#Facebook Groups Posting Service

[moregraceful]

hope everyone who got a creator subscription notif from me today realizes something deeply unwell and bizarre happened to me in march

[cleoselene]

from facebook of all places

posted by Jay Michaelson, and sourced by him as well:

Hello! I'm posting in response to the many sincerely anguished claims that not enough is being done to stop Trump. This is not reflected in the facts. - Represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group and State Democracy Defenders Fund, the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) filed suit on Monday against the Treasury Department “for sharing confidential data with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), run by Elon Musk.” Go to Public Citizen's website to learn all about this lawsuit, which is very likely to prevail. - On USAID, appearing with other Democratic lawmakers outside USAID offices on Monday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) shouted, “Elon Musk, you didn't create USAID. The United States Congress did for the American people … like Elon Musk did not create USAID, he doesn't have the power to destroy it. And who's going to stop him? We are... This a constitutional crisis that we are in today.” Lawsuits have also been filed in this matter, and are also likely to prevail. - Hakeem Jeffries has announced lawsuits have been filed regarding the firings of inspectors general. - On Jan 21, Democracy Forward, was filed at 12:01 p.m. ET on Monday and accused Elon Musk's DOGE of being a "shadow operation led by unelected billionaires" that flouts federal transparency rules. That should win. - National Security Counselors filed a suit arguing that DOGE meets the requirements to be a federal advisory committee and is therefore legally required to have "fairly balanced" representation, keep regular minutes of meetings and allow public access to meetings. Clearly accurate. - Eighteen state attorneys general and a slew of immigrants' rights groups brought swift legal action against Trump after he signed his executive order seeking to ban birthright citizenship for some children born in the U.S., arguing that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Obviously, clearly unconstitutional. - "Schedule F" has been challenged in court by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents employees in 37 agencies and departments. - Several immigrant rights groups in the United States, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s ban on asylum claims. - GLAD Law and the National Center For Lesbian Rights (NCLR) have sued to stop Trump's ban on trans people in the military. And there are many more - I'll link to a great list of them in the comments. Yes, there are Trump judges in the courts, and if Aileen Cannon types get these cases, Trump may prevail. But most judges are not like her. These actions are clearly illegal and/or unconstitutional, and they WILL be stopped. Just like the tariffs were not meant to prevail -- Trump won that round, "forcing" Canada and Mexico to take "action" on fentanyl -- these actions are not meant to prevail. They're meant to flood the zone with shit, confuse and immobilize us. They said they'd do "Shock and Awe" and that's what they've done. Nothing here should be surprising. Shock and Awe is up to YOU. I am not shocked, I am not in awe. Oh, and the "mainstream media" has reported on all of these. The info above has come from Newsweek, the NY Times, and other mainstream sources. Please stop attacking journalists when we are being threatened by the FBI. Who do you think you're helping by doing that? Stop it with the doomsaying and gloomsaying. Want to make a difference? Give thousands of dollars to Public Citizen, the ACLU, and similar groups. Show up at marches. Put your ass on the line and help protect people from ICE. If you're safe, do simple symbolic things (like changing your social media pictures) to support people who are not safe. Just like we should not obey in advance, we should not panic in advance either. This is not the end of democracy. That is just what the bad guys want you to think. Get over it and fight.

I don't know how many times I've heard "Dems do nothing!" when they are in fact doing a lot of things. You just don't hear about it because the mainstream news doesn't pay attention or you don't see out news beyond your social media feeds.

The other thing is, Dems don't break laws in their fights the way Republicans do. Your desire to turn every Dem POTUS into the Dick Cheney Version of the Executive but then screaming injustice! when the GOP does it -- you see the problem there?

[kkoffin]

We have lost in giggle v tickle. A woman who made a female-only app has been ordered by the high court of Australia to pay $10k to a man who was rejected from joining, under the sex discrimination act.

The $10k isn't at all what matters - what matters is that males are now legally entitled to join any female-only space in Australia. Women's single-sex spaces and services have no legal protection, as this precedent deems exclusion of males who decide, even on a whim, that they will call themselves women, is discrimination. Under the sex discrimination act.

Women's sports, bathrooms, prisons, lesbian dating apps, women's facebook groups, book clubs, feminist groups. Men are entitled to see everything going on in these groups and spaces. Women's safety in prisons, bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports is lost. This decision will effect the rest of the western world, and will not stay within Australia.

We've lost a lot of safety, and legally speaking we might have to pretend they are women, but we have not lost the ability to speak. Until speaking is illegal, we need to keep doing it. We cannot safely speak in private groups now. We must let men know what we are saying, and say it out loud. Say to their faces. Let the governments know that women are saying no, and women won't lay down and die, pretending there's no difference between us and a man in a dress in our changing rooms. We are not protected from them, but we can still speak against it. KEEP SPEAKING AGAINST IT. LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU THINK.

I know there's very few good voting options right now, seemingly all legislators hate women one way or another, we need to be known, as a considerable voting group. We need more gender critical women going into politics. If we make ourselves known, legislators will begin to consider our needs and wants. I know the risk young people face when being open with these opinions - losing friends, employment, family etc, but you need to do as much as you can. Post anonymously, join protests, donate to groups, BE LOUD! Our rights are being reversed.

The sex discrimination act was used to legally entitle men to all female spaces. The sex discrimination act was used to make female-only spaces and services illegal. This is going backwards. Laws made to protect us are the same laws being used to take our safety away.

[mariacallous]

Remember ivermectin? The animal-deworming medication was used so avidly as an off-label COVID treatment during the pandemic that some feed stores ended up going out of stock. (MUST SHOW A PIC OF YOU AND YOUR HORSE, a sign at one demanded of would-be customers in 2021.) If you haven’t heard about it since, then you’ve existed blissfully outside the gyre of misinformation and conspiracies that have come to define the MAGA world’s outlook on medicine. In the past few years, ivermectin’s popularity has only grown, and the drug has become a go-to treatment for almost any ailment whatsoever. Once a suspect COVID cure, now a right-wing aspirin.

In fact, ivermectin never really worked for treating SARS-CoV-2 infections. Many of the initial studies that hinted at a benefit turned out to be flawed and unreliable. By 2023, a series of clinical trials had already proved beyond a doubt that ivermectin won’t reduce COVID symptoms or mortality. But these findings mattered little to its fans, who saw the drug as having earned the status of dissident antiviral—a treatment that they believed had been suppressed by the medical establishment. And if ivermectin was good enough to be rejected by mainstream doctors as a cure for COVID, health-care skeptics seemed to reason, then surely it must have a host of other uses too.

As a physician who diagnoses cancer, I have come across this line of thinking in my patients, and found that some were using ivermectin to treat their life-threatening tumors. Nicholas Hornstein, a medical oncologist in New York City, told me that he’s had the same experience: About one in 20 of his patients ask about the drug, he said. He remembers one woman who came into his office with a tumor that was visibly protruding from her abdomen, having swapped her chemotherapy for some ivermectin that she’d picked up at a veterinary-supply store. “It’s going to work any day now,” he says she told him when he tried to intervene.

The idea that ivermectin could be a cancer-fighting agent does have some modest basis in reality: Preliminary studies have suggested that antiparasitic medications might inhibit tumor growth, and at least one ongoing clinical trial is evaluating ivermectin’s role as an adjunct to cancer treatment. That study has enrolled only nine patients, however, and the results so far show that just one patient’s tumor actually shrank, according to a recent scientific abstract. But these meager grounds for hope now support a towering pile of expectations.

Cancer is just one of many illnesses that ivermectin is supposed to heal. According to All Family Pharmacy, a Florida-based company that promotes the compound to fans of Donald Trump Jr., Dan Bongino, Matt Gaetz, and Laura Ingraham on their podcasts and shows, the drug has “anti-inflammatory properties that could help keep the immune system balanced in fighting infection.” (The company did not respond to a request for comment.) In sprawling Facebook groups devoted to ivermectin’s healing powers, the claims are more extreme: The drug can combat a long list of conditions, members say, including Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, diabetes, autism, carpal tunnel syndrome, crow’s feet, brain fog, and bee stings.

