Yeah, I was surprised they didn’t mention flora…

Tasmania has tasmanian devils. Do you really want to be on an island inhabited by devils?

That’s way too deep for a weekend…

I would delete my account the moment I’m too lazy to check if I’ve already deleted it.

Maybe they played it, but never repeatedly attacked cuckoos.

I disagree that anything you describe could actually be both commercially viable and deployable without authoritarian involvement

You haven’t heard of Ring cameras? Commercial security systems? They do basically what I’m describing, just not as well because they don’t have as much of an incentive. Are end users willing to pay for these more advanced models? No, so consumer grade cameras stick to object detection like deer vs racoon instead of specific individual detection (e.g. scanning eyes).

Governments, however, are willing to pay that amount. Why? Because they think it’ll help them detect criminals, and they think that helps keep people safe. It’s an extension of the HOA idea, just with government-scale funds backed up with law enforcement to go after threats. That, in itself, isn’t authoritarian, but setting up such a system opens the door for authoritarians to take control and misuse it.

I’d go so far as to say that the people in your theoretical HOA are analogous to supporters of a authoritarian regime.

Analogous, sure, but the HOA has no enforcement arm for non-residents, so all they can do is ask the police to intervene. That’s the difference with a city, it has a police force it can order to intervene using information from that system. It’s the mixing of enforcement and surveillance that makes it authoritarian.

So a surveillance system is not itself authoritarian, it’s only authoritarian of there’s some enforcement arm to enforce obedience or punish disobedience.

If it is nearly impossible to meaningfully use apolitically, then it is not apolitical.

Again, I disagree. Something is only political when used for political ends.

Yup, all we know is that there’s some connection to the shadow world (“and in the darkness bind them”) and other rings of power, we don’t know the specific impact it would have on each individual or race.

The ring’s primary power is control over the other rings, and it seems like the shadow realm is part of how that works (“…and in the darkness bind them”). I’m guessing Frodo is overwhelmed by the power of the ring and is taken to the shadow realm, whereas Sauron has more control and can stay in the real world.

Other races may have different effects. The elves have some amount of magical ability, so maybe they can stay in the real world too. Maybe the dwarves would concoct some device to block part of the ring’s power to stay in the real world. We don’t know, the only examples we have are halflings and Sauron.

That would be sick.

All three are half-lings, and all three wanted to hide the ring instead of use it to rule, so it makes sense it would have a similar impact on all three of them.

The necklace obviously still had an impact on Frodo, so Sam had to carry him. The chicken takes the place of Frodo, so both Frodo and Sam can carry the chicken.

Why let the chicken wear it? Frodo wore the ring on a necklace most of the time, why not do the same with the chicken?

Sauron wore it in the great battle, and he was by all accounts visible, otherwise how could Isildor cut the finger off? That would be a very lucky swing if Sauron was invisible.

No, I think its power depends on the wearer. Frodo didn’t want to be seen, so it made him invisible to everyone but Sauron, who understands its power.

What’s crazy is I agree with some of what he says, but disagree entirely with his company.

Basically, he says the Antichrist promises security in exchange for giving up your freedom. However, his company does exactly that, it promises security in exchange for taking away freedom from the people. So at best he’s a hypocrite and at worst an accelerationist.

I agree that people are willing to trade freedom for security, but I disagree that’s what governments should do. Governments need to protect freedoms first, and security second.

Again I am not arguing that it DOESN’T happen, but maga.place is 50% EXTREMELY biased, hateful, or misinformation. Not comparable to 8/10 posts on a VERY heavily leftist site being apolitical, and the other 2 having a grain of truth if hyperbolic.

I could point out more blatant examples, such as lemmygrad, or many communities on Lemmy.ml. Often the post itself isn’t as blatant, but the top comments certainly are, and the moderation backs it up.

The main difference is that Fox News is more popular. The same misinformation and aggressive rhetoric exists elsewhere, it just doesn’t have the same funding or reach as Fox News.

