• 14 Posts
  • 308 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I don’t really know, but I get the worrying sense that the courts don’t realize what a big deal this is.

    Cancel any other cases for any Trump-involved judge. Have 24/7 military grade protection for all court staff and everyone’s families. Have the NSA involved in tracking down every single person who makes every single threat to the safety of anybody, and prosecute them. The alternative is that the collapse-of-democracy-o-meter ticks one small mark closer to 100. I’m not trying to be all panicky about it but the country has essentially bottomless resources to deal with Trump’s cases with the gravity and urgency that they demand, but they’re being assigned this priority alongside 1,000 “business as usual” things. This isn’t a normal case with normal consequences. Make it a priority.



  • I was going to type this as a joke, but on reflection I think it’s 100% unironically true:

    The only reason they care is because Ireland’s right-wing hooligans are actually willing to physically mob up and attack immigrants and police, whereas a lot of the right wing in the US is too skeered to get into the streets and do the same un-stochastically ever since Ashli Babbit. They wish their followers here would do the same and can’t wait for it to start to happen.


  • Agreed, and besides that, travel bans are about the stupidest possible measure you could take to curb the spread of a virus even if there was a new one that was dangerous.

    Imagine you’re in China on vacation or business. Biden says we’re implementing a travel ban. Would you just shrug your shoulders and get an apartment in China? Or work out a way to get into the US via a third country?

    All it does, in reality, is make it more complicated and difficult to track the people who are coming into the US from China, because preventing that completely for any length of time is more or less impossible.

    Edit: Source 1 and Source 2


  • The most hilarious thing about the whole thing to me was the way he said, “blackmail me with money?” as if he’s definitely automatically wealthy to a level that he doesn’t have to worry about being bullied.

    Leave aside the whole framing where the only reason people might be pulling out is to blackmail Elon Musk personally, and just assume that that’s true and analyze the question of whether he’s big enough to be immune if they decide that’s what they want to do. Musk is worth somewhere around $100-200 billion personally. I picked, totally at random, a single one of the advertisers who have pulled out, and learned that Eli Lilly has a market cap of around $565 billion. Remember this? Back from a year ago?

    Eli Lilly and Co. stopped showing ads on Twitter the day after an account impersonating the pharmaceutical company — complete with a purchased blue check mark — posted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”

    Eli Lilly asked Twitter to take it down, but the tweet remained up for hours, because the platform’s staff was stretched thin due to recent layoffs and resignations. The tweet garnered hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes, and Eli Lilly’s stock soon took a dive.


  • Hm, yeah, I would just start up a Mastodon page in parallel with the Meta page. Pick the right “home” server to join; that’s critically important for Mastodon in a way that it’s not for Meta. Put in charge of the page someone who’s genuinely excited about participating in Mastodon, and would be engaged with the gaming community there whether or not they were in charge of the page. I don’t think I would recommend spending anything on ad promotion of the Mastodon page, but like I say I’m not convinced of the utility of spending money on Meta promotion either. YMMV

    Anyway like I say my level of knowledge about it is pretty minimal but I’m happy to talk more in depth on details of my experience also if you like.



  • I have some small amount of experience with this, but based on the little I know, here’s what I can say. First question is what is your goal? To get customers, or to create a community? Below is general advice but it’s hard to say just talking about it in the abstract.

    If you want a community, I would probably advise to just treat it as one more channel, have separate pages in Meta / X / Fediverse / Pinterest or whatever as separate communities, since in a lot of cases there won’t be overlap between them. I wouldn’t recommend abandoning your existing Meta or X pages to set up a Fediverse page instead, although making a contingency plan for the slow motion demise of Meta as a platform for the long term seems like a good idea.

    If you want to drive sales, then for me Google Ads always worked better than buying advertising on Meta or X or etc anyway. Have you measured conversion numbers from Meta? They make it easy to spend money definitely, but I always found the ROI in terms of pure paid sales to be pretty bad from them.


  • You could have just linked to the underlying source, Fox News.

    “For many years now, both the United States and Israel have been living in a policy fantasy world where we have tolerated Hamas’ existence in Doha and believed that Doha would be a moderating influence,” Richard Goldberg, the coordinator for the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on Iran, told Fox News Digital.

    I believe that to the extent that Richard Goldberg was responsible for Trump’s Iran policy, that’s a severe indictment of his qualifications on anything.