As a medication that supposedly was censored by elites—if not canceled outright by woke medicine and Big Pharma—ivermectin has become a symbol of medical freedom. It’s also a MAGA shibboleth: Republican-leaning parts of the country helped drive an astounding 964 percent increase in prescriptions for the drug early in the pandemic, and GOP members of Congress have used their official posts to advocate for its benefits. Ivermectin can now be purchased without a prescription in Arkansas and Idaho, and other states are considering similar measures.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a particularly strong proponent. In his 2021 book about the pandemic, Kennedy referred to the “massive and overwhelming evidence” in ivermectin’s favor, and invoked its “staggering, life-saving efficacy.” He also argued at great length that the pharmaceutical industry—with the support of Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates—had engaged in a historic crime by attempting to discourage its use. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, has similarly backed the conspiracy theory that the use of ivermectin was dismissed by “the powers that be” in an apparent ploy to ease the approval of COVID vaccines. (Not everyone in the current administration is a fan: Before he became the FDA’s vaccine czar, the oncologist Vinay Prasad publicly disputed Kennedy’s views on ivermectin, and earlier this year he called its use for cancer “the right’s version of masking on the airplane and praying to Lord Fauci.”) In response to questions about Kennedy’s and Bhattacharya’s current views on ivermectin, the HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard told me that they “continue to follow the latest scientific research regarding therapeutic options for COVID-19 and other illnesses.” She did not respond to questions about Prasad.

The idea of using antiparasitic drugs as cancer treatments was already taking hold by the late 2010s, Skyler Johnson, a Utah radiation oncologist who studies medical misinformation, told me. In January 2017, a man with lung cancer named Joe Tippens started on a dewormer called fenbendazole, which had been suggested to him by a veterinarian. Daniel Lemoi, who had Lyme disease, had started taking ivermectin in 2012 after reading a paper on the genetic similarities between humans and horses. Tippens would go on to achieve global fame among desperate cancer patients, and Lemoi became an ivermectin influencer during the pandemic.

Since then, a gaggle of dubious doctors has worked to bolster the credibility of deworming drugs within alternative medicine and anti-vaccine circles. Their underlying pitch has become familiar in the past few years: Health experts can’t be trusted; the pharmaceutical industry is suppressing cheap cures; and patients deserve the liberty to choose their own medical interventions. For the rest of the medical establishment, the worldview this entails is straining doctor-patient relationships. Johnson told me that many of his patients are now skeptical of his advice, if not openly combative. One cancer patient accused Johnson of bias when he failed to recommend ivermectin. The drug is so cheap and effective, this patient had concluded, that Johnson would be out of a job if everyone knew about it. (Johnson told me that he offers patients “the best possible treatment, no matter the financial incentive.”) Ivermectin has become a big business in its own right. Online pharmacies and wellness shops are cashing in on the deworming craze, with one offering parasite cleanses for $200 a month. Meanwhile, fringe doctors can charge patients who have cancer and other diseases thousands of dollars to prescribe such treatments.

Johnson’s own experience suggests that the cult of ivermectin is growing larger. He told me that he’s seen his patients’ interest in the drug explode since January, when the actor Mel Gibson went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and claimed that three of his friends had beat back their advanced tumors with ivermectin and fenbendazole, among various other potions. “This stuff works, man,” Gibson said. Meanwhile, in the ivermectin Facebook groups—including one with close to 300,000 members—the public can read posts from a woman with breast cancer considering using ivermectin in lieu of hormone treatments; a leukemia patient who has given up on chemotherapy to “see what happens” with antiparasitic drugs; or a concerned aunt wondering if the drugs might help her little niece with Stage 4 cancer.

But ivermectin advocacy is most disturbing in its totalizing form, wherein parasites—which is to say, the pathogens against which the drug truly is effective—are reimagined as the secret cause of many other unrelated problems. In the Facebook groups, members will share images of what they say are worms that have been expelled from their bodies by treatment. (This phenomenon brings to mind a different disease entirely: delusional parasitosis.) One recent post from the daughter of a Stage 4 lung-cancer patient showed a bloody glob that had “dropped down into her mouth.” Commenters debated whether this might be a worm or something else. “Blood clot from Covid vax?” one suggested. A few days later, the daughter gave an update: Her mom had gone to see the doctor, who informed her that she’d likely coughed up a piece of her own lung.

The whole exchange provides a sad illustration of this delirious and desperate time. Before it turned into a conservative cure-all, ivermectin was legitimately a wonder drug for the poorest people on Earth. Since its discovery in 1973, it has become a leading weapon in the fight against horrific infections such as river blindness and elephantiasis. Yet now that substantial success seems to have given birth to a self-destructive fantasy.

A decade ago, the co-discoverers of ivermectin—William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura—were awarded a Nobel Prize in recognition of their contribution to reducing human suffering. In his formal lecture to the Academy, Campbell offered some reflections on the simple science that gave rise to the treatment, and to its wide array of applications. But his speech contained a warning, too, that any medicine that works so broadly and so well runs the risk of being handed out too often. The more benefits that such a drug provides, he told the audience in Stockholm, “the more we must guard against the hazards of indiscriminate use.”

[threeacttragedy]

Entry 18: The One Where Two Roads Diverged in a Wood of GIFs and Written Words

“Lukola Crisis Hotline. How may I be of service?”

Me: Houston, we have a problem.

Dad: Do tell!

Me: You won’t believe who showed up last night! –

Dad: Oh, my goodness! Oh, my goodness! Whoa! I don’t know what to say! Wait – let me grab my Coke and my smokes. <waiting> Okay, I’m back. So, Misty appeared out of nowhere with Thang?! Well, this just got fun! <laughing>

For clarity’s sake, my father tends to give everyone a pet name. Some of the pet names are funny; some are quite cruel. But if they help him remember who the players are in this fandom (and in any other situation), I’m game to play along. Plus, his pet names tend to add a little comedy relief to whatever is being discussed, especially when it is not an outwardly funny subject.

In Lukola-Land, Luke is “Thang” (it’s actually “Thing” – as in the hand from The Addams Family – but my dad’s accent muddles the pronunciation into “Thang”); Nicola is “Ireland,” for obvious reasons; Antonia is “Misty,” for, umm, the Clint Eastwood movie, “Play Misty for Me;” and Jake is – well, Jake is actually just “Jake” because my father finds the USS Jakola offensive. In fact, when I was discussing the recent fandom events with him on Friday evening, my dad was genuinely shocked to learn the Jakolas still existed. His pet name for the Jakolas is “Fucking Stupid,” by the way.

Moving on to the matter at hand –

There’s been so much “noise” over the past few weeks that, when taken collectively, it is rather eye-opening. We’ve got Luke’s mother posting on Facebook about “Luke’s girlfriend…from Cyprus.” The leaked funeral video and photos (by allegedly Luke’s family). The Best in Show pap pictures of Nicola and Jake. The “just friends” interview. The disappearance of Jake (because he’s rehearsing for a play) and the sudden reemergence of Antonia.

If you’ve noticed from my recent entries on this blog, I have obviously found most of what has happened of late to be comical and not worth putting into written word. Instead, my thoughts have been dumped into GIF stories. To be honest, I was rather disappointed I couldn’t put this last part – Antonia emerging from the misty edges of the forest – entirely into a GIF story. Her reappearance was like a certain Bond villain coming back to life for the seventh time. In other words, it was total cringe. But it also altered an otherwise slow burning campfire into a motherfucking forest fire.

Me: Thoughts?

Dad: I need some time to think about this one – and a cigarette. Or two. Call me back in 15 minutes.

“Psychotic Fan Rescue Center, at your service.”

Me: You’re a dumbass.

Dad: <laughing> Well, this is insane. It makes no sense and it’s a convoluted mess. Why bring Misty back? She was killed off two seasons ago.

Me: No shit, Sherlock.

