Jeremy 🇨🇦 @thatgeoguy@coales.co

And yeah, I was just reminded that today is MLK day. What a great day to have such a callous, ignorant call to action.

Like, to be very clear here: the amount of white supremacy and abhorrent alt-right bullshit on Parler made it very clear that it needed to go. It was obviously causing real world harm.

To then come back and complain about this as "big tech is silencing us all" has some very big, "why are the whites oppressed" energy.

@xor on birdsite said it best: https://twitter.com/xor/status/1347795066039857152

The article doesn't even begin to try and deconstruct the false dichotomy between freedom and oppression. It basically dives into "well we don't care how you feel about parler but you have to admit big tech is bad, please buy our phone!"

What a horrible take. Literal calls to violence and you can't even muster the nuance to talk about when content should be taken down, or a call to explore ways in which freedom can be protected while removing harmful elements from your platform?

Purism put a blog post on their site recently trying to piggy-back off of how Parler got banned from all major big-tech co's.

I'm not gonna link it, but it's an extremely bad viewpoint to take, and part of the reason I have been so frustrated with the Purism community with how much they flirt with the idea of unfettered "freedom."

Strong reminders of Alberta's #kudatah once upon a time, except the people doing this are clearly more prepared and more dangerous.

These people are a fucking embarassment. I'm not even from the States and I can definitely say today was an awful showing. Where are the real leaders to shut this down? What happened to maintaining order? Did we forget BLM six months ago?

If this is just a small sampling of what's to come I am really not comfortable with 2021 rolling in like this.

I also realize I said this last year when we almost started with WW3 in 2020, but holy shit.

Happy March 308th folks!

I wrote some very early thoughts on the @PINE64 #Pinephone and @purism #Librem5. Forgot to share this with fedi earlier 🤐

https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/2020/12/06/Librem-5-Evergreen-vs-Pinephone/

It's not vaporware! I got my Librem 5. I'll have to post more detailed thoughts on this vs. the pinephone going forward.

This, incidentally, is perhaps why Alberta and the US are such dumpster fires when it comes to the COVID response. Leadership in these places don't even want to get on TV and acknowledge that more must be done, so people continue along as if the world has corrected itself.

If it hadn't corrected itself, then surely someone would have done something by now?

I think this is really important. The best way I heard this described was by @patio11@twitter.com who described how the purpose of a fire alarm is not, in fact, to inform you that there is a fire. It is to remove any obligations that would prevent you from acting as if there were a fire.

Something I shared on bird site today, but did not share here. I think it's important though, so choice quote from this article in the Atlantic:

"“People have the mistaken belief that if the government allows them to do something, it is safe to do,” Johnson said."

Acknowledgement of a fact by leadership permits people to also acknowledge that fact in ways they would not otherwise

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/americas-best-prepared-hospital-nearly-overwhelmed/617156/

CO is just about back to lockdown / stay-at-home orders again.

I'm not going to be super affected by this, since my behaviour hasn't changed much since the first lockdown, but it does make me really sad that this is just cycling over again.

I really don't understand why mastodon works so well on mobile web, but is absolute garbage on desktop web. I get weird crashes all the time, and I've disabled every add-on for coales.co.

Any good desktop #clients for #Mastodon on linux?

I wrote about an Apple / iOS 14 bug, which was difficult to track down and otherwise very subtle https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/2020/10/17/iOS-14-what-time-is-it/