What’s funny is that other fox-named news orgs (local fox stations) tend to be among the best wrt accuracy and lack of rhetoric. In my area (Utah), the local fox station is way better than the large, independent, conservative station and news org (KSL and Deseret News, both owned by the dominant church here). They’re unaffiliated with Fox News, but many get them confused.

And then a couple hours later he is suspended. I guess it’s possible the FCC threatened to take action against people hosting Kimmel

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. ABC stations were involved in a merger which was close to the edge of violating antitrust. Determining whether it does or not could take a long time in the courts, which could cause complications when negotiating contracts and whatnot. Kimmel’s remarks implied that Republicans were to blame, which could be considered a violation of certain agreements for OTA transmission. Again, that would take a long time to sort out in the courts.

Maybe what the FCC said amounted to intimidation. Maybe ABC was looking for an excuse. Idk.

Bigotry and swearing are not the same thing, and you fucking know it

I didn’t claim it was, I also don’t claim “maga” is bigotry. I’m saying both are something someone could take offense to.

What matters is the content and the admin/moderation team. Our instance has fantastic admins IMO, and I haven’t had issues with mods either. I don’t know what the mods/admins look like on maga.place since nobody seems to be interested in that, only the name of the instance and the posts in their conservative community.

It is rooted in a worldview that’s all bad faith, campism, and proudly intolerable behavior.

I think it’s just saying the quiet part out loud. That type of behavior happens all the time from the left side of the aisle as well.

Look at all the people calling anyone remotely conservative “fascist,” do you think that comes from a careful review of the facts, or more from tribalism? I think it’s the latter. Yes, there are fascists on the right, but that doesn’t mean everyone on the right are fascists, just like there are communists on the left but not everyone on the left is communist.

Accurate statistics about gang violence and birthrates don’t make hyperfixation on those things any less racist!

Sure, and the same can be said for leftist content with high factual accuracy (e.g. Mother Jones). I read both, as well as “neutral” news (minimal overall bias) to get a good idea of the facts. Spin is fine, provided I’m aware of it and can find the opposite spin with similar factual reporting.

You are defending the honor of a literal Nazi newspaper,

I’m not talking about honor, I’m talking about freedom of speech. I’ll also defend the right for communist, tankie, and other far left content to exist on the same grounds. One of my favorite musical artists is Rage Against the Machine despite never agreeing with their political message, because I love that they can be so blatantly against our current system. I want more speech that I disagree with, not less, because challenging closely held ideas is how we make progress, because we’re forced to elucidate why we hold them.

We don’t need Nazis.

But we do. Nazism was a popular movement, and we need people to understand it or we’re doomed to repeat that era of history. If we hide it, people will forget why it was so bad and it’ll fester until it gains enough power to cause problems.

I recommend watching some of Peter Thiel’s talks, because he makes interesting points, while doing the thing he warns of. It’s incredibly interesting to see how blind he is to what he’s doing. Basically, he says people are so obsessed with security that they’ll give more power to the state, which will bring about the Anti-Christ (i.e. someone like Hitler), who sells “safety” in exchange for absolute control. And then you look at his company, Palantir, which provides the tools to the government to do that exact same thing, provide security in exchange for absolute control.

Being so scared of fascism that we won’t allow publication of fascist works is a huge part of this obsession with security in exchange for freedom. I reject that.

I believe the safest society is one where people feel so uncomfortable that they take that responsibility on themselves instead of outsourcing it to someone in power. I believe we need to strip entities from centralized control and provide tools for individuals to make decisions for themselves. I avoid fascist content because I find the ideas bankrupt, not because it’s unavailable to me. In the context of Lemmy, it’s a decentralized system, so we should be trying to decentralize moderation as much as possible instead of relying on admins to defederate when something looks scary.

Reddit being cool with fascists was a world-changing problem, and a big part of why I fucking left.

