#what if elon bought twitter for this very reason | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

daughter-of-sapph0 · 1 year

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quick question, what's an era 2 tumblr user? we have eras??

it's sorta something I made up myself. tumblr has gone through various shifts in presentation and tone that dramatically affected how people use the website. honestly idk if anyone besides me actually uses this system, but I'm gonna use it anyway because it's funny

so Era 1 is from the start of tumblr until dashcon. this is where the dashboard had those weird lines on the side of reblogs, was the hight of superwholock, allows editing other people's posts, and was filled the overwhelming prevalence of fandom. back then, tumblr wasn't very mainstream and most people who used it were big nerds (affectionate). so there was a strong sense of community between people who had shared interests.

Era 2 starts after dashcon in summer of 2014. this was a disaster of an event that sorta boosted tumblr's popularity for better or for worse. this is also when I first joined in late 2015 as an undertale blogger originally (my first blog has since been deleted though). this is what I'd call the meme era of tumblr. it's when most of the most popular jokes are from. it's when massive inside jokes and tumblr references started. and it's the time where the most people were active. and it lasted until about late 2018 with the porn ban

Era 3 was kicked off with many users deciding to leave tumblr near the end of 2018 beginning of 2019. tumblr's policy on porn up until then had been "go nuts. show nuts" until it was bought by virison who tried their best to make it "family friendly". the whole thing was handled very poorly ("female presenting nipples") and didn't even get rid of all porn, just porn from sex workers and artists who sold nsfw content to make a living. most of those people left for sites like twitter, and many other sfw artists (and also people who just used tumblr for free porn) left with them. for a while, tumblr was pretty empty. but not entirely. there were still very close knit communities, arguably even closer than Era 1 even. and honestly, this is when tumblr was at its most usable. it was quiet. the only thing that you had to worry about was the occasional porn bot (and staff's growing authoritarianism, but we'll get to that). it's hard to argue when exactly Era 3 ends. I like to say it's when elon musk bought twitter, but I also think it might have started a bit before then. it's more of a slow transition that happened sometime between early and late 2022

Era 4 is the return era. when everyone who went to twitter came crawling back. this was sorta kicked off with staff starting to be more lax with their porn restrictions. but don't think that staff was having a change of heart and suddenly nice. for the longest time, they had been overstepping boundaries and abusing their authority, such as banning mainly Black and leftist users calling them "Russian psyops". it was also around this time that people discovered that there were several terfs on the development team, and that was likely the reason they didn't ban nazis and terfs despite both being in clear violation of the tos. tumblr staff tried to distract from this controversy by adding a bunch of gimmicks. the crabs for April fools, blazing posts, checkmarks, tumblr live. this for some reason actually worked, and a lot of people just forgot or didn't care about staff any more, and it actually brought in a lot of new users. I have no idea how long Era 4 will last. all the Eras have been kicked off with a massive change in how social media operates that becomes more dramic and impactful each time. so short of the us government completely banning tiktok for good, I doubt Era 4 will end any time soon.

sorry this turned mostly into a rant against staff near the end. as you can obviously tell, I'm sorta biased towards Era 2 and 3, as that's when I had the best experiences with tumblr. and a lot of the problems I have with the site today can be traced back to staffs stupid decisions and abuse of power and authority.

but yeah. I hope that makes sense.

#dostxt #asks #tumblr eras #tumblr era

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tpquill · 1 year

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The legacy of the Blue check mark ✔️

I’ve been on Twitter since 2009; long enough to witness the birth of the “legacy blue tick/check” and what it meant.

It’s main reason was to give those in government and the entertainment business a platform where a blue check meant you are the official account of the name created. For the entertainment industry it allowed fans of celebrities to follow them, knowing the person you followed was the legitimate account and not some troll, trolling social media for shits and giggles. For official government accounts it meant you could follow factual political information. For entertainment news channels (like Fox) it meant you could get the latest about the entertainment world. For media industries, it meant you could follow their page for up to the minute news.

For years it’s been like this, normal, safe, reliable…until recently you could post quite happily, follow your favourite celebs, engage in political or domestic subjects. Report accounts (it was very rare in the early yrs) accounts that were being abusive or spamming. And then came a loud mouthed bigoted buffoon, who used the platform for political and personal hits. This dawned a wave of abusive, racist, homophobic, xenophobic behaviour to start crawling out of the gutter. Flooding the platform with vile threats, vile behaviour and very vile people. Twitter suspended the worst of the accounts and pretty soon most social media platforms did the same. The cries of “freedom of speech, first amendment rights being taken away from them” rang out like the wails of a banshee into the night.

This was seen as an abuse of power and then the owner decided to sell the platform on the open market - did Jack Dorsey get bored or was he pushed out? He left Twitter out in the open for anyone to buy at a high price…high price indeed. Twitter during 2020 was instrumental in keeping disinformation as much away as possible by fact checking, adding disclaimers and warnings on posts that were not telling the truth. Suspending accounts abusing the rules and cooling off periods for those not following them. This did not sit well with the loud mouthed who wanted to be able to say what they wanted, lie bare faced on their page or threaten those who opposed their rhetoric. One such loud mouthed opinionated person is Elon Musk. Not the brightest spark in the room. Inherited a wealth from his fathers ownership of an emerald mine in South Africa (actually fact) in other words just like the orange Buffon who used the platform to abuse and lie through - Musk is a trust fund billionaire. Bought Tesla (no he didn’t invent anything) picked the brains of scientists to create SpaceX (his money funded it he’s not the brains behind it the scientists are) the billionaire playboy likes to throw his money around to feel important, has always felt his freedom of speech was hampered by the rules of the previous owners of Twitter. So he put 44b across and bought the platform. Fired practically everyone who had spent several decades working for the company and installed a bunch of yes men to help him run the social media empire.

worst.mistake.ever

Top advertisers fled the platform

Installed a repeatedly nauseating algorithm that doesn’t make sense. It also throws up accounts you have either blocked because of content or accounts you have never followed but hey it’s Musk running the show.

Added sponsorship from pretty crappy, cheap advertisers that flood the area worse than google pop up ads.

And now decided that the blue check mark you had been given by the ownership and proof of who you are to distinguish you from those who would use your name for other trolling means - you need to pay for.

Will remove the blue check mark if you don’t pay up.

No wait, will reinstall your blue check mark if you have over 1mil followers

Has decided to reinstall your blue check because you publicly claimed you wouldn’t pay for it just to rub your nose in it, by inserting a clause that YOU the owner of your page - verified it by your phone number.

How very gracious of the aSSclown. Now for me, the blue check mark doesn’t mean anything. I’m of no importance, I’m not famous, I don’t have a massive following, but I do have an opinion and understand why celebrities have kicked off regarding their check mark that’s been there since they registered with Twitter. I do feel their annoyance because why not? They like to know that their fans are following the real deal. It also helps their careers when they can be seen by advertisers and can advertise their up and coming projects on a social media platform but Musk’s idea of playing the “teach you all a lesson” behaviour is just another step of proof, that he’s as incompetent at running this platform as he is with everything else he touches. Once admired businessman and philanthropist, he’s become more of a laughing stock with his unstable views of trying to clean the platform up. He’s allowed previous banned accounts back on (banned because of their disinformation and hatred) cozied up to dictators, pleaded with others to come back. Spread disinformation regarding people’s support on the ongoing conflict In Ukraine and sided with the opposing side. Posted misinformation and when caught out - claimed the algorithm wasn’t working properly. In other words Elon hasn’t got a clue. While others are creating different platforms to transition too, all eyes are on the orange buffoon, who used this once good media platform, inspire to create as much havoc in the next election, knowing full well that in 2020 he was silenced for his part in sending out misinformation about the election he claimed (falsely) that was rigged against him. Stirred up enough trolls in the gutter by organising a crowd of homegrown terrorists to attack the nations Capitol building to stop the election being certified against him. Musk has proven that he is more in favour of allowing the media platform he doesn’t really care about as it’s losing money, due to his poor handling crash spectacularly into the ground or walk away and allow the likes of the dishonest Republican Party take over and finish what the orange buffoon started. The fact remains that the more he can turn away from Twitter through loss of faith, loss of blue check mark the better - you’re only interfering with his course of carnage anyway.

You can stay and fight - remove his hold on you.

Go into your settings, edit your profile, remove your name and put it back in again - the blue check mark disappears. Add more symbols after your name, it too removes the check mark. Those who have always followed you, know who you are because they will still stay on your followers list. Your account will still be the same just no blue check. Add a photo to your profile that states it’s you. Don’t give Musk the satisfaction of owning you - your legacy mark was given to you as validation, but your fans or followers already know that.

Remember the reason you were given that little blue tick - Musk should never hold that kind of power over you. Those who have paid the $8 well that’s on them and the only reason they’ve done so is for their own reasons or possibly self entitlement - either way, they’re paying a billionaire the privilege of owning them.

#bluechecktwitter #muskdestroyingtwitter #legacybluechecksgone

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tomorrowusa · 7 months

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Elon Musk's father was a progressive in local government in South Africa during the apartheid era. Elon is estranged from his father and left South Africa when black majority rule appeared on the horizon.

Elon seems to take after his mother's side of the family.

This month, Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, alleging that its denunciation of X—the A.D.L. had accused the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter of amplifying antisemitism—has cost Musk’s company a fortune in advertising revenue. The Anti-Defamation League, in turn, asserted that Musk’s threat was “dangerous and deeply irresponsible.” [ ... ] Musk’s family history has a bearing on the dispute, but, in the book, as I pointed out in a review, Isaacson only glancingly discusses Musk’s grandfather J. N. Haldeman, whom he presents as a risk-taking adventurer and whose politics he dismisses as “quirky.” In fact, Haldeman was a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist who blamed much of what bothered him about the world on Jewish financiers. Elon Musk is not responsible for the political opinions of his grandfather, who died when Musk was three years old. But Haldeman’s legacy casts light on what social media does: the reason that most people don’t know about Musk’s grandfather’s political writings is that in his lifetime social media did not exist, and the writings of people like him were not, therefore, amplified by it. Indeed, they were very unlikely to circulate widely, and are now quite rare. Still, they’re not hard to find, which makes it unfortunate that Isaacson neither quotes from nor mentions them. Musk has said that he bought Twitter to halt the advance of a “woke mind virus” spreading online. His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.” Haldeman was born in Minnesota in 1902 but grew up mostly in Saskatchewan, Canada. A daredevil aviator and sometime cowboy, he also trained and worked as a chiropractor. In the nineteen-thirties, he joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.

As historian Jill Lapore (author of that New Yorker article) mentioned, Elon Musk is not responsible for J. N. Haldeman's opinions. But it's curious that both Elon and J.N. have been fishing in similar waters.

Social Credit has roots that aligned it to fascism. Though after World War II the Canadian Social Credit Party's message became more diluted and it drifted towards libertarianism; it had seats in Canada's parliament as late as 1980.

Like the bulk of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Musk embraced libertarianism – gladly using the copious infrastructure and research paid for by government funds while claiming to have created wealth without getting help from anybody else.

We don't inherit political views or ideologies the same way as DNA. But pervading mindsets in a family can persist with some members of that family for several generations.

Twitter/X is increasingly a cesspool of hate speech. J. N. Haldeman probably would have approved.

#elon musk #twitter #x #social media #j.n. haldeman #technocracy #fascism #social credit #libertarianism #antisemitism #adl #hate speech #leave twitter #delete twitter #quit twitter

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goldfishu · 1 year

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my feelings about twitter

I have had time over this week to reflect about the whole elon twitter acquisition and I have some thoughts. Initially I was upset, disappointed and even angry by the reaction to it. People were joking or treating it like just another day, that it didn't really matter. This bugged me a lot, and this is not just because I have personally dislike Mr musk. I feel really troubled about huge sources of information and social connection being bought up by hyper rich individuals who are known to have abusive workplaces. If you're not familiar with tesla working conditions you should read up on it. It's not like the previous owners of twitter are angels by any right, but elon is so unabashedly terrible to other people that I cannot really reconcile it. I feel like I cannot ethically use twitter knowing what he is. And I don't want my life to be ruled by billionaires. This is the platform I share my art and my work to not only friends and peers but also clients and people who enjoy it. I don't want it to be tainted.

So I guess when people say "boohoo, nothing changed" it really upset me. But over the week ignoring that type of response or the typical "we can ruin this site so he sells it" rationalizing I see about staying somewhere we know is wrong, I feel like there's a different reason why artists/streamers/coughcontentcreatorscough are choosing to stay. Its a combination of things. Firstly most people don't feel that strongly about elon so they won't leave, meaning that clients or audiences for what we produce are still here pretty much all the time, so leaving would be missing out on work 100%. And since the content stays, the people want to leave even less, it's compounding. I think another reason people don't want to (or cant) leave is because very few other platforms provide the reach that twitter has. Art gallery sites don't attract non artists, closed communities like reddit and mastodon limit your audience and stifle promotion. Tumblr does not feel like a great alternative but its all I got at this point.

I cannot really blame people for not wanting to leave. I dont want to leave!! There are no viable places to share work because everyone wants a centralized website, not niche sites. I feel like at odds with two halves of myself; one half wants to go apeshit and tell elon to [redacted] to finally be banned and the other is thinking about my livelihood. My solution: ao3 sets up some twitter clone. or we coup against elon? I am open to suggestions.

#rant

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year

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youtube

Elon Musk (Full Interview) | Real Time with Bill Maher

Bill Maher: So I think a lot of people thought when you bought Twitter, that this is kind of an outlier, like how does this, what doesn't fit with these other things you're doing. I never thought that. Because I think you're dealing with big civilizational issues and problems, and I was right on your page. I think Twitter is one of them. I mean you have talked about this "woke mind virus," in really apocalyptic terms. You should explain why you don't think it's hyperbole to say things like it's pushing civilization towards suicide. First of all, what is the "woke mind virus"? And if we don't deal with this, nothing else can get done. Tell me why you think that.

Elon Musk: I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic, and anything that results in the suppression of free speech. So you know those are two of the aspects of the woke mind virus that I think are very dangerous, is that it's often anti-meritocratic. You can't question things, even the questioning is bad. Another one would be cancel culture, and obviously people try to cancel you many times.

Maher: Many times. Every week. From left and right. I've had it from both sides. And it's interesting, you and I are both like in that little group of people, maybe it's a bigger group now, who are called conservative who haven't really changed. I don't see you, think of you as a conservative.

Musk: I at least think of myself as a moderate. I've spent a massive amount of my life energy building sustainable energy, electric vehicles and batteries and solar and stuff to help save the environment. That's not, it's not exactly far right.

Maher: You drew that diagram once where you're here, I related to that, and like, the world has changed. I feel the same way I feel like very often wokeness, it's not building on liberalism, it's the opposite of liberalism. I can mention many examples where it's the opposite, including free speech.

[ Note: This image was created by Colin Wright. ]

Musk: Free speech is actually is extremely important and it's bizarre that we've come to this point where... free speech used to be a left or liberal value, and yet we see from the, in quotes, "left" a desire to actually censor and that seems crazy. I think we should be extremely concerned about anything that undermines the First Amendment. There's a reason for the First Amendment. The First Amendment is because people came from countries where they could not speak freely, and where saying certain things would get you thrown into prison. And they were like, well we don't want that here.

And by the way, in many parts of the world, including parts of the world that people might think are relatively similar to the United States, the speech laws are draconian.

Maher: England is quite different.

Musk: I won't name any countries but...

Maher: England. Why are we protecting them? They have no First Amendment. It's very easy to prove libel in England whereas here it's almost...

Musk: I love England.

Maher: I do too, but I wouldn't want to say the wrong thing or you could be sued easier there. I mean there are - in France I think if you deny the Holocaust, which I think is abhorrent, but I also think it should be part of free speech, right, you can be thrown into jail okay...

Musk: I really can't emphasize this enough. We must protect free speech. And free speech only matters, it's only relevant when it's someone you don't like saying something you don't like, because obviously any speech that you like is, that's easy

The thing about censorship is that, for those who would advocate it, just remember at some point that will be turned on you.

#Elon Musk #Bill Maher #Real Time with Bill Maher #woke mind virus #free speech #freedom of speech #censorship #woke authoritarianism #wokeness #woke #wokeism #cult of woke #wokeness as religion #religion is a mental illness

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fuzzarchive · 1 year

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Thinking about where I plan to go once Tumblr finally dies. I’ve pretty much already accepted that Tumblr is gonna die, I knew that the rate at which people were buying blaze, checkmarks, crabs, ad-free browsing, etc. was not enough to cover Tumblr’s operating costs and I knew the amount of people purchasing those features was not going to rapidly increase anytime soon.

One thing I know for sure is that I am DEFINITELY not going back to Twitter, it was a cesspool even before Elon Musk bought it. TikTok is off the table for me as well, naturally. Instagram is a platform where you can only post things and reply to other people’s posts, it doesn’t have any option for you to share posts onto your account for the people who follow you like with reblogging or retweeting as far as I’m aware, and I would prefer to use a platform that circulates content in that way rather than relying entirely on an algorithm. Basically none of the other “big platforms” are a very good option for me.

The two places I think I’ll use are Pillowfort and the fediverse (well, the fediverse isn’t really a place, but rather a collection of places).

Pillowfort was created to be a clone of Tumblr, except it is non-profit and runs entirely on donations (it also allows you to post nsfw content, if that appeals to you). It used to be in closed beta and you had to pay $5 in order to sign up, but now it is in open beta and it has a wait list that allows you to sign up for free. It has the main perks that Tumblr has, such as tags that are separate from the body of the post and no character limit, but there are a few features that Tumblr has that Pillowfort still lacks, such as asks and being able to queue posts and being able to run multiple blogs. I already have an account on Pillowfort, I just haven’t been using it much since, well, I haven’t been able to find any of my friends or mutuals on there. If we’re mutuals and you have a Pillowfort account or are planning to create one, please let me know so I can follow you!

As for the fediverse, there’s a variety of different fediverse software out there that is used to mimic other popular platforms. For example, PeerTube is a YouTube-like, PixelFed is an Instagram-like, Funkwhale is a SoundCloud-like, and Mastodon and Misskey are both Twitter-likes. I can’t seem to find any fediverse software that’s really comparable to Tumblr, though. Maybe there will be a demand for one once Tumblr is finally on its deathbed and somebody will make one then. I really hope a Tumblr-like complete with asks and the ability to queue posts and such gets made eventually, federated Tumblr instances sounds awesome. Right now I’m currently on a Calckey instance called stop.voring.me, though I have considered running my own private instance for just me and my irl friends if they are up for it. If you’re confused as to what the fediverse is, how federation works or what the appeal of it is, here’s a video that I think explains it quite nicely. Also, if we’re mutuals and you’re anywhere on the fediverse where your instance is able to federate with the one I’m on, let me know so I can follow you!!

I didn’t make this post to announce that I’m leaving Tumblr or anything, it’s still the place where I spend most of my time online and I’m going to be here until its last day of operation. I just made this post because I’ve been thinking about how hard it will be for me to adapt once Tumblr is gone and to sort of make a plan for it, and to encourage other people to start making plans as well and start thinking about how they’re gonna stay in contact with their mutuals once Tumblr is gone.

I don’t use Pillowfort or the fediverse a whole lot right now, but that’s because right now everyone is still on Tumblr. I can’t get my friends and mutuals to follow me to these other places right now, and the likely reason for that is because they’re not gonna be able to get their friends and mutuals to follow them there for the same reason. I suspect that will change very quickly once the plug on this website is finally pulled, and on those sites it will become a lot easier for me to find people as people flock to those sites. I’m still going to miss Tumblr though, and I want to find as many of the people that I commonly interact with on Tumblr as I possibly can on these other sites so that I can still preserve the online space that I’ve spent all this time curating for myself at least somewhat.

#original post #pillowfort #fediverse

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splathousefiction · 8 months

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At the time, no

BSky lacks too many extremely basic security elements for me to recommend it in good faith

Edit: Because I answered this on mobile and wanted to get to a solid keyboard

Things BSky Lacks At The Moment:

You can't upload GIFs or video of any length.

No Two-factor authentication

There's a single recovery mail option, but no SMS/Alternative mail recovery option. SMS isn't secure, but the fact even /that/ isn't there really bothers me as an IT person.

These severely impact my ability to both be a sex worker and feel safe using the service. I should stress that Bsky is literally in it's infancy and was very obviously cobbled together when elon started his rampage of gutting twitter as a service (BTW, if there was any doubts he bought it for transphobic reasons, let me clear that up for you). The service is less than a year old, but the fact it's lacking even extremely basic, totally normal safety features is pretty absurd.

My next critique comes in the form of BSky's invite system-it's literally to keep the service from crashing due to a mass migration from Twitter, and that's the only reason. As I'm typing this I have both services open in my browser, and they look identical. Millions of users would likely leave Twitter in an instant if the service was open, which would cause outtages that lasted gods know how long. Gatekeeping as a means of keeping the service up is absolutely a choice-but it also means that there straight up is nobody there that you really know.

I've never been massively popular and think follow counts are stupid; but I've only been able to find like, 2-4 people I know, who also aren't posting on the service ATM simply because there's nothing really to react to.

Bsky also isn't doing a whole lot about hate groups. Hategroups appearing on every platform is an inevitability because many americans still don't wash their ass or know the caress of the sun, but Bsky's method of dealing with this is a mass-hiding option under the user control panel-an option that will "seed out" hate speech based on an algorithm. Which, if you know anything about hate groups and how they communicate, is fucking lazy as hell when active moderation towards such people would send both a positive message about the platform's stance and make people feel safe.

With all of this stated, here's some things I actually like about BSky:

*The Devs are very open about the fact they're actively working on improving the service, and are more or less transparent about what they're currently working on. This is leagues better than anything we had on Twitter even before Musk took over.

*It's a great way to "start anew" on a twitter-like service. I'm currently using mine as a way of hopefully building attention towards my Fansly page, and gaining funding to shoot more porn.

*People in power aren't protected. What I mean by that is you can scream at billionaires again and they absolutely will see it. The service is currently tending left politically, with many users falling under the LGBT spectrum. It's nice and notably different than Twitter.

All of this can change in an instance for any reason whatsoever. For the mean time, if you get a code there's no harm in making an account; but be aware the service is very much a rickety schaffold of what it should be.

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pitposter · 1 year

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Why did the Twitter account got deactivated?

Short answer: It got deactivated because I deactivated all of my other twitter accounts as well. Just don't want to be on that site at all anymore.

Long answer: Having those accounts stay up was giving me a ton of anxiety as that site gradually worsened, and it's hard to say what direction that site is going in but it's looking to be very right wing as long as Elon is in charge. As a trans man, I shouldn't have to explain why that makes me very anxious. This brings me to my second reason: I reused twitter accounts (since trying to make new ones is hell, especially with how you need a new email for every single one) and it's near impossible to completely clear off a twitter account. Not only was scared there could've been something left over from when I was 13 on one of those accounts that'd get me in a lot of trouble (like most 13 year olds, I was dumb, edgy, and uneducated), but I'm also very openly transgender and god knows what'd happen if the wrong crowd found me on the elon musk nutbar site and came to bother me over here. If you've ever been on twitter you know how deep people dig just to find something out of context and start trouble. I know it's somewhat irrational, but that didn't stop it from being a constant source of anxiety for me. Besides, I never used the site anyways after Elon bought it, it was just time to move on.

#not kid icarus #asks

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coochiequeens · 1 year

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The man is worth $44bn but couldn’t afford to keep 3,700 employees? And a lot of those layoffs were women?

Two women who lost their jobs at Twitter during mass layoffs after Elon Musk took over the company are suing, claiming that the company disproportionately targeted female employees for cuts.

The discrimination lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges to hit the company after Musk, the world’s richest person, bought the company for $44bn and set about making swift, drastic changes including laying off around half its workforce, or roughly 3,700 employees. Hundreds more subsequently resigned.

The new suit, filed on Wednesday in San Francisco federal court, said that Twitter laid off 57% of its female workers compared with 47% of men.

The gender disparity was more stark for engineering roles, where 63% of women lost their jobs compared to 48% of men, according to the new lawsuit.

