I just wanted to update you on this.

So I’m not a superstitious person so I don’t really believe in the tarot, although I respect the time you put into this and I respect it in the way that one can appreciate a religion and understand it without agreeing with the theological position. I probably tipped my hand on that when I called this a Rorschach test.

Anyway, all that aside, your reading got me to reflect on things and it has acted as a catalyst for me to start getting my shit in order and this has yielded some really positive results already, after being stuck spinning my wheels for well over a year at this point.

So I just wanted to thank you for being the nudge that I clearly needed to start making positive changes in my life. I’ll try and remember to update you again at about the 6 month mark. (If I forget, I’m very open to being reminded about this.)

This is a good take and I should have said that I do this in spaces that are quite hostile to radical politics, in particular the ones that spring up around “thought leader” content creators who speak out against the radical left at least as often as they do the far right while funnelling people into the democratic party and shit.

I don’t do it in progressive community spaces, I leave them be or very occasionally I will occasionally chip in with something that contributes to the discourse while shifting it leftwards but not in an obnoxios “Read theory, you libs!!” way.

It’s only the spaces that are culty and terminally lib which are led by progressive grifters posing as leftists that I do wrecker shit like I described above because it’s impossible to actually do genuine work in those contexts (you get banned or shouted down immediately) so the only way I have come up with working within that context is by using an accelerationist approach and putting too fine a point on the sort of discourse that would typically be deployed against people who stray too far from the internal orthodoxy. I’m not gonna name names but I’m sure you know the pseudo-radical content creators who immediately fall in line with that vote blue no matter who shit when the election rolls around but who are otherwise mostly focused on punching left (against anarchists and communists alike) while grifting their audience for donations and patreon memberships. The ones who function as smaller spinoff grifts which mirror those larger DNC astroturfed “movements” and “activist groups” that are just fronts to wring people for donations, except with content creators they use the same sort of model to create a personalized brand out of themselves in the process.

Whoa, just so they can report them to the government and get the student executed!? How strict is their education system?? (/s)

just like how North Korea apparently have a schrodinger’s haircut thing going on where they execute people for both having and not having Kim Jong Un’s exact haircut.

Thesis: You must have Kim Jong Un’s haircut or else face execution

Antithesis: You must not have Kim Jong Un’s haircut or else face execution

Synthesis: Go bald

Baldies stay winning!

They can surveil all the elderly people, people with disability, and people living below the poverty line as they make their way from their frigid, unheated houses so they can temporarily shelter in heated public spaces as they desperately try to stave off the effects of hypothermia for one more day.

Another day, another dizzying amount of money spent doing anything but improving the lives of the average person, all courtesy of the Kid Starver regime.

https://youtu.be/Gu8YiTeU9XU

The economy is so bad that inflation is even hitting the Irish elder abuse genre of content creation (/s)

Back when tankie got popularized as a term outside of the radical left it was equal parts hilarious and painful seeing libs deploy it against oldhead anarchists that I knew of online. It must have been infuriating for them to have it turned on them like that.

These days when I’m outside of explicitly radical spaces online and I see a progressive advocating for anything beyond peaceful assemblies and performance, when they start advocating for actual activism that can achieve things, sometimes I larp as a turbolib and I try policing them by calling them a tankie and telling them shit like “We can’t just physically oppose law enforcement agents because that will make our side look bad by not following procedure within the democratic system” and “we have to wait this out until the next election but when it does come around in 3 years we can use all the energy we have built up to campaign hard but in the meantime we should call and write to our representatives to ask them politely if there’s anything that we can do”.

This might seem odd but it’s me doing wrecker shit within progressive lib spaces by shifting the leftmost acceptable boundary of politics within that space slightly so that the people who are advocating for things that work will stop trying to appeal to the impassive, performative progressives they are surrounded with and start feeling like an outsider to those spaces by causing an artificial faultline within the group, so that the furthest left of them feel alienated and politically adrift from those spaces because suddenly I’m getting support for saying “Um, yikes! Settle down there, tankie. We just have to ride this out and do nothing or otherwise the optics will be bad, okay?” and meanwhile they are screaming out that something has to be done urgently. Aggravating that tension within different factions of the space and crystallizing it by putting it to words while encouraging people to rally on either side of it means that those furthest left will be more inclined to start breaking free of the anti-tankie programming (“I’m not a big bad evil tankie by arguing that we need to get armed and resist ICE and start a general strike so why are people agreeing that I’m acting like a tankie??”) and they get firsthand experience at how that term is used to police the left. With a little luck they will become desensitized to it and to learn to hate the libs who deploy it because… libs care more about optics than they do about what’s being done right in front of them

I’ve used exaggerated terms here to illustrate the point but I know how to use pitch-perfect wording and terms from their own political discourse to get them to believe I’m genuinely one of them since they listen to phrasing and the cheap “x is like voldemort” superficial political analysis (using the term analysis very loosely here) instead of thinking in terms of genuine political principles. Because they’re libs.

At worst it causes the libs to fight amongst themselves but, ideally, it makes the furthest left of their numbers start peeling themselves away from liberalism and toothless progressive politics.

Congrats on the recognition!!

The economy has gotten so bad that inflation is even affecting penises now.

When will it end? When will this penis inflation bubble pop??

They’ve gone on record stating that they have a ton of racks that aren’t even hot because they cannot get enough electricity supply to power all of them.

They have bought up the supply and they have piles of cards and ram sitting idle collecting dust because they can’t even power them on while people that could make good use of them can’t because now they’re all so unaffordable because they’re literally hoarding PC hardware like a dragon in a fantasy setting hoards a pile of gold. (Draw your own conclusions about what solutions fantasy stories have for dealing with dragons sitting on hoards of treasure.)

Tell me that doesn’t sound a whole lot like collusion to feed this ridiculous bubble.

But yeah, it definitely does the same for me and I’ve made a little commitment to myself to try to add extra details into my alt-text to make it like a little reward or Easter egg for the people who do read it so it’s not just a sort of afterthought for people with visual impairment but as a way to break down the barrier and the stigma around using accessibility tools (in a very small way) by encouraging everyone to read the alt-text because they might get something out of it that they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. If we often get bonus content that is relevant to the image in the alt-text then we’re all going to be more likely to engage with it and hopefully we can inspire others by setting the standard with good examples of visual description.

Not to overstate the importance of my alt-text here but my hope was that it might get noticed as a little experiential thing where you get a sense of what it’s like to have a visual impairment and how the alt-text can really enrich your understanding because the blurry keychain becomes much easier to understand when you’ve got a written description to guide your interpretation of some blurry pixels.

In another life I had to do quite a bit of presentations for my work and it was only when there was a coworker who was legally blind that I started doing visual descriptions of images like graphs or pictures to represent a concept that I realized just how valuable it is to all participants if I take a moment to describe the images and how they relate to what’s being presented. It really reinforces the message and drives things home for everyone when you’re presenting and it was a really big moment for me to be hit with the curb-cut effect in such a dramatic and almost tangible way like that. I made a commitment to myself to continue this practice for presentations and public speaking after I had that epiphany that this coworker was a catalyst for.

There are dozens of us

I haven’t had a decent PC in forever and I was hoping to get one this year, if I played my cards right. The market had other plans however (as it does for us all).

I’m basically just stuck riding out this tidal wave of bullshit hardware stockpiling and scalping until your comment can become my reality.

I’m always a little bit surprised when I find out that someone has read the alt-text that I wrote out.

I give it my best effort regardless but I find myself wondering if I’m doing a good job with it - if I’m capturing the right details in a logical order that makes enough sense to stand on its own and whether I’m doing it with the right amount of depth.

Thanks for the encouragement!

A year can feel like an eternity away when we are having a lot of weeks where decades happen

perfectly manicured monobrow

You just doxed yourself

Bumping and adding a direct link to the crowdfunding campaign so it’s easy to click on:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/surviving-an-onslaught

Ezra Deklein