Tootfinder

TL;DR: what if instead of denying the harms of fascism, we denied its suppressive threats of punishment
Many of us have really sharpened our denial skills since the advent of the ongoing pandemic (perhaps you even hesitated at the word "ongoing" there and thought "maybe I won't read this one, it seems like it'll be tiresome"). I don't say this as a preface to a fiery condemnation or a plea to "sanity" or a bunch of evidence of how bad things are, because I too have honed my denial skills in these recent years, and I feel like talking about that development.
Denial comes in many forms, including strategic information avoidance ("I don't have time to look that up right now", "I keep forgetting to look into that", "well this author made a tiny mistake, so I'll click away and read something else", "I'm so tired of hearing about this, let me scroll farther", etc.) strategic dismissal ("look, there's a bit of uncertainty here, I should ignore this", "this doesn't line up perfectly with my anecdotal experience, it must be completely wrong", etc.) and strategic forgetting ("I don't remember what that one study said exactly; it was painful to think about", "I forgot exactly what my friend was saying when we got into that argument", etc.). It's in fact a kind of skill that you can get better at, along with the complementary skill of compartmentalization. It can of course be incredibly harmful, and a huge genre of fables exists precisely to highlight its harms, but it also has some short-term psychological benefits, chiefly in the form of muting anxiety. This is not an endorsement of denial (the harms can be catastrophic), but I want to acknowledge that there *are* short-term benefits. Via compartmentalization, it's even possible to be honest with ourselves about some of our own denials without giving them up immediately.
But as I said earlier, I'm not here to talk you out of your denials. Instead, given that we are so good at denial now, I'm here to ask you to be strategic about it. In particular, we live in a world awash with propaganda/advertising that serves both political and commercial ends. Why not use some of our denial skills to counteract that?
For example, I know quite a few people in complete denial of our current political situation, but those who aren't (including myself) often express consternation about just how many people in the country are supporting literal fascism. Of course, logically that appearance of widespread support is going to be partly a lie, given how much our public media is beholden to the fascists or outright in their side. Finding better facts on the true level of support is hard, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about the "fact" that Trump has widespread popular support?
To give another example: advertisers constantly barrage us with messages about our bodies and weight, trying to keep us insecure (and thus in the mood to spend money to "fix" the problem). For sure cutting through that bullshit by reading about body positivity etc. is a better solution, but in the meantime, why not be in denial about there being anything wrong with your body?
This kind of intentional denial certainly has its own risks (our bodies do actually need regular maintenance, for example, so complete denial on that front is risky) but there's definitely a whole lot of misinformation out there that it would be better to ignore. To the extent such denial expands to a more general denial of underlying problems, this idea of intentional denial is probably just bad. But I sure wish that in a world where people (including myself) routinely deny significant widespread dangers like COVID-19's long-term risks or the ongoing harms of escalating fascism, they'd at least also deny some of the propaganda keeping them unhappy and passive. Instead of being in denial about US-run concentration camps, why not be in denial that the state will be able to punish you for resisting them?

As we continue down this path of escalating nihilistic meme violence, it can feel like the worst things have become viral. We are drowning in the memetic effluent of a capitalist media that profits by maximizing engagement. But I wonder if anyone remembers "Pay it Forward?"
A movie came out in 2000 about a kid who started a viral kindness campaign. The idea was that you do something nice for someone else with the expectation that they do the same in the future. I never really saw the movie, but I do remember the time. There were a few weeks, maybe a few months, where people started doing it. People would just be randomly nice, and everything actually just started feeling better.
Over time, the world caught up. Capitalism consumed the whole thing, and life went back to normal. 9/11 happened the next year, and the US started down the path of becoming the most twisted and evil version of itself. But there was a short time that doing nice stuff was a viral meme, a thing that people just started doing.
Gun violence doesn't have to be the only viral meme we have. We can make good things happen too.

I've filed a report about a minor problem with a #Python package, namely that the source distribution contained some trailing junk that breaks GNU #tar. On one hand, I'm happy that upstream took the issue seriously. On the other hand, I'm terrified of how much #AI slop was involved in the response.
I mean, my short bug report yielded a few walls of text of #LLM analysis of what the cause of the problem might be, of suggested solutions… and praise of the author's fix. These are interspersed with short comments from the author, all pasted under their own personal account. And the linked pull request is also huge, with "verification code" that's quite sloppy (bits that don't do anything, conditions that will never be true… but at least it seems to do what it was supposed to do).
Honestly, I don't know what to do. Not that I ever planned using this package, but at this point I will definitely stay away from it. It's in #Gentoo, and I'll have to continue maintaining it for the sake of reverse dependencies, but I feel like it's unfair to expose our users to packages that have clearly proven to accept AI slop without reviewing it properly. Or rather, AI slop that's being reviewed… by AI. How can anyone think this a good idea?!
There were multiple times in my life when I've considered retiring from Gentoo, for variety of reasons. There were also multiple times when I wanted to get away from computers altogether. Unfortunately, we're living in a truly fucked up world, and there is no escape. The best you can do is put an ever increasing effort to keep fixing all that crap that will just keep piling on faster and faster.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource