BlueSky, February 2024

February is both a short and busy month, so I think I wasn't paying as much attention to social media. Plus it's all so overwhelming, amirite? I'm still trying to figure out the difference between my BlueSky feed and what remains of my Twitter feed (which I will post tomorrow). Once again, there weren't a lot of images on BlueSky. More snark on BlueSky, I think, and less politics, or maybe I don't favorite politics posts as much anymore.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account, and is in reverse chronological order. I've moved the few images a bit out of time to spread them apart better.

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A world where no parties gerrymandered would be better than one where there is tit-for-tat partisan warfare but the world where Dems unilaterally capitulate and the US House is controlled by the party that has a minority of voters supporting it is worst of all.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

"A Christmas Carol" except the ghosts show Scrooge the past, present and future downstream effects of microplastics he's responsible for.
Chris Steller

There are so many market failures as to suggest that the idea that markets will fix everything is the failure.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

I sure don’t see why voluntarily dying to protest towering injustice is supposed to be obvious evidence of mental illness but being professionally committed to die for your country’s military interests, which these same people would praise, is not. Is it because one draws a paycheck
Jess Zimmerman

Oh good the two genders. Men in Black or Liberace:


Elle @elleisanisland.bsky.social

Do you know the difference between a Nazi party and a party full of Nazis, because I don't.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

i think that a lot of people in political media *want to believe* that the broad public wants a "moderate abortion compromise" — defined as between what Democrats want and what Republicans want — despite the clear evidence that the broad public wants mostly-unregulated access to abortion services.
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

The old journalism is dying. The new journalism is being smothered in its crib. Now is the time of peers venmoing each other the same five dollars after industry-wide layoffs.
Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social

Another thing the rich used to do is obsess over their legacies, and now they're just like doing donuts with the entire economy while shrieking "NUMBER GOES UPPPPPPP" until every industry is sucked dry and left for dead
Gretchen Felker-Martin @scumbelievable.bsky.social

To ban birth control and recreational sex you must totally destroy the concept of privacy and give the government total power over the intimate lives of its subjects. Despite this being a hopelessly unpopular idea no matter who you ask, sociopaths expressing it continue to gain political power.
Joe Dunman

A society that loved children and/or the future would do almost everything different from this one with it's Gaza ceasefire vetoing, library stripping, health care denying, gigantic car speeding, climate foot dragging, chemical recklessness, etc, etc, etc.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Saying that DEI is “getting” more divisive is pretty egregious use of passive voice, weaseling out of saying who is responsible for the division (hint: it’s the people who have explicitly said their aim is to lie about what DEI is and turn everyone against it)
Neil Stenhouse

I’m not sure that dei programs are all that effective, but it’s very clear that anti-dei as a political tendency is about keeping workplaces as segregated as possible and excluding black people writ large from certain jobs
Adam Serwer

I like how community gardens look from space:


Dan Marshall @danmarstp.bsky.social

This is the great irony. For years experts who study structural inequality have complained that DEI is just corporate window dressing, making only small, if any, impact. Now we are all positioned to defend DEI because it is the new conservative dog whistle for full blown segregationists.
Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social

Listening to 80s music and it's amazing how many songs are basically about men's inability to express any feelings whatsoever, and the notion that this *might* cause relationship issues.
@charliejane.bsky.social

How many heat records need to break before reconsidering the assumptions of the industrial growth economic paradigm?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Why isn’t AI doing the tedious shit for creative people instead of doing the creative shit for tedious people
Isaac Io Schankler @eyesack.bsky.social

Huge “SUVs” and trucks are an obvious policy failure we are going to do nothing about. Another one.
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

There are problems with AI from a labor perspective but the most immediate thing about it that is destroying society is the way that AI-generated content is coating a previously somewhat legible information universe in a thick opaque sludge of ambiguous origin, dubious logic, and impenetrable search
@scoopsstp.bsky.social

What’s behind all these people sketching out brokered convention fantasies is something that always goes unsaid: they hate that voters get to choose candidates and they long for elites in smoke-filled rooms. This is an important thing to remember with America’s punditry. Democracy is disdained.
Jared Yates Sexton

it’s foolish to imagine yourself as immune to scams, but my strategy of never answering the phone for any purpose is pretty much rock solid. the really disheartening thing about the prevalence of scams is that instead of talking about it like a public policy problem, we all act like it’s on every grandma to stay vigilant
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

A couple years back on the bird site I encountered the assertion  "Unsolicited advice is always criticism.  Always." And I have thought long and hard about that since then. And changed some of my behavior.
joel hanes

