Yehuda Rothschild republished (with permission) a presentation (Archive.org link) by Lara A Jacobs, Mvskoke citizen and Native scientist, on settler colonialism - what is it, what is colonization, what happened when settlers (in North America) arrived.

The whole thing is excellent, and I hope there's a video version, or one is done one day.

Some particular points I want to mention/synthesize:

Colonization is not a historical event, but a continuous process that requires ongoing support through social and legal systems and institutional violence.

Colonization doesn't just mean moving in and kicking out indiginous people, though it definitely means that. It's also continued occupation of their "lands, waters, and environments", the forced breakup of families and communities through unjust and cruel laws and foster systems, the intentional obliteration of native peoples' languages, cultural practices, and value systems (often through forced fostering and the original residential homes).

We (the White European Settlers) operated -- and still operate -- under a value system and ideologies that are manifestly destructive (the following is quoted):

• Conquer and defeat their surroundings
• Biases against undeveloped areas
• Associated uncivilized areas with evil
• Commodity-based utilitarianism (e.g., extractive practices)
• Extraction of 'natural resources' (e.g., forest products, marine fisheries, mining, etc.)
• Capitalism

All of these in direct opposition to the beliefs, ideologies, and practices of Native cultures and communities, which had been existing largely in balance with their environments for many thousands of years before settlers arrived.

There is much much more in the slides that were shared and I'm grateful to Lara and Yehuda both for making these available.

If I was going to work in #government and had my choice it would probably be at the US Digital Service.

We collaborate with public servants throughout the government to address some of the most critical needs and ultimately deliver a better government experience to people. We work across multiple agencies and bring best practices from our various disciplines.

Also found out they are now hiring #remotework employees, a few years ago they were DC-local only. 🤔

Nothing's wrong, GameRant.

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And it's your #tracking I'm blocking, not #advertising (well, ok, it's that too)

I recently learned about a small town in Alabama that has not held a public election for more than sixty years. The town is Newbern, Alabama. While nearly eighty-five percent of the town residents are Black, before 2020 the town never had a Black mayor.

An unbelievable and yet completely believable story of voter suppression in the deep south

Guy Nave, Jr gives a well-written and succint history of voting rights for former enslaved Black people in the south, then tells the story describing the incredible "hand-me-down" white mayorship in the majority-Black town.

"We've never had an election out here. We don't have ballots and machines to do it." Stokes became mayor in 2008, when he inherited the position from Haywood Stokes Jr. Their ancestor, Peter P. Stokes, served in the Confederate Army and “owned” enslaved Black people when Newbern was a cotton plantation town.

A tiny fediverse wishlist:

• Quote toots
• A real DM implementation w/ E2E encryption (black-box, ie. even the host cannot read them)

From the Black Voters Matter Fund mailing list (I can't find a web link for this on the website):

Georgia Voters, Your Voter Status Is At Risk

Hundreds of thousands of Georgians could see their registrations canceled, causing concerns among voting rights advocates. The Georgia Secretary of State plans to remove 191,473 inactive voters, citing outdated lists. While accuracy is essential, this will disenfranchise voters in the process. Protect your right to vote - check your status today at https://mvp.sos.ga.gov, and stay informed about these changes. Let your voice be heard in Georgia's elections!

It's a good reminder for all of us - especially anyone who believes in actual Democracy, justice, and law - that that the GOP's "best" chance these days is to repeatedly attack our voting rights, most particularly those of oppressed "minorities".

("People of the global majority" I saw someone brilliantly describe those we often call "people of color".)

Anyone got a recommendation for a good RSS reader for Android (like NetNewsWire on iOS)?

And now for something different from NovaColor: Understanding the Color Gray and Its Shades

I use NovaColor acrylics for my artwork, and love their occasional articles on the theory and history of pigments #art #painting #arthistory

Been wanting to re-focus on the ol' blog here, and a friend told me about https://shutupwrite.com/ -- there's a local event tomorrow night so going to go hang out and work on some longer posts with a bunch of other writers #writing #blogging #community

"[T]he problem is, if you let them get away with it, it gets worse and worse and worse."

Small town newpaper doing the good work in small town America.

Corporate media, please go back to #journalism 101.

Atopia

Archiving our anxious fears as precious artifact
We make a Story
Stripped to bare words encoding our natures faiths and selves
These and all in grit and grim warning 
Dystopia

Bleak grey hued rough hewn the view from future's window
Staring eyes in hope forlorn
Dust and ash the gifts our benefactors leave in progress' wake
Every memory and bright treasure stripped melted for coin

Mechanized servant eaters of all growing green feeling loving things
If not fled are fed
The shining things from heart head and gut once born now consumed
Our inner voice fed back become lies so sterile and ape'd

Semi-sentient vastly parasitic the collectives cancerous intent to only grow 
Choked full on us it is us in the mill in the dirty grist
The fluttering trembling lights only ours to give are drowned in grasping dark

In mirrored certainty the self-satisfied boast ignorance toast ignorance
Read our troubled Story and see
Utopia

Danah Boyd: What if failure is the plan?

