alyaza [they/she] @ alyaza @beehaw.org

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people.

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this is part of a growing trend of militia people (both acting alone and in unison) intervening in disaster areas--and it doesn't bode well for the future. the first real flashpoint that most people might be aware of is the 2020 wildfires in Oregon, where there were dozens of panics about "antifa infiltrators" that engulfed entire towns, led to militia checkpoints, and saw police officers have to be rebuked by their commanding officers for peddling conspiracies. but it's gotten significantly worse since then--pretty much every wildfire year there's been at least one story of one militia group or another going into a disaster area and causing problems or stopping people randomly.

Agreed that he himself isn’t particularly relevant, but his supporters are still very influential in some areas of the open source community.

hilariously you can see some of the reflexive defense of him over in the FOSS thread of this article. way too many people feel obliged to run defense for this guy and it's just cringeworthy to watch

i mean, whom among us has not said such things, without retraction, as:

Cody Wilson [who at the time of his charging was 30] has been charged with “sexual assault” on a “child” after a session with a sex worker of age 16. [...] The article refers to the sex worker as a “child”, but that is not so. Elsewhere it has been published that she is 16 years old. That is late adolescence, not childhood. Calling teenagers “children” encourages treating teenagers as children, a harmful practice which retards their development into capable adults.

Mere possession of child pornography should not be a crime at all. To prosecute people for possessing something published, no matter what it may be, is a big threat to human rights.

A national campaign seeks to make all US states prohibit sex between humans and nonhuman animals. This campaign seems to be sheer bull-headed prudery, using the perverse assumption that sex between a human and an animal hurts the animal. That’s true for some ways of having sex, and false for others. For instance, I’ve heard that some women get dogs to lick them off. That doesn’t hurt the dog at all. Why should it be prohibited?

and whom among us has not had to retract such positions as:

There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

these are obviously positions that everyone would take the fall for if they had a blog.

Not defending pedophiles, but

you are about to defend pedophilia. rethink this and stop talking.

there was a time when 13 was considered adult.

and? Stallman is not talking about a previous time at any point here. also: that previous time was bad anyways. why would we want to--especially with respect to age of consent--go back to considering 13-year olds and younger to be adults? they cannot meaningfully consent to sexual relations with adults; it's just child abuse. all of this is why Stallman's words are abhorrent.

It’s still legal for teenagers to marry in most countries.

Stallman is not talking about teenagers. he explicitly distinguishes children (again, people <13 for him) from teenagers (people 13-17).

An anonymous hit job

it's literally his own words all the way down here. if it's a "hit job" it's entirely Stallman's own fault for being a freak with morally abhorrent takes. one of the first things mentioned here is that he had to retract the position that "voluntarily pedophilia" doesn't harm children (a category of person he defines as anyone under about 13)! any reasonable person would find this abhorrent and Stallman a horrible person for ever having defended said position in the first place, because it is genuinely abhorrent to defend something like that. that's just child abuse.

he's not particularly relevant at this point, but even this one note (and its retraction) feel like they should put to bed whether or not Richard Stallman should have any influence over anything:

Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.

I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.

[Many years after posting this note, I had conversations with people who had been sexually abused as children and had suffered harmful effects. These conversations eventually convinced me that the practice is harmful and adults should not do it.]

like, bro, what are you doing. beyond being abhorrent, this is the sort of nonsense Reddit used to be infamous for and it made the website fucking rancid. why would anyone want to share a political movement with Stallman when he has to be debated out of positions like "you should not have sexual relations with people under the age of 13."

Rent control primarily benefits renters who stay put for extended periods. While this does have some benefits in allowing tenants who would otherwise be forced out of gentrifying neighborhoods to stay, the problem is that it doesn’t benefit their kids or other less resourced people who didn’t get in early. Since the benefits accrue the longer you stay put, it’s usually older tenants who benefit the most and they often have higher than average levels of wealth among tenants. Meanwhile, tenants who don’t get in early can be harmed by increased prices overall.

there's also the fact that even when it works, it's still a stopgap measure. rent control alone obviously isn't going to bring down already high rent--it basically can't do that--it's just going to lock in a tenant's current current rent price or put a cap on the maximum increase in rent they can experience. and that's only so helpful if your rent is already $1,500/mo or $2,000/mo like it is in many major US cities. you need to do other things to make rent control maximally useful for tenants.