The lawsuit accuses the company of violating federal and California laws banning workplace sex discrimination.

Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said women “had targets on their backs” once Musk acquired the company,

regardless of their talent and contributions.

“It’s not a huge surprise unfortunately that women were hit so hard by these layoffs when Elon Musk was overseeing these incredibly ad hoc layoffs just in a matter of days,” Liss-Riordan said at a press conference in San Fransisco discussing the four class action lawsuits she has filed on behalf of former Twitter employees.

Wren Turkal, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said she had been through acquisitions at other companies but that she had “never seen anything like this”.

“I have a family, I have a kid to support,” Turkal said at the press conference. “All that we’re looking for is fairness. I’m also worried about my friends who are financially in a difficult position or are in a difficult position for visa reasons.”

Liss-Riordan represents current and former Twitter employees in three other pending lawsuits filed in the same court since last month.

Those cases include various claims, including that Twitter laid off employees and contractors without the advance notice required by law and failed to pay promised severance, and that Musk forced out workers with disabilities by refusing to allow remote work and calling on employees to be more “hardcore”.

At least three workers have separately filed complaints against Twitter with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claiming they faced retaliation for advocating for better working conditions. Liss-Riordan said that she has also filed a complaint with the NLRB on behalf of employees who were protesting policies Musk was implementing including the “abrupt return to office” policy.

“It’s very clear that this company is doing all it can to disrupt worker organizing and that’s also illegal,” she said.

Twitter has denied wrongdoing in the lawsuit involving advance notice, and has not responded to the other complaints.

The lawsuit comes as Musk’s company continues to face scrutiny on multiple fronts. This week the company came under under investigation by city officials in San Francisco following a complaint that the company allegedly converted rooms in its headquarters to sleeping quarters.

As of Monday, the office has “modest bedrooms featuring unmade mattresses, drab curtains and giant conference-room telepresence monitors” with four to eight beds a floor, employees told Forbes. The changes appear to be part of Musk’s plan for a more “hardcore Twitter” in which he has demanded workers dedicate “long hours at high intensity”.

“People’s livelihoods are at stake here,” Liss-Riordan said at the press conference. “Real people were impacted by these decisions.

“Of all the issues facing Elon Musk, this is the easiest to address: treat the workers with respect, pay them what they deserve under the law,” she added.

#Elon musk #Sex based discrimination #Twitter #women impacted by lay-offs

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hope-of-virgo · 1 year

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everything old is new again

well, it happened. twexit is upon us.

It's been a while since I've written anything longform that wasn't in a uni assignment, so it might take a while to get back on the horse. For the last 10 years or so my "contributions" on social media have been in the format of 140/280 characters or less. This is both a good and a bad thing; I tend to fuck around a lot less when I have a character constraint, but equally it means a more complex discussion gets more arduous due to Tweet Threading.

Can't wait to read back on this in another 10 years being like "what the fuck happened here?", or maybe we'll all have been fed into an industrial woodchipper to appease the rich. Who knows? But here's the context, mostly for my own reference.

Elon Musk, richest man in the world (although not for long at this rate), bought microblogging site Twitter. This was at the end of a long Legal Thing where he basically fucked around and found out. He tweeted a thing where he was like "I'm buying Twitter" without doing a legal disclosure to a government body that he already owned part of it. If he didn't actually pull the trigger on it, he would be investigated for securities manipulation, so he basically had to. Problem is, Twitter was (but again, not for much longer), worth $44B at the time, and even Phoney Stark isn't that rich, so he had to finance it with loans against Tesla and SpaceX.

Within like a week of the close of sale, which already basically had to be dragged out of him under threat of deposition over Other Stuff, things had already gone to shit. A bunch of advertisers pulled out, he fired literally half of the staff who promptly filed a class action under Californian law, and he formed a Bold and Ambitious Plan to charge people $8 a month for a "verification tick". Previously the mark had been to denote that this is the Actual New York Times rather than an account pretending to be them, but would now be used to denote people who had paid for Twitter Premium.

Now, this sounds fucking great on paper. The problem is, the users are the product, not the customer.

Like it or not, Twitter kind of had the market cornered on "drop a line to a person". As I found out when forming an exit strategy that let me still talk to the people I care about (hello Madboards alumni!), we took the ease of access for granted a bit. The simplicity of the site meant that you had to be laconic about what you wrote, which lead to great headlines in newspapers. Equally it meant that instead of having to repeat "jobs and growth" a thousand times in a political campaign, if you're someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you can just dunk on people you don't agree with, which does a bit of your work for you.

That's the power of ~*branding*~: name recognition, especially in politics, is king. That's a lot of the reason people use(d) it tbh, politicians liked interacting with their audience and the press, and if you were a member of the press or the public, it was easy to drop someone a line for a comment, or contact your local member of Parliament to talk about an issue you felt strongly about.

When you buy a business without really understanding what that business sells, though, you're doing something a little bit stupid. When you buy a business and then upend the entire thing, you're doing something *very* stupid. Likewise, when you have a site that's a) free to use, b) has low barriers to engagement, and c) has such a broad appeal and audience selection that it gets a huge variety of users, doing anything to upset that very delicate status quo is a tenuous prospect at best. So here we are. For clarity, I'm still On There because I have a great list of people that I love talking to, and it never hurts to keep extra channels of contact open.

On the one hand, it'll be great to not wake up every morning and feel the compulsion to scroll through the worst takes by the worst people. On the other, I'm going to miss the unique blend of stuff and people I had going on. I broadly credit this as getting me through the COVID lockdowns; 95% of my IRL friends fucking vanished at literally the exact same time as my ex and I broke up (no coincidence), and while I still had to go to work through Original Recipe and also Delta Strain, I was on the receiving end of pretty much relentless bullying from my boss, dealing with atypical anorexia, and having to manage the realisation that being transgender is a major reason that I've been so unhappy over the last 30 or so years. All that while broadly locked indoors for 2 years and dealing with the stress of working in healthcare during a pandemic by ~*consuming cannabis*~, putting shit up my nose, and listening to the same 1500 songs on repeat.

So here we are. 12000 tweets, 13 years, 85-ish carefully curated followers. Very little of substance communicated in that time. The nature of everything is that everything has its time, and no matter what happens after this point, I'll always remember that I was a Twitter user.

