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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FU
Posts
17
Comments
2,222
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • So you're into sending the police after the writers, directors, and producers of the Saw movies, but not the audiences?

    I dunno man, that's still too fascist for my tastes, but you can keep fantasizing about it. I promise I won't try to send the police after you for your perverted fantasies of state power.

  • I hate torture-porn movies like the Saw series, but a lot of people are fans of them. Should I worry that those people are likely to commit kidnapping, torture, and murder? Should I advocate that the makers or watchers of those movies be investigated for kidnapping, torture, and murder — without any evidence that a crime was committed?

    We don't send the cops after people for liking murder stories, theft stories, industrial sabotage stories, or treason stories. We shouldn't send the cops after people for liking stories of Harry Potter getting fucked by Severus Snape either.

    I think you should be more careful to distinguish fantasy from reality. Most fiction readers and writers have no problem doing so.

  • I'm just saying, police investigation of fiction creators and readers for the content of their fiction is way over the line of a lot of social and political norms.

    (Also, I think you'll find that police abuse children a lot more than pervy fiction fans do; so really, who should be investigating whom? Investigation into crime is supposed to start with evidence that a crime actually occurred — not with your personal disgust towards someone's reading matter.)

  • Many Republicans are sponsored and bribed by fascist powers such as Putin's Russia. They are under orders to take actions intended to weaken American industry, government, and society. This includes, for instance, sabotaging infrastructure projects, blocking disaster preparedness and relief, and fomenting political violence. The long-range goal is to make America incapable of projecting force to protect its international allies, global trade, etc.; a medium-range goal is to restore a regime broadly supportive of the international fascist movement.

    (Just consider: Why does Putin support Trump? Putin doesn't want to make America great; he wants to make America incapable — especially, incapable of defending Ukraine and, ultimately, other European allies. Putin predicts that Trump/Vance will accomplish that goal.)

  • Federated platforms don't die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

    If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it's still around, but it's greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don't tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

    If the technology isn't developed with an eye to new users' needs and new use cases, because it's "good enough" for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn't work well on mobile — but it's good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.

  • I thought everyone knew meth comes from Nazis. Like, not only have white-supremacist dirtbags been big in the US meth trade since forever, but the actual historical German Nazis were literally on meth. Here's Wikipedia —

    From 1938, methamphetamine was marketed on a large scale in Germany as a nonprescription drug under the brand name Pervitin, produced by the Berlin-based Temmler pharmaceutical company. It was used by all branches of the combined armed forces of the Third Reich, for its stimulant effects and to induce extended wakefulness. Pervitin became colloquially known among the German troops as "Stuka-Tablets" (Stuka-Tabletten) and "Herman-Göring-Pills" (Hermann-Göring-Pillen), as a snide allusion to Göring's widely-known addiction to drugs.

    (The Allies favored cigarettes, which Hitler hated.)

  • New York is all the Asgardians' fault. If Thor hadn't gotten himself exiled, Loki wouldn't have come to Earth and found the Tesseract, so no invasion.

    Sokovia, though, is all Tony's fault. He built and released an unaligned superhuman AI agent. (Don't do that, folks; it predictably breaks the planet.)

  • The 1984 Gibson novel Neuromancer begins with the line, "The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel."

    At the time, this unambiguously meant the speckled gray of analog TV static: radio noise amplified and played out through a CRT's scanning electron gun. However, before too many years had passed, new TVs started displaying a solid blue screen when tuned to a dead channel.

    And in 1996, Neil Gaiman riffed on Gibson's line, in Neverwhere: "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

  • The first-past-the-post voting system sucks; the resulting two-party system sucks; but right now we have to operate within it. The mathematics of that system entail the simple fact that if you discourage people from keeping Trump out, you are helping get Trump in. That makes you a Trump supporter.