Network effects intersect with perception to drive a sense of a site’s social relevance and interpersonal significance #twitter #failure #socialmedia

Are0h is one of the main drivers behind a ground-breaking social media presence called Play Vicious (now defunct). Over on his blog he's telling the story of Play Vicious and the challenges he, MarciaX, and the site's members faced.

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• Recuerda PV : Chapter 1 - The Start, Part 1
• Recuerda PV : Chapter 2 - The Start, Part 2

I had long become accustomed to navigating primarily white and male spaces, the demographic over-represented in the tech industry, so I had a frame of reference for what to expect as I logged into my first Mastodon instance.

Looking back, I can't say it was a terrible experience overall, but what surprised me was how concentrated the monoculture of white men of various tech skill levels present. It was aggressively white.

I'm one of the cishet white dudes that populate the spaces that Ro is talking about. I've tried over the years to be pull in more and more voices from outside that bubble though, including some time where PV was one of my main social spaces. I didn't say much, I just tried to follow along and get a sense of what folks were talking about and where they were coming from -- and I count myself fortunate that Ro and MarciaX were always welcoming.

Since returning to the mastodon/fediverse (with Twitter's enflamé) I've been keeping my eyes out for how and where I can be a more effective advocate for making the fediverse a more safe space; still with a main goal to doing a lot of listening rather than speaking.

Hate to sound like a Luddite (or Boomer), but GPT-3 terrifies me.

Les Orchard is going old-school with the new school, and created a little webring app that links Mastodon accounts. ("Webring?" Ask your grand-parents kids.)

My first FediRing profile

When people praise the lack of #viral content on Mastodon (or the #fediverse in general), it’s seems to be mostly white tech folks, happy for our clever bubbles to be left alone.

But for people who desperately need to be seen and heard, going viral on Twitter is one of the only ways for their stories to get told #BlackLivesMatter, oppression in the middle east, genocides in Rwanda and South Asia, the #metoo movement -- these movements couldn't be ignored because they grew fast and visibly, making it hard for them to be ignored, dismissed, or covered up.

The Fediverse as it exists right now would see these movements isolated, defederated, gated by content warnings, and probably DDOS’d by bad actors running malicious instances. ("Mal-odons"?)

I guess right now I don’t want to see posts and think pieces about how "content can't go viral" on the Fediverse (whether or not it’s true) is only a net-positive. For all its faults Twitter has been a positive force for social change and visibility in millions of people’s lives.

We must learn from it and ask how — if we are going to make a case for the Fediverse as an alternative to Twitter — we can be better while not throwing those of us in the most need back to the wolves.

• This post was 93% inspired by this excellent thread by @shengokai on #twitter.
• I got that link from @jennyrae@wandering.shop, thanks!
• This meta-thread from @shengokai is also great reading on the #twittermigration

Help I've over-devops-ed my blog

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What with Twitter (aka birdsite, hellsite, muskosite) flailing in the clammy hands of Dr. No, and interest in the federated web re-emerging, I figured it was time to review my own web presence and see what was the situation.

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Dear reader, it was Not Good.

Warning one was hitting this site from my work network and getting a BitDefender screen of doom saying the site was serving a keylogger. NOT GOOD.

Then the site - which was hosted on Linode and runs my own homegrown blog software, Goldfrog - went completely down. After some "where did those ssh keys get to, where is this thing anyway" I got logged in and figured out that my server had been hacked in some way, TLS and letsencrypt removed. I haven't had time to troll the logs for evidence as to how the server was accessed, but I downloaded them and have them set aside to look later.

We Can Rebuild It

Thus entered a week of figuring out once again how the heck Monkinetic is built and deployed, migrating the code from Github to Gitlab (which I'm more familiar with due to $dayjob), and refactoring the Ansible code that builds the server and deploys the blog/content.

Finally today I got it 85% done, which is pretty good for a full migration between hosting providers (I also moved from Linode to Digital Ocean where I already have some other services).

Masto-tootly-don

With the insanity on Twitter, I logged back into my Mastodon account on toot.cafe and enjoyed the huge stream of new folks migrating from Twitter to federated platforms (mostly to mastodon.social since that's the first/largest instance, but folks are making their way from there to smaller instances as they get more comfortable).

Apparently Mastodon 4.0 is out (release candidate) and they've changed the annoying-until-it-was-gone "Toot" to "Publish". I'd have preferred "Post" myself, but 🤷‍♀️.

Maybe servers should just change it to suit their audience?

Prints of some of my recent paintings #abstractart #acrylics

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Order yours here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SparktreeStudio

I am unreasonably happy about a tube of paint and some palette knives showing up in the mail