tripu @tripu@social.cleverlibre.org

Two recent examples of why #feminism is necessary, and where our focus should be: [ultraorthodox Jews in Israel](https://twitter.com/Fauerzaesp/status/1695553905466179634) and [Islamists in Iran](https://twitter.com/omid9/status/1696215393885462963).

(* _Allegedly_; I don't trust tweets without attribution; time, places and circumstances may be wrong.)

I think these are the #authors I've spent most time with:

* **Eduardo Mendoza**: 4 books (out of 5) of [his most popular series](https://www.goodreads.com/series/86682-el-innombrado-detective-o-el-paciente-del-doctor-sugra-es) plus 2 more.
* **Katsuhiro Otomo**: 6 volumes of [Akira](https://www.goodreads.com/series/57444-akira-6-volumes).
* **Arthur C. Clarke**: all 4 #books of [Space Odyssey](https://www.goodreads.com/series/49122-space-odyssey).

**Marcel #Proust** will oust them all when I'm done with his [7-volume novel](https://www.goodreads.com/series/55129-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu).

I'm so done listening to #CurtisYarvin, aka #MenciusMoldbug. (Last time: #Triggernometry #podcast.) Don't let me ever read or hear from him again.

I've given him enough opportunities already to defend his views and proposals, but specific ideas and policy proposals he has zero. There's a limit to how much hand-waving one can do and historical anecdotes one can point to before coming back down to earth and to actual reforms.

It's not that he's sometimes dog-whistling, it's that dog-whistling is all he does, devoid of any content.

Stop slipping away, stick your neck out, and answer direct questions. Here's a good heuristic for him and his followers: if straight answers to specific issues sound absurd or alarming (dictatorship? racial hierarchies? state surveillance? empire?), there's a non-negligible probability that your ideas are wrong.

Second time in a few days that someone on Mastodon replies to me with attacks, contempt or outrage after just a couple posts, and then blocks me.

I am guilty of replying to their posts uninvited (isn't that what all this is for?), but in all cases my comments were good-intentioned questions or opinions, not ad-hominem or hate.

My ideas may be _wrong_, but I expressed myself well within the norms of respect and civility, and I did mean well.

What's happening? Is intolerance and divisiveness creeping in to #Mastodon too?

I love the silly plays on words and terrible #puns here on Mastodon!

@JessTheUnstill

I agree with the spirit of your post.

The issue arises, I think, if we forget that #capitalism is an _economic_ system. And a _political_ system, at most. _Not_ an ethical framework.

Capitalism may assign a rough “value” to individual human beings based on their economic output, but that's a byproduct of its calculations, and we should not equate that with “dignity” or “moral worth”.

It's like blaming the metric system for the fact that some people are very short. Or linguistics for the fact that some people have a different mother tongue and thus we can't communicate as easily with them.

Capitalism is fine within its sphere. As long as we make sure we use a different tool to measure moral weight, we'll be OK.

Beautiful and inspiring

https://medium.com/@AaronBleyaert/how-to-lose-weight-in-4-easy-steps-1f135f7e1dec#.9n223n4zb

~7 km, ~40' beautiful steep #run to my brother-in-law's #vineyards and back. Snack: delicious #grapes ripe for harvest!

Not elections in Gabon. Not Ukraine. Not the crisis in Niger. Not protests in Syria.

Let alone the 1,323 children under 5 who died of #malaria _yesterday_.

No. This.

Explain to me again why I should care about “the news” when #news #media have a vested interest in pushing my buttons, their analyses are so biased, and their priorities so skewed.

About #priorities, case in point: today, major #newspapers in 🇪🇸 #Spain imply that by far the most important #news (as measured by real estate occupied on their front pages) is

what one person

who is the head of a federation of

one sport

in one country

says at a press conference about

one incident.

That incident was _not_ a crime. That person is _not_ an influential leader or thinker. There is no international conflict involved. Nobody died, or is going to die, or is going to survive, depending on the outcome of this.

After #Kindle, #Polar, #Samsung, etc I've learnt the lesson.

My next #gadgets will be ugly and lack some cool features. Perhaps they'll even be more expensive. But I will move GPX, TCX, MP3, EPUB, TXT, JSON, etc in and out of them at will.

Damn.

The contortions I have to make to copy a few podcast episodes to a #Samsung #Galaxy fitness tracker over BT…

Stupid app requiring a load of other stupid apps and background services just to be able to keep all my workouts inside a walled garden, and even then it's near impossible to get the files for anything useful.

The “send music to #Gear” feature tries to guess where my audio is (on my phone), but fails — so I have to manually copy and paste MP3s from obscure directories to some magic path, every time, to have the app send them to the device.

You building and selling a #gadget? This is the exhaustive list of apps, plugins, processes running in the background, accounts, subscriptions, online services, protocols and formats I want:

* Something I can mount as external storage over USB, or similarly over BT, with a regular file system containing all items in standard formats that are interoperable, that I can read and write without restrictions.

I have very bad #memory in general, but good memory for #places. It's interesting how I clearly remember where I was when I was reading certain #books, even many years later.

* _The Lord of the Rings_: trips by coach between Granada and Seville, 2005–2006.
* _Dracula_: commuting by bus between Madrid and Alcobendas, 2011 or 2012.
* _What Do You Care What Other People Think?_: beaches of Malta.
* _Don Quixote_: Tokyo, 2014–2016. _On Liberty_ ,too; I remember reading that at one of those popular cafes near Omotesando.
* _Swann's Way_: bus commutes in Madrid, 2019 or 2020.

And so on.

Why do I trust the literary canon and the classics, then?

* Not just old but considered best by experts (literary critics, historians, artists, philosophers, writers themselves).
* Survived not among a handful of alternatives, but among _millions_ of other books, the vast majority lost and forgotten (ie plenty of variety and competition).
* To an extent, in art “consumed and appreciated by more” correlates with “quality” (by definition, because art should be liked by people).
* Today, definitely not propped by trends, intimidation, inertia, or consumerism (quite the contrary).