BeautifulMind ♾️ @ BeautifulMind @lemmy.world

Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software pro

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2 yr. ago

It's one thing if you want to subject your personal/private online life to a sort of virtual panopticon, but if you want to also look at classified material while also letting your morality cops peep over your shoulder, that should be disqualifying. Under no circumstance should a device with spyware on it have access to anything like classified material

Translation: they're buying their shit elsewhere because Target sucks and is overpriced

lol shut up brain

Yes, the point to expansively criminalizing this sort of thing is that they then get to prosecute who they want, at their discretion. The lesson is always 'know your place' and it's why these ghouls should never have power

...except it's not speculation at all. There's a long history of Trump saying shit like 'somebody oughta do something about [x specific person, for y reasons]' and then randos in his audience volunteer to do 'something' like mail pipe bombs to them, or make threats to them and/or their families.

And just like that, a vote that should have been the simplest, most-straightforward choice with one outcome obviously preferable to its alternative, proved to be too much to ask

it’s the “liberals” who are the real enemy

Maybe a simpler way of explaining that is that it always boils down to this; when forced to choose between supporting leftist/prog politics and fascism, it's the status-quo liberals that consistently choose fascism out of fear that anything lefty/social-justicey would be too disruptive

That's just the thing- they've got church-funded groups churning out historical revisionism in which the Framers were really trying to found a Biblical version of Sparta but the wicked usurpers got power and ruined it with their War of Northern Aggression

Reality? LOL they're trying to replace reality with their version, which tells you to bend your contemporary knee to them

It's beyond frustrating to jump through all the process hoops to get a shot or pick up a prescription (use our online scheduler, bla bla) and after going to the place they had the right vaccine, sure enough the appointments are running 40+ minutes behind and meanwhile it's march of the Karens trying to assert themselves while the skeleton crew on staff try to answer multiple phone calls at once

I mean yay, someone's getting extra in their dividends or something but seriously when I showed up 10 minutes early in order to not hold up the works, a 45 minute wait costs me a whole hour of watching staff radiate the same energy as beaten dogs while shitty people demand to see a manager and slow everything down

TBH I hope they all strike, hard.

Yeah this is the point at which pressure to pick a side, even if it's a contest between unacceptable options, gets in the way of being able to have the conversations necessary for a people to engage in self-governance.

Would I like it if I could vote directly on the question of whether or not to send money and military aid to a country engaged in apartheid and genocide? From my POV Israel should be pressured to choose between having US backing and continuing to commit obvious crimes against humanity, but unfortunately the false-binary rhetoric field is super-strong on this issue and obvs that means I should be shamed for being nazi-level anti-semitic or something like that /s

Weird. I've been running AdBlock and AdGuard for years and nary an issue with youtube. I just never see ads there.

FWIW it was only when I added a vpn to my mix that I started being made to submit to captchas whenever I do anything like search

And isn't it terribly interesting that new speaker Mike Johnson's disclosures don't include any bank accounts? For a lawyer that's been working for cash-rich groups like he has been, that's certainly interesting. Given the company he's been keeping (lots of dark money, lots of shady finances) it's just soooo interesting that his first demand is that the IRS not have adequate funding to audit people with shady financial dealings

There is a 'no religious test' bit in the constitution It turns out that the only religious test the constitution sanctions is DON'T PROPOSE RELIGIOUS TESTS

That's the one that tells us you can't be trusted with secular authority

This is true and very welcome, but TBH that's a very low bar to clear and a long time coming. Up until the Biden admin started taking action, union protections have been steadily eroded since the Reagan admin. and with that, union membership went on a decades-long collapsing trend (and with it, so did labor's buying power).

The point to my above post was that it had to get very dark for a candidate like Trump to get any oxygen whatsoever, and if there's one way to drive despair in democracy, it's to make people that grew up expecting to live middle-class lives into poor people.

This is probably as good a place and time as any to reflect on how everything went as terribly wrong as it had to get in order for clowns like Trump to not be laughed out of politics.

Politics had to fall very far, very hard, to get to the point where enough people felt like voting at all was a waste of time- and probably the biggest single factor I can point out is when the Neoliberals took over the Democrats, American Labor lost its only champion, Antitrust law lost its only advocate, and both major parties in the USA essentially became handmaidens to corporate power. While this was happening, the GOP, long since a dark-money puppet organization, abandoned any pretense of doing anything in the public interest and became a full-throated howl of corruption and voter suppression and gerrymandering.

When both major parties in a duopoly system take turns tag-teaming the working class for their donors' profit margins, you can expect that working class to radicalize, leftwards and rightwards, it's what happens every time when a working class realizes it's being objectively fucked. There was a reason Weimar Germany was so full of left-socialists and right-fascists, the middle had thoroughly failed and it turns out that when given the choice, status-quo-liberals will always choose fascism over socialism.

They’ve already tried it once after all (or twice if you count the storming the the capital and the attempt to certify fake electors as two separate occurrences), and only failed by the thinnest of margins.

TBH the insane thing we're doing today that we also did after the civil war is... allowing participants in said insurrection to govern instead of handling them the way other countries treat their traitors.

this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.

Things that are relatively new, circa Columbine

• the 24-hour news cycle
• rage-farming as a genre of syndicated media (think: Limbaugh, Hannity, InfoWars)
• selling fear becomes huge moneymaker for opinion programmers (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, etc)
• politics as a staple on social media comment threads
• offshore groups (like troll farms, etc) posing as domestic political actors, targeting particular demographics

Ready access to guns is of course a problem, but it's probably made worse when all those folks with ready access to guns are bathed in fear and loathing 24/7 by millionaires making lots of money telling them things to make them or their families afraid or angry. Just a thought

Billionaire wants people to peer-pressure others into bending over more deeply into being exploited, film at eleven

Assuming a mask blocks 50% of particles or droplets in either direction (preventing yours from escaping if you're sick, preventing outside particles from getting to you), when 2 people wear masks that reduces the chances of transmission in a given retail encounter by 75%.

Reducing those odds by that much, when (from an epidemiological POV) the biggest math factor is to drive the r number down below 1, it's a huge deal. If you do that consistently, the virus becomes rarer and rarer and has fewer opportunities to mutate and more importantly, you're feeding fewer and fewer human beings to it.

It means that the speaker is a seven-mountains dominionist, his program is to subordinate all spheres of life to the church (his church, not your church).

Barton is a professional liar whose career involves re-writing history to advance claims that (for example) the founders of the USA intended his particular sect to rule, so it's only proper that you should hand secular control of everything that matters to preachers of a modern sect the framers never heard of, whose primary skill set is gaslighting and lying

The game is totalitarian, fundamentalist rule of every aspect of life.