pjwestin @ pjwestin @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It depends on how much of an absolutist you want to be. No government allows absolute freedom of speech. Libel, slander, and incitement of violence are all forms of speech that are illegal in basically every country. If your platform refuses to remove these forms of speech, you would be protecting what is generally not considered to be free speech, and it's possible you could even be held legally liable for allowing that kind of speech to spread on your platform.

If you decide not to be a free speech absolutist, and instead define free speech as legal speech, then things get complicated. In the U.S., the Supreme Court has held multiple times that hate speech is protected under the First Amendment, so censoring hate speech would mean your platform wasn't allowing all forms of, "free speech." However, the U.S. has much broader protections on speech than most Western countries, and hate speech is illegal in much of Europe.

So, TL:DR; free speech is a sliding scale, and many countries wouldn't consider hate speech to be protected form of speech. By those standards, you could have a platform that censors hate speech but still maintains what is considered free speech. However, by other countries' standards, you would be censoring legal speech.

...OK. Did you think I was agreeing with her when I called her the poster child for liberal delusion?

...no. I'm saying Joy Reid, an MSNBC pundit, believes Kamala Harris ran a perfect campaign.

who is like ran a pefect campaign?

Joy Reid. She was very impressed that Queen Latifah endorsed her. It's made her into a sort of a poster child for liberals who are delusional about the Democrats flaws.

That is not my experience at all. I'm mostly seeing people the, "Harris ran a perfect campaign," crowd buying in on this one.

I don't know if it's the same person, but I noticed this is a Substack article. A lot of good, independent journalists publish on Substack, so that's not immediately disqualifying, but it does mean there's no editorial review.

Thanks for sharing this. Yeah, that complaint isn't very compelling. I don't know anything about the computer systems he's talking about, but his analysis seems anecdotal, and his unnamed mathematicians giving odds of, "beyond 1 in a Billion," doesn't seem very scientific.

Do you have a link to that Reddit? Presumably, the numbers should be available. If there are 10,000 votes in a county for Trump and 8,000 for the rest of the ballot, figuring out the numbers shouldn't be hard. I've also heard from reputable sources that bullet ballots were very high this year, but I hadn't heard they were statistically improbable...

Some of this data is compelling, but this last bit now has me skeptical:

The 2004 Presidential election and a 2002 Senate election were also decried as fraudulent by experts, including Spoonamore—to no avail.

“I don't know why John Kerry refused to engage nor why Max Cleland refused to engage. This is the third time I've walked into the public square, poured kerosene on myself and set myself on fire saying, ‘Hey, this election was defrauded.’ And all three times the same thing has happened. People just run around going, ‘Oh my God, don't question elections. Oh my God.’ They keep questioning integrity. Well, I was right in 2002 and I was right in 2004.”

Anyone know if this Spoonamore guy is legit, or is he just some crank that's been claiming the elections have been rigged for 20 years? Can anyone with expertise on these topics (statistics, cyber security, election process) weigh in on the claims here?

It also can't be understated how much private corporations benefit from technology this research yields. We spent $25 billion ($175 billion in today's money) on the Apollo programs alone, and NASA research has led to everything from cell phones and laptops to the rubber molding process used for sneakers. The DoD wasted a ton of money in the 80s on this new technology that involved getting computers to communicate with each other, and now we have the internet.

The government spends money in ways that could never be justified by cooperations, then the cooperations enrich themselves with that research and use the profits to lobby Congress for lower taxes and limited spending. It's absolutely infuriating.

The Switch is fantastic for what it is. Sure, it's anemic and old, but it's a creative design that more or less created a whole product category and allows for very creative gameplay.

This is actually their design philosophy: "Lateral thinking with withered technology," or, "what can we do with old technology we're really familiar with?" Nintendo was much slower to market with their 16 bit console than Sega, but they took their time to understand the new tech, and developed the first handheld cartridge console with 8 bit technology at the same time. Sega tried to emulate its success with a color handheld system, but it was large, had poor battery life, and didn't sell very well. Instead of rushing to catch up with a color handheld, Nintendo released the Game Boy Pocket, which was very popular. and released an entirely superior product in the Game Boy Color a few years later.

This philosophy isn't always a benefit to them; they lost the Final Fantasy franchise because the cartridge system on the N64 wasn't powerful enough to run it. However, it's usually a boon; the switch has been incredibly successful despite its graphical inferiority, and despite being comically underpowered compared to its competitors, the Wii is the secon-best selling console of all time, behind only the PS2.

Their track record on consoles is hit or miss because they don't make the same product every generation like Sony and Microsoft. For every Wii and Switch, you get a Wii. U and Virtual Boy. They're shitty with their IP, but hardware development is literally the best thing they do.

Here's what I wrote to my delegate's office:

I am writing to you because I am worried about the upcoming DNC chair elections, and I'm attempting to reach my local delegate. A recent piece in Politico seemed to suggest that many in the party believe that the takeaway from the 2024 election is that the party moved too far to the left, and that it became too involved in identity politics. As Joseph Paolino Jr., the DNC committeeman for Rhode Island, put it, “The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle."

Of course, the idea that the Democratic Party has gone too far left is absurd. This is the party that passed NAFTA. This is the party that ended Glass-Steagall. This is the party that added work requirements to Welfare. This is the party that prioritizesd banks over homeowners during the subprime mortgage crisis. This is the party that adopted and passed the Heritage Foundation's healthcare plan. On paper, this is a center-right party.

