Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

@nataliedavisgdread If it's truly a balloon, with no means of propulsion, why are people acting as if there was any choice about where it goes? It's at the mercy of wind currents, is it not?

@Popehat

"Local" social media, whether Facebook or NextDoor, is the worst of all possible media.

With non-local media, you might be able to convince yourself that the unhinged racist sexist homophobic people who hate the poor are at least people you don't have to interact with on a regular basis. You can stop loading the page or app and retreat into the warm embrace of the kind-hearted people you interact with in the real world.

With local media, you are forced to confront the reality: it is your neighbors, people who live near you, who are hateful. When you are putting out the trash bin on trash day, and wave to your neighbor, they're the one calling the police because someone "undesirable" was walking down the street minding their own business.

Maybe it would be better to know, except what are you going to do with that information? It's not like anywhere else is any better!

The only way to win the game is not to play.

@Jaden2@mstdn.social I’m starting to think that if you don’t feel like a radical, you’re not paying attention!

@cstross It's amazing to watch. I mean, we can't be sure yet, but I sure wouldn't bet against your first guess!

@Pat It takes a bigger brain than mine to understand that, despite Dr King and Malcom X being murdered with guns, guns were somehow essential to civil rights. Perhaps it's true, in the sense that King's murder with a gun led to LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act of 1968, in part to stem the protests that erupted afterward.

Guns have been used against civil rights protestors over and over and over again, and used by civil rights protestors almost never. This practical history of what has actually happened seems more helpful than your counterfactual assertion that guns are equal to freedom. That is plainly not true.

In a country awash with guns, my daughter doesn't have the freedom to use a locker at school, and I don't have the freedom of feeling certain that she won't be shot at school. In this ridiculous hellscape of a country awash with guns, we've had 55 mass shootings in the 33 days of 2023.

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

The history is clear, the results of the experiment are in: guns are killing us, and it needs to stop.

@kingsley @BrunoMcGee

It seems like a lot of departments have reasonable education requirements, and they don't seem to help. For example:

https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/tyre-nichols-wasnt-murdered-because

Ending qualified immunity, that would clearly help. It might also result in understaffed police departments as cops quit rather than take out insurance policies, but that just sounds like it would help in two ways!

@timpierce

At a guess, the rich white men writing the policy would barely notice am additional subscription fee among all of the other fees they're paying for their children to go to college.

@mitchw @pluralistic