Dad: Hell, maybe this has all been a nest of vipers.

A nest of vipers? Ah, yes, the idea that we have a group of venomous snakes thrown into the same close-quartered trench – in an every-man-for-himself type situation – each taking strikes at the others whenever their backs are turned.

In Entries 1, 13, and 15 – with an emphasis on “Entry 13: The One Where the Ashes Blew Towards Us with the Salt Wind from the Sea” – I wrote about what the Lutonia narrative could look like, if real. I will not rehash in detail those entries here, but I will link them at the end of this entry if you want to read, or reread, them.

Now, the General Audience almost certainly didn’t pay a lick of attention to Antonia when she appeared alongside Luke at the Boss event held January 30 (she’s always just been a Face in the Crowd). But the sudden reappearance of Antonia stopped the Lukolas dead in their tracks because – like my dad said – she was seemingly killed off two seasons ago.

The Lukolas have suddenly found themselves at an intersection of confusion and, likely, a bit of distress. The long and winding road we’ve been traveling along has diverged into two paths – and, no, you cannot travel both.

The problem with the Lutonia narrative has always been that Luke has never formally acknowledged Antonia as his girlfriend. In fact, Luke had the perfect opportunity to do so when he posted about the Boss event on his Instagram grid – but he did not. I could rationalize the idea that Luke and Antonia wanted to keep their relationship private after the Papsmear misstep if it weren’t for the fact that Antonia has been historically loud in her social media posts. We spent the summer and fall with insinuation post after insinuation post from Antonia. Yes, all those posts that alluded to her being with Luke without any actual evidence that she was, in fact, with Luke. By the time Antonia got to “Pasta-gate” in mid-November, the Lukola fandom barely even blinked before dismissing her as, well, the antagonist from “Play Misty for Me.” And this leads to something even more problematic for the USS Lutonia – Luke has never rescued Antonia from being ridiculed and torn apart by the fandom. My dad would call – and has called – Luke a cad for this.

Jumping to the other side of this misshapen triangle, we have Nicola and her Assassin (my dad’s pet name for JVN). Assuming Lutonia is real, the only logical answer for Nicola’s behavior is that she has spent months trolling Luke, Antonia, and <gasp> the fandom. Nicola herself has admitted to being chronically online and, at a minimum, being aware of fan edits – so much so that during the London premiere she commented that she and Luke “can’t do anything” without the fandom reacting to it. Therefore, I will call “foul” on anyone who tries to persuade me that Nicola was unaware of, at a minimum, how the Lukola fandom had reacted to the Claddagh ring, Chaos Week, and the October airplane posts. JVN openly mocking Antonia on social media with, for example, their Slick Back Bun routine only added fuel to this fire.

For shits and giggles – and so I can get to the bend in this road – we will roll with my dad’s “Nest of Vipers” theory for a moment. We will concede that Lutonia is real, which, in my opinion, makes Luke the absolute worst boyfriend in London and Antonia a woman who doesn’t mind being treated like roadkill. It also, unfortunately, makes Nicola and Fan Favorite JVN come off like online bullies – with the only plausible reasoning for the bullying being that Luke and Nicola are at odds with each other. No, I take that back – they’re not at odds with each other – they’re seemingly at war with each other. I’ll even amp this up a bit and throw in the suggestion that, assuming Lutonia is real, Netflix & Co. is aware of the strife between its two Polin actors and are protecting their asset with blurred Polin-Lukola posts to pacify the fandom. Dun-Dun-DUNN! And yes! That was a sly nod to Jake.

Me: Thanks for that. You just made Luke into an absolute prick and gave Antonia’s starring role in “Play Misty for Me” to Nicola.

Dad: Hey, I’m not the one who dug up Misty! That was all Thang!

Me: Then why does everyone say Luke is the nicest person? Nicola, his co-stars –  

Dad: All lies.

Me: Would you STOP?!

Dad: But I’m serious! Thang could be a complete pig behind closed doors and Ireland could be on the verge of a psychotic meltdown because, uhh, maybe she’s obsessed with Thang and pissed he chose Misty.

The unfortunate thing about this Nest of Vipers theory is that I could almost certainly make a convincing argument that it was legit. I’ve always joked with my Inner Circle of Lukolas that no one wants to see me go rogue, especially not – I’ll bite my tongue on that one. But I will emphasize the importance of keeping an open mind when you’re reviewing information. Always consider both sides of the coin. That said, it’s hard to ignore the evidence that was presented to us through the World Tour interviews and behind-the-scenes footage; therefore –

Me: I’m having a hard time believing Luke is someone who wouldn’t protect his girlfriend. He seems to support Nicola online quite a bit. Why wouldn’t he do the same for Antonia?

Dad: <laughing> Fine. Antonia isn’t his girlfriend. Maybe it’s all just a bunch of fuckery like I’ve always said.

“Fuckery” is my dad’s pet name for PR bullshit. If you didn’t pick up on it in previous entries, I am not fond of PR theories. But I also cannot ignore that PR relationships do exist and have for decades (hell, we could go back centuries and find examples of PR relationships across multiple noble and royal families – think about that, naysayers). It was my dad who first sold me on the possibility of Antonia being PR. So, I will consider this road to PR-ville in the same manner as I did the Nest of Vipers theory – with this PR theory having perhaps the better claim.

I mentioned earlier that the General Audience almost certainly paid little attention to Antonia’s existence at the Boss event. Although some people may find what I’m about to say a bit unkind, it doesn’t make it any less valid (and I’m not saying it to be cruel): Antonia, in the overall scheme of things, is of very little importance to the General Audience. She has less than 15 thousand followers on Instagram, even after being connected to a man who has almost three million. However, oddly enough, that didn’t prevent the Daily Mail from dropping a story which predominantly focused on Antonia within the same timeframe that images from the Boss event were being dropped on the Internet. It also didn’t prevent video footage of Luke and Antonia at the Boss event from being leaked online almost immediately – even when there were undoubtedly more famous celebrities attending the event. I’ll be realistic with this next comment, too: Luke may be relevant to the Bridgerton fandom, but that does not mean he is significant to, say, People Magazine’s average reader. So, why the sudden burst of publicity at this event?

I waited to write this entry to see what Luke did with the exposure from the Boss event. Would he finally put Antonia on his Instagram grid? Would he put her in his Instagram stories? Would Antonia post pictures from the event on her Instagram grid or stories? Would Luke unambiguously acknowledge a relationship with Antonia?

Although Luke posted to his Instagram grid and stories about the event, he did not include Antonia – at least not directly. The closest he came to including Antonia was via an Instagram story – on which he did not tag her – of a black screen with a link to a Boss TikTok that included images of Luke and Antonia from the event. The TikTok did not tag Antonia either. Luke did not post Antonia’s image to his grid or his stories.

And Antonia didn’t post about the event at all.

I wasn’t sold on a PR narrative when I started writing this entry, but my eyebrows raised when I saw Luke’s “black screen” Instagram story. This was either Luke attempting to circumvent the Lutonia narrative while throwing Antonia a bone, or it was Luke being an absolute douche of a human being. And, if it’s the latter, Mr. Newton needs to check himself into Assholes Anonymous.

I will concede that a couple of mutuals put up a few stories about the event (which disappeared after 24 hours) and Boss included (and tagged) Luke and Antonia in an Instagram and TikTok reel – without formally identifying Antonia as Luke’s girlfriend. On a side note, Luke could have reposted either of these reels – which tagged Antonia – but he did not. Luke also did not like this Boss Instagram reel with Antonia in it (and he does not have a public TikTok account), but Luke did like a separate Boss post of him and David Beckham (without Antonia). The only news outlets that called Antonia Luke’s “girlfriend” were rag-mags like the Daily Mail and Hello, both of which put an emphasis on Antonia. Digital Spy noted that Luke and Antonia “have yet to officially confirm their relationship.” So outside of some tagged reels (that weren’t reposted or acknowledged by Luke) and rag-mag speculation, what did Antonia get from this?

Dad: Publicity.

