Fox Thirty Eight 🦊🌹 @fox_news@mastodon.social

there is so much energy in this picture

Wish I could say this was surprising but the SNP has been ignoring its transphobia issue for fuckin years. Some of its biggest politicians are terfs and transphobes.

Fuckin good oan Mhairi Black fir bein one o' the few decent MPs in the party. Solidarity wi Teddy

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19021581.snp-equalities-campaigner-teddy-hope-quits-claims-party--hub-transphobia-scotland/

Here we are, bloodied, but unbowed.

As is customary, I will give it a full three days before I start talking about how almost nothing has changed and we're all fucked in multiple ways on multiple timescales once more.

Delightful - it's looking like we really *have* bought ourselves a couple of years' reprieve.

Biden Cabinet picks face confirmation hearings ahead of the inauguration

The Cabinet has picked face confirmation hearings?

Oh, no, the Cabinet picks will be facing confirmation hearings.

minimum wage shouldn't be $15 in 2021, it should have been $15 in 2010, which is $17.85 now, and it should remain pegged to the CPI and continuously updated

What’s really weird is Matze’s wife and their meeting and her instagrams posts about their family, and her mother’s role as a “Builder of Rossiya”

This is all getting delightfully geopolitical.

Also, this turn of events just decomplicated recon on what right wing extremists are planning on Parler, as the CIA/NSA can now be involved without a warrant.

Good luck Parlerites.

https://twitter.com/vickerysec/status/1351227537985318929?s=21

Maybe they’ll release the peepee tapes on Parler.

Given all that, let’s talk optimization. These bits aren’t strictly necessary, but will increase effectiveness.

* One subject per letter. People have only so much working memory, so they’re only going to remember one.

* Heavier than normal paper. Not so heavy that it doesn’t fold well into an envelope, but something with _presence_. That which has more physical weight, has more emotional weight.

* Handwriting that’s tidy, but a little on the small side. If somebody has to pay attention to parse it, they’re more likely to remember it. That’s true for every step in handling the thing, from the basic admin. assistant who first screens it for relevance, all the way to the final recipient.

* Somewhat formal phrasing. This emphasizes that you thought about what to say before you wrote it, not to mention being a class signifier.

* Use pen. Even erasable pen says “I really mean this” more than pencil does.

3) All thought is embodied. You can’t touch an email, and a phone call to somebody’s office almost never results in them hearing your own voice, with your own emotions. But due to their rarity, a physical letter is quite likely to end up in the addressees’ own hands. That means all the brain machinery which tells someone ‘this is really real’ kicks in. The physical is naturally important to us.

This is among the reasons that people who grew up before email have an outsized influence at every level of government. They shouldn’t be the only ones.

Handwritten letters. Not joking.

It takes hundreds of emails and phone calls to make a member of the government even pretend to give a fuck about what one wants. But as few as two physical, handwritten letters can hit the action threshold.

Let’s unpack the why of that, shall we?

0) More than one sender. If only one person is known to have any particular opinion, it’s automatically dismissed. (If you’re encouraging them to continue a stance which they’ve already taken, you’re already the N+1th person.)

1) Rarity value. They simply don’t get many, so hardcopy stands out.

2) Time investment. Sad to say, but ‘took the time to sit down and write this’ carries more weight than ‘took the time to compose a message that’s clear and to the point’. (It’s best to do both, of course.)

Conservatives: "I miss the good ol days of the 1950s"
Me: "Grocery clerks made $18/hr adjusted for inflation"
Conservatives: "Not like that"

What they usually mean is they miss the racism/sexism/child abuse.

Major financial donor to the US National Rifle Association (#NRA) will challenge the Association's Bankruptcy filing and reregistration in Texas over alleged financial fraud by the NRA https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/16/nra-donor-bankruptcy-dave-dellaquila-wayne-lapierre

I guess they found a home at Epik.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/17/tech/parler-back-online/index.html

Looks like they didn't require AWS after all.