(Mostly rhetorical questions, I just strongly believe that you have an incorrect analysis of this situation and what must be done to change it and am hoping to provide other perspectives because you are not getting it…)

your analysis of the situation is "kamala harris is promising a fascist dictatorship as well [...] She is also promising to purge us." which is, respectfully, a Charlie Brown had hoes level statement. it can be dismissed with prejudice because it's so obviously false.

i have no idea what about this comment is objectionable to you, but whatever it is this is most certainly not the way to object to it.

your rights still depend largely on your zip code.

i mean: this sort of devolution is how all federal systems work, and especially the one established by the Constitution. your issue is very literally with the system here.

accordingly: implying that the problem is the Democrats for not unilaterally overturning the entire constitutional order when they don't have the votes to do that (or anything, for that matter!) is nonsensical. it's not a materialist way of looking at the world. there are obvious constraints that prevent them from doing this. if you want to productively change things, the goal should be to give them (or another faction i suppose, although i have no idea what faction this would be outside of democratic socialism) the political power needed to begin changing the constitutional order. i don't know what other strategy you adhere to which is capable of changing this at scale.

?

If everyone here pressured the Democrats to do better

i don't know why your assumption is that people--especially in this thread--aren't simultaneously doing this. i am literally a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (and have been since... 2019, 2020?) for example. and that activism is a big source of my problem with the arguments in this thread in the first place. there are about 60 DSA state legislators and probably 200 or more local DSA elected officials doing exactly what you're asking right now. two of our members, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, explicitly lost their Congressional seats this year over their activism for Palestine and pressuring the Democrats to do better.

what do the Greens have comparable to that? and how does voting third party do anything to pressure the Democrats that Cori Bush's eviction moratorium protest, or Bowman's DSA-led Green New Deal for Public Schools, or any of the policies i mentioned downthread at Flashmob like the Build Public Renewables Act don't do more effectively? i can show you that Bush fighting for an eviction moratorium helped get that extended; Bowman's GNDPS has led to a surge in activism pressuring local school districts and cities to do the same; and of course, policies like the BPRA are law now. i don't know what voting Jill Stein in 2016 or even Howie Hawkins in 2020 did (and i love Howie, he's a cool guy).

retroactively correcting myself here: the All-Electric Building Act is actually another thing NYC-DSA won and i just didn't realize it. it's pared down from our demand, which was "the state energy conservation construction code shall prohibit infrastructure, building systems, or equipment used for the combustion of fossil fuels in new construction statewide no later than December 31, 2023 if the building is less than seven stories and July 1, 2027 if the building is seven stories or more.", but the actual law ensures the core of the demand is adhered to: going forward most NY buildings will be all-electric.

We are talking about the Democratic Party here.

i'm noticing that you're refusing to engage with the points i'm making describing all the ways in which the Green Party--in contravention of your assertion that they "have to actually work to live"--fails to be a vessel for any sort of serious political action, electoral success, or winning radical demands that would help avert the worst effects of climate change.

anyways, did you know that one of those socialists in office i'm talking about in New York--Jabari Brisport, a guy i know pretty well and who really walks the walk (devout environmentalist and vegan)--ran as a Green Party candidate in 2017 with the backing of New York City Democratic Socialists of America? because he lost 70-30 when he did that (that was a "respectable performance" for a Green Party candidate) and the Greens reaped exactly nothing from him running besides a "moral victory" that they haven't improved on or built off of since.

and strangely, when we ran Jabari again as a Democrat in 2020, he actually won. and because he won, he's a big reason we got the Build Public Renewables Act passed--and a reason why bills such as the Clean Futures Act and the All-Electric Building Act get introduced and debated at all (because he helps introduce them and fight for them on behalf of the chapter). thanks to him, there are now material, working class victories that socialists can point to for why people should elect us over moderate Democrats who don't care about any of this. if he just kept running as a Green, we probably wouldn't have been able to do any of that. running as a Green was a quixotic strategy that accomplished nothing for the working class, and he'd be the first to admit that.