A single word but one that resonates throughout an otherwise silent wood.

But to be honest, I’m not entirely convinced this was for publicity. I’m not saying I believe Antonia is Luke’s girlfriend either – that’s a whole cauldron of contradictions on its own. I’m simply intrigued that Antonia has her Instagram tags turned off and she has not yet allowed any Boss event tags to appear on her page. So, outside of some junky rag-mag callouts and a few TikToks, what benefit did Antonia receive? And, if Antonia didn’t truly benefit from this appearance (or, at least she doesn’t appear to be reaping the rewards from a girlfriend or PR standpoint), who did benefit?

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that a series of events had happened one after the other over a relatively short two-week period: (1) Luke’s mum mentioning “Luke’s girlfriend…from Cyprus” in a Facebook response; (2) leaked video and photos of Luke from a funeral; (3) those utterly ridiculous pap pictures of Nicola and Jake; (4) Nicola stating she and Luke were “just friends” in an interview; and (5) the sudden summoning of Antonia after exactly six months of being MIA.

As I sat here writing out the events of the past two weeks – and considering the reappearance of Antonia – I couldn’t help but speculate as to whether each of these events was meant to have a specific purpose that didn’t get its desired result.

The comment by Luke’s mother was so far out in left field, most Lukolas chucked it up to being suspicious and dismissed it as such. The funeral pictures and video released by one of Luke’s family members was quickly scrubbed from social media; therefore, just as quickly ignored. The pap pictures of Nicola and Jake were openly mocked across social media as being staged. The “just friends” comment – after almost a year of, particularly, Nicola dodging that phrase – didn’t seem to send many Lukolas overboard. Is it possible that the fandom’s mild reaction to all these events wasn’t anticipated? Which leads me to wonder if Luke and Nicola wanted a reaction and realized the only way they were going to get it was to play the only card they had left – Antonia.  

When you look at the above referenced events individually and collectively, they appear to indicate a push to shut down the Lukola narrative. Why?

They could have shut down the Lukolas before the World Tour even took off. They could have shut down the Lukolas during the World Tour. They could have shut down the Lukolas after Papsmear. Why wait almost a full year to draw the line in the sand? Especially after every devoted Lukola would argue that (mostly) Nicola has left a trail of Swiftie-like clues to insinuate Lukola is real, and that Luke has made a visible effort to remove Antonia from his narrative.

Whatever the reasoning may be, we must admit Antonia’s reappearance had a purpose – and one that we need to respect. I have a hard time believing Luke would voluntarily step in the same pile of dog shit he stepped in back in June without a valid and significant reason for doing so.

And this is where I will draw the line.

I will not speculate further about why Antonia suddenly rose from the ashes of Manderley – and I will not tell you which road to take from here. That’s something you need to do on your own but, be warned that regardless of which road you choose – the one where you conclude Luke and Antonia are a couple, or the one where you decide Antonia is playing the role of PR distraction – the Lukolas are currently fighting a losing battle.

The Lukolas have become collateral damage. They’ve either been caught in the crossfire of an online war between Luke and Nicola (and their respective sidekicks) over, presumably, Antonia; or they’re the unwitting victims of some messy PR bullshit that has resulted in Lukolas being bullied across every social media platform by rabid Jakolas and Anti-Lukes.

Amazingly, though, many Lukolas remain resilient.

When the going gets tough…

But sometimes the tough don’t get going.

Yesterday, someone wrote to me, “Why are we still here? Just when we think something good is finally going to happen we get pushed back down. I’m tired of the dumb games.”

I rarely answer “Asks,” but my response to this comment is:

“Two roads diverged in a wood…”

Two roads.

One road is quite disheartening and the other is shrouded in underbrush.

But what you've overlooked is that there is an alternate path – a third road – the one that brought you to this point.

Turn around.

That road takes you back home – and, if you’re ready to go home, go home. It’s okay. It takes an unbelievable amount of courage to admit you’ve had enough. Remember that saying – “A wise woman once said, ‘fuck this shit,’ and she lived happily ever after.”

Take your time and decide what makes the most sense to you.

Dad: What are you thinking?

Me: Of a poem.

Dad: Oh, which one today?

Me: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by…”

Dad: Which road is that…?

P.S. Just for a bit of comic relief at the end of an otherwise somber post (not even Dad could make it lighthearted), I just wanted to say:

I love eating grapes.

IYKYK.

Those links I promised:

[libraford]

The saga of the turkey continues.

After menacing me for 5 minutes while I was out servicing the trail, the turkey went on to run through a couple neighborhoods.

And people are weird about wildlife here.

So there are posts in the Facebook group about her, very much freaking out that Thanksgiving dinner is walking around. They called the wildlife department, who said they can't intervene because the animal is not in distress.

The people who do not know animals are saying 'clearly she is in distress, she's running around in the streets!'

'Animal in distress' in this context refers to injury or immediate threat to life. A hen on her normal migration pattern is not in distress. She's just on a walk, she's not doing threat displays. If she really feels threatened, she'll get big and fly away.

What is bugging me about the conversation is that people who don't know animals very well are assuming that they're being chased out by the construction happening. While it's not impossible, it's also worth noting that we live north of a very large bird sanctuary home to a flock of about 20 turkeys.

It's normal to see solitary hens in spring. This is the time they search for nests and forage for food. We've had turkeys here for quite some time on both sides of town.

Since the construction, people are noticing more wildlife in the area. But the wildlife was already there-and has been for some time. They just notice it more because they're mad about the construction and make assumptions about wildlife.

It's somewhat frustrating to me that we intentionally built wild patches in our parks to assist wildlife migration so that there would be more wildlife in the area, and then people see the wildlife and have a negative reaction to it.

I'm trying to use this as an opportunity to educate, but I'm finding that it's difficult to do that when there's so many emotions wrapped up in that plot of land.

[bethelctpride]

How to find the local queer people when there don't appear to be any queer events nearby

are you sure there are no events?

Because they're a lot more common than you think, but you have to look in the right place! The social media algorithm sadly will not feed them to you. You will generally have to go through at least one layer of introduction before you meet folks directly.

Yes, this is a bit of a secret social club. Because many of these people lived through being too public might get you raided by cops or get you dead. They're rightfully cautious. They want to make sure people showing up aren't there to do harm. And the more rural the area, the tougher it will be to find people, but they're definitely THERE and likely having the same thoughts that nobody else is there.

Queer social activities are overwhelmingly run by middle aged folks (who have time, money, skills, and energy to do so) and they tend to use different social media because that's where they originally built communities!

The advice here for hunting down groups assumes you are an adult who can figure out logistics and safety of contacting other adults and getting yourself somewhere safely.

For social media, check Facebook and Meetup. These are most likely to have large local-ish groups putting on events. Join some groups. Many may be private and require approval before you see content. Even if there's not one immediately nearby, join the closest one, whatever "close" is. Even if it's not a perfect fit, they generally know the other even smaller groups nearby and may give you an invite to closer group or even direct contact info for The Local Guy where you text him.

Next up, Instagram. You'll pick up some folks a little younger and more business and pop up events this way. Sometimes you may not see an event until after it happened! Message the person and ask when next one is. Good odds there's a repeat.

Still no luck? Check out specific types of businesses/orgs in your area that tend to have an overlap. Maybe the local bar or coffee shop has a gay night once a month. Check their posts for last month, or if you can filter by date, look specifically in June. If they had one, message and ask about if they have an upcoming one. Even if they don't, they may put you in contact with organizer from past one.

For organizations, check for groups serving HIV+ populations and the neurospicy. Even if you fall into neither category, because of the overlap, there's good odds they offer specific services FOR queer folk. Contact them and they'll know who in the area is putting on events.

Check furry groups. Generally they do most organization via Telegram, which will require an invite. Find the nearest furry convention, check to see if they have a message board. Search for telegram. there's likely one attached to the convention and asking there of "hey, is there a furry telegram group that covers X area?" there will be one. I hope you like bowling, because this is by far the most common non-convention furry event.

