aasatru

Sure, that’s a different problem entirely. I’m a big proponent of universal income, universal education, and taxing billionaires out of existence.

I don’t think it’s possible to make up for historical (and soon to be historical, for that matter) injustice by paying for it. I am convinced we need to create a society where these injustices are not decisive for your possibilities in life. So I think we agree on this point.

(Within the academic debate on this, I find the idea of justice in acquisition to be pretty appealing. In particular the article Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation by Michael Otsuka from 2006. It’s behind a paywall with its original publisher, but if you search for https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00061.x on sci-hub you’ll find it. It’s less than 30 pages and a pretty light read, as far as I remember)

a) OP is talking about racial divides, not only racism. b) Makes sense, sure. Whether it’s acceptable is another question. You don’t need full-on communism to erase historical inequality. Even capitalism holds a promise of meritocracy, even though it routinely fails to deliver. In the real world, wealth tax and free universal education can go a long way. But accepting that the descendants of slaves are still poorer than the descendants of their masters and considering it to be anything else than a huge problem is seriously fucked up.

Also, Scandinavian social democracies are pretty egalitarian.

That sounds super interesting! I can’t watch the video right now, but look forward to checking it out. Thanks for sharing! :)

I think we carry culture on even when we don’t notice, so there’s still a lot of Europe left in white Americans even when they don’t think about it actively. In the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver talked about how American tipping culture originates in how the British during the Tudors period would tip servants when being invited to festivities, or something like that. Just as one random example.

DNA tests to try to re-establish heritage is pretty popular among African Americans who can afford it. Samuel Jackson got himself Gabonese citizenship after DNA tests linked him to the Benga people. But entering it that way through a DNA test in adulthood obviously leaves you with a whole lot of catching up to do.

On a more positive note, it seems African nations are often quite welcoming towards African Americans who search for their ancestry. I’m not sure Europeans will extend such goodwill towards our white American cousins for very much longer.

Racial divides are very much present in South America, but racial tension seems to be a little lighter than in the US. Culturally, Brazil might have gone particularly far down the path of considering everyone part of a shared Brazilian identity, independent of ethnicity. Then again, Brazil has incredible class differences, and how is race distributed between the gated communities and the favela?

One source observes that “[w]hite workers have 74% higher income on average compared to Black and Brown people”, so just because the culture might be less racist than the US, the systematic issues are still very much there.

As for race tensions, America has a few original sins. One is slavery, another is genocide. The two meet and interact in an interesting way when one considers cultural genocide: Africans brought to the US as slaves were not only forced to work for free, but they were taken from their families, deprived of their language and culture, and forced to create something new out of their situation. That’s the depressing backstory of how blues became so great.

You see this in today’s America: What is there of African culture left in African Americans? African music survived and transformed into call and respond in cotton fields, which transformed into rhythm and blues, which eventually became R&B and hiphop. Other than that? I can’t think of anything, but maybe I’m ignorant.

In South America, it’s a different story. I went to Colombia last year and briefly got to meet some people from the Afrodescendant community working on remembrance. They too were processing not only centuries of slavery and bad treatment, but also more recent horrors of the armed conflict. They did so in ways that embraced their African roots: Their use of colour, their artwork, their whole cultural production still shows clear roots back to Africa. They also have their own food, fuelled as always by “ancestral knowledge”. I also felt like their vibe was a mix between South American and African, but that’s harder to measure. Importantly however, unlike their American counterparts, there was not a successful effort to cut off these roots made on the basis of pure cruelty. They are highly aware - and proud - of their ancestry.

It’s a complex argument, but I think it is an important one to understand why racial divides in the US are so fucked. White Americans are so fucking obsessed about their great grandfather being Irish, yet they don’t want to consider the fact that black Americans had their entire history forcefully erased as a potential issue. I think it is an issue, and I think it’s part of the reason why tensions run so high in the US.

It just has real heavy JPEG.

Here’s a Reddit post for the Toyota cybertruck, which looks pretty legit to me. I also really love it - I can’t tell if it’s the fact that it’s an incredibly unconvincing camouflage, or that it looks like it’s trying to ruin Toyota’s good name by signing it on this piece of junk.

There’s also a picture of a Tesla with an Audi sticker going around, but that one was posted to Reddit two years ago so before Elon Musk went full nazi. I like that one because if I saw it in traffic I would have genuinely believed it was an Audi - I don’t give enough of a shit about modern car design to notice. Maybe until it starts making fart sounds or crashes into something because the driver is occupied with the gigantic dashboard iPad. But I digress.

Not everything on the internet is fake. There’s a bunch of Tesla owners out there, and a lot of them are looking for ways to communicate that driving their car is not an endorsement of fascism.

