I was suggested before to do something like a focused letter on topics (specifically on labor, which I have been toying with a lot) but I do not like the idea of "constraining" scope because everything is inherently connected. That doesn't mean I haven't started on it but I am still nervous on putting it out there. I write for myself first to organize my thoughts in a way I can assert my understandings and secondly to share so I can have others I trust help course-correct and grow our collective understanding.
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I am afraid. I do not believe that the idea of this violence is made clear, nor is it of immediate concern, even to some of those holding strong sentiments for community well-being and development. Even the case of book banning within the United States, a now-trivialized situation by mainstream media of authors having their visibility in their intended place of reading, does not focus enough on how this is an extension of the general nature of the United States’ need to maintain a state of both disillusion and lack of self-guided intellect. Additionally, according to mainstream media, there’s no clear interest in longer and more insightful discussions between representatives, not even on a hyper-local level, when news stations were once more willing to report on these things - in part of commercial social networking’s ability to create spaces of aggressive thought collapse. Tying that with the nature of language as a tool of both oppression and maintenance, there’s little reason to expect people to stumble upon concepts that lead them to truth, there isn’t enough capital that can be made from that (whereas masculinity and its tendrils intertwined with capitalism tend to be, by design and shaping by the market’s directors). These things, the inability to acknowledge the role of book banning in maintaining a populace of disillusioned and disinterested people, the lack of open debate and discussion free of the corporate and professional class of “political commentators” (a substitute for the direct voice and direct words of the people) and now the inability for people to directly understand and parse what impact local laws that are both illegible to the public like Florida State Bill 256 in 2023 or more encompassing and equally illegible like Presidential Policy Directive 20 are tools of weapons against the people who reside within the United States. Despite what the media industry has repeated on behalf of the government, national security does not mean the security of life and stability for those outside of the realm of the political industry, but more on the ability of a nation to maintain its ability to continue its behavior with no restraint.
What does one do to combat this (can we truly)? The most immediate answer under capitalistic society is to produce even more material - but this is shortsighted as the material has to be engaged with, discussed and provide actionable output lest it becomes what James Baldwin had described (in references to books) as a meal for “the affluent populations". These people (which is us), "which should have been their [poor working class people] help, didn’t, as far as could be discovered, read, either - they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes”. We are crafting new ways to cope with the new middle class's uncomfortable place in society, providing these people with new language to further entrench themselves as the “new” lords and aristocrats. Obtaining awards to address but never directly challenge, to critique but never truly attack, from the same institutions of violence does nothing but provide a yet another opinion into the void of toothless insurgent actions. These eagerness to run to these behaviors are as strong as the notion that voting makes a difference in a country where the people, places and roles that need elections are inaccessible, invisible and non-controllable by the American public. We have to push harder than dancing around topics and return to rooting ourselves in what “action” means. Wikipedia defines action from the lens of philosophy as “an event that an agent performs for a purpose, that is, guided by the person’s intention”. We work within a world of many performers whose intentions tend to centralize around extraction, coercion and demolition of the meanings of humanity. We collectively accept the concept of inaction, the opposite of what Max Weber would define of social action to be “the subjective meaning [of action] tak[ing into] account the behavior of others”. Inaction can be seen as a choice of indifference, especially when it comes from those who have the most freedoms to engage in such behavior. By choosing not to engage people who’ve spent time doing the work to interrogate, demand and produce action, one can slide into silent and passive acceptance of the hegemonic violence that we currently see rampaging Syria and the south side of Chicago, under the rule of Modhi and Macon, the intertwining nature of violence of Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden as agents of the spectacle and its child, terrorism. We won’t see it as any more than an “issue in a foreign land”, something to comment about on our neocolonialist devices of communication from our places of comfort within the belly of the beast. If we choose to do anything, the very least we should do is choose to listen to the people who our leaders are willing to print money to kill. Read and understand what they're saying and do everything you can to prevent their actions from being in vain.
“For if they find their state intolerable, but are too heavily oppressed to change it, they are simply pawns in the hands of larger powers, which, in such a context, are always unscrupulous, and when, eventually, they do change their situation [sic], we are menaced more than ever, by the vacuum that succeeds all violent upheavals,” by James Baldwin from The Fire Next Time.
]]>The spec kinda expands on this at https://indieauth.spec.indieweb.org/#oauth-2-0-extension but tl;dr: it removes the need for private stuff and makes the client ID public so you don't have to do client registration (but it also now forces that clients to be addressable — which could be an issue for headless/console apps but that's easy to work around if you do what Mastodon does with dynamic client registation).
This could if the the identity's info provides endpoints similar to OAuth2 — either an authorization and token endpoint or the singular endpoint that'd have all of that info and more (more at https://indieauth.spec.indieweb.org/#indieauth-server-metadata, I'm opting for this because it makes it easy to expose things like documentation about how it works, what kind of scopes are supported and the like).
]]>Shit to do when I'm not doing anything else (like stressing about rent being due in a week).
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