Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

I've been asking myself variations of this question ever since I first took a trip to a "poor country" and had the scales fall from my eyes about what our world actually is:

"What is the point of our moral ideals in a world where people can endlessly express care and concern for others—those living in zones of everyday poverty or spaces of terror like Gaza and Tigray—but do nothing in practice?"

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/moral-limits/

Oh, were two Israeli government officials murdered? Please let me know when the number gets to 50,000 and I’ll consider reviewing my preferential trade agreements with Palestine.

#israel #genocide #Palestine #Gaza #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism

Netanyahu wants to achieve 'total victory' in Gaza. Any criticism of Israel is antisemitism. Today's cartoon by Luc Vernimmen. More cartoons: https://www.cartoonmovement.com/search?query=&sort=created&order=desc

#Gaza #Netanyahu #genocide

#Adobe just raised its prices, some are over US$100 a month 😬

Stop paying rent on your tools, switch to #FOSS alternatives:

➡️ @kdenlive - Video editing

➡️ @ardour - Digital audio workstation

➡️ @tenacity - Audio editing

➡️ @Blender@mastodon.social (main) & @blender@video.blender.org (videos) - 3D animation & video effects

➡️ @Krita@mastodon.art (main) & @krita@tube.kockatoo.org (videos) - Painting & illustration

➡️ @inkscape - Vector drawing

➡️ @darktable - Organise & develop raw photos

➡️ @www.scribus.net.news - Desktop publishing (feed)

welcome to the future, now your error-prone software can call the cops

(this is an Anthropic employee talking about Claude Opus 4)

#ai

When I had my hysterectomy, I was told recovery would be quick because I was young, fit & otherwise healthy.

They were wrong. The surgeon made an error and despite signs of post op bleeding, discharged me & went on vacation.

When I returned to the ER, I was ignored & gaslit

They told me it was “normal” to be in more pain 8 days after surgery than on day 1 (it’s not).

They said “what do you want us to do?”

They refused to run any tests beyond basic vitals, and scolded me for wasting their time

I knew something was wrong, but I was young and hadn’t yet learned how to advocate for myself.

The pain, swelling and bruising were getting worse with each passing day. I was dizzy, listless and had no appetite.

I slept ALL the time.

I was not getting better

I did what anyone would do, I went back to the ER. Surely this time they would take me seriously?

They didn’t. They made no attempt to hide their frustration that I had returned”. They made misogynistic comments about how “sensitive” I was & that being in pain was normal

I went home feeling completely dejected and disrespected, but also starting to gaslight myself.

Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe this was normal pain. Maybe I did need to suck it up.

I tried to force myself to eat and go for light walks. I tried to play through the pain.

I was vomiting everything up and frequently collapsing from fatigue.

I could not suck this up.

My boyfriend had to carry me into the ER for a third attempt to get help

They did the exact same thing. Asked what we expected them to do. Told us the pain was normal. Refused to call a consult or run tests.

Thankfully my boyfriend believed me over them. He was certain if I went home, I wouldn’t make it through the night

He refused to let them discharge me. He told them, loudly and sternly, that he was not taking me home to die. That they needed to do their jobs.

They threatened to call security but he did not back down.

Thankfully a doctor overheard him and decided to look in and see if he could calm the situation.

When he saw me, half unconscious and white as a ghost, he immediately ordered tests. He told the triage staff not to call security and to take me into a private room

It turns out my boyfriend was right. Had I gone home that night, I wouldn’t have made it to morning.

I had a massive internal bleed and a giant infected abscess which had been growing since the surgeon sent me home.

I was rushed to another hospital for emergency surgery and given 50/50 odds of survival. I spent over a month in the hospital, developed a second hospital acquired infection, and needed 11 months to fully recover.

