Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

A few fragmentary thoughts about what anarchistic vision evokes for me:

* Deliberation rather than majoritarian voting

* Mutual aid rather than government programs or charity

* Empowerment rather than top-down instruction

Today I visited a natural burial cemetery with my parents, who are considering reserving plots there.

It was really gorgeous! It's all meadow and open woods rather than manicured lawn, and newer burial mounds can be seen here and there. This place (Panorama Burials) is doing lots of work to promote a healthy ecology (native plantings, removal of invasives, respect for tree root zones) but also maintain access.

I'd be pretty happy with that myself.

There's a level of jingoism in the Democratic convention that makes me uncomfortable...

📩 Read in our weekly newsletter (and subscribe):

- Police ignore warnings about press freedom at DNC protests
- As protests return to campus, schools must do better on press freedom
- Why is Chicago removing newsracks?

Plus, what we are reading...

https://freedom.press/newsletter/chicago-police-ignore-journalists-rights/

While I get it, I hate that we measure success as "adding jobs".

Fewer jobs but with improved standards of living for everyone would be great!
https://journa.host/@pbump/113005808516868057

The Chicago police said they didn’t need training on journalists’ rights at protests to prepare for the DNC. But their “abysmal failure” this week proves otherwise.

Officers who threaten and arrest journalists for doing their jobs should lose their own.

https://freedom.press/news/chicago-police-ignore-warnings-about-press-freedom-at-dnc-protests/

California drivers have functionally one choice for a digital license plate vendor. AB 3138 would hand that vendor more data, even though it has failed in the past to secure location data and to meet basic contractual obligations with a state agency. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/digital-license-plates-and-deal-never-had-chance

The time has come: call your local comic shop and pre-order THE TOXIC AVENGER #1 and get in on the entirely new story we are telling.

"it would take between 44 and 104 years for new trees to absorb as much CO2 as the amount generated by #wood #bioenergy that displaces #coal."

“Our conclusion is [replacing coal with wood to generate electricity] actually makes #climate change worse”.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02676-z

Do you see anarchism as more of an affirmative vision of what should be or a resistance to a status quo that shouldn't be?

Do you think of yourself mostly as anarchistic or not anarchistic?

The doctors who want to tell the DNC about the hell they saw in Gaza

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/dnc-palestine-gaza-doctors-uncommitted-israel-kamala-harris/

"We’ve seen the images on social media and elsewhere of the scale of the destruction in Gaza. How did that compare with what you saw firsthand?"

Dr. Rana: There are no words, pictures, or videos that can really capture what’s happening. As soon as we got to the other side of the Gaza border crossing, it was like this dystopian image out of a movie. I mean it was just dust. It was an annihilation of the entire land. It’s not just buildings that were destroyed. There were things that looked like dirt fields, but I was told, That was an orchard. That was this farm."

Join us next Wednesday 28th for two must-see talks at the GDG monthly meetup 🤩 !. Nikhil Suresh, author of Lucidity - Mataroa Blog (@ludicity), will give `A talk about the skills that programmers need to defend both their code and their careers from the reality that the industry has real incentive problems and bad actors’.
Maksim Lin @maks will dive into the Maestro testing framework, the awesome testing tool you’ve never heard of!.
RSVP https://www.meetup.com/gdg-melbourne/events/302732707/

@lightweight I became rather unpopular at our primary school (where my wife was also a teacher) when I suggested that the 'free' software they were using in class to collect all of the kids' learning data, year on year, might actually be a rather poor idea. My explanations earned a number of "No one really cares about that, do they?" type responses.

Ugh. Listening to this woman talking about this 'info gathering' tool that she's using. I wonder how much she knows how that software is funded? I suspect it's by 'advertising' - monetising children's data. I wish Jesse Mulligan would ask that sort of thing. And yeah, the use of of these tools and social media by school kids are both fraught. She's calling the tool - which is spying on the kids, somehow, to gather data - 'easier'/less intimidating than actually talking to them.

I'm assuming this Chick-fil-a initiative (if it's true) is about injecting more US-style Christianity into the media there. Wow, blech. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/chick-fil-a-cooking-up-new-family-friendly-video-streaming-service/

The fact check pedants can't say these are fake until they publish the real ones. https://brianmcfadden.org/2024/08/15/leaked-emails-from-the-trump-campaign/

Join us playing #HurryCurry together: Check it out from https://codeberg.org/hurrycurry/hurrycurry and have some fun with us (playing now, live).

(We tested the flatpak version, feel free to ping if you have trouble joining)

#Codeberg #LibreGaming #linuxgaming #Godot #Gaming #foss_gaming #CommunitySpotlight

@mike_hales tells me that volume three of Stephen Yeo's 3 vol. history of socialism and cooperativism is now out:

A Useable Past

The History of Association, Cooperation and un-Statist Socialism in 19th and early 20th century Britain. ​

Volume 3. Class Conflict and Co-operation in 19th and 20th Century Britain. Education for Association: re-membering for a new moral world.