As opposed the tens of trillions thrown down the drain by Democrats, conservatively speaking.

we're not talking about the Democratic Party here. we're talking about whether the Greens are a vehicle for electoral success, and even a basic evaluation of the facts is that no, they aren't. they lose 99.8% of their races above the local level--none of their ostensible local success, which itself is fleeting, translates above the local level.

again: there are more elected socialists in New York's legislature currently--who caucus together on a shared radical platform--than there are Green Party candidates who were elected to a legislature total in the party's now 30ish years of existence. those eight socialists got the Build Public Renewables Act enacted into law (which "will require the state’s public power provider to generate all of its electricity from clean energy by 2030. It also allows the public utility to build and own renewables while phasing out fossil fuels.") and they've pushed for things ranging from the the Clean Futures Act that would "prohibit the development of any new major electric generating facilities that would be powered in whole or in part by any fossil fuel" to the All-Electric Building Act that would prevent "infrastructure, building systems, or equipment used for the combustion of fossil fuels in new construction statewide". what do the Greens do that come anywhere close to this? where is their equivalent of the BPRA being signed into law?

That is why most of what they’ve achieved is at the local level.

the Green Party in my state is opposing a ranked-choice voting initiative because it's not good enough for them and they want proportional representation--when they haven't even run a non-presidential candidate in my state in at least the past four years despite liberal ballot access laws.

their best performing candidate in presidential history is a guy who thinks mom and pop capitalism is fine, and that the real issue with our country is "corporate capitalism" ("It’s corporate capitalism that I’m against. Not small business, Main Street, mom-and-pop capitalism. And the difference is far more than a difference in magnitude. It’s the difference in the quality of power."). his theory of change is fundamentally progressive-liberal at best, but indistinguishable from what people like Elizabeth Warren believe.

there are more open socialists in just the New York state legislature right now (8, all caucusing together, will be 9 next year) than have been elected total above the local level for the Green Party (5). even accounting for party switching, this expands to just 9 people in history. this is not a party which is ever going to be a serious vehicle for left-wing organization, and i would argue it is genuinely detrimental to socialist and left-wing organizing to send people to organize with them. i would literally prefer people not electorally organize than organize with the Greens; they have thrown tens of millions of dollars down the drain for absolutely no benefit.

the issue isn't really with federating messages per se (that's actually quite easy afaik, at least in federation terms), it's with how to display them and everything associated with them. my understanding--based off of the fact that i'm working on a project where we're having to fight how ActivityPub works, and how to display things is a big problem--is that ActivityPub is structured in a way you can be fast and loose with the stuff you're federating, and it's not a super big deal necessarily. but how it displays is a big deal, and that's a total mess. and a lot of that mess begins with how Mastodon does stuff and the need to accommodate its choices (which i think are mostly bad for anything that isn't microblogging, so non-microblog platforms have to design around it). it's then amplified by differences in front-ends and clients, none of which can agree exactly on how to display or handle things, and some of which can't/don't display certain things at all and create differing user experiences as a result.

how Mastodon handles content warnings, for instance, is a big problem. functionally it's just a details tag and i think in ActivityPub it's literally just a "summary" field. but the field is--in addition to being used as a details tag, a readmore, and a summary field--primarily used as the load bearing content warning functionality on Mastodon. so everything has to kind of assume the field will be used the way Mastodon uses it, which is... an issue, to say the least. obviously, not everything can handle that (or wants to handle that) the same way by design, so you get a bunch of differing ways to display the field that might not even contextually make sense for what's in it.

that's what the issue is with translating from Mastodon-to-Lemmy and vice versa, and likewise would probably be the difficulty with translating stuff from forum-to-Lemmy even in a best-case scenario. i'm not even sure what the best way to handle our conversation would be, for example, since forums are often chronological/basically never indent replies/exchanges, but Reddit-alikes like Lemmy allow for different ways of sorting thread replies and do indent exchanges.

interoperability is the problem with this. what "integration with the fediverse" means practically for novel forms of software is "handling a trillion really annoying edge cases that Mastodon created for every other thing that isn't Mastodon." Lemmy, for example, handles interoperation with Mastodon incredibly poorly (and vice versa). you can do it, but for meaningful interaction it's not very good. and forums have their own sets of edge cases that would probably make, say, forum-to-Lemmy interoperation a giant mess.