Glorified network janitor. Perpetual blueteam botherer. Friendly neighborhood cyberman. Constantly regressing toward the mean. Slowly regarding silent things.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • I generally try to use RSS feeds, but I’ve come to realize this doesn’t really work too well with current-/world news, because it becomes a firehose that drowns my entire feed. So these days, I just have my other interests in RSS feeds and use the BBC and The Guardian front pages to quickly get a summary of current events. I also visit my local newspaper site for headlines (they put their stuff behind paywall though, so it’s just headlines).

    I’ve culled my social media to Lemmy and Mastodon and I use pretty aggressive word filtering on Mastodon to get rid of topics I’m not very interested in.

    It’s not perfect by no means, but I haven’t really found anything else that works. I wish I had some better way to follow European and African news and commentary, but everything (apart from manually visiting sites) seems to always result in a firehose of news that drowns all other sources.







  • I’ve been politically active most of my life and I’ve voted (I’ve got a dual citizenship, so I can vote in two countries, which I’ve done), however, as I’ve grown older and am now nearing retirement age, I’ve realized the futility of it all. The same elite politicians are still in power. They still top their party ballots (“the big names”, “heavy hitters”) and normally get auto-elected to the parliament. They are creatures that live within the system and thus the system never changes. Issues haven’t been solved - at most we’ve reached some kind of muddled centrist consensus and agreement that “this is what it is” - there’s actually very little reform and every mandate period with sways a bit, like a wave reaching to hit the beach to wash away the sand castle but not quite reaching.

    The old truism of “people being more conservative as they age” has been completely opposite for me. In my youth I was probably liberal, slightly right leaning democrat - these days I’m very firmly anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist libertarian socialist and believe in self-governance and workers’ self-management. I organize whatever I can in my local community but I’ve stopped voting (I don’t resent anyone else for voting - please do if you believe it’s useful).

    When it comes to the political system in the U.S - I have opinions of course. Largely irrelevant, since I don’t live there, but I find it hard to “fix” something that wasn’t designed to be fixed in the first place. Cory alluded to it in his post, but the founding form of the union was not really intended for greater social justice, cultural realization or to allow the repressed to politically participate. It was for a small group (the political elite) to rule on behalf of wealth of the nation, and the majority’s decision-making was confined to choosing among a select number of their peers within tightly controlled elective processes.

    It sort of “consensual domination” made possible by the concentration of global capital, which allows concentration of political power. I think it’s hard to fix something that was designed to sail off course. I think the better option would be to change the system.

    But I don’t deny that we could make it better. Considerably so. Many of those things you list would improve and reform. But in the end it would still be the same system.

    Sorry for the wall of text. Not sure if that made much sense - I hope it was somewhat coherent and not just my braincells having a spat of ADHD.