    “The presence of the Hamas office shouldn’t be confused with endorsement but rather establishes an important channel for indirect communication,” the minister wrote.

    The Qatari Hamas liaison office has played a role in helping secure the release of 50 hostages in exchange for 150 Palestinian prisoners and a four-day ceasefire. Qatar first announced the agreement once both parties had finalized it last week.

    Sounds like this was good thing then. No?

    Looks like your other post was removed, which I honestly don’t agree with, although I would describe this story as clear propaganda attempting to put “Obama” and “Hamas” and “shocking revelation” all in the same sentence.






  • Yep. This was how I learned to play. We played at tables or while walking around as needed, and for times we needed random numbers we had a little piece of paper with a big grid with numbers and we’d flick a pencil at it and wherever the eraser landed was the roll. Everything was d20 and we had very little idea of the rules, and over time as we got sourcebooks we started to absorb them gradually, but mostly we used the sourcebooks as a repository of lore as opposed to as anything prescriptive in terms of the mechanics we should be using.

    10/10

    You have to make sure you don’t have any power-hungry dickbags in your group that will abuse it I guess, but we had an absolute blast in every sense.




  • Individual privacy and security is national security.

    The “nation” in anything resembling a democracy is made up of individual private people with their own motivations, and their own sometimes considerable power, whose security is protected even when it doesn’t line up with the interests of whoever happens to be in charge of the government. Those nations can become extremely powerful, much more so than “secure” states, because they have within them powerful people who give good faith to the systems of government that can organize and wield state power. It has to be that way. Any government that betrays that relationship will collapse into something akin to modern-day Russia. Certain policies might be bad for “individual privacy” in the short run, and good for “national security” in the short run, but there’s a reason why the nations of Nazi Germany or the USSR who prioritized state security so high above that of individuals, weren’t at all secure in practice. On an individual or a national level.

    In the absolute middle of World War 2, when Britain was fighting literally for its life against the literal Nazis, and losing, the government had to deal with paying rent to the sometimes disagreeable landlords for their military intelligence offices, and they had to face angry questions from civilians in government about firebombing in German cities and how it was inhumane. They weren’t allowed to just get on with whatever they decided they wanted to do. There was no question about “well this is a government matter so I don’t care what you think, as a private person, and I don’t have to.” That’s not how a democracy works. Some people might disagree, but in my opinion that’s why the side that Britain was part of ultimately won the war: Because the British people knew their rights as individuals would be respected, and so they in turn felt comfortable giving wholehearted support back to the government when the government needed it.

    Anyone who describes “national security” as a thing that has to be balanced against the rights of the people who in actual reality make up the nation, is probably talking about something more akin to “state security” in the USSR or Nazi sense. Not the security of the actual nation, but the safety and convenience of policymakers and their friends, sometimes specifically their safety from the nation (i.e. the people).


  • Your language in the comments are also very divisive for someone claiming to want to break idealogical lines.

    Yeah, probably so. That’s how I feel about it though. I literally just posted it because I thought it was a really insightful and important message and one I wanted to share. It’s like a celebration of these victories that working people have been able to achieve recently, and an important insight into reasons it was able to happen and how to keep it going. Then I got this swell of disapproval about it. I interpreted that as stemming from people being addicted to their divisiveness and unsympathetic to the victories of anyone who doesn’t perfectly agree with them ideologically. So yeah I got sort of embittered about it with my response.

    I think you’re right and I apologize about being combative about it, that’s probably not productive, you’re right. But it’s hard for me to be apologetic about the reasons for the reaction.

    If everyone’s agreeing with you, you might just be in an echo chamber.

    I actually kind of enjoy when most people disagree with me, that’s why I’m over here commenting instead of in /c/workersrightsoverpolitics. I do definitely have the feeling that there’s an echo chamber effect going on, yes.



  • I welcome your downvotes, you short sighted fucks.

    I tried to find this to send a picture of it, but I couldn’t, so I’ll describe it: There are some panels in “The Cartoon History of the World” showing some revolutionary movement, where the revolutionaries spent all their energy arguing amongst one another over factional issues, and it shows them getting led off at gunpoint still arguing their issues amongst one another, and then their little feet hanging from the gallows up above the frame, with speech bubbles still coming down from above showing them arguing with each other. And that’s the end of that revolution.

    That’s you guys, apparently. Good luck.