Zero Personal Scandals

:-|

Literally a book about them.

Zero Blackmail Material

:-/

Now that they’ve cleaned that shit up.

Zero Handlers

:-|

8-|

Zero Financial Incentive

The guy with $50M in his personal fortune and a family net worth of over $400M?

Shut the fuck up.

Hindenburg was a hiccup in history relative to the fallout from an AI bust.

We’re solving the Reddit bot problem the same way we solved the Twitter bot problem.

Is there any aspect of the police state that libs won’t support?

They seem pretty reticent about pursuing white collar crimes, particularly when they intersect with sex trafficking of under-aged girls.

Enjoy your “AI” biometrics!

There’s going to be many pictures of Sam Bridges in the Palantir biometrics catalog.

Liberalism enables fascism.

If you’d just stop scratching them…

compelled to use

I gotta say, a lot of the compulsion seems to be around “adult content” which is fairly easy to avoid in most cases.

I would be more interested in how these rules tend to target LGBTQ+ groups for censorship than how they slap a “teenagers” tag on anyone who isn’t feeding them biometric data. This feels like another edition of “straight is normal, gay is sex” Christian orthodoxy being codified into the digital landscape.

If a county bans alcohol sales, it’s not sharia just because Islam prohibits alcohol.

If a Muslim community refuses to issue liquor licenses, you’re going to see Christian Nationalists accuse the municipal government of “operating under Sharia Law” in order to justify a state-level take over of the administration. These laws give them the necessary leverage.

If your religion says “be a good person and help others” so you get into politics so you can write good policy, it doesn’t make your policy religious unless you write religion into it or pass it under a religious legal system.

If you’re implementing policies in defiance of the state’s majority party, they can point to your minority religion as the reason for your opposition. And they can galvanize the broader state religious majority to strip you of municipal self-rule, by claiming your religion says “be a bad person and hurt others”.

When I said republicans want a theocracy, I meant it literally.

Any hard look at Abbott, Paxton, and Patrick suggest they aren’t theocrats nearly so much as they’re just fascists using any excuse to consolidate power. Texas is heavily conservative Christian, so they slam that peddle a bunch.

This push for “anti-Sharia Law” legislation is more of the same. An excuse to deprive municipalities of self-rule.

I’d consider this a Christofascist law.

Sharia is already prohibited…

The various ideological tenants of the law aren’t prohibited. If a county wants to declare itself “dry” and refuse to issue alcohol sales permits, for instance, there’s no real state or federal guarantee against it. The fact that the people passing the law are doing so in the name of an Islamic faith rather than a Christian faith or a secular commitment to sobriety doesn’t normally play into the rule’s legality.

Lest you think I’m advocating for sharia law, I’m not.

I don’t think people writing or voting on this legislation really know anything about Islamic religious teachings or legal codes.

If someone in a city council tried to cap the interest rate local creditors could charge, based on their opposition to the concept of usury, I doubt a lay Texan would key in on this being an aspect of Islamic fundamentalism unless some AM Talk Radio host or Joe Rogan affiliated podcaster mentioned it. If a local school district passed an ordinance protecting transgender athletes from discrimination, how many people might trace this back to The Prophet’s positive attitudes toward mukhannathun or Ayatollah Khomeini and Al-Azhar’s fatwas explicitly permitting reassignment surgery… unless a conservative pundit explicitly brought it up.

“christian law” would be effectively the same thing

There was a whole Thirty Years War suggesting the definition of “Christian Law” is not so well-defined. But, again, I think there’s a very limited understanding of historical religious strictures across every faith. People tend to only know what they’re told of, within the context of the speaker delivering the message.

What you’d consider a normal Evangelical religious edict might fly directly in the face of a traditional Catholic or Eastern Orthodox legal code.

Islamic Laws stray even farther, depending on which Islamic community you’re coming from (Indonesians can hold very different social morals than Nigerians or Turks)

We should all start looking into decentralized network infrastructure like a wifi&lora meshnet or community run satellite connection.

As usual, its a great idea. But it requires the kind of coordinated effort and extensive financial commitment that anarchist movements never seem able to muster. The great thing about the IEFT was that it set universal standards for connection and communication. Community run meshnets and one-off local groups end up with a plethora of competing standards and very insular bespoke networks.

I’ve played with local meshnets before and what I tend to find lacks the general utility of a standard ISP (trying connecting to your bank or your office VPN from a daisy chained local internet hub) with a few hobbyists who come and go as the mood strikes them.

It’s very much a “you get what you pay for” situation. Without a real professional organization guaranteeing service, you’re at the whim of someone else’s hobby setup.

Orwell was a British police officer in Myanmar, crushing independence movements and worker organizations, during the early parts of his career.

