Uriel-238

This raises one of the problems with company-sponsored media that has been a problem since Pulitzer and Hearst. Your bosses and sponsors will always have opinions about what news is fit to print.

So during the cold war never a bad thing was said about GE (we bring good things to life!) despite how they were pushing our elected officials to buy more nuclear warheads, even when we had plenty. GE bought a lot of commercial time from all three networks and no one wanted to disrupt that cash flow.

This might be a benefit from federated social media, that burying a story becomes impossible requiring only a bit of vigilance from its end users.

If we just left it at that, I’d agree. Reddit had a handful of right-wing media watch subs that would track and report when someone said someting egregious, legally gray or in light with the fascist movement identity (e.g. mythical history to justify legitimacy.) That can not only be used to expose their mask-off faces to the public, but in instances where incitement or threats turn into action, it can be reported to investigators to help track down key players.

So, much the way backpage was helping law enforcement track human traffickers (who did business on backpage) we have the option of leaving them be, but to exploit their intra-sect candor.

Subnautica is entirely a cautionary tale about the hazards of diving (without even decompression sickness or nitrogen narcosis). I died most by running out of O2 scrounging in wreckage, or underestimating the medium-sized toothy fish. Still. It’s dangerous!

Ima say the Titanic claimed a few more lives. In First Class, no less.

A vault or filing cabinet.🗄 Or, every file can track all the state-changes with every keytype or click and update the permanent file whenever there’s a pause in activity.

My dad was an astronomer, and as a toddler I thought it was the funniest name for a star. Then the movie came out and I was bugged that they misspelled the name for the promotional posters (but not in the movie itself).

If you’re in the US, the police can search your home anyway if it thinks it has cause to do so. Misinforming a judge in order to get a search warrant and permission for a SWAT raid is routine in the US, and just a matter of whether they’re looking to harass you and your neighborhood. Misuse of dubious informants is common. In this case, cause to do so tends to be more about assets that the officers can seize than sufficient crimes require intervention. US law enforcement likes big convictions, but it likes lootable money and assets even more.

Normally, copyright infringement is not grounds to raid someone’s home, and while corporate lawyers will send nastygrams when your IP addy is found on a seeding list, that is not sufficient proof that a given individual in that house is responsible. Still, once the police decide you’re a bad guy they’ll look for something, anything to pin on you, and are allowed to lie to you in the process of investigation (or torturing a confession out of you), so shut up and ask to speak to your lawyer.

In the UK, it appears the police are even less regulated, given parliament has sent brute squads to news agencies to dispose of embarrassing data.

In both cases, it’s a matter of being too small to be noticed by law enforcement (or too expensive to media companies to prosecute).

If you are a big enough fish, a media company will hire ICE (that is the US Immigrant and Customs Enforcement) which hires itself out as an all-purpose brute squad with police authority, when it’s not hunting for immigrants. ICE flew to New Zealand to Raid the Kim Dotcom estate in January 2012 (which we still hypothesize was less about piracy and more about a new music distribution system that was going to compete with the record labels). Note that the shotgun blast of charges against Dotcom didn’t include copyright infringement, but were ambiguous like espionage, conspiracy and violation of the CFAA all of which are difficult not to do if you’re a normal person on the internet.

You’re right that I should have specified the US, and will edit my original comment.

It’s not a crime in the US that has state-served sentences like fines or imprisonment, rather is a civil infraction. Granted, the media trade organizations like the MPAA and RIAA would very much like to make copyright infringement felonious, but that could easily lead to overenforcement and filling our already impacted prisons even more.

I’ve heard the European watchdogs are more severe and will go after grandmothers who play radios too loudly regarding public performance regulations.

But we’re in an era in which states are passing laws to make persons illegal or strip them of their rights, so we can’t rely on the state (any state) to fairly assert how their populations should behave, and Disney has been an IP-maximalist shit since the mid 20th century.

So our respect of legality should only extend to what can and will be enforced. The Sheriff of Nottingham does not deserve our obedience. (Prince John neither)

At this point we can attribute it to mad science. The Titan submersible was not appropriately stress-tested and was missing important safety features. (Only crew on the outside can open or seal it, even in an emergency.)

