Nah I was the one who cracked the Liberty Bell tho

It has investors, those investors are going to want money.

It doesn’t make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community in the first place, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.

The only reason to create a fediverse server directly under the auspices of a University or under an official capacity for the University would be to use the fediverse server as a public communication tool (like how Universities and other institutions might use Twitter), which actually isn’t a bad idea but is totally separate from what people are suggesting here…

I think things become much more chaotic and prone to quickly escalating to lethal applications of violence if there is the constant threat that anybody could be concealed carrying and more importantly that if someone felt the need to carry a firearm that they would likely conceal it.

Bringing a large visible rifle into a situation still escalates the threat of violence, but at least it does it in a clear and unambiguous way. There is no excuse to shoot the teenager dressed in basketball shorts and a wifebeater with absolutely no where to hide a rifle because you saw somebody else nearby with a rifle and you think the unarmed teenager might be concealing one. (There really is almost never an excuse to shoot anybody unless they are holding a gun and aiming it at you, and maybe even not then if you are on the one antagonizing them).

The US is a country where police not unregularly shoot innocent people, often unarmed black men or other minorities, and handwave away any responsibility for the needless violence by suggesting there might have been a handgun…

With a hunting rifle or shotgun there is no ambiguity about your intentions in a space or how you will potentially react to lethal threats of violence. There is no conveniently conflating other innocent and unarmed people with the people holding rifles or shotguns and easily getting away with it. On the other hand there is no surprising people by entering a space under false pretexts about your capacity or intentions around violence with a rifle or shotgun, since carrying a large weapon immediately identifies you as someone carrying a large weapon.

My point is, concealed carry is only effectively a right or privilege if society gives you the permission to arbitrarily carry around the means to end many peoples’ lives in your pocket, which is something really only extended willingly and consistently to white, christian conservative men. Carrying around a hunting rifle or a shotgun is a different story.

Look at the way handguns are used in US media, they are treated as status symbols of power and righteosness. Shows and movies constantly rely on the revealing, obtaining and losing of handguns to portray changes in the power of characters (lazy fucking writing but that is another rant…). To US culture the handgun is the ultimate object of empowerment and of personally distributed justice and that says everything you need to know about handguns really.

(also, if you are someone who actually needs to protect yourself with a handgun, you already know who you are, this conversation is irrelevant)

As a USian, while I think gun violence is a preventable mass tragedy that unfolds daily here I also think that when minorities, indigenous people, women, queer people or really anybody who isn’t a white christian rightwing man talks about wanting to own a gun to protect themselves while living in this country I can’t disagree. If you don’t understand the very real threat of police violence that you can’t resist or stop, and the very real threat of other kinds of violence that police will NOT step in to stop because of who you are, you can’t really argue against owning guns in the US to people that have no other choice than to take this kind of thing seriously.

I think handguns should be made much much much more illegal, since the handgun is actually the tool of state violence and oppression, it is the tool of surprise murder and intimidation. On the other hand if you carry a rifle you have to state your capacity for lethal violence, there is no hiding it or revealing it like a powertrip or gotcha card, which isn’t to downplay the terror and violence that evil rightwing terrorists have wrought upon the US with assault rifles, but at this point I don’t think owning a hunting style rifle or a shotgun as somebody who lives in the US is an unreasonable idea, especially if you have become a convenient political and literal target for the right.

To be clear, the whole stupid idea that owning an ar15 with a 30 roung mag, bumpstock and quick change mags somehow makes you safe to a home defender that breaks into your house at 3am when you pull it out and proceed to shoot 30 rounds erratically in the general direction of something you hear, sending bullets careening through the walls of your neighborhood and more likely killing somebody’s kid sleeping in their bedroom than doing anything to make you safer IS pathetic and spits on actual real gun culture.

Also I want to note that people who roleplay as mil-sim types by spending actual thousands of dollars on pseudo-military equipment to live powertrip fantasies are by and large hilariously pathetic, especially because they are usually completely and utterly blind to (or worse directly supportive of) forms of authoritarian violence (state or otherwise). See lots of loser white dudes showing up in 24k worth of weekend warrior dress up GI Joe gear to defend the incredible threat to civil liberties that society expecting people to wear masks during a pandemic represented… Good job chuds! You saved the day!

Bernie Sanders can pronounce it however the fuck he wants, with as thick of a brooklyn accent as he wants.