He wrote these books from lived experience. As propaganda tools to antagonize against the USSR, they were brilliant expressions of the very Doublespeak his most famous book coined. Using fear of the foreigner to rally people into the Two Minute Hate sessions he ostensibly pillared.

That’s going to be a crazy policy to try and enforce. Reminds me of the US attempt to ban sports gambling online but only domestically. That just prompted people to make accounts overseas.

As usual, the governmental response is to increase the surveillance state and punish the end users, without addressing the incentive to create or distribute illicit content. They’re just feeding a sprawling black market which… may be the intent. Black markets are notoriously unregulated and far easier to manipulate/gouge/swindle people over.

Why would they choose Texas for their EPIC city?

Because Texas has an enormous Muslim population - 500k and growing - thanks to the large O&G industry that stretches into Islamic countries.

It also has a large Hindu population, owing to the large number of East Asian expats in the consulting industry.

Yup.

he decided to pursue a career in journalism with the encouragement of his father, who advised him that “they’ll take anybody”

If you had a dollar for every journalist who flunked out of college, you’d be Vanderbilt rich.

babies can’t consent

Parents make a whole host of medical decisions for their kids that they don’t formally consent to.

Just pounding on consent gets you in the same circle as the anti-vaxers

I don’t think many people try to say that no one should ever be allowed to get a circumcision.

I see a desire to make false equivalency between two very different procedures, because they both have “circumcision” in the name.

Very specifically, this is in response to EPIC City, a master-planned community north of Dallas that’s being bankrolled by a group of Muslim real estate developers. But you can see it echoing the disgust conservatives have for Minneapolis and Dearborn, Michigan, with their own large Muslim populations.

A lot of this is a tacit attempt to control Muslim municipal populations be restricting how they govern themselves locally.

So you can step in at the state (maybe federal, if Chip Roy gets his way) level and announce this mayor or judge or city council is illegitimate because the leadership isn’t Christian.

Very specifically, this is in response to EPIC City, a master-planned community north of Dallas that’s being bankrolled by a group of Muslim real estate developers. But you can see it echoing the disgust conservatives have for Minneapolis and Dearborn, Michigan, with their own large Muslim populations.

We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume

I’d be curious to meet someone who wasn’t.

300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:

How do you have a conversation about whether or not god exists and we are all subjects to his teaching? How do you debate with someone who shows up wearing the sin of misguided faith?

And the answer, largely, was “you don’t, you burn them as a heretic”.

Again, this takes us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. We don’t want a large movement of deeply religious reactionaries burning people at the stake. So we nip the impulse in the bud by censoring individuals and organizations that propagate hysterical beliefs about The End Times and Eternal Damnation of the Human Soul, as a means of goading them into enforcing a theocratic dictatorship.

In the same vein, we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) don’t like ICE banging down people’s doors and dragging them off to concentration camps. And I’d posit we wouldn’t be living in this moment if the anti-immigration firebrands had been isolated, muzzled, and neutered before they could propagate a bunch of reactionary misinformation to the general public.

The flip side of this is the Israeli censorship of Palestine, which we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) generally don’t like. Not because we have some contrarian attitude towards censorship generally speaking, but because we believe propagating information about the genocide is a primary means of changing the policies around our country’s support of it.

And then there’s the flip-flip side, where we (generic Lemmy Libs) are perfectly happy with censoring Chinese/Russian media, if we believe this media is somehow being weaponized to weaken the US or turn the population against itself.

300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now.

We fucking better be. The notion that modern public education, mass media, and online social discourse hasn’t granted us any new useful information is pretty bleak. Sort of raises the question of why human language exists at all, if it’s just white noise and nobody is gaining any kind of material benefit.

(Although, check out Peter Watts’s Blightsight if you want to chase that rabbit down the hole).

But part of the appeal of censorship is that you’re gating your social circle from regression. You’re not going back to re-litigate settled issues with any kind of seriousness. You certainly aren’t going to tolerate reactionary quarters of your population that try and reinstate them.

My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes.

I would argue that it is cruel to indoctrinate someone else with misinformation and a kindness to spare them from delusion. Similarly, bigotry can turn verbal harm into physical harm very quickly. Even benign communication can be weaponized if it is used to drown people out or deafen them.

So I’ve got three general categorizes of communication that it would be compassionate to spare them from.

I mean, he’s a journalist in the same way Josef Mengele is a doctor.

See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology.

I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.

You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored.

Every system has its gray areas and decision points.

That said, I see a lot of anti-censorship absolutists who seem zealously in favor of open debate until… they get swamped by spam posts or drowned out by monied interests or sea-lioned by people who are just being annoying.

Hell, Charlie Kirk died with a debate on his lips. And TPUSA’s love of campus debates appears to have died with him.

How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.