Stockton Rush was dismissive of safety, but gets mad science points for using himself as a test subject. So he totally bought the ticket to ride. As for the passengers, maybe they needed more council to advise them to mitigate environmental risks by reducing engineering risks.

Laugh at danger, sure, but be prepared for it to eventually eat your face.

I still don’t know. It may have had to do with saying something nice about NATO but I’m not sure. One of the problems I generally have is discussing things descriptively rather than prescriptively (I’m often looking at political situations well beyond my pay grade), usually to say this is a problem. I don’t know how we’re going to fix it but it’s bad and is likely to get worse.

In a pluralistic society it is as bad as racisim or prejudice against Muslims or misogyny. If your fear of a given group informs a change of a long-term friendship just from that friend coming out, then yeah, it’s not only a social dysfunction but informs what job positions you can have that are public-facing or public-serving.

For instance, transphobes shouldn’t be doctors, pharmacists or defense attorneys if their transphobia might affect their regard to clients.

Maybe in a police state where citizens are expected to adhere to an extreme level of conformity then being transphobic might not cause additional harm, but no one would want to live in such a society.

Edit: Cleaned up typos

Copyright infringement is not a crime [in the United States]. It’s grounds for a civil suit, but it looks really bad for Sony entertainment to try to bleed tens of thousands of dollars from a poor family trying to watch a movie they couldn’t afford to watch in theaters.

Possessing or viewing CSAM is so severe a crime, you need a lawyer to dispose of it. To not do so is to stay in possession of it, which is a felony. To destroy it is destruction of evidence, which is a felony. Your only recourse is to stuff it in an unmarked box, and ask your lawyer to anonymously hand it over to the local precinct. It is essentially social toxic waste.

ETA [rant] Note that a) Sony (and all the other major studios and publishers and record labels) gladly pirates IP that is not theirs, and also underpays the people that produce their content. And b) Sony freely engages in dark patterns and odious TOSes which is one of the reasons I haven’t been able to play Sony games in years. So it is actually more ethical to pirate Sony content (or again, that of any major studio, record label, publishing house or AAA game company) than it is to pay the company and support their ongoing abuse of workers, end consumers and the market.

Also there is one thing you can do to them that is worse than pirating their content, and that is not pirating their content. [/rant]

Edit: Specified that in the United States, copyright is not a crime. It can be a crime in other parts of the world (such as within the EU) and it can be treated as a crime in the US if a company is annoyed enough at you, and has done so to recover / stop the distribution of pre-release content. (A beta iPhone model comes to mind.)

I’ve been on Reddit long enough to get permabanned from favorite subreddits for weird reasons, and kicked off Reddit completely for a whole week (I was permabanned for an alleged bad misinterpretation of a comment, and it took a week for them to review and reverse the ban.) So I’ve had sore spots.

There are communities I miss, and so far I haven’t found equivalent ones here, but my experience here feels a bit like when I was starting Reddit. I’m still learning how to fit in.

Once on Reddit, I was accused of being a tankie (and had to look up what the heck tankies were. I think having mixed opinions regarding specifics of the Soviet Union is controversial) and I was banhammered from a left-wing ideology sub for Atlantism which I still don’t fully understand what that means. (Approving of or not being sufficiently critical of NATO activity, maybe?)

So, having been the recipient of injustice by Reddit and its moderators, my attachment to it was already reserved.

Whenever we can

So far, Republicans are happy enough to stress-test the mutual loyalty doctrine with obnoxious officials embarrassing the integrity of their office, pushing / voting for odious bills that are poorly written and that overreach, or saying the incitement-to-violence and bigotry / exclusionist rhetoric out loud.

