Hi friends,
The http://alt-text.org alt text library project needs a new leader, because I have brain cancer.
I would like to connect with the #accessibility dev community, something I have never figured out, probably in part for neurodivergence reasons. I want to hand the project off to a team or a leader if anyone is willing to take it over.
Github: https://github.com/alt-text-org
WIP MVP: a site designed for writing alt text with a private library: https://my.alt-text.org
Boosts appreciated
I'm a Jew who's been afraid at Palestine protests.
Then, I learned more. I learned that I didn't know what people were chanting. I learned there was a lot to unlearn.
Then I decided I don't want my identity used to shield a genocidal apartheid state.
Some people in The Comments seem to be misunderstanding my point to be that individual actions don't matter. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that actions which influence and restrain institutions are the only ones that matter on the scale of institutions, which is the actual scale of the problem.
Your neighbor throwing out a bottle is unfortunate, but every ounce of effort you expend on being mad at them, rather than the company that made a billion bottles last year, is wasted.
Two rival gangs had divided up the city between them and agreed to a code of conduct.
But one day, one gang thought that other had encroached on its territory too closely.
“This is our part of the city and these are our people to exploit!”
So the gang attacked the other, killing some gangsters inside its own territory.
So THAT gang launched its own attack, gunning down a few of its rivals and a bunch of innocent bystanders.
Maybe we shouldn’t have gangs ruling and exploiting and murdering us?
“Noooo!” cried the liberal institutionalist. “Those gangs had an agreement. It had a right to retaliate. A riiiiiiiight!”
The problem with Johnstone being censored, over and above the imperative to respect free speech, is that it gives an aura of subversive legitimacy to a propagandist lunatic. @Caitoz isn't a "well known alt journalist", she is a red-brown crackpot, a left-branded wannabe Alex Jones, who weaponizes justified opposition to Western capitalism and imperialism to whitewash open support for fascist governments in Russia and China. She deserves not to be silenced, because she deserves the chance to be discredited by exposing her hypocritical nonsense to bright sunshine.
I warned you, stopping fascism is difficult, it's messy, and sometimes it requires you to sacrifice things you believe dearly, to be successful. I cannot end capitalism if I'm already dead because some nazis put two in the back of my skull. I have absolutely not choice but to talk to people who want nice things, don't have any capital, yet somehow still believe their liberal capitalists. Either I get those people on my side, or I'm dead.
I did not make the hellworld; I'm just trying to win.
Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has died in prison, presumably murdered on the orders of Vladimir Putin.
In the run-up to the rigged Russian elections this March, the puppet opposition figure Boris Nadezhdin became a rallying point for genuine anti-war sentiment and subsequently began to act in defiance of the Kremlin—not unlike how Yevgeny Prigozhin began as Putin's lackey but eventually struck out on his own. In this context, Putin likely feels that he cannot afford to permit any opposition figure to remain alive.
Navalny himself does not interest us. As a Russian anarchist put it a couple years ago,
"Navalny is an opportunistic ultra-nationalist bigot of a politician who paints himself as a populist using a narrative of anti-corruption politics that would only prop up a different batch of oligarchs."
Still, the protests when Navalny was arrested in 2021 were arguably one of the last expressions of the kind of mass resistance that could have prevented the invasion of Ukraine:
https://crimethinc.com/2021/01/24/letter-from-russia-on-the-protests-of-january-23
The recent events in Russia show that when authoritarians like Putin or Donald Trump gain power, it is only the beginning of the bloodshed.
But the tendency to rally around opposition figures rather than developing horizontal networks of resistance is part of the problem.
I have no hope, but I don't need it anymore. It's not like I'm giving up.
There’s a certain kind of shill who can watch the Israeli state chase a mass of brutalized, starving Palestinians civilians into Rafah and then prepare to chase them back out of Rafah and still somehow deny genocide because it doesn’t look like their idealized imagining of a genocide.
When we tell you "German liberals and centrists appeased the fascists, merc'd the left and then were surprised when they ultimately lost to the Nazis" this is what we mean.
This is why I'm considering phasing out casual use of social media. The spaces are crawling with trolls who will accuse me of bad faith if I insist to keep communicating across difficult but surmountable lines of difference - and then conversely, to gaslight me that I'm asking too much when I call people on their shit when they're across the lines I cannot surmount - but across which I must communicate for the sake of, like, survival (*cough* ECOCIDE *cough* GENOCIDE *cough*).
I'm aware that this situation was partly generated by algorithms on commercial sites that boosted outrage for clicks - I never really liked e.g. Facebook and I've been dormant there for almost 10 years, but I had some actually constructive conversations there prior to ~2012 that I cannot seem to have anymore.
Masto seems better - I don't have much experience - but I do like to keep my timeline diverse in ideology & interests, and it looks like a lot of people whose bad behavior thrived on commercial social media have crossed over too.
I wonder if I'll need to wait until they all suspend me 😂
We understand that stepping back from the platform formerly known as Twitter remains difficult as long as so many trusted voices continue to prioritize it. By adopting the X-last approach, you can take collective action to address Elon Musk's hateful and dangerous direction: http://www.xlast.org
I would tell you that you should boycott all aspects of the Super Bowl, but I know that for almost all non-Native Americans a football game is more important than their anti-racism and caring about Native/Indigenous people.
Repeating for those who missed it:
"British Channel 4 (publicly owned commercial tv, not government funded) has examined “confidential Israeli documents” regarding #Israel’s claim that #UNRWA staff were involved in the #Oct7 attacks.
The network reports Israel has “provided no evidence” in its charges against UNRWA personnel."
Zero evidence. That's all it took for US-Satrap Nations to starve more #Gaza #Palestinians and deprive them of aid. A complete fabrication that UN workers were #Hamas.
Científico antinómico