"Just because you hate someone doesn’t mean you can’t love them.” ~@DetroitDan

@hankg on the bright side, then, we can think if it as kind of an eternal light…

punishment is a cost. we do it because it is offset by important benefits, like deterrence in the context of systems of predictable accountability, or reducing a person’s capacity to do harm. but the punishment itself, it’s not a win, not a benefit. it’s a cost.

it is understandable that direct victims should glory in the punishment, but the rest of us should do our best not to. we mete it out always in sadness.

@hankg not sure!

is mastodon the midwest? https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/109598075150433931

never understood why people put mock feces in their hair and call it hygiene.

wait, who bought southwest?

apparently, signal qualifies as "our technology overlords", but facebook is meek and neutral and espouses no dangerous ideology. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/jack-dorseys-twitter-signal-privacy.html ht @dangillmor

Discovering a civilization on a very distant planet, along with some means of instant communication, could be great for social science. We'd make a deal: we do the social science for you, you do the social science for us. Since neither of us have an interest, beyond academic curiosity, in the other civilization's arrangements, the work might actually be credible.

offense should be neither given nor taken.

hmm. Toot! previews full tweets when you embed a Twitter links, so they basically look like cross-platform quote tweets?toots?twats?

the “official” Mastodon iOS client does not.

@akhilrao who knows, maybe not so bleak! what if it’s a lab developed very contagious supermild virus crossimmune with COVID and after the leak we’ll all be perfectly immune from now on with no ill effects? #HappyHypothesis

While we were loudly arguing about Ivermectin, we forgot to hold Gilead accountable for sitting on GS-441524. Flood the zone with shit, they say. https://twitter.com/victoriacyanide/status/1607925652858220545 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GS-441524

OK. It is so deeply suppressed I don't know what it would mean, but it must mean something. #JabLeakHypothesis

when they tell you as a child to dream big, there’s a danger you may mistake all the other people in the inspiring tales you imagine for mere extras.

when you are the object of love at first sight, the perpetrator is the love that spied you.

expressions of enthusiastic agreement on this platform are called darn tootin'.

if you rely upon apple products to conceal and manage the complexity of contemporary technology, please spare a bit of sympathy for people who find contemporary social arrangements complex and fraught. where is the apple for people without malice overwhelmed and confused by contemporary mores, even while they are genuinely and importantly more just than the mores many people were raised with?

I find I'm in the mood these days to rewrite the internet from scratch.

I'm not sure that's an efficient use of my time.

BREAKING: Comfort and Joy