To clarify, there are no good, public-serving Republican subdivisions today: GOP and conservative values since the 1960s have pushed for policy that has led us to where we are now, where precarity (when not poverty) is so pervasive that Mussolini-wannabes and purge politics (culture wars) are popular. Every conservative alive who’s been voting either to cut social safety nets, cut taxes or elect officials to do so have bought tickets to ride this train. (Not to mention stock in the proverbial railroad company). The never-Trumpers and OG fiscal conservative Republicans are essentially members who wish there was still more altitude from which to plummet, and the impact point wasn’t so close.

So, it’s more that no-one wants to take responsibility for the consequences of their own voting histories, now that the train is rocketing forward at high speed, so they’re blaming each other.

But yeah, whether we meme this up to wedge the factions further apart, or find additional controversies with which to divide republicans, or even encourage factions to splinter and submit their own rival candidates to elect instead of Trump / DeSantis, we are doing good work to give US democracy (lower case) time to sort itself out.

The US Libertarian Party is really rather removed from libertarian parties of other natures or typical libertarian ideology. As far as I can tell the major difference between being US Libertarian or Republican is that Libertarians actively do not care if they’re hated. Notoriously, Penn Gillette divorced himself from libertarianism because the Libertarian Party got too obnoxious for him.

Typically, Republicans trying to distance themselves from Republicanism pretend to be conservative independents. Bill O’Reilly has asserted such as has others on the FOX News cast. (Tucker Carlson, maybe? I wonder if it’s a FOX News editorial guidelines to assert party neutrality, even as they were giving Trump softball interviews or letting him rant on the phone for 60+ minutes at a time.)

To Republicans it’s about loyalty over principle. Everyone who is part of the movement gets the benefit of doubt while anyone else is an enemy.

Of course this hasn’t stopped infighting within the Republican party, so they’re now factioning and fighting among themselves as well, each sect claiming to be the true base of the Republican party.

McDonald’s is notorious for suing any food-related company with a name starting with Mc or Mac, for trademark infringement. McDonald’s lost to McNally’s, a steakhouse in California, but I have to assume they’ve won enough to persist the policy.

Although in the 2010s it was observed that copyright lawyers on retainer to movie studios and record companies were over-eager to report infringement to media platforms even when it was obviously unintentional and not useful for piracy (e.g. dancing baby videos.) And Disney has a long wretched tradition of suing daycare places for wall murals long before the internet.

So this might be a matter of retained legal teams keeping themselves busy with overvigilence, since overenforcement makes such companies look like abusive dicks who deserve to be pirated (or worse, deserve to be not pirated).

Looking at Iran right now, I imagine there may come a point when violent revolution is appropriate. The Masha Amini protests (and the escalation to assassination, arson and sabotage) are the result of years of infrastructure failure and brutal retaliation by law enforcement and religious authorities. Pro-tip: If your side is the one bombing girls’ schools with poison gas, you might be the baddies.

I doubt the left in the US is going to start civil war, but the militant right is eager enough that I’m worried about lethal attacks on pride parades. But for now we still have alternatives to burning down police precincts.

I liken the right wing attacks on civil liberties akin to containing the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar. There’s enough integral complexity in the systems that pass and enforce execrable bills (and elect officials inclined to submit them) that they are prone to sabotage through malicious compliance with policy.

Still, according to retired CIA analysts interviewed on PBS, civil war in the US is inevitable (though they didn’t specify it was imminent) and the kind of election reforms and diffusion of political power back to the public that might prevent war is unpopular among state or federal officials. We’ll need to pressure them to pass such measures, probably with a level of extortion that equates to the threat of violence. Specifically what is well above my pay grade.

As heinous as their child predation and corruption of office have been, war profiteering, bonded labor exploitation, global pollution, suppression of harm assessment science and pushing deadly addictive pharmaceuticals all put their immorality at an exponentially higher scale.

Anyone who is a Republican at this point is actively supporting the white power / Christian nationalist movement and the fascist takeover. That is to say, they’re in support of the purification movement and genocide whether or not they personally believe in the culture war or are a fiscal conservative loyalist.

43 years of failed fiscal conservative policy only served to accelerate the Republican party toward fascism and the Trump takeover of the GOP during the 2015-2016 primary. So it essentially was fascism all along.