That’s not why I left. I left because they removed choice by closing their API, which meant I was forced to use their clients. I stayed away because they cracked down on moderators who protested. I was never really happy with the way moderation worked, but I was able to vote with my subscription and move to subs whose moderation I liked, so it worked well while Reddit stayed out of it. The moment they asserted top down control is when I left.

This is also why I like sh.itjust.works. The admins have a very hands off approach and only step in when there’s actual abuse, and leave the rest to the users. That’s how platforms should work IMO.

I don’t see why I or other any SJW member should be subject to bad faith, corporate spam.

Then don’t sub to their communities, or even block the whole instance.

I do not believe in “safe spaces” or “echo chambers”. The latter in particular is a loaded, polemical term that means nothing.

I think it’s pretty clearly defined. Here’s the Wikipedia definition, which fits my understanding perfectly:

In the context of news media and social media, an echo chamber is an environment or ecosystem in which participants encounter beliefs that amplify or reinforce their preexisting beliefs by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.

It’s the equivalent of what Trump does by surrounding himself with yes-men and eliminating dissent. It’s what happens on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml when moderation decisions are made to ban people critical of China or Russia, or sympathetic to western liberalism.

I personally am proactive about avoiding echo chambers. I consider myself libertarian, I live in a conservative area, and I spend a lot of time on liberal Lemmy, all so I get exposure to a diverse set of ideas. I watch and listen to liberal, conservative, and libertarian media I consider high quality, so I don’t silo myself into one way of looking at things.

I want social media to reflect my ideals, which means every idea is subject to challenge by providing good information and reasoned arguments. So, when there’s a suggestion that an instance be defederated, I default to “no” and must be convinced of ill intent before changing that to a “yes”. Differing ideals does not automatically mean they have ill intent, even if vocal people in the media with those ideals have ill intent.

There is a beautiful irony that US conservatives claim to oppose echo chambers when they are the biggest enablers of this concept

Projection is a well known trait of narcissists, and has very little to do with political bias (source, conclusion: “Overall, we find those on the left and right are equally narcissistic. However, liberals and conservatives differ in which dimensions drive their narcissism”).

Am I acting in bad faith by stating…

No, that’s an opinion.

However, I think both liberals and conservatives in power oppose “real action” (arrests and whatnot) because they want power. In essence, they get more political capital by slapping companies like Meta on the wrist instead of actually holding them accountable.

If a side opposes one group more than the other side, that’s because they think it’ll harm the other side more than their side. It’s rarely about doing the right thing, it’s about doing the thing that makes them look good and their opponents look bad.

When you ignore such things, you get russia.

Hence why we have protests, lawsuits, and media coverage. In Russia, you won’t get far doing any of those things. People know what’s going on with ICE because of those freedoms, we don’t really know what’s going on in Russia or with the Uyghurs in China because they don’t have the same freedoms.

The day the opposition to ICE stops is when we’ve become similar to Russia.

Trump has negative political support (approval is below 50%), he isn’t like Putin.

There are parts of the country where people aren’t allowed to vote

That’s just not true, do you have a source?

To vote, you need to be a citizen and register to vote before the deadline. The deadlines are clearly posted, and the process is very easy (just fill out a form and either mail it or drop it off). You only need to register once, and you’re good for life, though you’ll need to update registration if you move (at least for mail voting or between states, not sure about within states for in-person voting, I’ve never voted in person). The stages I have lived in all do registration online as well, so it’s trivial to do on a work break or something. There are even non-profits who go around to help people sign up.

There are problems, such as not every state allows mail voting (which helps for busy people, e.g. those who work multiple jobs) and no day off to vote, but the voting registration process is simple and accessible.

The approach to districting is also clearly malicious and strongly suggests US conservatives oppose real democracy

Gerrymandering isn’t unique to conservative, liberals do it too. It’s a problem nationwide, not just in red states. Both parties like the status quo, otherwise we’d see legislative action.

You can be a conservative in other countries and not support security services setting up check points for non-whites, beating up people and deporting your own citizens.