IMPORTANT: Do NOT expose your cybertruck to sunlight, never get your cybertruck WET, and do NOT under any circumstances feed your cybertruck after midnight.
April Wolfe

About 1 in 5 Americans in 1955 believed Joe McCarthy had been treated very unfairly. About 1 in 5 Americans in 1975 believed Richard Nixon had been treated unfairly. About 1 in 5 Americans in 2010 believed Barack Obama was a Kenyan Muslim. A large portion of the political and media elites who, from the 1960s up to the present, successfully forced the narrative about "the liberal media" into the center of our national discourse were the same people who cultivated the attention of that 20%. People like Ann Coulter or Tucker Carlson. Just because that fairly stable 20% is comprised of mostly white people who consider themselves to be more truly American than their fellow citizens, that doesn't mean that we have to spend so much time talking about them and their cockamamie opinions.
Seth Cotlar

Imagine if you unintentionally or negligently caused a person to die. Imagine how that would haunt you for the rest of your life, assuming you are not a total sociopath. For Elon, for billionaires in general, it's just a thing you shrug off.
Tom Tomorrow

I've often said that 'people don't care' is an insufficient explanation or frame. People actually care about a lot of things. But people also don't know what to DO about a lot of things.
Prisonculture

All my life I heard “the profit motive in health care gives us the best care in the world!” And what actually happened was that the profit motive in health care gave us the most profitable care in the world, a thing that anyone could have told you would happen.
Courtney Milan

The Study:


Tom Flood

When I moved to Canada from the US, the switch in how healthcare was handled was a quality of life improvement on par with when I went from homeless to not homeless lol
DJDynamicNC

Mainstream Media coverage of the Presidential race is focused on memory issues. Like for instance they keep forgetting to mention that Trump is a rapist.
Frank Conniff

The history and tradition of the Constitution are that white people in the south get all the power
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

Just a reminder: the marketplace of ideas metaphor doesn't work if the shitty ideas don't go bankrupt and go away after being widely discredited
Pwnallthethings

Some of us are seen as dangerous because we're not primarily motivated by money. Some of us have turned down opportunities AND checks. Not worth the price of our souls! This is why throughout history, authoritarians have feared artists, activists, teachers, and thinkers. And seek our silencing.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

If you want a good example of how "free speech" is often used as a banner for censoring speech, ask yourself how a corporation can give untold sums of money to super PACs because "money is speech" but you can't donate to a bail fund to to literally free protesters from jail
Gillian Branstetter

Thinking of a bassoon, a farting bedpost
melon @jaredsnyder.bsky.social

Thinking of a harmonica, a melodious organizer for pocket lint
Chris Steller

It gets a LOT simpler to decide what to do when you start with love for the earth and all the people.
Build Soil Plant Chestnuts

Systems:


Tom Flood

There is no amount of increasing border enforcement or deporting people that will ever make the American right wing believe the border is being properly handled by a democratic president. Any compromise on this is just a signal that they can demand more & keep the issue live. Immoral, bad politics.
Kelsey Atherton

There's a reason Nigel Farage is known as "the man who wouldn't take yes for an answer." The minute you cave in to the far-right, they move their demand to something more radical — and keep lying about your position.
Michael Hobbes

Imagine if bodies or ecosystems worked the way most of our meetings, governance systems, and economic systems worked. Sorry, your liver is a sacrifice zone. The heart decided.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Parents don't have rights. Parents have power, and they have responsibilities. Children have rights.
Naomi Kritzer

How long could it possibly take to write that no, a president can’t murder his opponent just because he can find 34 senators who will back him up?
Radley Balko

Yeah, I’ve seen people claim that gay teenagers are being pressured into transitioning so they won’t be gay anymore, which makes absolutely no sense on any level.
@gaygirlboss.bsky.social

"I would like to trade my status as a marginalized minority for one that's even more marginalized" is deranged human behavior and these stories depend on thousands of people doing it.
Michael Hobbes

Everyday, I'm remembering that climate grief should be reserved for things already lost and that the rest is learned (manufactured) helplessness. Grieve species loss, grieve lives lost, plans lost, ecosystem change, soil loss. But don't grieve what's yet to come; organize.
Build Soil Plant Chestnuts

I feel like if you need to resort to this car storage nonsense due to lack of space, maybe you shouldn’t have so many of them in a dense urban environment:


Alex @mplsalex.bsky.social

just learned about a center at/adjacent to UVA that is devoted to bringing "viewpoint diversity" to UVA, which apparently means paying a lot of bog-standard conservatives to give talks on grounds. anyway 7 percent of  undergraduates at UVA, the state's flagship university, were black in the 2022-2023 school year. virginia is 20 percent black. but yeah we need viewpoint diversity
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social