I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn’t even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.
Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.
This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, “Why is my internet so slow? What’s this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!”
Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn’t set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn’t even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.
I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, “Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we’ve added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?” But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.
There’s a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that’s making me think maybe it’s time to ditch Windows for good.
No, that’s what they’re doing. If you’ve ever heard it said of conservatives, “every accusation is a confession,” this is a pretty prime example. It’s a lot easier to convince people to do some gnarly shit if you can pretend that the same gnarly shit is already being done to them.
Like, running a successful grift isn’t about convincing your mark that your dubious proposition is above board. They can pretty much always tell something shady is going on. To con someone successfully you convince them that, yes, something shady is going on, but that shady thing is actually working in their favor. You have to convince them that shadiness is the trick that’s going to let them get one over on everyone else.
Nobody wants to live under a dictatorship. Literally nobody. But if you can trick them into believing they’re already living in one, well then installing your own suddenly gets a lot easier. “Look, you’re already getting grifted. But if you put us in power and let us run our grift, our grift is going to benefit you this time. We promise.”
It won’t, though. It never does.
It might finally give conservatives clear permission to go out and hurt the people they don’t like, though. And that might be enough for a lot of them.
Huh, my money would have been on syphilis-related brain disease.
My main takeaway from this article is that “Austrian Economist” is apparently the new euphemism fascists are using to try and trick people into thinking they’re doing something other than fascism.
It’s so crazy to me that they throw this word around and they haven’t come up with a shared definition.
That’s actually kind of the point. It’s like how they use the words “communism” and “socialism.” It’s a word they’ve made wholly synonymous with “unquestionably bad,” and it’s defined by what it isn’t rather than what it is so it can be whatever they point at when they say it. Keeping the meaning vague and amorphous is a way to self-police their own thoughts, and short circuit any meaningful discussion or debate before it even starts. It creates a boundaryless field of discomfort they only experience as a gut feeling. As soon as a conversation starts to stray into the territory of acknowledging that people who are different than them might nevertheless be full human beings they get that bad feeling in their gut and say, “I don’t know… That sounds kinda woke.” And everyone knows that anything “woke” is unquestionably bad. Ta-dah!: uncomfortable thought successfully avoided. Thought that may have led to a change of the status quo successfully avoided.
Even when we’re talking about the thought influencers on the Right who are consciously aware of the above, they can’t be seen to define it publicly because that would mean they would have to be honest about the seed of hatefulness they’re dancing around when they use euphemisms like this. When someone asks them how they define “woke,” they can’t answer, “You know… N*gger stuff.” That would instantly discredit them in the eyes of just about everybody, and they wouldn’t be able to pretend to be a serious person making a serious point anymore.
Also, by pinning its meaning down with a definition it would lose much of its power as a propaganda tool. It would lose its universality. It would mean something specific rather than whatever that thing is that you don’t like.
Nobody has made a serious attempt to overthrow the government this year
…Yet
I’ve noticed a lot of conservatives don’t have the same full-throated support for Trump this time that they did in 2016. For instance, he lost a ton of gun owner support when he started talking about “taking the guns first, and letting the courts sort it out later,” and then going on to sign the bump-stock ban. I’ve seen some of those people go from rabid Trump fan-boys to kind of sneering whenever they hear his name. I suspect a lot of them are going to end up falling in line come November, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there were a fair few people casting protest votes as well.
The headline is slightly misleading. 2.8 million searches were halted, but according to the article they didn’t attempt to figure out how many of those searches came from the same users. So thankfully the number of secret pedophiles in the UK is probably much lower than the headline might suggest.
Oh, well, if the film studios say so then by all means…
The state of science reporting has been absolute dog shit for decades. The vast majority of the time when you track down the study an article is based on, the claims of the article are either massively exaggerated, or sometimes even completely different than what the article claims. It seems like a whole industry of taking fairly mundane studies and punching them up into some exciting pieces of short fiction. So many years of garbage reporting has me immediately skeptical of any article with a bold claim, or which mentions any kind of significant breakthrough.
Huh, I would have guessed it would be more of a urine and mildew smell.
So the guy who notoriously despises public transit failed to come through on his promise to revolutionize public transit?
Wow.
I mean, who could have seen that coming?
Of course it would be. Dictatorships aren’t really possible in a country with a military that refuses to march against its own people.
So… 16%?
It’s basically the entire point of fascist movements: to create an in-group who is protected by the law but not bound by it, and an out-group who is bound by the law but not protected by it. The hypocrisy isn’t just endemic, it’s foundational.
34 felonies so far.