Ian Kenway @iankenway@social.cleverlibre.org

#World ‘gravely’ unprepared for effects of #ClimateCrisis – report | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/10/climate-crisis-world-readiness-effects-gravely-insufficient-report

#GlobalWarming #ClimateChange

"Week of legislative defeats and popular ridicule continues for embattled #UK Prime Minister" https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/05/not-exactly-vote-confidence-amid-brexit-chaos-boris-johnsons-own-brother-resigns #brexit

Irish joke.

#politics #Brexit #BoJo

How the Liberal Left created the Conservative Right and extremism in the fediverse:

As someone who cares greatly about equality, and recognizes minorities and underprivileged groups deal with some unique and difficult struggles I realize the title to this post would seem a bit inflammatory. But that is not my intention, my intention is to address a very real problem.

As anyone on the fediverse knows there are generally two major groups of instances. Those that wont ban anything of any kind, no rules it's the wild west (red instances). Then there are those that ban anyone who shares any opinion that disagrees with their politics, even if you criticise both the left and the right in the same breath you will likely quickly find the instance or yourself banned.

However the unfortunate consequence of this pattern of behavior is to promote ever increasing support for red instances and to drive grey instances (instances that take a middle ground) into being red instances. Should be obvious why...

You basically have a spectrum of behavior with red on one side and blue on the other. With everyone crammed into the 0.1% of either end of this spectrum that means most new instances will start off, most likely, somewhere in the grey area, even if their just marginally shy of being red or blue in its full extreme.

The experience for an admin of such an instance is to quickly be overwhelmed with people from blue instances blocking and banning for things like criticising a democratic politician or something rather minor. By the end of the first few months a blue/left leaning instance will quickly find itself on dozens of suspend or ban instances as a result and find they only have a voice among the 99% red instances and the 1% grey instances out there.

Since this means they naturally wont have a voice among blue instances, and most people are on social media because they want to be social, this means their only incentive is to appeal to red instances (since that's where all their boosts and likes come from). Along with building animosity for how blue instances treat them and with the acceptance of red instances you will find all the incentive for the instances to move to be an extremist red instance with extremist no-rule policies quickly develop.

As such we see exactly what we are seeing now on the fediverse, an ever increasing number of red instances very quickly overwhelming and overtaking the blue instances.

Of course this is made worse by the fact that those ont he blue instances can only see other blue instances. so they will be under the mistaken impression that the red instances don't exist and that the blue instances are thriving and growing and dominating over the red instances. This ignorance just ensures the red instances grow unchecked and unchallenged.

As someone who's personal policy is anti-extremism, and with this pattern being one that generates extremism it is very VERY concerning to me.

#mastodon #fediverse #uspol #extremism #mastoadmin

I was just at our local #demonstration against the proroguing of #Parliament. I reckon there were around 2500 people but I can’t be sure. All very good natured and a sudden heavy shower dampened nobody’s spirits. There were speeches by my #MP #BenBradshaw and #SarahWoolaston, MP for #Totnes (a former Tory) as well as others such as trades unionists and a leave voter who had changed his mind.

#Exeter #England #UK #Politics #Brexit #Europe #EU #StopTheCoup

Lucas calls further for a written constitution and a people's vote

#Brexit #StopTheCoup

#StopTheCoup #protests across the #UK – in #pictures | #Politics | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/gallery/2019/aug/31/stop-the-coup-protests-across-the-uk-in-pictures

#EU #Brexit

@iankenway
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I want to thank everyone for your patience. As many of you know we have been redoing the entire QOTO architecture. This included many new services for our users (all free!) but also some very big changes.

It took us some time to move over to the new infrastructure plus our founder, Jeff, was in the hospital for about 9 months and that seriously slowed us down.

However the latest version of QOTO's variant of mastodon has been beta tested and is ready to go. We will begin the upgrade of the official server tomorrow evening.

As always the QOTO server will include all our usual additions to the code base and MathJax support will be reenabled on this upgrade as well.

We will update the community with the exact time of the upgrade sometime tomorrow once we know. But expect it to be in the middle of the night for both Europe and USA time zones.

#Qoto #Mastodon #upgrade

#QOTO is upgrading to v2.9.3 tomorrow (finally got tests working). All the usual QOTO enhancements are still there. Really excited to play with all of @Gargron 's new features!

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage:
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

-- To Althea, from prison (last stanza only)

#poem #poetry #english #literature