And you can be a liberal in the US or elsewhere and support it. The TSA was expanded under Obama, and Obama could have ended it entirely and returned security to airports and airlines. But he didn’t. Why? Both parties like having more power.

To believe this is impossible in the US is how you get putin and your country turning into russia.

I 100% agree. The book It Can’t Happen Here is about exactly that, fascism happening in the US.

The closest we got was actually a Democrat: FDR. He famously broke the pattern of serving two terms and won four terms, and is the reason we have the 22nd amendment limiting presidents to 2 terms. He also incarcerated ~120k people in the Japanese internment camps, about 2/3 of which were US citizens. That’s far worse than the handful of US citizens ICE has wrongly arrested (most of which were quickly releases).

I’m not saying this to imply Trump is less bad (IMO, he’s worse in many ways), but to demonstrate that we’ve been close to fascism before from the opposite direction, so it could totally happen here.

And that’s why I think it is legitimate to preemptively ban oligarch propaganda

Thanks for the honest perspective.

I too agree that propaganda should be eliminated, but that should go through the community/instance it’s on. So the proper process is:

1. Report problematic content to community mods, explaining why it’s problematic
2. If no action from 1, report to the admins of the instance the community is hosted on
3. If no action from 2, report to your instance’s admins to see if they can get a response
4. If none of the above work, recommend defederation

AFAIK, we skipped all of those steps and went straight to 4.

Similarly, even if HOAs could deploy a system like that, that’d make them authoritarian.

That really depends how the system is used. If it explicitly doesn’t record regular residents and people who have signed up officially as visitors (and homeowners can review footage), I don’t think the camera system itself would really be authoritarian. Yeah, the system would be capable of violating privacy, but as long as the system is transparent and reviewable by the residents, I think it can be privacy-respecting. Basically, it would be like a home security system, but across a neighborhood, and it can even be self-hosted to not let third parties access the data (and police requests would go through the HOA board, which consists of residents).

That’s my point. If the system itself can be used in a privacy-respecting way (and the vast majority can), even if it’s typically not used that way, the system itself cannot be authoritarian. If an institution uses it in an authoritarian way, then the institution is authoritarian.

In short:

1. cameras are not authoritarian
2. databases are not authoritarian
3. license plate and face recognition software isn’t authoritarian
4. connecting 1-3 together in a searchable way isn’t authoritarian (would be a fun hobby project)
5. Sharing info from 4 isn’t authoritarian (again, could be a fun hobby with friends)
6. An institution (gov’t, business, HOA, etc) using 4 and/or 5 to enforce policy on citizens/employees/residents/etc is authoritarian

I have friends that use home cameras to do object classification as a hobby, mostly to identify and fee record wildlife. I’ve also heard of people doing this to identify package deliveries and catch package thiefs. Sharing those models with others on the internet is largely the same idea as what flock is doing, and with enough data, similar solutions to what Palantir is doing could be done entirely by hobbyists.

The products Flock and Palantir aren’t authoritarian in and of themselves, it becomes authoritarian when those products are used to enforce policy.

Letting the shampoo sit is only needed for medicated shampoo, like for dandruff, and that’s so the medicine has time to work. For every other type of shampoo, you should rinse it right after thoroughly getting to the scalp to not irritate the scalp.

I use dandruff shampoo, hence why I wait before rinsing. If I didn’t have dandruff, I’d probably do shampoo last.

I just checked all of my shampoo bottles (apparently we have almost 10… we have shampoo for dyed hair, dandruff, kids, dry hair, etc). None of them recommend waiting before rinsing, not even the dandruff shampoo (well, Selsun Blue doesn’t, can’t check the other since it’s in my SO’s native language, which I can’t read). I remember seeing some other brands mention waiting (I think Head and Shoulders?), so YMMV.

Some solutions here are technically illegal to make laws about. The government cannot force a company to give away its copyrighted server code, not even in compiled form. Since there are alternatives that don’t require giving away copyrighted material, it’s better to keep it vague.

So it’s both the friendliest to companies and the easiest to pass as a law.