Keeble

"the bird"

left wing bird, online and trying this " alternative social media" thing again. recently unionized barista. Weekly wikipedia streamer. ❤ @proxy ❤30. Avi: me!

last.fm listening


and western society has beaten most of those things out of us. sure, some of us have the American civic religion: that the institutions of the united states will bring us those three things. but the founders of America are hardly people to look up to, and the flawed society they made was in its own way a pretty neat reflection of their complex and flawed moral beliefs rather than their own failure to understand what would work infrastructurally. the us government gives us traditions that people mostly go along with bc they're a day off (do you spend your memorial day honoring military members who died?). the rituals honor things that mean nothing to most people beyond the ritual of it. and there's no community that the government supports.

some of us have (in America, generally a christian) church. but for those of us who don't believe in god and never have like me, that church has never held a real place for us.* the rituals are meaningless if they stand for something you don't believe in. and the traditions, unless you're the sort of person celebrating stuff like Pentecost, are mostly reconfigured to be in support of consumer culture and capitalism.

some of us, lacking those things, result to social media. to here. these have tradition and ritual, in their own sense, but mostly in the ways that a fandom has: shared lil jokes that are mostly by laughing at things created by other people or at other people being stupid, and the community is mostly shouting into the void without any real engagement (here is better than most but im of the opinion that social media is media first and social second and no matter what design choices you take to shift peoples behaviour when people go to social media they MOSTLY go to scroll, not to post)

none of these are substitutes for a community you see regularly, with members you may not expect to see all the time but always know one of a group will be there. a discord server is a salve, sure, but its not a replacement for a congregation or a mutual aid group or stuff like that without extensive moderation and lots of event planning to simulate the sorts of semi open spaces that real life places like elk's lodges and NA meetings and union locals and community choirs and food not bombs groups offer. a nightly discord voice call with a standard group of people who never changes is not a replacement for a community in the sense of these places

furry cons are an interesting space here, bc these things are actually are there. you go to a place, drop all relations, and engage in strange rituals like waiting in long registration lines that build camaraderie. you are surrounded by people who are in a public place where they know some but not all people and whose guards are let down. they are traditional too, after a certain point. you look forward to them and mark them on your calendar like catholic feasts. and, yes, they are community building exercises, too. many if not most people leave furry cons with more connections and friendships than they started.

but accessing these things 1 to 4 times a year, depending on how wealthy you are, is not perfect. its like being a christian who only goes on Christmas and Easter and just tries to use that to power through their identity for the rest of the year.

im not sure i quite have an answer to this, myself. but we need more. we need something. something whole and collective

*i acknowledge the work of certain religious institutions who really are trying here, and finding a way to reintegrate ritual, tradition, and community into a church setting or synagogue setting or temple setting without that dogmatic need to meet a literal god. its not most of them, though, particularly in the us where the big growth over the past 30 years has been with megachurches



cohostunionnews
@cohostunionnews

Documented has a piece out this week highlighting three bills that have been proposed to the New York State Legislature in an effort to curb rampant wage theft. This comes in response to a Documented/ProPublica joint project last year which found more than 127,000 New Yorkers to be victims of wage theft, (and that the New York Department of Labor was a mixture of understaffed, incompetent, and unable to prevent it).

Of these bills, they write that:

The proposed legislation — dubbed the Wage Theft Deterrence Package — includes three bills. The first (S8451) would empower the State Liquor Authority to suspend liquor licenses for bars and restaurants that the Department of Labor has determined owe their workers more than $1,000. [...]

The second bill (S8452) would enable the Department of Labor to place a stop work order on any business that has a wage theft claim of at least $1,000. That approach has been effective in other states, such as New Jersey, which shut down 27 Boston Market restaurants and eventually recovered more than $630,000 in back wages for 314 workers.

The third bill (S8453) allows the Tax Department to suspend a business’s Certificate of Authority — which allows it to collect sales tax and conduct business — in cases where wage theft exceeds $1,000.

The three bills include a provision that allows employers to avoid these punishments if they resolve the wage theft claims within 15 days.

You can find S8451 here, S8452 here, and S8453 here. Obviously if you live in New York I would strongly encourage you to contact your legislators about cosponsoring and helping pass these bills. (And while you're at it, maybe encourage them to help pass some of the other labor law proposals by the NY Socialists in Office!)


alyaza
@alyaza
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At some point I wanna write a big thing on the growing problem of what I call “techno-hermits”: people trapped at home addicted to delivery apps and essentially afraid of going outside or talking to anyone outside their ingroup that survive basically on media consumption and discord, in a prison of their own making, with no meaningful community support or way to dig them out of this hole



Keeble
@Keeble

this is a pretty revealing window into the flip most liberal and left of liberal westerners did after trump left office/when vaccines became available: they went from going all "believe science! its our duty to make the world safer for everyone!" to "well i don't have to think about covid anymore, because its over and there are vaccines which means i wont get infected again. and if i do i wont die or get long covid. oops i cant hear you im going into a tunnel byeeeeeeeeeeeee".

to me this logic is pretty South Park-y for someone nominally "left": the position that caring about stuff beyond a certain level is vaguely cringe and not something to be proud of. as sean o'neal put it in the av club in 2017:

South Park’s influence echoes through every modern manifestation of the kind of hostile apathy—nurtured along by Xbox Live shit-talk and comment-board flame wars and Twitter—that’s mutated in our cultural petri dish to create a rhetorical world where whoever cares, loses. Today, everyone with any kind of grievance probably just has sand in their vagina; expressing it with anything beyond a reaction GIF means you’re “whining”; cry more, your tears are delicious. We live in Generation U Mad Bro, and from its very infancy, South Park has armed it with enough prefab eye-rolling retorts (“ManBearPig!” “I’m a dolphin!” “Gay Fish!” “…’Member?”) to sneeringly shut down discussions on everything from climate change and identity politics to Kanye West and movie reboots. Why not? Everything sucks equally, anyway. Voting is just choosing between some Douche and a Turd Sandwich. Bullying is just a part of life. Suck it up and take it, until it’s your turn to do the bullying. Relax, guy.

see, covid was a crisis, an undeniable one. but the second you have the ability to slink back into that above logic its very comfy to do so.

another interesting thing about that tweet: it has the famed "cowards' ratio": it has an order of magnitude more likes than it does retweets. Generally, this indicates opinions that are widely agreed upon but that people are afraid of sharing bc their potentially taboo nature. THAT's what makes this attitude so interesting in total: because it shows that this south park-y apathetic return to 1980-2001 era normalcy argument is still really effective in some peoples minds, and why its so hard to get people to start masking again.

thankfully ive seen a big return at least temporarily to masking from people whove foregone that approach. maybe it will stick. but if the above tweet's attitude remains, and there are no large trustworthy institutions that get people to act in our collective best interest (rather than "well the only thing i have is keeping up appearances so if i wear a mask that fails" or whatever) im not holding my breath for a societal awakening as soon as it becomes convenient to abandon that