Tootfinder

kegbreath is too drunk to realize he, himself, from fully public and open statements, is being quoted.
Remove him from office and ban him from future federal office, now.
#USpol #hegseth #hegsethPete

Glasfaserausbau: Bundesregierung bringt TKG-Novelle auf den Weg
Mit der Novelle des Telekommunikationsgesetzes soll das Ende des Kupferzeitalters offiziell besiegelt werden – doch das wird dauern.
https://www…

Glasfaserausbau: Bundesregierung bringt TKG-Novelle auf den Weg
Mit der Novelle des Telekommunikationsgesetzes soll das Ende des Kupferzeitalters offiziell besiegelt werden – doch das wird dauern.

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

🎶 Watching Eurovision this week? 🎶
Good on you!
Don’t let a little genocide keep you from enjoying your singalong.
#eurovision #Eurovision2026 #eurovisionSongConteat

I wanna jump one more time on the whole "distraction" framing, because this is a point that needs to be hammered home (and I need a reminder to write something longer).
Attacks on trans youth are not a distraction from other types of coercion, they are central to it. Attacks on trans youth come from a conceptualization of children as property, which is literally patriarchy in the Roman sense of the legal objectification all people who share a household as belonging to a man. This legal structure, Roman slave law, continues to be the root of property rights and therefore the foundation of capitalism.
But colonialism also extends from it through the infantalization of colonized people as a justification for oppression. This can also be turned inward again manifesting as the justification for police (that is, some people "can't handle themselves and need external authority to act right").
The #Epstein stuff isn't some weird thing that rich people get away with, it's core to how wealth works. Money isn't useful by itself, it's a proxy for power. One manifestation of power is being able to violate laws that constrain others (this is the "freedom of the monarch" that Graeber talks about in Dawn of Everything). The war in Iran, especially the threats of nuclear weapons and genocide is not a distraction from the #EpsteinFiles, but rather a manifestation of the same thing.
Power must be demonstrated to affirm that it is real. War is a demonstration power. Violating the law without consequences is a demonstration of power. The most taboo things are using nuclear weapons and child sexual abuse. He has already done one of those, and he is going to do everything he can to do the other.
These are not distractions, these are all manifestations of the underlying thing that we need to fight. But we need to make sure we're fighting it as a single thing. We have to tie these things together, because if we do not then we risk reproducing the same thing again but worse.

«Wenn KI-Gesichtserkennung falsch liegt — Dieser Mann musste zu Unrecht 50 Tage ins Gefängnis:
Ein Mann wurde zu #Unrecht verhaftet und 50 Tage lang im #Gefängnis festgehalten. Der Grund - Eine KI hatte den Familienvater per

Wenn KI-Gesichtserkennung falsch liegt: Dieser Mann musste zu Unrecht 50 Tage ins Gefängnis | t3n
Ein Mann wurde zu Unrecht verhaftet und 50 Tage lang im Gefängnis festgehalten. Der Grund: Eine KI hatte den Familienvater per Gesichtserkennung als möglichen Täter identifiziert. Mittlerweile setzen mehrere Polizeieinheiten auf der ganzen Welt auf Künstliche Intelligenz, um sie bei ihrer Arbeit zu unterstützen. Die Arbeitserleichterung kann aber schnell nach hinten losgehen, wie mehrere Fälle […]

"Northern Thai residents march for action on polluted rivers. ‘This is an emergency’"
#Thailand #Pollution #Rivers

Northern Thai residents march for action on polluted rivers. 'This is an emergency'
BANGKOK — More than 600 residents of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces embarked May 31 on a roughly 68-kilometer, six-day ‘peace walk’ to demand the Thai government take action on the river pollution crisis that has seen Thai rivers polluted with heavy metals. The ensemble of affected residents, civil society groups, monks and students […]

"A genocide abroad is helping usher in fascism at home. Poll after poll shows the UK and US publics have switched their support from the #Israelis to the #Palestinians. And the response from the pro- #Israel

«Nach grossen #Datenleck's — #Schweiz'er Rechtsanwalt erklärt, was zählt - und wo es klemmt:
#Cyber-Erpresser drohen, gestohlene Fotos von Schulkindern zu veröffentlichen. Und private Parkplatzüberw…

Datenlecks: Schweizer Rechtsanwalt erklärt, was Betroffene tun können
Fälle wie bei Funkwache und Unisecur oder Schuelfoti werfen unbequeme Fragen auf. Der Rechtsanwalt Martin Steiger ordnet ein.

Just finished "Future Home of the Living God" by Louise Erdrich. It's a beautiful and entrancing novel in many ways, but I couldn't bring myself to like the ending. I think in one of my most recent book posts I complained about a deus ex machina, so it's ironic that in this case as the pages dwindled I was fully prepared to accept and even welcome one, especially with all of the deus-related stuff going on already. I am left profoundly unsure as to whether Erdrich imagines a positive future beyond our current oppressions, or just futility, when for most of the book it seemed like the former, which is something I seek out in earnest these days. It is of course impressive that a book about innocents being hunted through the streets of Minneapolis & Saint Paul, while a volunteer citizens network organizes to keep them safe, could be published in 2017. There are strong echoes of Octavia Butler here, and in both cases I think it's a marginalized position which allows authors to see with clarity that most mainstream authors miss or don't even attempt.
I think I will seek out more of Erdrich's writing, but only after a bit of a break.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon