GioCities

blogs by Gio

Tagged: alt-right

politics Ethical Source is a Crock of HotĀ Garbage

There’s this popular description of someone ā€œhaving brain wormsā€. It invokes the idea of having your mind so thoroughly infested with an idea to the point of disease. As with the host of an infestation, such a mind is poor-to-worthless at any activity other than sustaining and spreading theĀ parasite.

A ā€œpersistent delusion or obsessionā€œ. You know, like when you think in terms of legality so much you can’t even make ethical evaluations anymore, or when you like cops so much you stop being able to think about statistics, or the silicon valley startup people who try to solve social problems with bad technology, or the bitcoin people who responded to the crisis in Afghanistan by saying they should just adopt bitcoin. ā€œBad, dumb thingsā€. You get theĀ idea.

And,Ā well.

Okay, so let’s back way up here, because this is just the tip of the iceberg of a story that needs years of context. I’ll start with the most recent event here, the MastodonĀ tweet.

The Mastodon ContextšŸ”—

The ā€œheā€ Mastodon is referring to is ex-president-turned-insurrectionist Donald Trump, who, because his fellow-insurrectionist friends and fans are subject to basic moderation policies on most of the internet, decided to start his own social network, ā€œTruth Socialā€. In contrast to platforms moderated by the ā€œtyranny of big techā€, Truth Social would have principles of Free Speech, like ā€œdon’t read the siteā€, ā€œdon’t link to the siteā€, ā€œdon’t criticise the siteā€, ā€œdon’t use all-capsā€, and ā€œdon’t disparage the site or usā€. There are a lot of problems here already, but because everything Trump does is terrible and nobody who likes him can create anything worthwhile, instead of actually making a social networking platform, they just stole Mastodon wholesale.

Mastodon is an open-source alternative social networking platform. It’s licensed under an open license (the AGPLv3), so you are allowed to clone it and even rebrand it for your own purposes as was done here. What you absolutely are not allowed to do is claim the codebase is your own proprietary work, deliberately obscure the changes you made to the codebase, or make any part of the AGPL-licensed codebase (including your modifications) unavailable to the public. All of which Truth SocialĀ does.

So that’s the scandal. And so here’s Mastodon poking some fun at that.

rp ja, esĀ kawaii

  • Posted in rp

Sometimes steam will give you a coupon for a random game that isn’t very popular. And so this is how my eveningĀ went:

-33% off My Cute Fuhrer

politics Tweets about the attack on theĀ Capitol

Twitter is an ephemeral medium. You scroll through tweets just fast enough for them to register in your head, and then they’re gone forever. If you want to find something again, you can go to somebody’s profile and scroll through, one tweet at a time, until you find what youĀ wanted.

This is a lousy way of capturing history. That’s not great, because Twitter does such a good job of capturing important moments, as they happen. If you want to save that moment, though, what can you do? What do you do if you think a day’s tweets are important? Print themĀ out?

Well, I did. Here is what I tweeted and retweeted, on a page. Tactile. To beĀ read.