But hey, it was fun while it lasted.

#hope-of-virgo

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atmosphericradar · 1 month

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The interview of Elon Musk by Don Lemon revealed how ingesting right-wing talking points made Elon intellectually incurious.

Across the earliest segments Elon makes it clear that his personal Overton Window is shifted noticeably to the right. Him calling CNN "far left" is laughable, but this gives us some idea of the political circles he runs in, and the ideas he's injesting.

In the Great Replacement Theory segment we see Don's questions bouncing off Elon; Elon apparently doesn't grasp how his belief that "immigrants are biasing US national elections" dovetails into GRT talking points. Don, for his part, doesn't go out of his way to logically lay out how Elon publishing his belief might legitimize GRT. OK, fine, maybe Elon just doesn't know about GRT and isn't in the right head space to learn while in a high-profile interview.

But then we get to the content moderation segment, and Elon has the chance to talk about free speech, something he has repeatedly expressed support of and complex interest in. Don is giving Elon pretty standard talking points about social media content moderation, and Elon (as the owner of Twitter and a long-time "free speech absolutist") must have heard these talking points before. He claims that he bought Twitter on the grounds of preserving free speech on the internet! But the interview segment is mostly Don asking the same few questions over and over, with Elon not answering any of them and instead insisting Don is pro-censorship (without giving proper reasoning). I could think of a few good rebuttals to Don while watching the video, but Elon (who would likely consider himself a major proponent, if not an actual "thought leader", in the realm of American free speech discourse for several years now) offers only the most surface-level rejections of the way Don frames his questions.

The segment on DEI initiatives was even worse, and honestly painful to listen to. Don is really going at this point: posing several questions, bringing up studies and stats, and putting in work to try and pull some self-explanation out of Elon. But Elon stubbornly refuses to engage with what Don is asking! Elon repeats the same talking point over and over, not elaborating at all, and making no effort to tie in his "objection" to DEI programs with the actual question being asked of him. It's pathetic, and it shows that what he is regurgitating isn't his own idea.

I'm not going to rehash what happened in the "Woke Mind Virus" segment. Elon is a nepotism baby from an extremely wealthy mining family in apartheid South Africa, he isn't going to be a champion of race reparations or anything. His "color-blind meritocracy" viewpoint (two phrases which he never used in the interview) is outdated and denies reality. But again we see him clinging to a right-wing talking point instead of explaining himself. He won't actually say out loud something like "systemic racism, sexism, and transphobia are venquished problems, and we can let time equalize the racial mix of educated professions", because he doesn't believe that. He hasn't thought for himself, just knows the talking point.

By the end of the interview he's totally turned off, pressing Don for more questions because he wants to change the subject. The interview frustrates him, because he can't answer the questions meaningfully, so he wants to move on to something else. He doesn't have answers to Don's questions because he just absorbed right-wing talking points and did no actual thought on the subjects for himself. And he wants to move on because he wants to feel competent and smart (and cares less about whether he actually is those things). It's a very immature behavior to try and run away from hard work, but it checks for Elon who constantly flits from one project to another, throws money at problems, and always focuses on the future (never the present or the past).

I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, but I am genuinely saddened to see a science fiction geek be suckered into such anti-intellectual behavior. I don't know who could teach that man some additional critical thinking skills, but he really needs them. Now more than ever.

#elongated muskrat and adjacent #ideological dork web #conservatism #us politics #alt-right #critical thinking #videos #long post #my post #cw racism

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notmuchtoconceal · 1 month

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Seeing your recent post, I'm still mad at myself for reducing you. I can't believe I did that. When I told you that I used to speak like you, looking back, the thing that burned away my creative voice was rage for the exact same reasons you're describing. And instead of rising above it, I went on a quest to reduce others.

When I talk about this Quest for Reduction, it is something that stems from how others treated me. The demon you were talking about? Some of them are there in a person from the very start. Mine was born a few years back and grew over time, but the ingredients to his rise may have been there much earlier. He's something of a Language Demon. He's not capable of original thought but he can twist others'. He doesn't change words, but emphasis of words. You take a sentence like "I stole three hats from the store today" and change just the emphasis, and you get different meaning.

"*I* stole three hats from the store today." Not him, not her. Me.

"I *stole* three hats from the store today." Not bought, not borrowed. Stole.

"I stole *three* hats from the store today." Not two, not fifteen. Three.

His whole game is subtlety. He understands the importance of background music in a scene. You ever seen that video Alfred Hitchcock makes about how order and sequencing of a scene can drastically change what it's about, even if you don't change a single image. He's all about that shit. He wants you to believe *you* failed to communicate something. There's always some way to reduce a person's writing.

What I'm about to tell you next is so hideous. But you earned it by outfoxing me. And maybe it's interesting to you. Maybe it's not, maybe you've seen it all before. Maybe everything is boring to you. But I think I'm less boring than I let on, even if I am cruel. Whatever.

So he (I) went on a tirade. We found wordsmiths. We searched for the subtleties in peoples' writing and we knew the perfect things to say to make them doubt. It was never direct criticism, too obvious. You had to pretend you were someone else. It's like--if you walk up to Elon Musk and want to hurt him, you don't say "Elon, I hate what you did to Twitter and think you're a pseudointellectual hack," you instead deliberately get trapped in an elevator with him and pretend you mistook him for Zuckerberg and express your excitement about joining his new social media account, Threads. Then you walk out before he can respond.

There's a lot I could say here about my methods, but I'm so divorced from the idea of continuing I can't speak about them without complete disgust of myself. Maybe I'll share some stories someday. Needless to say, the strategies are all different.

With you, I saw a potential interpretation of your writing as rambling, non-sequitur, and lustful without substance (it's not this, I've come to realize--not even close). My first method of attempting to reduce you was to appeal to what I had mistakenly believed was your self-importance. I gave you a nonsense fantasy topic and tried to see if you could attach postmodern, disjointed meaning to literally anything I said. I've done this before, and it comes across as innocent and playful after the fact. You let people fall on their own sword and just grab the popcorn. Easy. But you didn't take the bait. You laughed at me and dismissed me. So I moved onto the next step.

