Thanks I guess for providing an example of one of the ways in which humanity needs to grow the fuck up - reach a point at which we generally actually think about things that people actually say rather than just being bitter slaves to our preconceptions and prejudices.

Hopefully your kids will do a better job of it. Or maybe their kids.

This neatly illustrates why I’m an anarchist - because institutionalized authority has made it such that the United States - a nation of 340 million people - is engaged in overtly destructive and internationally criminal violence and brutality not because the people have demanded it or even desired it, but because a handful of fucking psychopathic pieces of shit have managed to fight and claw and wheedle and lie their ways into positions from which they have the authority to make it so.

And that is, by any reasonable measure, insane.

Any system that allows for such a thing rather obviously should not exist. And that the United States, with its intricate system of checks and balances and its guaranteed freedoms and its strictly mandated adherence to the rule of law could reach this point clearly demonstrates that the problem is not how authority is institutionalized but merely if it is. If it is, then it can be, and sooner or later will be, abused for the questionable benefit of a few and to the detriment of all the rest of the world.

So it quite simply cannot be institutionalized. That’s the only sane approach.

So all that’s left is to wait for humanity to grow the fuck up - to evolve psychologically, sociologically and philosophically to the point that they no longer have or feel a need to have some institutional mommy and daddy to tell them how to and how not to behave.

Maybe in another few centuries…

The thing with the data centers is that the goal is entirely different from anything we’ve been told.

The key is that Google is implementing a system that allows people to get the information they’re after directly from them rather than clicking theough to a website. That’s undermining ad revenue, which not only threatens the existence of the websites but threatens Google’s existing ad-based business model.

So it can only be the case that they’re pivoting to a new business model.

And the key to that is the data centers.

Their goal, I grow more certain nearly every day, is to effectively privatize the internet by driving independent sites out of business, so that they (and their handful of more or less equally wealthy and powerful competitors) become the only source for all of that data they’ve already stolen.

Yeah - there’s a fairly significant game of The Emperor’s New Clothes going on, as the new set of impossibly wealthy assholes insist on pretending they’re not impossibly wealthy assholes and instead try to force society into accommodating them, apparently entirely unaware of the simple fact that all they’re doing is hastening the demise of the civilization that birthed them and on which they’re little more than grossly destructive parasites.

And that’s not an opinion - either mine or anyone else’s. It’s a simple fact that’s been borne out by history over and over throughout the ages, and will be again, no matter how many comforting lies people tell themselves and each other.

What’s a “Carrington” or a “Robinson” in the first place?

I wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone else, but I’m a human, and I thought the rest of us were too.

I don’t think whether or not they’re “good” people and the clients they end up representing have anything to do with each other.

It’s just a part of their job that they end up sometimes representing people who are charged with, and potentially even obviously guilty of, heinous crimes.

And their code of ethics specifically demands that they do their best to represent their client’s interests regardless of any and all other considerations.

So even just there, it could be the case that one defense attorney is a vile scumbag who gets off on the idea of freeing obvious criminals and it could just as easily be the case that another defense attorney is a veritable saint who sincerely believes that all people are fundamentally good and that it’s their purpose in life to help anyone who needs it, no matter who or what they’re deemed to be.

Both of those things undoubtedly exist, and pretty much any position one might imagine between the two, so I don’t think there’s any way to correlate who they represent and their own qualities.

Now all that said, I certainly couldn’t do what they do, and specifically because I couldn’t effectively represent someone who was certainly guilty. But that’s just me.

Funny how the Republicans, after four years of posing as the conscience of government, have gone completely silent on the subject of corruption.

Think it might be because their Republican president is already far and away the most corrupt president in US history, and likely at least in the running for the most corrupt national leader in human history?

IMO literally took his place.

My theory is that the DNC and the Dem establishment, in order to ensure that they can mouth leftist platitudes without the risk of actually advancing leftist interests and thereby alienating their big money donors, always have at least one or two ringers - people who, for one reason or another (most likely because they’re bribeable and bribed or extortable and extorted) can be counted on to, when necessary, cast the vote(s) that ensure that the Republicans don’t quite lose.

So Fetterman, just like Manchin (and Sinema) before him, is doing exactly what he’s supposed to do.

No.

My immediate reaction is that if it’s not genuinely sincere, it’s meaningless.

It doesn’t really matter if that’s true or not - the mere fact that that was my first reaction means that it’s a doubt that would continue to haunt me, and that’s more than enough of a problem all by itself.

Tyrants don’t come to power by mandating submission. They come to power by criminalizing dissent.

China doesn’t want to hand a pretext to a dangerously trigger-happy power - all the more when patience alone delivers what it wants.

This actually neatly sums up pretty much all of Chinese history.

Unfortunate that so many Americans, and even politicians, still haven’t grasped that.

Quite seriously, as someone caring for a parent with dementia, that’s entirely typical behavior.

Well… you know… except the scale is a bit different for someone who isn’t the fucking president.

Piefed by default auto-subscribes accounts to a curated set of communities, auto-hides downvoted content and downvoted posters, attaches icons to accounts to mark those that have beyond a particular threshold of downvotes and entirely blocks links to a curated set of sites because Rimu deemed them to be unacceptable.

The only saving grace is that at this point those (anti-)features are generally toggleable at least at the admin level, but that’s thanks to wjs018.

I dunno. I just noticed it as it was happening.

Try it and see.

It takes all of about a minute to sign up for an instance and it doesn’t cost anything, so there’s no reason not to do it. If you like it, great and if you don’t, you’re not out anything.

For the record I actually prefer KBin/MBin - they just have a better interface than Lemmy. But KBin was a one-man effort and when the guy running it burnt out, it soet of fell by the wayside. MBin is a fork that was meant to be a more open project, but the guy who was mostly responsible for it is a bit of a twat and mostly used it to pimp Monero, so it never quite caught on like it should have.

You might also sign up for an instance or two on piefed. The guy who’s mostly responsible for that is also a bit of a twat, but he’s had some good help and some people pushing back against his tyrannically censorious tendencies, so it’s pretty decent.

The only way you’re ever really going to know what you think about any of them is to try them out for yourself. And there’s literally no reason not to.

That’s about the weirdest part of this whole thing to me.

It really is just The Emperor’s New Clothes played out in real life, as a wide swath of people who certainly know better all studiously pretend that the President of the United States is not a petty, shallow, vindictive, willfully ignorant and delusional egomaniac with the emotional maturity of a toddler who’s slipping into dementia right before our eyes.

Slurp gobble.

Trump doesn’t have policies. He has whims, urges, compulsions, reflexes and tantrums.

pushing Democrats to the center

Because that worked out so well for them in 2024…

Anybody who’s surprised by this is part of the problem.

If an organization possesses influence or power that can be abused, then it inevitably will be abused. It doesn’t matter how conscientious people are or how many safeguards are put in place - loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit will angle for position in the organization, and sooner or later some will get through, and they’ll immediately start shifting the organization to accommodate them, which is to say, to accommodate loathsome, power-hungry pieces of shit. And it’s all downhill from there.

I’m not an anarchist by accident.