nickwitha_k (he/him)

Seconded. Not coming up with much when trying to find out more about it.

ISO 8601/RFC-3339 (Unix Epoch also acceptable) gang reporting in.

This might help. https://smcl.org/blogs/post/making-sense-of-reading-levels/

I had to look it up because of your comment. It’s been over a decade since I dealt with anything in the AP Style Guide or adjacent. Fortunately, you are correct.

Sadly, yes. It is largely a consequence of two things: constant right-wing efforts to destroy public education and neoliberal profiteering. The first requires little explanation. The second is something that I only learned about because LeVar Burton (Geordie LaForge in Star Trek TNG) has produced a documentary on it and has been participating in activism to try to fix the damage.

Basically, with the neoliberal philosophy that profit is more important than anything else, education fell into the sights of profiteers. Through connections and back-room deals, schools have been forced to adopt proprietary “literacy” methods and tools that were initially developed explicitly to allow people with diminished cognitive capacity to somewhat function in society. This means that there’s a whole generation that only learned how to do things like guess what a word is based on its shape, rather than understanding its phonetics or figuring out its meaning from its constituent roots.

This profiteering, as a side effect, also harms education overall as it has robbed people of their ability to engage in self-learning. Something that is only helping to cause further harm with people off-loading cognitive efforts to LLMs, and not having the skills to differentiate between when they spout pure bullshit and output something that is useful or factual.

There are those of us who will never see the protest (non-)voters as allies again due to their willingness to ignore the basic math of the election and enable fascists to win to “prove a point”. They are a step away from collaborators and hold part of the responsibility for every person who has been kidnapped by ICE, the end of a possibility of a free Palestine, every murdered protestor, every trans youth who commits suicide because they are denied care, every child that dies from measles.

Performative bullshit driven by the desire to feel moral superiority while helping get a fascist elected and undoing a century of civil and societal progress doesn’t make one an ally. It makes them useful idiots to the far-right and betrayers of people in vulnerable populations, everyone whose life is ruined by global warming.

I might forgive this who take responsibility and try to lend a hand in the multi-generation effort to try repairing the damage that has been in under 200 days (protest voters have fucked over GenX through Alpha, at the very least). But, as long as I live, I’ll not forget, nor will I allow them or anyone else to do so, lest someone make the mistake of thinking that they would stand up for anyone in any effective manner capable of positive change.

ackshully…https://hackerfab.ece.cmu.edu/

Yup. I’ve been pissed off at him since he started using the pied piper approach to avoid competition from the left, during Trump’s first term. He’s done a lot of good and bad since.

Resulting proportionality would fix all of that, and guarantee that a minority party like the GOP never gets total power. But, that’s a bit of a pipe dream.

Technoautocorrect

He did some great things during the peak but, since, he’s frequently been nothing but a corpo ghoul. Sabotaging efforts to break up convicted killer and “power company”^* PG&E. Supporting rate increases so that the board of convicted killer and “power company”, PG&E didn’t have to face any actual penalties for killing people. Adamantly opposing any wealth tax. Putting significant support behind RTO/quiet layoffs.

EDIT: Forgot my own footnote.

^* “power company” here used in quotes because they seem more practiced in getting away with murdering people though negligence and avoiding consequences for knowingly contaminating water supplies with carcinogens.

Anti-electoralism is mathematically indistinguishable from accelerationism. It may (possibly) have a different motivation but, it results in the same outcome.

Accelerationism is a religion.

Hard disagree. The data show clearly that willful lack of engagement with the electoral system has caused a measurable increase harm. Not the only tool that one should be using, nor the most impactful, but it is an important tool because letting the oppressor win unopposed only helps the oppressor.