t3rmit3 @ t3rmit3 @beehaw.org

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I think you are looking for a unified solution to deal with very different and very nuanced problems.

The swastika was chosen by Hitler as a means to legitimize his movement. It's important to remember that the average 1920s German had little formal schooling in world history. Even compared to our shitty and revisionist US curriculum, they had next to nothing. He could co-opt it and people were legitimately like, "wow, that's crazy, I absolutely have never heard of Buddhism or Hinduism or anything. Maybe we really did used to rule all of them". The Nazi swastika was at no point a dogwhistle, it's a very explicit and bold statement of their false identity. It was an assertion of power and authority. If you cede the symbol to them, you are intrinsically acknowledging them as the "legitimate" owners of that symbol, which they are not. You can very easily distinguish between a swastika that is being flown as a white supremacist symbol, and one that is not. No Nazis are building Buddhist temples or weaving faux-Native American textiles just so they can have a "plausibly deniable" swastika, nor using pictures of those items to masquerade as non-Nazis with a nudge and a wink (because that would hurt their 'pride'). They just use Nazi imagery directly.

To attack this, you need to very actively de-legitimize its improper usage, and boost its proper usage. The message cannot be "yes, this thousands of years old symbol really is about the Nazis", because that is the stance of the Nazis themselves. It has to be, "fuck off Nazis, that's not your's, and we're going to actively weed out your bullshit".

On the other side are symbols like Pepe, where the purpose was never about legitimizing their ideology, but in fact to hide it and dogwhistle. The creator of Pepe is attempting valiantly to do exactly what I said above, but I think that while getting Nazis to stop using it (and everything else, air included) is great, there is no wider history or adoption that makes Pepe worth using elsewhere. It was just a cartoon frog. In this case, drawing a direct line between people who choose to represent themselves with Pepe, and with the shitty ideologies they're using it to dogwhistle about, is actually the best counter to them, because a dogwhistle isn't a dogwhistle if the relationship is explicit and universally understood.

Banning Pepe outright in Steam profiles makes complete sense to me, because it sends the message that "we know what you're using this to mean, and you're not fooling anyone, dumbass".

Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).

I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of piece? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?

Are you asking me to speak to this? I can't speak to the personal motivations or viewpoints of either Native American tribes, nor of a myriad of Asian cultures. But I can say that I don't personally believe it is either fair, appropriate, or necessary for Buddhists to stop using a symbol they've used for thousands of years in order to distance themselves from a group they are not in fact associated with.

groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that

I think you may have fallen prey to a false narrative around this. From what I'm seeing, the "whirling log" (the native american symbol that resembles the swastika) was mostly dropped due to pressure from white people over their own white guilt and the politics around Nazism, not out of some collective spontaneous show of empathy, and never actually fell out of use completely, and is now being actively reclaimed by various native americans.

During World War II, Eskeets said the U.S. government asked the Navajo to “hold off” on using the symbol. So for an unknown amount of time, Eskeets said metalsmiths, weavers and other artists stopped incorporating it into their work. That helped create the misconception that items with a whirling log are no longer being made at all.

It's apparently still being actively used by the Navajo, as well, but they tend not to talk to white people about it since people can't have a normal one.

The sacredness of the “whirling log” makes it challenging to get some Native Americans to speak to non-Natives about the subject. That’s according to Edison Eskeets, a trader at The Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site and the oldest operating trading post on the Navajo Nation and in the United States. Several Navajo artists were contacted and either didn’t respond to requests or hung up the phone when asked to speak about the symbol’s significance.

Eskeets said the whirling log represents humanity and life and is still used for healing in hundreds of Navajo ceremonies.

“It kind of has everything on it,” he said. “It represents the constellation, the moon, the sun, the equinox. It’s down to the earth, the four directions, the rotation of mother earth, all of that … it’s the rotation of life.”

But the old meanings are all dead.

I'm sorry, but this is completely false. The swastika is still used all across the world for its original meanings. If you'd said this about e.g. Norse symbols like the Valknut or Sonnenrad, I'd be 1000% on board with you, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've not been to anywhere that Buddhism is common if you think everyone associates the swastika with Nazism.

There are specific versions of the swastika that Nazi Germany created that are only associated with Nazism, such as the 45-degree rotated swastika, or obviously any swastika embedded within another German military symbol, but to assert that the basic symbol itself has been co-opted is very Euro-centric.

Sidebar, but the nominees for this year's TGAs are ridiculous. It's the same ~7 games shoehorned into every category they can, and a few others sprinkled in where they can't.

You'd think there were only like 20 games that released this year that were good.

Some games that released this year, but snubbed by TGA in favor of kissing up to the same games n times over:

• Hades 2
• V Rising
• Satisfactory
• Mouthwashing
• Factorio: Space Age
• SULFUR
• Rise of the Golden Idol

Probably none. Now I'll name one that is large and influential, and isn't trying to combat the problem: X

I like this. 👍🏼

We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful.

