infuziSporg [e/em/eir]

Moonies BTFO by spike in Thai parallel gay marriage

mega-sicko.jpg

Do it, Donnie! Put the 100% tariffs on BRICS countries and Spain.

The tradition of anti-intellectualism goes back a long way. Certainly to Nixon and to Goldwater as a candidate, probably even further than that.

It’s not a bug in America, it’s a feature.

I installed Lemmy, hoping it’ll be a good alternative

So what made you install Lemmy

If you interact with a website through an app, you are ceding both functionality and power. Angry Birds is an app, Signal is an app, Reddit and Lemmy are websites with URLs and you are duplicating the function of a browser if you use anything else.

I’d heard of Lemmy (and Raddle) since the late 2010s, and put them in the “things I’d like to pivot to at some point” category. The main subreddit that I posted on (a transgressive mix of edgy, caring, partisan, and weird) was quarantined and then finally banned in 2020. As a result I quit using reddit altogether, but after a few months I poked around and realized people from that sub had started a forked instance of Lemmy as a refuge.

The one thing that’s lackluster is the search function. Everything else is superior.

If you can post this everywhere, and end up getting Trump to see it, you might be able to drive a wedge between Trump and Elon… sooner than would otherwise happen.

The lint filter that they recommend cleaning after each use, or a different filter?

National Assembly says “We oppose trying to turn the country into an outright dictatorship, that was bad… but we’re not going to punish you for it.”

He’ll do it again when he’s more prepared. Trump team is taking notes too.

Good question.

If the one party is founded and sustained by people who are sworn enemies of said corporate interests, there ensues an existential power struggle between the party and the corporations (foreign, domestic, or most often both), that typically ends up reaching beyond the borders of the country in question.

If the one party quickly becomes captured by foreign interests, chances are the party was founded with that intention.

Apply this lens to the last 107-119 years of history, and most of it will become much clearer.

So who watches the watchers? In a way we all do. But instead of this being a mere idealistic aphorism, there are mechanisms in place to ensure it. We enculturate people to value equality and not valorize themselves above others, we minimize the potential benefits of corruption and keep the punishments consistent, we ensure that the watcher is not a lifelong position, we ensure that watchers do not become a separate class, we subject the watchers to oversight and approval of those who are watched, and we set up the processes so that they only function when people are working together.

This is so much more extensive than the asymmetric and byzantine setup that passes for “checks and balances” in liberal democracies. Is it still possible for things to go awry as a few bad actors try to bend the framework to favor themselves? Yes, absolutely. And that is a challenge to the people setting up the framework, to keep the wrong people out initially and to make it strong enough that it can keep its integrity once the founders are gone.

Employers hiring for 40 hours a week (empty line)

Employers hiring for 35.9 hours a week (crowded queue)

This is only a few paragraphs in; on a larger screen you don’t even have to scroll.

This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices.

What is so objectionable about that, or so hard about copying it?

Being required to read something for less than 60 seconds isn’t a violation of your rights- in fact, this is less than 1% of the time a EULA or ToS takes. It also takes less time and bandwidth than many of the AI-training Captchas nowadays.

If you have a problem with reading 30 seconds of something you have a feeling you might disagree with, the real problem is you not being willing to peek outside your bubble.

Russia after Yeltsin

Russia during Yeltsin rolled in the tanks on its own parliament. The absence of foreign invasions was not for lack of malice, but for lack of capability.

The reason why ex-Warsaw Pact countries are flocking to NATO is because when the communists left power, the reactionaries resurged. And naturally the reactionaries in power wanted to be part of a right-wing alliance. But no matter what revanchists might tell you, living standards across Eastern Europe were better in the 1980s than they were in the 2000s.