I tried to frame everything as a metaphysical trap that you had "solved" so I could dissolve your writing and do this back-and-forth where we pat each other on the back for being clever enough to solve the mystery. You see this in cults a lot. Cults are addicting because you feel like you're privy to some sort of secret knowledge that all the other "sheep" just can't see. Leaving them requires the acknowledgement that you're just as lost as anyone else. You didn't fall for that, either.

Then I just got sloppy and appealed to my own sense of lust. I tried to wrest control from this game that was spiralling away from me by fixating on the erotic aspects of your writing and pretending you were playing into my hands by fulfilling a role I had always sought after. Probably my most pathetic attempt, but the Language Demon was running out of options. It's not a lie that you definitely awakened something lustful in me. But it's a lie that that's all this was and a lie that it started that way.

When you finally split, you managed to reduce me. I had nothing to offer you. When you said this, it was the perfect thing to say to humble me and humiliate me. You didn't hate me so much as you'd seen my type before, both in yourself and in people you'd known. I wasn't a villain. I was a good, worthy person who was afflicted by a demon. Evil would be interesting, but I'm not even that. Not evil. Just common. DAMN.

I've never met someone who's the Real Deal before. Never met someone who's put me in my place quite like that. I'm not exaggerating when I say you blew my mind. I don't think you exorcised the Language Demon, but you sealed him away for a while. You halted my Reduction Tirade.

And I've been reading your stuff this time. Not skimming it, not reducing it. Actually trying to comprehend it. And there's more depth to you than I could have possibly imagined.

I'm writing this because it disturbs me that you're going through a rut right now, and I'm terrified that I had a hand in causing it. I've destroyed a lot of people this way, but you're the first I want to salvage at all costs. I figure that perhaps by adding some clarity to my intentions I can help you realize it's nothing you did wrong. It's my own hunger that caused this. It's a hunger born from my own inability to communicate properly. Not evil, but common, like you cunningly implied.

I want to sit down and listen to you now. I hope you come to realize that people can be interesting through their own interest in you, or that people don't have to be interesting to be worth your time. Or that you, as an interesting person, can *make* other people more interesting by giving them ideas.

Honestly why the fuck is someone with your gift not out there changing the world right now. I'm not saying you have any sort of duty or obligation to lend your talents to anyone, but rare people are cosmic chances that the world has--chances that are temporary and must be seized upon immediately or you have to wait a century for them to show up again. You said you thought maybe you'd consider just writing erotic stuff, but that's far too reductive for you, I think. The Language Demon you sealed away would love for you to do that, which makes me think it's a bad idea.

Anyway, I'm typing this up fast and not really correcting myself because I have limited time all of a sudden because Reasons. So here's my boring crash-landing of a conclusion: I don't know exactly what you want for yourself, but you're the most deserving person of love I've ever met. (Yeah I know everyone deserves love, blah blah blah, I'm speaking from my id). I realized that both of us made the mistake of letting our past interactions with others color our perceptions of the strangers we were. I don't think it would be wise for us to do that. We're entirely new people. We aren't a "type," and I think it's dangerous to assume such. It is so, so tempting to fixate on the aspects of you that are a reflection of me. But I can't do that, and I think the reason why I do is because I have a tendency to view happiness as an amorphous inevitability that can never be as unique as anguish.

We say that pain shapes a person, but happiness is treated as if it's just some sort of icing used to coat other, "truer" feelings. When people say "these are my true colors," why is happiness always left out as a truth? I think there's something to be said about its purity that we discount it. And I don't think happy people are boring by any means.

I want satisfaction from you. I understand you, and I don't. But I am happy to listen. And I'm waiting to hear you speak again.

I would have forgiven you. I would have let you back in had you the strength to have said this to my face. Man to man. Unblocked me. Treated me as a friend instead of a pawn in a game with yourself.

As well-studied as you may be, you could have only given this apt of a reply in resonance with the truth. By continuing to hide, you put the truth in service to deception and despite my awareness that you needed to become someone else to arrive at truth, I don't like being lied to.

Is it possible that you're such a compulsive liar, you're unafraid to lean further into the truth, well-aware you can build-up doubt, re-orient, re-direct later; in essence, taking two steps forward with the intent of taking three steps back? Possibly. Is it possible that you still think you're an innocent bystander and you're telling me to my face what you think my game is under the pretense of claiming it as your own? That's possible, too. You could be so afraid of how good I am at manipulating you, you'll sit there and lay out -- point by point -- every projection you saw in me, as if hoping some evil in my heart would feel flattered and gladly take it as my own, hence you would have managed to "feed" me.

You would have massaged the medicine into the dog food or whatever the exact words of stated-goal were you repeated over and over.

Alternatively -- you being the one to block me, to go on a smear campaign against me, willingly destroy yourself because someone you wanted didn't want you back (you never really wanting him until you couldn't have him) -- maybe you're so afraid of how covertly manipulative I am you need the distance to have the clarity to say any of this out loud.

The existential crisis you induced in me may be your own, but it's one I saw in myself from an early age, having known abuse so intimately. I had feared my entire conscious personality was a ruse to lure people in and torture them. While I fear that may be true of you, it isn't for me. I don't need to hide from those I love, they need to hide from me. My pride and vulnerability wounds them, for living in accordance with the truth (as close to the truth as a man can get, one must always strive) irritates their deceptions as though dissolving a spiritual and psychological bacteria.

You worship filth. Not in the way John Waters does as a means to build up an earthy tolerance -- manure, urine and ash containing vital nutrients which endow the fields with richness -- rather you worship corruption. You're as much of a towering intellect as athleticbrutality. Like all those afflicted with the Christian mindset, you're a devil worshipper. It stems from your polarized split-view where good and bad are cleaved to alleviate yourself of the traumatic severing of your feelings from your will.

Satan is the One True God of Christianity. Satan is not the Broken Heart of the Jewish people, whose Tribal God of Abundant Love grew shattered and vengeful in exile as any Broken Heart Would -- but the collective manufactured fears and agonies of the displaced who have made themselves slaves in a final desperate plea to make the pain end.