We are all well aware there are Nazis out there right now, and text is more than sufficient to convey reminders of that.

I think it's also worth noting that a lot of media pictures of Nazi/ Christofascist/ RWNJ marches use photographic techniques (e.g. low-angle shots) for dramatic effect to drive clicks, rather than a more direct and undramatic approach, and it's hard to see that as anything but giving them exactly the kind of attention they want.

Charlottesville was a great example of this.

Likewise, one article about the Ohio march showed the Nazis through a cafe window, as people inside looked on, with the camera set low against a table. The photographer was trying to convey a juxtaposition of Nazis against people living their "everyday lives", but if they'd just taken a picture of the 10 assholes at face level, walking down the sidewalk, it would have better conveyed the reality of them being a tiny group of Nazi cosplay losers.

"We're coming to your neighborhood" is the message that Nazis want to sell, and media is doing it for them for free half the time.

No, bots are not real people, so them masquerading as real people holding an opinion is, by definition, misinformation.

This isn’t misinformation.

Right, the other example is. The whole point is the difference between propaganda (the bots) and legitimate political sentiment (all real people). Given that Musk is actively choosing not to combat misinformation bots on his platform, it's fair to step in.

When these crappy "AI"s finally do displace my job, I will become a fireman, but in the Fahrenheit 451 sense, and it'll be servers instead of books.

They're not just reading into it, if that's what you mean; the SA, and the rest of the crew's behavior towards Anya is all very much what they described. Jimmy seeing Anya as a disfigured womb with a foal (as in, a horse) is literally what happens, not a figure of speech.

They wouldn't lift a finger the past 4 years to actually put procedural guardrails in place to fight the rising tide of authoritarianism in the GOP, but they're going to in the next month-and-a-half? Please.

It depends how you want to use it. This isn't strictly a NAS controller, it's also running the Jellyfin server. If I was going for a "pure" local NAS, I'd probably just set up Samba.

Technically, for this project I actually used an rPi-like, the FriendlyElec CM3588, so it's a little beefier than a normal rPi. It's got the 4 M.2 SSD slots, which let's me RAID the drives if I want, as well.

This is a good read, and I was very much expecting to disagree with it going in. It basically aligns with where I am:

Whatever China may have aspired to during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, it has become another Capitalist, Imperialist, wannabe hegemon. Xi is sitting exactly where Trump wants to, with a lifelong appointment and unlimited control.

I won't rehash my issues with Leninism and the abject backwardness of creating an all-powerful Single-party State and then believing that it will ever willingly dissolve itself into a Stateless society, but suffice it to say that I think China proves out that Authoritarianism is the default fail-state of centralized governments, no matter their aspirations. That's not to say they'll all get there, but it is to say that the self-preserving and authority-maintaining aspects of government inherently bias it towards centralized, authority-based control, not distributed, democratic cooperation and consensus.

My partner loves this game, and also endorses anyone here who hasn't played it to do so. :)

I think it's important for groups of people to be able to choose to ban propaganda and misinformation, because propaganda is not simply information being imparted, it's an entire ecosystem of deceptive methods to disseminate information and to alter your perception without you realizing.

If it were calling for the EU banning X solely because they don't like Musk's shitty personal opinions, I'd agree with you, but they cite the disinformation, misinformation, and outright propaganda that the platform is being used to spread, and I think that's perfectly valid.

Take 2 scenarios:

5 million actual people telling you that 'x' political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.

500 thousand actual people, plus 4.5 million bot accounts telling you that 'x' political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.

In reality, you don't even need the bot accounts to outnumber the real users if you control the algorithms that determine what people see, which is exactly the situation that X is in right now.

tl;dr This isn't about banning the viewpoints themselves, it's about banning a platform that deceptively alters visibility of viewpoints to manipulate people.

Banning things you don’t like is not a solution

Tell that to Musk; X bans TONS of people over their viewpoints.

• Getting over a pretty debilitating flu that lasted 4-ish days
• End of this week I take a 2-day train ride, which I'm looking forward to SO MUCH, so I'll have senioritis at work all week
• Finished up a couple different hands-on projects that all went amazingly
  • dremeled a non-safety-cut P365X-Macro frame for thumb and magazine safeties all by eye
  • finished assembling a rPi NAS for my dad's place that has spotty internet, so he can have a local 'streaming' service with movies and tv shows

I want to pay them for Bloodborne on PC, but Sony won't let me! Sounds like that's their choice/ problem.

Truly curious, what did she do that was corrupt and/or racist?

that goes out the window when you start suggesting “restorative justice” for someone who shot a baby.

I mean, it's got to apply equally to everyone. Not everyone may be open to, or able to be reformed, so some will need to be kept apart from society, but you can't apply a different standard of justice based on how you feel about someone.

Por que no los dos?

Reading further, it's a pretty compelling argument that sanctions are the root cause, and this kind of instability and pressure is exactly what sanctions are meant to bring about.