He has earned at least that much lol

Being a scientist also kinda means understanding what are your strengths, and how you can combine them with other people who are smart along very specific narrow vectors.

Being a scientist means understanding that if you work together with the right kind of smart, curious people you can build amazing things that will improve the world.

Being a scientist in 2025 means understanding the modern business world is utter bullshit and will rot any science it touches to the core.

Being a scientist, like truly living that ethos, means being someone who believes the truth is important and that there are power structures who will fight tooth and nail to subdue that truth or hoard it to themselves for personal gain.

Being a scientist thus effectively means that I would expect that after having a brief conversation with you that you would at least understand the grave danger that entrusting science communication in another for profit social media company poses and how it doesn’t seem sensible to take that risk when the actual material barriers to creating Fediverse communities as alternatives aren’t actually that high no matter how much it feels like the barriers are impossible and the network effect is unbeatable.

Don’t get me wrong, those hurdles are real, the fediverse can be confusing, there are lots of growing pains here… however, not every scientist needs to become an expert in selfhosting Fediverse software, and not every scientist needs to become a Fediverse evangelist (although it wouldn’t hurt), but we do need to connect boldly and clearly the tragic hypocrisy of supposedly truth valuing people (scientists, science communicators and leaders that defend science) all shepherding dutifully onto another platform that will silence and betray them violently.

Scientists are inherently aligned with modern progressive politics, or rather scientists need to understand they are at everything up to physical bodily danger from being hurt by conservatives now and they need to understand that makes them fundamentally aligned with modern progressive politics.

There is no “I don’t want to get political here” and the failure of the science community at large to recognize how embracing Bluesky as if it was a genuine solution to the unfolding catastrophe of science being defunded and destroyed is embarrassing. Those of us on the Fediverse should be kind, but also we should make fun of them for not using their brains. They clearly have them. Fucking use them you fools.

Bluesky is a for profit corporate venture, the same EXACT incentives that now have placed us all very much in danger and have placed the very funding structures of science in danger the world over (at least in US/European connected science communities) are at play in Bluesky and Scientists betray the begrudging respect the public has for their intelligence (even if they pretend to hate Scientists) by treating Bluesky like it is safe. Bluesky is not safe. This is no different than scientists endorsing any other thing that is fundamentally a threat to the health and safety of innocent people. It is just new, people are scared and scientists are largely too overwhelmed to see things for how they are.

At the end of the day, every Scientist needs to hear to their face that Bluesky is a threat to science, science education and the free access to knowledge in general the world over, they need to defend their choice to go on Bluesky anyways instead of Mastodon (both is fine tho) along the terms of what motivates their pursuit of studying and doing science. I don’t care if scientists are already overwhelmed and scared, they along with everyone else have all the information to understand why choosing Bluesky to throw the weight of science communication behind is dangerous, and it is unacceptable to give them a pass because 2025 is a terrifying mess. 2025 is a terrifying mess for reasons DIRECTLY RELATED TO THIS DISCUSSION. Scientists should understand that better than almost anyone else if they are paying attention, and many do which is why Mastodon is full of scientists!

Well, y’all produced Mein Kampf, which is a definite L for german literary culture (among other bad things), but y’all did produce The Magic Mountain which slaps so it is a mixed bag.

A very violent, uneven, mixed bag.

edit seriously though, to any Germans out there or people connected with German culture that are in deep despair right now, fucking read or listen to the Magic Mountain it is amazing and speaks to every part of German culture that resists fascism and celebrates what fascism abhors (love, weakness, sickness, fragility of body and the wisdom that brings the mind when the mind is willing).

Thomas Mann began writing The Magic Mountain before the outbreak of WW1 and initially it had much different philosophical conclusions/politics, but then WW1 happened, Thomas Mann turned directly towards writing non-fiction works on politics, eventually evolving to become much more humanist through the experience of WW1 and then after WW1 Thomas Mann returned to writing The Magic Mountain with an entirely new, much more nuanced and loving view of humanity. It is a wonderful, magic winter blanket of strangely hallucinogenic calmness, it is extremely dry in an unrelentingly hilarious way and it has sections of prose that rival any other modernist novel period, though I can only speak for the English translation (John E Woods translation).

If you are wondering why I am going on effusively about how relevant a long ass book about being in a sanitarium that was published in 1924 is to modern european, us and global politics, I don’t know what to tell you other than fuck just have to trust me…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Mountain

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