Candelestine @ Candelestine @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Ah, I see, thank you. I was relying on spellcheck to identify the word without knowing much about it. I'll edit.

Ah, I see. Yeah, that's true.

Simply that a perfectly healthy cis person will sometimes get online and masquerade as a trans person, in an attempt to act poorly and otherwise further their goals of increasing transphobia in the world. And they find the process itself entertaining, having fun by hurting people is actually probably the primary goal, with the political agenda being secondary.

It's going to vary too much based on local circumstances and the norms and expectations of that populace.

A better way to approach it would be to study fascism, and look for that pattern. There is a large body of highly scrutinized work exploring the history of fascism, so that's going to be a more reliable, efficient approach imo.

Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, between the three of them, more or less laid out the basics. And in that chronological order.

Civil wars can happen in a lot of different ways, it's any set of circumstances that leads large swaths of a country to fight other large swaths of it.

A grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Who else?

We can't drown out botnets without botnets of our own. Information war is war, but lacks attrition, so the opponents never actually get defeated.

So, we can either accept this status quo, or we can escalate. But I don't think we can just try harder, we're givin her all she's got, Jim. It's not like medical professionals are known for having tons of free time and extra morale to burn away on twitter.

So, we need technical assistance, of some sort.

The plotline of the show Designated Survivor. Follows Kiefer Southerland as a Sec of HUD that has to take over following a terrorist attack. He basically carries the show, it's pretty good.

As much as it irritates the contrarian in me, I do have to chalk this up to an honest criticism of capitalism in general. Since news corps have to pander to both advertisers and broad swaths of the public, who are often on the squeamish side when it comes to facts they themselves find unpleasant, big news corps are extremely limited in how they can present things.

Generally viewer-funded news gets around this, in the US that's things like PBS, NPR, Democracy Now and nowadays, Patreon supported content creators. Not that this system is without flaws or anything, but it's significantly better in general.

But look at it this way: They're selling a product, in an environment swarming with competition, and their costs are very high. So they're going to lean into the biggest markets they can. The kind that eat too much McDonalds and watch reality tv and don't vote. Naturally, those folks don't like their analysis to be too hard-hitting, otherwise it'd be routinely, roundaboutly implying they're fat, stupid and lazy. Saying that to your customers is rather counterproductive, no matter how true it is.

I'd be reluctant to speak so openly about it myself, except there's not really many of them on here. They're mostly all on facebook, twitter and reddit still. Y'know, the lazy options.

Generally speaking, the design of the Fediverse leans towards radical transparency and disclosure.

It's not particularly private at all. Instead it levels the playing field by making a lot of the data companies would normally be harvesting and selling available to literally everyone with minimal effort, drastically reducing its value. It also just collects relatively little data to begin with.

If, however, you were hiding from a hostile government or something, this is one of the last places I would use for communication.

I don't know, I think our tone has been pretty soft on Netanyahu the whole way around. Regarding what's publicly known anyway.

We can threaten Lebanon with an aircraft carrier. We cannot threaten a treaty ally with an aircraft carrier, just doesn't work the same.

Even so, I'd say we just delayed. Netanyahu is probably going to attack Lebanon as soon as he finishes in Gaza, just to prolong the war and save his own ass from his own people, who are not happy with him.

My guess anyway.

Put some in front of each of those for actual accuracy. NASA does have projects it exclusively funds and controls.

Those are not without failure either, of course, the Challenger disaster being a classic example. Details are important, at any rate.

Only by violating a signed treaty. We really tried to give that up a lot of years ago, though it was very common for us in the more distant past.

It's the kind of America Trump is referring to as the "greatness" he wants back.

Atrophied...? It's a private company that NASA helped fund to help develop their own, independent capabilities. The private sector is always less careful, this should not be surprising.

There's a whole different private American company launching their own attempt next month or something.

There's more lenses to look through asides the lens of nationalism.

I know this soft pushing is all he can do, but I really don't think Netanyahu is listening. Pretty sure this has just turned into a generic landgrab, just like all the others through the centuries.

This is not a new thing in the world.

A big part of the problem is America's responsibilities to our network of allies. We used to regularly betray the treaties we signed, it was extremely common in our dealings with first peoples. We stopped about a century ago though, since then we've tried to actually stand by our word when we gave it, though more in letter than spirit.

Since we had this pre-existing military alliance with Israel though, it immediately put us in a very difficult position of having to betray an ally in the midst of conflict, or betray our principles. Since Netanyahu benefits from prolonging the war as long as possible to save his own ass, we're largely stuck in this fucked up position. So, Biden tries to make the best of it, and use our insider position to try to do wield what influence he can. Ultimately though, Israel doesn't actually need us. If we fully withdrew, Gazans would still be dying en masse, just to less accurate weaponry.

So, we probably just need to withdraw ourselves from Middle Eastern security, to be frank. But the details of how best to accomplish that are over my head. We do have treaty obligations all over the globe though, not just to NATO, but all sorts of other countries too. There's a Rio Treaty for instance, which actually has us in a military alliance with almost all of S America. We're actually allied with around half the globe, which is just ... a lot.

Then on top of that all, you have our military-industrial complex which is just doing its war profiteering thing, exactly how Pres Eisenhower, the repub pres and WW2 general who coined the term "military-industrial complex" in the first place, warned us it would. We were scared of the USSR for decades, which is what gave it such a strong foothold, but it didn't go away after it became unnecessary. And now war seems to be spreading over the world again, so ... yeah.

All that said, I do think we need to keep the pressure up on Biden to call out Israeli war crimes. He doesn't really want to, it seems, but he needs to, and it would not be a violation of our treaty obligations to do so.

It's really just one of the ugliest situations a person could come up with. It's not like hamas is good people either, they're as bad as the IDF when it comes to caring about innocent Gazans.

Personally I support an international coalition replacing the IDF, so Israel can't just massacre them all and take the land. But Arab countries so far refuse to support that.

Yeah. The online trolls have multiplied and even bled into irl. The mainstream dems did learn some lessons from the Hilary/Bernie thing though. We didn't all become full-throated democratic socialists, but we started to remember how important compromise and dialogue are, instead of trying to lead from the top-down.