(and if your reaction is EW Furries, you need to kill the little Puritan living in your head that hates people having fun doing stuff in a way you think is Cringe. Bowling is not that uncool.)

Still no luck? Now you're going to have to go search for individual queers in the wild! Your best luck is going to be with three other types of groups: 1. SOME Church activities 2. activities that attract the neurospicy (train groups, collecting groups, etc)

3. Tiny specialty groups where everyone is old and its in danger of dying out

If you're really rural sometimes the ONLY group doing any activities is the local church. If they're listed as "open and affirming" that's what you want. Unitarians and Congregationalists are most likely to fit that definition. But you should be able to run web search for that exact phase of "open and affirming church" + "your town" and it'll show you SOMETHING nearby. You may still come up with nothing, but the ones that are doing that tend to be really dedicated, so they will have info about what local groups are friendly to queers, if not open about that. They will also have non-religious activities like knitting or potluck even if you don't want to go to a service.

Neurospicy activities- check your surrounding libraries for activities as well. Even if you're not that brand of spicy, the overlap is high. Find an activity you are reasonably interested in and go meet locals. You'll find out which ones are queer after a few meetings. Often it will turn out everyone is and nobody said anything until one person does. (like our local hackerspace. secret trans hangout)

Endangered skills- do you really want to learn some weird, specialty skill that's dying out? Ask around. call the senior center and have them post a note. Post at the library. stick a thing on a bulletin board at the grocery store. Pick something you are GENUINELY interested in learning like flint knapping, or how to cook a regional dish, local history, how to spin llama wool. Weirder and more endangered the better. Post several! Give them a way to contact you by phone. Unless they are horrendously bigoted up front, you are about to learn a skill and once you disclose "hey I'm gay", you are about to be introduced to every solitary queer in the area that is a friend of a friends' granddaughter's classmate. Often your mentor won't quite GET it, but you're their favorite person now so they're trying. And as you get introduced, suddenly the local flint knapping group is also the queer flint knapping group! and you should post on social media about your cool new activity and SURPRISE, you found them all! Also they now all have cool knives. win-win!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic

I'm coming to Minneapolis! This Sunday (Oct 15): Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Monday (Oct 16): Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Enshittification isn't merely a form of rent-seeking – it is a uniquely digital phenomenon, because it relies on the inherent flexibility of digital systems. There are lots of intermediaries that want to extract surpluses from customers and suppliers – everyone from grocers to oil companies – but these can't be reconfigured in an eyeblink the that that purely digital services can.

A sleazy boss can hide their wage-theft with a bunch of confusing deductions to your paycheck. But when your boss is an app, it can engage in algorithmic wage discrimination, where your pay declines minutely every time you accept a job, but if you start to decline jobs, the app can raise the offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

I call this process "twiddling": tech platforms are equipped with a million knobs on their back-ends, and platform operators can endlessly twiddle those knobs, altering the business logic from moment to moment, turning the system into an endlessly shifting quagmire where neither users nor business customers can ever be sure whether they're getting a fair deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Social media platforms are compulsive twiddlers. They use endless variation to lure in – and then lock in – publishers, with the goal of converting these standalone businesses into commodity suppliers who are dependent on the platform, who can then be charged rent to reach the users who asked to hear from them.

Facebook designed this playbook. First, it lured in end-users by promising them a good deal: "Unlike Myspace, which spies on you from asshole to appetite, Facebook is a privacy-respecting site that will never, ever spy on you. Simply sign up, tell us everyone who matters to you, and we'll populate a feed with everything they post for public consumption":

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876

The users came, and locked themselves in: when people gather in social spaces, they inadvertently take one another hostage. You joined Facebook because you liked the people who were there, then others joined because they liked you. Facebook can now make life worse for all of you without losing your business. You might hate Facebook, but you like each other, and the collective action problem of deciding when and whether to go, and where you should go next, is so difficult to overcome, that you all stay in a place that's getting progressively worse.

Once its users were locked in, Facebook turned to advertisers and said, "Remember when we told these rubes we'd never spy on them? It was a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and we'll sell you access to that data in the form of dirt-cheap targeted ads."

Then Facebook went to the publishers and said, "Remember when we told these suckers that we'd only show them the things they asked to see? Total lie. Post short excerpts from your content and links back to your websites and we'll nonconsensually cram them into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see them. It's a free, high-value traffic funnel for your own site, bringing monetizable users right to your door."

Now, Facebook had to find a way to lock in those publishers. To do this, it had to twiddle. By tiny increments, Facebook deprioritized publishers' content, forcing them to make their excerpts grew progressively longer. As with gig workers, the digital flexibility of Facebook gave it lots of leeway here. Some publishers sensed the excerpts they were being asked to post were a substitute for visiting their sites – and not an enticement – and drew down their posting to Facebook.

When that happened, Facebook could twiddle in the publisher's favor, giving them broader distribution for shorter excerpts, then, once the publisher returned to the platform, Facebook drew down their traffic unless they started posting longer pieces. Twiddling lets platforms play users and business-customers like a fish on a line, giving them slack when they fight, then reeling them in when they tire.

Once Facebook converted a publisher to a commodity supplier to the platform, it reeled the publishers in. First, it deprioritized publishers' posts when they had links back to the publisher's site (under the pretext of policing "clickbait" and "malicious links"). Then, it stopped showing publishers' content to their own subscribers, extorting them to pay to "boost" their posts in order to reach people who had explicitly asked to hear from them.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers who paid Facebook's Danegeld to reach them. A user will only spend so much time on Facebook, and every post that Facebook feeds that user from someone they want to hear from is a missed opportunity to show them a post from someone who'll pay to reach them.

Here, too, twiddling lets Facebook fine-tune its approach. If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed. When the user's participation returns to higher levels, Facebook can draw down the share of desirable content again, replacing it with monetizable content. This is done minutely, behind the scenes, automatically, and quickly. In any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders.

But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss.

One reason this gambit worked so well is that it was a long con. Platform operators and their investors have been willing to throw away billions convincing end-users and business customers to lock themselves in until it was time for the pig-butchering to begin. They financed expensive forays into additional features and complementary products meant to increase user lock-in, raising the switching costs for users who were tempted to leave.

For example, Facebook's product manager for its "photos" product wrote to Mark Zuckerberg to lay out a strategy of enticing users into uploading valuable family photos to the platform in order to "make switching costs very high for users," who would have to throw away their precious memories as the price for leaving Facebook:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The platforms' patience paid off. Their slow ratchets operated so subtly that we barely noticed the squeeze, and when we did, they relaxed the pressure until we were lulled back into complacency. Long cons require a lot of prefrontal cortex, the executive function to exercise patience and restraint.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, a man who seems to have been born without a prefrontal cortex, who has repeatedly and publicly demonstrated that he lacks any restraint, patience or planning. Elon Musk's prefrontal cortical deficit resulted in his being forced to buy Twitter, and his every action since has betrayed an even graver inability to stop tripping over his own dick.

Where Zuckerberg played enshittification as a long game, Musk is bent on speedrunning it. He doesn't slice his users up with a subtle scalpel, he hacks away at them with a hatchet.

Musk inaugurated his reign by nonconsensually flipping every user to an algorithmic feed which was crammed with ads and posts from "verified" users whose blue ticks verified solely that they had $8 ($11 for iOS users). Where Facebook deployed substantial effort to enticing users who tired of eyeball-cramming feed decay by temporarily improving their feeds, Musk's Twitter actually overrode users' choice to switch back to a chronological feed by repeatedly flipping them back to more monetizable, algorithmic feeds.

Then came the squeeze on publishers. Musk's Twitter rolled out a bewildering array of "verification" ticks, each priced higher than the last, and publishers who refused to pay found their subscribers taken hostage, with Twitter downranking or shadowbanning their content unless they paid.

(Musk also squeezed advertisers, keeping the same high prices but reducing the quality of the offer by killing programs that kept advertisers' content from being published along Holocaust denial and open calls for genocide.)

