And it didn’t end in… tragedy? Because the ending of a fart is arguably its most important quality.

Banning USian social media services doesn’t stop people from wanting sites like these, nor does it protect you or your community from the impacts that these services have on the rest of the world that will unfortunately affect you.

Like why exactly do people even want to be a part of these panopticons when the negative consequences are so severe? Because I think that people mostly do understand that they are sacrificing their privacy and autonomy to these platforms, but how can we get people to understand the seriousness of these sacrifices?

Not a defense of USian social media websites BTW. I think we should burn these sites to the fucking ground. But while they’re active, I don’t see how banning your community from interacting with and monitoring them is a good idea.

Why stop at one when you could stop at just zero and not use a compass?

This reply was brought to you by The Lost MC.

Okay Pooh, based answer but this isn’t World History homework, this is English homework, so I actually need you to spell “murderer” specifically please

Truly disgusting society

A.A., a 35-year-old Palestinian father detained from Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital for 19 months, described extreme torture, including being raped by a trained dog at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp.

“One of the dogs raped me – the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing,” he told PCHR.

What the absolute fuck

It’s almost beautiful how terrible of an opinion this is 🖕😆🖕

The working class

Only if he gives up his power and privilege permanently

Very cool! Apparently someone did an open-source implementation of this (OpenEvolve).

There are definitely bots but I think people are good about making their bots known, and most of the content you see is posted by humans… because who tf would pay to run a bot farm on our little corner of the Internet?

If you want to see absolutely no accounts that self-report as bots, there’s a setting for that in Lemmy.

Has SOG stopped being trash on Israel yet?

Democrats have a nasty habit of rehabilitating Republican politicians after they leave office. For example, ask Obama or Biden or any Democrat politicians about the Bushes or Reagan and you’ll invariably get positive responses.

Thanks I hate it 🙃

As a child coming from communism, I know it’s not that bad as it was there and I believe or think the problem here is more about fascism but either way, I think I am just confused???

Full disclosure #1: Lemmy has a lot of communists and anarchists. The Lemmy developers are communists and IMO it informs the design of the site. Lemmy.world has a liberal anti-communist bent IMO.

Full disclosure #2: I am an anarcho-communist, i.e. a libertarian communist in the vein of Peter Kropotkin. The main difference between anarcho-communists and state communists is that anarcho-communists do not support States, in particular “”“communist”“” Marxist-Leninist regimes or any other existing States. For this reason anarcho-communists and state communists have a glorious history of fighting like cats 😆.

These first two disclosures I’m telling you because I’m against capitalism and pro-anarchism and I don’t want to spook you, so I want to be transparent about my biases.

Full disclosure #3: I had a nice upbringing with a white family and I have lived in a rich American suburb for almost my whole life. Most people in my position are simply too comfortable to talk about changing the status quo like I do.

So here is what I actually want to talk about: it’s pretty bad here in America for most people! It’s worse than a third-world country in the rural deep South. Everywhere in the US, black and indigenous people are at best second-class citizens everywhere in the country, a system designed from the ground up to keep black people subservient and destroy indigenous people and uphold white supremacy. And Sinophobia has been a driving force in American politics since the 1800s. And we interned Japanese people during WWII, and even some Democrats use that historical comparison to justify what is happening to people detained by ICE. Healthcare is hard to get even for wealthy people. Mental healthcare is almost non-existent. Homelessness is answered by cops. School shootings are so routine that they rarely make national news anymore. Almost everyone is one big medical incident or one missed paycheck from homelessness. Our privacy has been gone for decades; we voluntarily carry mobile surveillance devices (cellphones) in our pockets. Workers have almost no rights. Dissent is only tolerated if it doesn’t threaten power, and while it’s worse under Trump, it was never really tolerated under any administration. The cops are tyrannical and completely unaccountable. We have the highest prison population per capita on the planet. We spend the most money by far on our military. Schools are physically crumbling and there is a teacher shortage because we don’t pay them enough. Infrastructure is crumbling and needs to be repaired, and even if we do repair it, it’s car-centric infrastructure so you basically have to have a car to survive in this country. Higher education is incredibly expensive but simultaneously expected even for entry level positions…which people aren’t even hiring for anymore, even in traditionally “safe” fields like engineering.

I could go on and on and on. And everything above applies during and before the Trump administration, and it will almost certainly apply afterwards as well, because we don’t have an organized left and the Democrats are basically diet right-wingers who are literally paid not to rock the boat.

Honestly: everything sucks here, we’ve been on the brink of a civil war for decades, and the only reason I haven’t left yet is because I don’t have the money to make the move. If I ever found the money to do so, I’d drop all my shit and be on a plane out of this shithole without even kissing my parents goodbye. I genuinely do not understand why people come here (although I welcome you nonetheless!) if you could go almost anywhere else.

And all of that…in the richest country on Earth! All of the problems in this country are solvable; the ruling class chooses not to solve them, and the working class is too desperate to rise up and solve the problems ourselves.

I’m not saying it’s not bad wherever you’re from. Just that it’s not good here and that you kinda need to expect that things are going to be trash in order to not get trampled.

ICE is out of control right now. (My mom was born here)

That fucking sucks 😞… Fuck ICE

I appreciate you comment because I am over her reeling, my family left all that government because it horrid and came here legally unlike Trump’s family of war dodgers, both him and Elon’s family came here illegally so what he is doing is so savage!

Personally, I don’t oppose Trump for being a draft dodger or Elon for being an “illegal immigrant”. It’s… literally everything else.

IMO when the drafts were active, Americans had an ethical duty to get out of them because the wars America fights are for private interests. And no one should be illegal, i.e. following the law with respect to immigration only shows the wealth of the immigrant and says nothing about their character. For example, if I was to propose a law that instantly made all immigration legal, would you oppose that?

I just can’t wrap my head around everything going on.

American politics is weird and complicated. Take it slow.

Mao didn’t invent the phrase, he only used it. The phrase vastly predates communism in China.

Trump is not any kind of communist, Maoist or otherwise. For example, he’s not nationalizing any industries or making them worker-controlled in any way, he has not abolished private property nor promised to do so, he has not supported workers’ rights, he has not attempted to disempower the capitalist class nor has he promised to do so, and the de-facto redistribution of wealth is from the poor to the rich, i.e. the opposite direction of what communists call for.

Trump is a fascist like every other US President. However, Trump is accelerating the decay of American capitalism into full fascism at an alarming clip.

Real talk for a second: you basically made this post because Donald Trump said a Chinese thing and that spooked you, right? IMO you have some ingrained Sinophobia you need to work on.

Toss the homophobes into the sea and move on? Easy fix!

Library Genesis when it’s up and Anna’s Archive. Anna’s Archive’s database is a proper superset of the Library Genesis database but IMO Library Genesis is a little easier to search. For both sites, make sure you’re rocking uBlock Origin.

I don’t know much about TorGuard VPN, but it’s probably fine if it’s been fine for pirating other stuff. Books are on the order of 300MB for uncompressed scans or 3-50MB for books that are rendered directly to PDF, i.e. it’s not that much data unless you’re training the next ChatGPT. I pirate a lot of academic books as an autistic PhD student and I’ve had no issues 😆

Happy reading! 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴🏴🏴