To clarify, I remember the day you said more people ought go to church. Churches are nesting grounds for demons because they're grease traps for spiritual bacteria. The displaced huddling masses coming in to beg for forgiveness leave trace elements which grow heavy and leaden, accruing over time to defile the holy places as spiritual super bacteria which survive the purgings make themselves at home, copulating on the altars. Truthfully, ritual purification is a lost art far from a glorious affectation, and it should ideally be performed before entering and after exiting any holy place, much like one would wipe their feet on a welcome mat.

(The same goes for hanging out with people after intense periods of productive work, but smart phone technology having made seeming illusions of time and distance, we're seemingly encouraged to pry open one another's mouths with our filthy, butthole-prodded fingers at any moment of any day and not only be proud of the convenience, but sneer at anyone who doesn't make themselves a willing opening.)

We defeat Satan by ignoring him, for to even acknowledge his presence feeds him. When he makes the attempt to strike us in his weakened state, we may simply laugh him off.

Your old messages are so revelatory, I will take your partial repentences gladly, though you yourself will still be ignored.

The old gods are real. Darkness and light are elemental forces. The words angel and demon are mistranslations of words which refer to messengers between the human and divine realms and the quality of mind which possesses one like genius. There is only mind -- matter itself being mind solidified, all things endowed with the soul of their creator -- and you know-well fear to be the mind-killer. To fear anyone reduces them to the bestial. This is why love sets us free. On the Earth, we have choice and we choose daily to live in heaven or hell, but neither of those are real places outside our imaginations. The splendor of this material world and how our mind moves in and out of it possesses too much grandeur to reduce to hoary old self-persecutory cliches. That's what all false binaries are: gay, straight, black, white, man, woman, self, other. All things are spectrums for the rainbow being the symbol of God's promise to never destroy is a plea to open our minds and recognize gradation rather than annihilate in the name of appeasing the old order.

Admitting one is lost is the first step to being found.

In keeping with your admission of the dangers of subtlety, I'd like to clarify I could never be as lost as you. I won't apologize for saying this, you being aware you pulled me off-course semi-deliberately (you having been so confused, the nature of your cognizance is ambiguous).

I don't think happiness is inevitable. Rather, misery is.

It's only a matter of time before each of us experiences sickness and heartbreak again, and we weather them as any coming storm, for our happiness is well-worth fighting for, much like our freedom and our love for our fellow man. Part of me wishes to chastize you with your favorite word "spoiled" that you could ever view happiness as inevitable, but rather a certain false happiness which is, as Malcolm X would say, the negation of conflict is inevitable in a neoliberal establishment where abuses are ignored, platitudes given, and business proceeds as usual.

The next time you feel compelled to call you or someone else "spoiled" remember always that your material bounty was a bribe you accepted to excuse spiritual and psychological deprivation, and had you been given the choice (been stronger to see past the lies; how your love was twisted by words) you would have fought harder to preserve the gift of choice, it being the only gift ultimately worth keeping.

I tried to kill my capacity to love to keep myself from loving you. I'm not anybody's savior. All I can do is save myself and hope those I love enough to interact with can come to the correct takeaways themselves. I sometimes feel so desperate to love and love freely I open myself to those who are beneath me and let them smear me with the filth of their shadow projections, being so tolerant they drag me down to their level and attempt to usurp my identity.

You could never be a lifelong friend, but you being smarter and more driven (and in your way, honest) revealed numerous self-defeating patterns in my own life, and I'll always be thankful I knew you.

Were you not in so much pain yourself, you could have communicated these vital points to me, for I only learned them by being engaged and putting the pieces together as though mentally reconstructing a house which had been hit by a cyclone.

You absolutely can talk to people calmly, firmly and to their best interest when you have the capacity to separate your bullshit from theirs.

I confess, you first being like a mentor, once I felt myself "outgrowing" you I would have cherished you as an advisor, having such a dynamic perspective which wasn't my own, there was much I could have still learned from you, had you valued either me or yourself enough to stay in my life.

You demand other people rule you, then resent them the power you willingly surrender. You demand an owner for you can't claim ownership of yourself and can thus only resent any opportunity for equality. In that vital sense, you're just like my last boyfriend. You lack genuine humility. You're not willing to learn from those you admire because making yourself subservient to someone you wish to learn from requires not only vulnerability, but humility.

I didn't become more than you through ruthless domination alone, oh no. It was by being selective in those I served. I think on some level you're aware you tell yourself you should serve everyone freely and this is "the way it should be" because you want everyone to serve you, just because. You think by surrendering your right to choose, that's a sacrifice everyone you meet should make because you did, it "being good enough for you" you've allowed yourself to have righteous indignation for anyone who doesn't willingly make themselves a slave.

Writing erotica or horror stories isn't only a way to get the itch out, it orients the mind toward confrontation and clarifies values.

When you're not aware of what's in your unconscious, you replicate it unthinkingly.

This is why we learn from the things we make.

This is why we make to learn, not show off.

Physical beauty and social prestige are symptoms of right work, not things in themselves to chase. A lot the problems men have with the overreaches of "feminism" are ultimately cart before the horse thinking which require witchcraft to resolve.

We don't make social progress by making excuses for ourselves. We do so not through the pretense of doing our best to escape blame, but by just doing so. If you've been amputated to fit a standard model theory of human worth, you may not know how to ask for things which would allow you to do your best, but feeling powerless, would follow the wrong example of other helpless people in your position.

Never forget how afraid you were that I could really love you. Never forget that you chose the comfort of the misery you already knew over striving for something more dangerous, fulfilling and ultimately real. Never forget I admired your thriftiness and your savvy, but never your globe-hopping because I couldn't separate in you what was a willingness to explore other cultures and what was a pretense to have "experience" and "knowledge" to browbeat those you regarded as bigger sheep than you.

I don't envy those who run away and hide.

It's as simple as that.

#ask was from july #potentially an AI #don't fuckin matter #i know the true forces behind it #feelings will never be verifiable #perception is a creative act #negotiating confirmation bias is an art #delusions can be deployed productively #when you know they're delusions #purty mindset is a cage #ignore me and do what you're told #your coach and manager are direct-downloads from the system #they know what's best for you #tis better to serve and never learn #than deal with frightful ambiguity #outside the constraints of service

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