However, I believe it is true that this party has focused too much on identity politics, and we need to place that blame where it squarely belongs: on the center. It was centrist Democrats who, in the absence of any coherent economic message, increasingly adopted the language of identity politics. It was the center who used identity politics as a cudgel, not only against their right-wing opponents, but also those on the left who questioned the party's priorities. It was Hillary Clinton (who no serious person would describe as, "far-left") who said:

"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow...would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”

If the party were to decide that it was going to spend less time on identity politics and more time on a serious progressive platform, that would make sense. Polling indicates that many progressive policies, even those considered, "far-left," like higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, a higher minimum wage, Medicare for All, and even Universal Basic Income, all command widespread support from across the electorate. They are certainly more popular than the crypto-based, "economic opportunity," platform pitched by Mark Cuban this year.

However, based on what I have read from Politico, it does not seem like the party is interested in a progressive economic message. It seems that many in the party are simply concerned with abandoning the aspects of identity politics that they believe are unpopular. One Florida member made some offensive and thinly veiled attacks on the trans community, saying that he didn't want to be a member of the, "freak show party." It appears that, instead of reflecting on how the Democrats' centrist economic policies have failed the working class, many members would like to abandon vulnerable members of the party that they believe are no longer politically useful.

The Democrats don't need to start jettisoning demographic groups, they need a progressive platform that can bring the party together. They need to move to the left economically, not to the right socially. However, if the party does decide to stop protecting the most vulnerable Americans in the interest of being more, "centerist," there is an upside; voters will finally be able to abandon the Democratic Party without harming marginalized groups.

You're right, but the nuance you're discussing is not what's being discussed here. Listen to this bit:

“The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” said Joseph Paolino Jr., DNC committeeman for Rhode Island. “I’m going to look for a chair who’s going to be talking to the center and who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day.”

Or as one DNC member from Florida put it: “I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”

These speakers aren't distinguishing between socially left and economically left, and reading between the lines, it is very clear that the member from Florida is talking about dropping support for trans people (in a thinly veiled and very offensive way, I might add). They lost the working class because they don't have a working class message, but they're blaming the social policies for their loss.

There is an argument to be made that the way they are approaching socially progressive issues is hurting them. Kamala Harris telling the ACLU that she supports transition surgery for migrant detainees painted a very large target on her back for a policy that would have effected a very, very small number of people. That probably should have been a, "pick your battles," moment for her.

If the argument was, "We're not going to focus on trans people in sports for now, because a lot of people still don't support that, but we're going to talk about how Medicare for All helps everyone, and we'll make sure that gender affirming care is covered," OK, there's a case to be made for that. But what they're actually saying is, "Well, the economic policy is set by the donors, so there's nothing we can do about that, but the trans stuff seems to be costing us more votes than it's winning us, let's drop that." They're trying to jettison the progressive groups they think aren't helping them instead of building an agenda for progressives to rally behind.

As they begin to dissect their collapse in the presidential election, some Democratic National Committee members are concluding that the party is too “woke,” too focused on identity politics and too out of touch with broad stretches of America.

From the bottom of my heart, fuck these people. They've moved so far towards neoliberal policy positions that they no longer have an economic message to give their working-class base. In the absence of a coherent economic vision for the party, they keep doubling down on, "identity politics," to keep the the Obama Coalition happy; they have nothing to unify their base, so their only option is to take up any position that is important to the demographic groups that make up the party. Now that this strategy has been thoroughly and decisively defeated, their reaction isn't to return to the progressive economic policies that won them these groups in the first place, but instead to figure which minorities are, "unpopular," so they can abandon them. What a bunch of stupid, shortsighted cowards.

Yeah, sports is a great analogy. Just because you don't like basketball, doesn't mean you won't like soccer, and just cause you don't like turn-based RPGs, doesn't mean you won't like 2D platformers. It's all about finding what you vibe with.

Lots of good advice here, but I would just add, start with your interests and work out from there. You like puzzle games? Portal is a great physics puzzle game, so you might like that. It's also a 3D platformer, so you'll find out if you like games with a lot of running and jumping. It's also technically a first-person shooter (not in the sense that you shoot enemies, but you do shoot a portal gun at walls), so if you don't like that aspect of the game, you'll know that FPSs aren't for you.

Doesn't have to be the type of gameplay either. You like designing things? Maybe try the Sims or Animal Crossing. Like horror movies? Maybe start with something simple but creepy, like Limbo. Detective stories? Something like Strange Horticulture might be up your alley.

The most important thing is to look around and see what catches your interest. Read some reviews, watch some gameplay footage, and find something that's right for you. Don't just say, "I'm going to do video games now," and buy a Call of Duty or Dark Souls because, "gamers," like them.

I mean, yeah, but they'd be in a better position to make that argument if they hadn't been campaigning with Mark Cuban. (Not that Robert Reich needs to be told that, but it still needs to be said.)

Those are the three branches of the U.S. government, but in this context, they mean the three institutions required to pass legislation; a bill must go through both the House and the Senate and then be signed by the President to become a law. If Democrats had taken one of those institutions, they could have slowed the Republicans' agenda..

Yup. Call your Senators and tell them you have no faith in the party leadership, and that Chuck Shcumer cannot continue as Senate Minority Leader. If they're up for reelection in the next two years, tell them you're happy to support a primary challenger if it's the only way to get change.