I survived due to luck & privilege. Had my boyfriend not believed me, I wouldn’t be here. Had he not been a white man? He likely would have been removed & I would have died

This is medical misogyny. They didn’t listen because I was a woman. They thought I was being dramatic

I tell this story because of what happened to Adriana Smith. A young black woman in Georgia who tried to get medical care for severe headaches, and was dismissed and gaslit instead.

She suffered brain death at home because no one believed her. Because of misogynoir.

To make matters worse, she’s been turned into a medical experiment because she was nine weeks pregnant and living in a state with an abortion ban. She’s on organ & tissue support being treated as a human incubator.

No care when alive & forced “care” when dead

Misogyny in medicine kills. It maims. It disables and traumatizes.

Women are frequently treated as hysterical and not given the medical care they require.

We often need a man to accompany us just to be taken seriously.

It’s not right and it needs to change

I will forever deal with medical PTSD because of what I went through, but at least I survived.

Adriana wasn’t so lucky, and no one’s survival should ever be based on luck, privilege or their ability to find a man to speak for them

I survived due to luck and privilege, Adriana didn’t.

What’s worse, due to abortion bans and dangerous forced birth policies, her body is kept alive on organ and tissue support without her family’s consent.

We must do better:

https://www.disabledginger.com/p/adriana-smith-misogyny-and-the-cruelty

#misogyny #misogynoir #ableism #patriarchy #abortion #mybodymychoice #disability #ableism #uspol

If you are protesting the Trump regime's war on America, you need to know your rights. (You need to know them regardless.)

The ACLU is offering training: https://act.aclu.org/a/2025-kyr-training-2

h/t @jennifer

Finally! A decent AI risk management tool!

https://airiskbutt.com/

In addition, despite claims that ShotSpotter only records audio of gunshots, the microphones are in fact always on, and there have been instances of the police submitting ShotSpotter recordings of human voices as evidence in criminal trials.

Did.a video on the raw milk thing!

Contents: media literacy about agriculture & lots of talk about poop. Because cows

https://youtu.be/piB_DdO2D6I?si=LWwsq-t3jP_Wftg8

BROOKLYN! Pop in at 6pm tonight for a screening of InterRebellium @ P.I.T. (Property is Theft), organized in collaboration with the NYC anarchist book fair.

#Trump’s tax bill to cost 830,000 jobs and drive up bills and pollution emissions, experts warn - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/22/trump-republican-tax-bill "demolish key components of climate legislation signed by Joe Biden that has spurred a record torrent of renewable energy and electric vehicle investment in the US."

EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis - https://www.iccl.ie/digital-data/eu-ruling-tracking-based-advertising-by-google-microsoft-amazon-x-across-europe-has-no-legal-basis/ this is big #tcf #adtech

We cleaned up our forgejo setup & noted down the steps needed to sso intrgrate forgejo in keycloak:

https://domaindrivenarchitecture.org/

#forgejo #sso #keycloak

Recent leaks have undermined the kinds of lies that the drafters of the Constitution intended journalists to expose when they wrote the First Amendment’s press clause.

That’s exactly why journalist-source confidentiality needs protecting.

https://freedom.press/issues/recent-leaks-reinforce-why-journalist-source-confidentiality-needs-protecting/

"I believe this process has created a symbolic society — one where people are elevated not by any actual ability to do something or knowledge they may have, but by their ability to make the right noises and look the right way to get ahead. The power structures of modern society are run by business idiots — people that have learned enough to impress the people above them, because the business idiots have had power for decades..."
[link in previous toot]

Ed Zitron doing a pretty solid impression of a modern-day Veblen here.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

This is probably obvious to everyone already, but I jotted down a brief note about why having a `robots.txt` matters when creating tarpits for LLM bot zombies scouring the web for content--even when, especially when, they don't read them.

https://inkdroid.org/2025/05/22/tarpit/

This week’s comic is now up on Daily Kos
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THE NEW SNEETCHES
-
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/22/2323427/-Cartoon-Tom-the-Dancing-Bug-and-The-New-Sneetches