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Some rambling thoughts on the rise of the far right.
Things have gotten too big. Things that cannot go on are beginning to not go on. Some people addicted to these ideas can’t face the threat that represents to their status. Some people sold on the idea that they had a preferential right to these ideas, but have led lives on the margins, resent that they never really had access.
Things will crumble because they’re too big to stand up.
All we have ever had as a counter is kindness
…Yesterday, I left the funeral directors on my bicycle and directly outside had to sit on my bike at some traffic lights for several minutes in the early pre-weekend rush hour traffic.
I was surrounded by cars that are too big doing all kinds of stupid moves to try and get through the lights.
The racists are not the only problem. They’re just the obvious face of it. Everything that is too big and too much is also the problem. And we have to face that
@urlyman "Everything that is too big and too much is also the problem." Women have said that for millennia !
On a different note, I totally agree: I also have a problem understanding the universe.
…Ridicule/absurdity is a vital tool. Used wisely, it’s a kind of kindness (that our species has been practicing for eons). Portland protestors seem like a great example to me
…When ridicule tips over into resentment that’s a problem cos resentment never lessened resentment. I struggle to stay the right side of that line.
Back to the too big cars at the traffic lights: I find it easy to resent SUV drivers but if I think more carefully what I resent most is them being allowed to be sold the stupid fucking idea in the first place.
I resent racists, but what I more accurately resent is them saying and doing racist things. Yet my resentment doesn’t lessen theirs at all
…Unmanageable scale breeds resentment and AI is a response to that. It’s a response that tries to scale up unmanageable scale, which is not artificially intelligent, it’s just actually stupid. On its face, if it had one.
…My dad’s generation were trained on a form of resentment called Empire and ended up having to have a 6-year long resentment battle that killed his brother and many millions of others. It ended with exhaustion, which we called victory, and at the end things were smaller and excess was lower.
And there was the possibility of less resentment. For a bit
…Anyway, my recommendation is that those of us not already living at the margins *voluntarily* downsize. And out of that comes the strong probability of less resentment.
Here’s the very wonderful @danmcquillan talking to @parismarx about #decomputing, a kind of #degrowth
@urlyman Very inspired by e.g. https://small-tech.org and #smolweb , I have thought a lot about “human scale systems” the last few years. One of my most interesting observations, is that not even web search needs to be web scale. We tend to think of web indexes as huge beasts which need parallel processing to scan, but take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinboard_(website) , to quote Wikipedia “As of July 2024, Pinboard contained 288 million bookmarks for 233 million URLs.” That probably contains all the pages you're actually interested in hitting, and that could even be searched with reasonable performance using a single system.
Many moons ago, at a water cooler talk where I worked back then, engineer A made fun of the tiny car engineer B used to get to work. I looked at engineer A and asked why it was stupid _not_ moving two extra tons of steel just to move yourself. And, remember, these were engineers, so that question hit the spot.
I agree: Too many things are too big and too much. And they often only need to be so... because _they_ need to be so, not because _we_ need them to.
@Lemmus nice thoughts. Thanks
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