Today, Musk continues to squeeze advertisers, publishers and users, and his hamfisted enticements to make up for these depredations are spectacularly bad, and even illegal, like offering advertisers a new kind of ad that isn't associated with any Twitter account, can't be blocked, and is not labeled as an ad:

https://www.wired.com/story/xs-sneaky-new-ads-might-be-illegal/

Of course, Musk has a compulsive bullshitter's contempt for the press, so he has far fewer enticements for them to stay. Quite the reverse: first, Musk removed headlines from link previews, rendering posts by publishers that went to their own sites into stock-art enigmas that generated no traffic:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/05/x-twitter-strips-headlines-new-links-why-elon-musk

Then he jumped straight to the end-stage of enshittification by announcing that he would shadowban any newsmedia posts with links to sites other than Twitter, "because there is less time spent if people click away." Publishers were advised to "post content in long form on this platform":

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/111183068362793821

Where a canny enshittifier would have gestured at a gaslighting explanation ("we're shadowbanning posts with links because they might be malicious"), Musk busts out the motto of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

All this has the effect of highlighting just how little residual value there is on the platform for publishers, and tempts them to bolt for the exits. Six months ago, NPR lost all patience with Musk's shenanigans, and quit the service. Half a year later, they've revealed how low the switching cost for a major news outlet that leaves Twitter really are: NPR's traffic, post-Twitter, has declined by less than a single percentage point:

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

NPR's Twitter accounts had 8.7 million followers, but even six months ago, Musk's enshittification speedrun had drawn down NPR's ability to reach those users to a negligible level. The 8.7 million number was an illusion, a shell game Musk played on publishers like NPR in a bid to get them to buy a five-figure iridium checkmark or even a six-figure titanium one.

On Twitter, the true number of followers you have is effectively zero – not because Twitter users haven't explicitly instructed the service to show them your posts, but because every post in their feeds that they want to see is a post that no one can be charged to show them.

I've experienced this myself. Three and a half years ago, I left Boing Boing and started pluralistic.net, my cross-platform, open access, surveillance-free, daily newsletter and blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

Boing Boing had the good fortune to have attracted a sizable audience before the advent of siloed platforms, and a large portion of that audience came to the site directly, rather than following us on social media. I knew that, starting a new platform from scratch, I wouldn't have that luxury. My audience would come from social media, and it would be up to me to convert readers into people who followed me on platforms I controlled – where neither they nor I could be held to ransom.

I embraced a strategy called POSSE: Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. With POSSE, the permalink and native habitat for your material is a site you control (in my case, a WordPress blog with all the telemetry, logging and surveillance disabled). Then you repost that content to other platforms – mostly social media – with links back to your own site:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

There are a lot of automated tools to help you with this, but the platforms have gone to great lengths to break or neuter them. Musk's attack on Twitter's legendarily flexible and powerful API killed every automation tool that might help with this. I was lucky enough to have a reader – Loren Kohnfelder – who coded me some python scripts that automate much of the process, but POSSE remains a very labor-intensive and error-prone methodology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

And of all the feeds I produce – email, RSS, Discourse, Medium, Tumblr, Mastodon – none is as labor-intensive as Twitter's. It is an unforgiving medium to begin with, and Musk's drawdown of engineering support has made it wildly unreliable. Many's the time I've set up 20+ posts in a thread, only to have the browser tab reload itself and wipe out all my work.

But I stuck with Twitter, because I have a half-million followers, and to the extent that I reach them there, I can hope that they will follow the permalinks to Pluralistic proper and switch over to RSS, or email, or a daily visit to the blog.

But with each day, the case for using Twitter grows weaker. I get ten times as many replies and reposts on Mastodon, though my Mastodon follower count is a tenth the size of my (increasingly hypothetical) Twitter audience.

All this raises the question of what can or should be done about Twitter. One possible regulatory response would be to impose an "End-To-End" rule on the service, requiring that Twitter deliver posts from willing senders to willing receivers without interfering in them. End-To-end is the bedrock of the internet (one of its incarnations is Net Neutrality) and it's a proven counterenshittificatory force:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

Despite what you may have heard, "freedom of reach" is freedom of speech: when a platform interposes itself between willing speakers and their willing audiences, it arrogates to itself the power to control what we're allowed to say and who is allowed to hear us:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

We have a wide variety of tools to make a rule like this stick. For one thing, Musk's Twitter has violated innumerable laws and consent decrees in the US, Canada and the EU, which creates a space for regulators to impose "conduct remedies" on the company.

But there's also existing regulatory authorities, like the FTC's Section Five powers, which enable the agency to act against companies that engage in "unfair and deceptive" acts. When Twitter asks you who you want to hear from, then refuses to deliver their posts to you unless they pay a bribe, that's both "unfair and deceptive":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

But that's only a stopgap. The problem with Twitter isn't that this important service is run by the wrong mercurial, mediocre billionaire: it's that hundreds of millions of people are at the mercy of any foolish corporate leader. While there's a short-term case for improving the platforms, our long-term strategy should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

To make that a reality, we could also impose a "Right To Exit" on the platforms. This would be an interoperability rule that would require Twitter to adopt Mastodon's approach to server-hopping: click a link to export the list of everyone who follows you on one server, click another link to upload that file to another server, and all your followers and followees are relocated to your new digs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

A Twitter with the Right To Exit would exert a powerful discipline even on the stunted self-regulatory centers of Elon Musk's brain. If he banned a reporter for publishing truthful coverage that cast him in a bad light, that reporter would have the legal right to move to another platform, and continue to reach the people who follow them on Twitter. Publishers aghast at having the headlines removed from their Twitter posts could go somewhere less slipshod and still reach the people who want to hear from them on Twitter.

And both Right To Exit and End-To-End satisfy the two prime tests for sound internet regulation: first, they are easy to administer. If you want to know whether Musk is permitting harassment on his platform, you have to agree on a definition of harassment, determine whether a given act meets that definition, and then investigate whether Twitter took reasonable steps to prevent it.

By contrast, administering End-To-End merely requires that you post something and see if your followers receive it. Administering Right To Exit is as simple as saying, "OK, Twitter, I know you say you gave Cory his follower and followee file, but he says he never got it. Just send him another copy, and this time, CC the regulator so we can verify that it arrived."

Beyond administration, there's the cost of compliance. Requiring Twitter to police its users' conduct also requires it to hire an army of moderators – something that Elon Musk might be able to afford, but community-supported, small federated servers couldn't. A tech regulation can easily become a barrier to entry, blocking better competitors who might replace the company whose conduct spurred the regulation in the first place.

End-to-End does not present this kind of barrier. The default state for a social media platform is to deliver posts from accounts to their followers. Interfering with End-To-End costs more than delivering the messages users want to have. Likewise, a Right To Exit is a solved problem, built into the open Mastodon protocol, itself built atop the open ActivityPub standard.

It's not just Twitter. Every platform is consuming itself in an orgy of enshittification. This is the Great Enshittening, a moment of universal, end-stage platform decay. As the platforms burn, calls to address the fires grow louder and harder for policymakers to resist. But not all solutions to platform decay are created equal. Some solutions will perversely enshrine the dominance of platforms, help make them both too big to fail and too big to jail.

Musk has flagrantly violated so many rules, laws and consent decrees that he has accidentally turned Twitter into the perfect starting point for a program of platform reform and platform evacuation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/#ex

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: JD Lasica (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_%283018710552%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[invisibleicewands]

Michael Sheen’s extraordinary gesture as he pays off debts of hundreds of people

He plays an angel on screen and he has proven he is an angel in real life by undertaking an extraordinary gesture. In an unprecedented move the actor has used his own money to write off personal debts of hundreds of people in South Wales

It’s been confirmed that Michael, who famously plays angel Aziraphale in Good Omens, has brought light and relief to many families struggling with debt with this wonderful act of benevolence.

The move was not publicly announced by the Port Talbot star, but was uncovered by fans who spotted posts on Facebook in local community groups from a television production company called Full Fat TV.

