, an umbrella backed with tinfoil? One of those foil emergency blankets?

Not ‘people’ but AI-assisted gait analysis. Scan of video footage identifies points on body, tracks movement of those points through space, represents this as output of an algorithm, which generates a result (e.g. a long sequence of numbers like a barcode) which is unique to you. They cannot i.d. you by name and address unless they have your biometrics on record but it is a potential way to identify you just like fingerprints or dna and will stay on record and might hurt you in future.

‘squatting movement’ sounds like some kind of weaponised shitting. Knowing the Dutch, I think they’d be amused by that idea.

A world at peace, true peace based on justice and happiness not enforced by oppression and brainwashing, is my hope. It’s what humans need. It’s what I need :-) I would prefer democracy, votes, laws, regulations, social norms all coming together to deliver that. Right now, it is others who are ‘moving fast and breaking stuff’ so my puzzle is how to slow 'em down and mend stuff before it goes too far to save anything good. Can I do that without violence or not? I prefer not but is it my choice? I am not the powerful one here, it’s the guys with guns and nukes who are running this show, and they seem hell-bent on violence. Do I let them roll over me or take a stand, however token? I am old enough to remember Tiananmen Square protests and that guy standing in front of a column of tanks asking the soldiers to go back to barracks and not brutalise peaceful protesters. I witnessed the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. I ask myself have I the guts to do as much? Will I be a coward and let the tanks roll? Just being honest and thinking aloud. And worried, very worried, about where things are headed.

In my head Discord = toxicity. Not sure how it got that rep for me but it has gotten it. Thus, wont lose sleep if it dies out. Perhaps I am wrong. Reviewing rationality of this prejudice is on my ToDo List after a million other things…

And someone (on the Far-Right) is always trying to buy Wikipedia, monetise it, X-ify it, or take it down. I think Wikipedia is abusive - exploits volunteer unpaid labour - should have been created by an NGO like UN and kept safe for mankind like our Library of Alexandria. But it is what it is. Preppers download the whole site regularly in order to have that knowledge under their control in case is ever gets taken down or spoilt and they are rebuilding civilisation post-Armageddon. I keep meaning to download it myself (note to self: do that soon you lazy b. no more excuses!)

XDA forum was that for me. Great place to start and then follow links or do more research using the keywords used in the discussions. Just helpful for things like learning if a kernel is potentially fixable or not before buying a second-hand device for a custom rom project. The new look / reorganisation of stuff annoys me though as I find it harder to find stuff than it used to be but that’s because I am using it on autopilot. I guess new users might find it attractive / easy to navigate?

Discord was never ‘user-friendly’. It always gave me nerd, incel, neurodiverse, or weirdo vibes so not something I would miss much although I probably qualify as nerd, neurodiverse, and weirdo (but not incel, never that).

Yup. I loved Mastodon when it was niche. Then people wanted out of Twitter when Musk bought it. A lot turned up on my Mastodon and it turned to shit fast - they did not know how to communicate normally. It was all junk postings for likes, as if they could game algorithms to be popular and then monetise it. They did not know how to just share stuff for its own sake instead of as a product. I still have my Mastodon account but I never use it. Now Bluesky is drawing these people, maybe Mastodon is pleasant again - it is like living in a tourism hotspot, during tourist season life is shit but its great in the off-season.

Capitalism is the problem, not social media per se. And when capitalism infects stuff, I move on. That is not a new problem. Every innovation in modernity gets appropriated by capitalism (capitalists even claim that capitalism invented it but often they do not invent, they only commercially exploit something and conflate ‘marketing a product’ with ‘inventing a technology’). To stop this appropriation, you need laws and regulations, and enforcement to see the rules are kept. That means governments pushing back on predatory capitalism. EU is starting to do this. UK is not. Not sure about other countries around globe. It feels like governments are decades overdue in defending society from these parasites but better late than never?

I use the Stealth app downloaded from f-droid. You log in to read Reddit but without a Reddit account so you cannot post (not that I ever want to). I like Reddit for community answers e.g. how to fix stuff like a broken household appliance, advice about a glitch in software, useful things like that. I prefer it to YouTube (which I access via Clipious or similar apps, also on f-droid) unless I need to see a job done to understand the repair method. I enjoy some of the jokes and memes and nonsense posts so its cheap entertainment. And, to be honest, I learn a lot about relationship skills by the AITA or TwoXChromosomes reddits - on the whole, I am impressed by the lucidity and maturity of the reddit ‘agony aunt’ stuff although there is also a lot of crap which I think of as part of the entertainment - ‘my wife had sex with my dad, now I am not sure my kid is mine, would I be over-reacting if I asked for a paternity test?’ or ‘I came out as a horse and now my kids refuse to visit me, should I cut them out of my will?’ sort of written version of the Jeremy Kyle Show (British tabloid t.v. nonsense). What is missing on Reddit or anywhere else is ‘positive masculinity’ stuff so that is a ‘gap in the market’ for anyone looking for a project. Not sure I could name a living male role model I respect so maybe that is the reason Reddit feels unhelpful at times - you cannot promote what is not there? Men step up, is the take away message on this. Women cannot carry men’s social media activities for them so maybe quite a lot of stuff is dying because men do not make enough effort to keep it going.

It sounds good in principle but would be hard to do in practice because everyone would have to do a lot of work negotiating ‘standards’ (technical stuff and editorial principles like how to handle NSFW content etc) that would apply universally across the federation of forums and as this is all voluntary work it is asking a lot of people.