pogmommy

Not much that won't land us in prison or dead

I totally understand the desire to own physical media and agree that WB is doing the right thing here, but optical media is terrible means of preserving media. If your discs are suffering from disc rot, you really shouldn't lose sleep over making or "sourcing" your own local digital copies.

In the same boat. It's been very freeing

Yeah man the radical left's crazy violent agenda like... Free healthcare, and decent standards of living? No wait I mean the erosion of systems of inequality fuck wait no I mean uh labor rights and empowree workers wait shit no

I'm starting to think the radical let's crazy agenda is actually far less violent than the status quo

It's already pretty shitty to be fair

Cool. Are they gonna act like it, or should I expect more texts asking me to donate?

I've gone all-in on (properly) federated social media and I've got to say it's been a great experience. After what's happened to Twitter, with Zuck's recently stated plans for Meta, and TikTok's immediate Trump cocksucking, I realized that all privately-owned platforms are as good as compromised, no matter the utility they otherwise provide.

Instagram was more difficult as it was how I found out about a lot of local events, and was my primary connection to a lot of old friends, but it was worth it. I actually reach out and talk to those friends who I previously just followed. It's restored some actually connection that social media had stripped away, and I find myself avoiding the endless scroll I used to get caught in.

I'm still working on evacuating YouTube, but using RSS feeds to be more deliberate about whose uploads I'm notified about has helped a ton.

I use fedilab, in part because it's the best app for peertube that I've found. But it's got great support for Mastodon and Pixelfed as well.

My one year of German from high school translated that into "I am (Joe) Biden"

You're an idiot who should suck on a lead pipe and encase your mouth and hands in epoxy resin so nobody is ever subject to hearing your thoughts again

But i don't mean that as an insult, so don't you dare be offended by it

Not beyond engagement bait he doesn't. Fuck that guy

English is the dominant language in the US, nobody argues that. But making it the official language has a lot of implications, both symbolic and bureaucratic.

Needless to say one of the "unintentional" side effects of this EO is the nationalist posturing, giving some ammunition to chuds who like to shout things like "speak English, this is America", and general eurocentric colonial sentiments.

It also has the possibility of introducing barriers to migration, which given the administration's expressed interest and prior action, is a guaranteed motivation. The fact of the matter is that the people coming here who are most likely to know English (thus be admitted entrance into the country and approved for citizenship following this EO) are going to be white. Having worked in higher education, this would be massively damaging to so many international students, never mind all the many other people who might be seeking entry to the country for all the myriad of reasons one might do so.

There are also significant legal ramifications for the millions of current citizens for whom English is not their primary language. The implementation of an official national language is certain to erode accessibility of bureaucratic systems to those who rely on multilingual resources, which were previously mandatory for public services to provide. Moving forward, we're very likely to see many of these resources become unmaintained (if not be scrapped altogether), while the material published in English is kept updated. Again, this is absolutely going to disproportionately impact people of color in the US, who are more likely to not speak English as a first language, or be fluent in it at all.

And while I feel like those points speak for themselves, I'd also like to add that I grew up being preached to about how great the US is for its multiculturalism. I was taught a whitewashed and distorted history, but the benefits of multiculturalism were never overstated. We benefit from being surrounded by people with experiences vastly different than our own who we can learn from. Language is intimately tied to our capacity for understanding and developing knowledge, so any attempts to suppress the presence of languages other than English block us from any growth we might experience from them, either on an individual or societal level. For so many minority groups, particularly indigenous peoples, language is one of the most raw connections we have to our history and culture.

Tl:dr (but please do read it all); designating a national language, in the US, with its current administration, is a transparently nationalist effort to harm minority groups, both prospective migrants and current citizens.