The posts read: ‘Actor Michael Sheen has been campaigning for a fairer credit system for years and in an extraordinary gesture, he has used his own money to write off personal debts for hundreds of people in South Wales. If you have received a letter from a company called Ten Acquisitions the good news is that Michael has paid off some of your debt and he’d love to hear from you. The details of how to get in touch with him are in the letter.’

Intrigued by the posts which appealed to those who had received letters from a company called Ten Acquisitions confirming that Michael had paid off debts, one fan took to X to ask him directly if the posts were true.

Fans wondered if it was somebody using his name as a scam, but the actor in replies on his X account confirmed the posts were neither clickbait nor a scam.

He wrote: ‘It’s not clickbait. I want to clarify, because we want people to get in touch.’

The campaigning Welshman, a long time advocate for a fairer credit system, has teamed up with the production company to film a documentary about the plight of those struggling due to unfair financing.

On Monday, Michael appeared in Parliament where he joined calls for a fair banking act to tackle the credit crisis affecting people and businesses.

In 2022-2023, more than 9 million were declined for credit, with millions relying on pay-day-lenders and buy-now-pay-later schemes with high interest rates. At its worst, lack of access to affordable credit means hundreds of thousands of people find themselves turning to loan sharks, while viable businesses remain stuck, unable to develop and create jobs. Campaigners are calling for a Fair Banking Act to help ensure that everyone can access essential financial services and support.

Speaking at the event in Parliament on Monday, Michael said: “Anyone can find themselves in a place where they need credit to make ends meet or to get through a difficult time. The lack of affordable credit for people on lower incomes is harming individuals and families, but also businesses and communities. Whole regions are seeing their growth held back. We can’t keep waiting and hoping that things will get better. We need something to change now. The Fair Banking Act could be the thing which really makes the difference”.

"We can’t keep waiting and hoping that things will get better. We need something to change now."@michaelsheen has joined calls for a #FairBankingAct to tackle credit crisis affecting people and businesses.

[momo-de-avis]

Personal report after 12h with no electricity

At 11.30 am my partner's besting a boss' ass on some videogame while the power goes out. We think it's our power grid but turns out it's the whole building. Ok. We wait it out. Then I do what I usually do when shit like this happens, I log onto facebook to check the nastiest gossip group about my city and of course they've posted there already asking did the power go out? And comments start saying "yeah, it's the entire country and all of Spain"

At this point I go. What the fuck do you mean

Blissfully unaware that I have internet connection for just one hour, I frantically google and turns out... Yeah. An entire peninsula went to shit.

Now this shits scary cause what the fuck would cause such a massive blackout in TWO countries. Plus, information is coming out that parts of France were screwed as well as Morrocco and it keeps getting worse.

Meanwhile, it's my day off, and I'm going to preface the next events by saying that I worked all day saturday and sunday we were in another city, so we actually had no food in the house and intended to go out and buy stuff this monday. Also, our entire house is electrical: oven, stove, hot water---everything.

So, with this in mind, my boyfriend leaves for work while I try to go about my day. Not even thirty minutes in, he calls me and says "so, don't panic, but Civil Protection has announced that maybe perhaps this could last two-three days, worst case scenario" which, guess what happened. I'm in an all-electrical home with no food. Doesn't bode well for me.

This is when I decided to go out and buy something. Big mistake, maybe, but needed. First of all, it's hot as shit outside and I'm walking everywhere cause the surface metro went to shit. Every mercearia, every chinese warehouse (you know the ones), every store is packed full of people queuing outside. So I think, in a stroke of genius, I'm going to Lidl.

Listen, on one hand, good choice cause Lidl has generators. On the other, 30 minutes in line when all I had was bread, and some apples. In front of me is two young dudes with two whole chickens, some toilet paper (literally two rolls only) and a pack of pasta. Behind me is an old woman who's complaining that someone is gonna push her over the floor and decides to get into a spat with the Lidl worker who is just passing through and working on the faux apocalipse and who pretty much tells her "if you fall on the ground, you're falling alone" which lmao but around us is entire families with whole carts packed full of waters and toilet paper, and I'd love for someone to study humans' relationship with toilet paper when there's a crisis because what were you expecting? Shitting for power like a hamster on a wheel?

Anyway, thirty minutes and a cramp on my arm later, I manage to buy my tower of bread, sliced cheese and apples, get the fuck out of there, and on my way stop at an indian owner mercearia, and I am mentioning the nationality of the owners because if you're portuguese you know and also these dudes made bank on this day, and I grab a can of chickpeas and black eyes peas cause you know, canned goods for cold salads, and that is when it hits me that people are stocking on water and toilet paper but nobody's grabbing the canned goods? Meanwhile, a woman comes in and starts complaining that she wants her NIF number on the receipt (NIF is our VAT number) at which point the dude behind the register, who's been calculating everyone's total using his phone's calculations, literally lifts his finger, dumbfounded, at the blackened screen of his register and goes "ma'am, no energy" at which point you could see the shame on the woman's face developing as she realised "Oh, I am the bitch" and I mean, shit like this was starting to brighten my day.

It's when I get home that I realise I now have absolutely no service on my phone.

Boyfriend arrives back home as he and his coworkers have been told to just go and he tells me yep, service went to shit as well, nobody can call anyone at all, no messages, nothing---cellphone providers cut everything to avoid being overloaded. This is when we decide to go out and buy a radio and a couple of candles. I want to mention that I stopped at another mercearia and as everyone ran like nutjobs stacking on waters, I casually walked out with flavoured sparkling water (tangerine) because you people need to fucking chill.

Imagine if you will, a warehouse with a sliding doors only half open cause the power's out, and people lining up outside in the sun, a security guard ordering a few to go in and others to wait, and then you step inside and it's a massive warehouse full of literally everything you can imagine (to quote a friend, if Good Mart doesn't have it, it doesn't exist---if you know, you know), but everything is dark, there's a few people rummaging through some boxes using their phone's flashlight, and the most pissed off looking chinese guy grunting at you and ordering you to show you the items you picked so he can write the price on it. Honestly, incredible if you ask me, absolute best part of this whole shit.

Now imagine if you will as well, a bunch of families barging in and buying flashlights that, I don't think a single person realised this, are actually not battery-charged but usb-charged and it was just funny as fuck to watch the staff witness this, realise this, and say shit. There were people buying gas cookers and camping equipment which lmfao people were FREAKING OUT and mind you, they'd been communicating throughout the day that they would very likely restore power within the day (parts of Spain already had power by this point).

We leave with our radio, our ugly ass green candles and my cruzadex book because fuck me if this isn't the perfect opportunity for it, and that's when I see everyone around me on the street has the same exact radio which lmfao

And that's when things actually turned nice. We ate dinner at the balcony watching the sunset, roasting a chorizo and eating cheese, and as night fell the skies were amazing and we just enjoyed a perfectly nice summer night in the complete darkness. We played scrabble by the candlelights and fairylights. There were people on the streets dancing and having fun, there was people blasting their flashlights out the window, one guy across the street went fucking wild with green and white flashing lights, and people were just having fun.

And I think this event made all of us realise just how dependent we are on not just electricity but technology over all. People panicked but at the end of the day everything was pretty chill. Literally the only lights you could see from our home was the hospital, everything else was super dark. I now think we should do this once a year to decompress and disconnect.

It was 11.30PM, I was brushing my teeth and I hear people outside shouting and celebrating, and that's when I look and see lights everywhere.

Also, I really want to know what all those people buying gallons of water and camping gear are gonna do with all that shit lmao

Here's some pictures

[metalheadsagainstfascism]

Sorry literally one small rant about the blue bracelet movement about why I think it's disingenuous.

I literally posted in a local liberal Facebook group "Hey. If you want to show your ideals wear a mask and protect yourselves and others."

And the blue bracelets are mad, calling me a troll, telling me they're uncomfortable, asking if I wear my mask all the time.

I've literally worn my mask at concerts. Like... the fuck. And I know people that were anti-mask that now won't take them off because they're like "Damn I haven't gotten sick once since I was forced to wear this." In high customer service jobs.