I’ve been considering buying some nice stickers that can achieve similar effects without destroying the car, and leaving them under the windshield wipers of parked Teslas around town with alongside a friendly note. I’m sure some people would be happy to use them.

A word for users of a website to self-identify as a group will rarely not be cringe. Like, come on, is this how you self-identify?

Doesn’t work so well here as the content is platform neutral. We’re all just “users”, really.

They can survive incredibly rough conditions.

If they feel you are threatening them, they won’t run away; they’ll stand up for themselves and try to scare you away by hissing at you. If this happens, you better fucking run.

Not because they make up any actual threat to you, but because the poor little fellas can get so worked up over this they have a heart attack and die right in front of you. They’ll defend their nest until death.

So yeah, don’t mess with lemmings. Please. They’re too precious.

I use Mbin, but as a mountain person I feel strongly for defending lemmings. They’re adorable little hamsters who get really worked up about pretty much anything.

Honestly, lemmings are a good metaphor for the community here. We’re tiny, but we stand up and fight against something must larger than ourselves and we refuse to back down. I just hope we don’t work ourselves up to a heart attack over it.

1. Bridged Mbin user posts micro blog to community
2. Bridged Bluesky user comments on Bluesky copy of post
3. Profit?

It could work. If anyone on Bluesky wants to give it a shot I can make a post to some testing community - my profile is bridged. Not very interestingly so though, as I don’t post microblogs often.

Edit: I just made this post in Mbin, seen here in dbzer0’s Dylan community, and here on Bluesky. Spreading it everywhere certainly worked, if a bridged user wants to respond they can share their emotions after listening to this. ;)

One can post from WordPress to ActivityPub, which could lead to blog posts ending up in Mastodon feeds. Mastodon users can then share, like, and comment.

You cannot, however, make blog posts to WordPress using ActivityPub. It’s for distribution only, like an interactive RSS feed.

I thought for a second if they had finally made Bluesky opt-out. Sadly it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that. :)

I love ⚝! Wasn’t aware of its existence. It looks more like the full-scale Fediverse logo than ⛦, and also looks a lot friendlier. Big fan.

A star also makes sense in that one of the functions on a lot of federated platforms is to favourite posts, indicated by ☆. So using a star as a symbol for social media makes some degree of intuitive sense, perhaps. In addition to the similarity to the rainbow pentagram, obviously.

Nordmann bosatt i Danmark! 🤝

Speaking of occult meanings, in meteorology, an asterism in a station model indicates moderate snowfall. It all points back to Scandinavia!

I guess there are multiple metaphors possible, but I think it works to think of the fediverse as a constellation of multiple stars, each with their own set of celestial objects spinning around them. The pentagram kinda exaggerates how interconnected the fediverse is - sometimes instances will not be interconnected, by design.

As for my username (as well as my profile picture!), I am Scandinavian and pretty tired of nazis stealing my cultural heritage for their bullshit propaganda, so I figured if I’m gonna be an anonymous antifascist online I might as well reclaim some of my culture in the process.

Sadly that’s not quite enough to remove the association between runes and nazism. ᛟ (family/bloodline) has been completely overtaken by nazis, but I think there’s a risk using any set of runes as a symbol would attract the wrong audiences.

In either case I don’t think any of the symbols would have been well suited. They reflect priorities in Nordic society back then - like bull (ᛏ), moose (ᛉ), and horse (ᛖ). ᚷ can represent a gift, but that too has sadly been appropriated by other people we do not like to associate ourselves with.

I guess ᚹ (joy) and ᚱ (travel) would not be so bad, but they don’t immediately strike me as great symbols for a social media protocol either. Maybe they could be fused with the <> ActivityPub logo to some interesting effect.

I can see how a unicode symbol could be nice - the asterism is just convenient. It’s nice enough, and it fits the metaphor. The pentagram is good for other uses.

I personally prefer ⛧ as the Unicode symbol, but I can kinda see why it hasn’t taken off.

It seems GoToSocial comes with some reservations against being crawled, which is why fedidb had to update their robots.txt. So it might not be included here by design.

Or at least that’s the impression I get from this comment section: https://piefed.social/post/496750

It’ll be interesting to see what’s going on with today’s bump in users. I’m afraid you might be right about the reliability, but then again the GoToSocial instance you linked earlier has now been removed.

I guess there’s also Fediverse Observer: https://fediverse.observer/stats

They put the whole Fediverse at 1.38M active, so a bit lower than Fedidb. Might be more accurate.

That’s double our monthly size in a single day, ignoring all Bluesky users outside of America, and using their stats from several months that ago when they have probably grown since.

So yeah, they are way bigger than us.

Bunch of spambots there though, but that goes for Fedi as well. So making a proper comparison is impossible. No doubt they have way more users than Mastodon though.

Huh. Do you know of a better alternative?