That's why I won't trust them. They just want to have their little friendship bracelets but won't protect our most vulnerable.

-fae

[milfstalin]

Hey, I saw your post, and I just so happen to be looking for advice on how to organize. I would greatly appreciate any assistance you can provide!

hi. well that was sort of a trick post in that your circumstances are going to affect your choices very much ! down to class position & location i would say. also i am writing this assuming that you have no experience at all & are also a communist / dialectical materialist.

the communist movement in the us is very fractured right now, as well as a low level of class consciousness (due to imperialism & de-industrialization) that is easily redirected towards rightwing organizing because of settlerism & white supremacy and likely you are going to find more non-communists (anarchists, radlibs, etc) than communists around in your area - do not take this as being impossible to work with them, and especially if you do not know any other communists in your area then you will be alone otherwise.

my experience is mostly related to student activism starting from college and precisely, single-issue activism related to the pro-palestine movement & lgbt+ rights organizing, but i would say that the most important first step is to take stock of your material conditions.

what progressive groups currently exist in your area? student groups like ydsa at a local university? branches and chapters of cpusa or psl? a food not bombs group? horizontalist mutual aid groups? dsa chapters? bds or jvp? tenants unions and trade unions? what concrete goals have they accomplished? which ones are viable for you to show up and contribute towards? for example if you are a studnet it will be naturally easier for you to get into student organizations. if you are a service worker then chat with other service workers in your workplace and get a read of the situation. are there local protests going on? reformist efforts or dual power building? etc. try contacting them. ask what they are all about and how you can contribute.

most likely, there will be public events to try and entice the masses to join up for protests & rallies. check local facebook, instagram, reddit, other social medias.

the first goal here is to find a low-barrier entry point to get experience with any type of organizing in the first place, essentially to get your feet wet, whether with horizontalists or with big tent groups or full-fledged democratic centralists- inevitably, you will experience positive and negative sides of each organizational style; what is important is learning by doing- iterate on your past efforts, and dont repeat techniques that lead to disaster. it is learning by doing.

the second goal is to build up a local network of people you know and can trust in the local scene so to speak, finding potentially other communists too. odds are that you will have to deal with a deluge of non-communists in general, but you can also demonstrate communist organizational techniques and educate other organizers by practice- the most convincing way is to demonstrate the correctness of your theory by actually doing it and actually winning so to speak.

the third goal is more my read on the circumstances - we must prioritize education on the class struggle and creating new communists requires talking to non-communists. the first two goals will lead to this naturally. but talking is not enough, demonstration is also required.

but the hardest part is the first step, actually making contact with people, then the rest will follow naturally in my opinion. anyways good luck out there, it is tough, but i believe in you!!!

[pangaeaseas]

social media/internet in the scholomance universe would be insaaaaane. Clickbaity articles like 'Top Ten Tips To Surviving the Scholomance' scammy 'scholomance coaches' advertising services a scholomance parents Facebook group where people are always causing drama because one of their kids killed someone else's

r/scholomance. just...r/scholomance. 'aita for leaving a 13yo to die horribly?' and all the responses are like NTA you just did what you had to. Ppl posting desperately asking for an alliance.

imagine scholomance-confessions.tumblr.com. 'I think El Higgins is a maleficer' someone pre a deadly education. ppl clowning on them in the notes or agreeing. 'I think Orion lake is actually a maw mouth' everyone is laughing. 'i would let a maleficaria fuck me' ok .

[mariacallous]

A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Meta argues that US law requires the company to let people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds.

It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has tussled with researchers and developers over tools that give users extra privacy options or that collect research data. It could clear the way for researchers to release add-ons that aid research into how the algorithms on social platforms affect their users, and it could give people more control over the algorithms that shape their lives.

The suit was filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of researcher Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. It attempts to take a federal law that has generally shielded social networks and use it as a tool forcing transparency.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is best known for allowing social media companies to evade legal liability for content on their platforms. Zuckerman’s suit argues that one of its subsections gives users the right to control how they access the internet, and the tools they use to do so.

“Section 230 (c) (2) (b) is quite explicit about libraries, parents, and others having the ability to control obscene or other unwanted content on the internet,” says Zuckerman. “I actually think that anticipates having control over a social network like Facebook, having this ability to sort of say, ‘We want to be able to opt out of the algorithm.’”

Zuckerman’s suit is aimed at preventing Facebook from blocking a new browser extension for Facebook that he is working on called Unfollow Everything 2.0. It would allow users to easily “unfollow” friends, groups, and pages on the service, meaning that updates from them no longer appear in the user’s newsfeed.

Zuckerman says that this would provide users the power to tune or effectively disable Facebook’s engagement-driven feed. Users can technically do this without the tool, but only by unfollowing each friend, group, and page individually.

There’s good reason to think Meta might make changes to Facebook to block Zuckerman’s tool after it is released. He says he won’t launch it without a ruling on his suit. In 2020, the company argued that the browser Friendly, which had let users search and reorder their Facebook news feeds as well as block ads and trackers, violated its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Meta permanently banned Louis Barclay, a British developer who had created a tool called Unfollow Everything, which Zuckerman’s add-on is named after.

“I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly,” Barclay wrote for Slate at the time. “But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically.”

The same year, Meta kicked off from its platform some New York University researchers who had created a tool that monitored the political ads people saw on Facebook. Zuckerman is adding a feature to Unfollow Everything 2.0 that allows people to donate data from their use of the tool to his research project. He hopes to use the data to investigate whether users of his add-on who cleanse their feeds end up, like Barclay, using Facebook less.

Sophia Cope, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, says that the core parts of Section 230 related to platforms’ liability for content posted by users have been clarified through potentially thousands of cases. But few have specifically dealt with the part of the law Zuckerman’s suit seeks to leverage.

“There isn’t that much case law on that section of the law, so it will be interesting to see how a judge breaks it down,” says Cope. Zuckerman is a member of the EFF’s board of advisers.

John Morris, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes open development of the internet, says that, to his knowledge, Zuckerman’s strategy “hasn’t been used before, in terms of using Section 230 to grant affirmative rights to users,” noting that a judge would likely take that claim seriously.

Meta has previously suggested that allowing add-ons that modify how people use its services raises security and privacy concerns. But Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, says that Zuckerman’s tool may be able to fairly push back on such an accusation.“The main problem with tools that give users more control over content moderation on existing platforms often has to do with privacy,” she says. “But if all this does is unfollow specified accounts, I would not expect that problem to arise here."

Even if a tool like Unfollow Everything 2.0 didn’t compromise users��� privacy, Meta might still be able to argue that it violates the company’s terms of service, as it did in Barclay’s case.

“Given Meta’s history, I could see why he would want a preemptive judgment,” says Cope. “He’d be immunized against any civil claim brought against him by Meta.”

And though Zuckerman says he would not be surprised if it takes years for his case to wind its way through the courts, he believes it’s important. “This feels like a particularly compelling case to do at a moment where people are really concerned about the power of algorithms,” he says.

[libraford]

Watching people in the city Facebook group make posts asking about childcare services and using photos of their kids to boost the algorithm like...

....yikes. just yikes.

[lonestarbattleship]

March 5, 2024 Refloat of Battleship Texas

"Good Morning!

This morning Battleship Texas Foundation, Valkor Energy Services, and Gulf Copper plan to undock the Battleship Texas. This hours-long process will start at roughly 4 am. This operation is incredibly dependent on weather conditions -tide, current, and visibility. As of right now, there is very dense fog, if the Galveston Pilots do not have sufficient visibility, the discharge will be delayed until the next suitable tide and current window.

With over 700 tons of steel renewed on the ship and hundreds of thousands of man hours put into making the hull substantially watertight, we have great confidence that today will be successful. Once this 112 year old hull goes back into the water we will be subjecting her to an extended evaluation period while the ship remains in the shipyard.

I combined all three videos posted on their Facebook page.

Posted on the Battleship Texas Foundation Group Facebook page: link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link, link