Rottcodd

As I just noted on another response, mostly it was that I came up with a delicious turn of phrase and couldn’t not post it. And yes, while broadly I think that Google deserves every bit of shit that’s thrown their way and more - that they could vanish from the face of the Earth tomorrow and the internet could only benefit - this particular incident really isn’t a good example.

I have to admit that I was so pleased with that turn of phrase when it came to me that I went ahead and posted it in spite of the fact that this specific incident doesn’t appear to be a good example.

It’s really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from “Do no evil” to “Don’t even bother pretending not to.”

It’s cynically amusing that we’ve reached a point in US history that Supreme Court justices with no integrity don’t even bother trying to hide the fact that they have no integrity.

I think that’s actually part of the vetting process when a new nominee is chosen. Most of the public focus is on ideology, but that’s likely just the first phase of it for the people reviewing possible candidates. It’s likely that after they get a pool of candidates who are ideologically acceptable, they actually look for a particular combination of arrogance and an utter lack of integrity, so they can, it is hoped, end up with somebody who will not only be corrupt and dishonest but defiantly and determinedly corrupt and dishonest - somebody who can just be set on whatever path they’ve been bribed to follow and then set free, and their own egos will take over and keep them on that path.

Axiomatically, no, since it isn’t even AI in any meaningful sense of the term, so it fails to live up to its hype right out the gate.

When Tom Cotton says “little Gazas,” what he means is “little communities of people I reflexively hate and want to see die, and you should hate them and want to see them die too.”

So… aren’t these wannabe twitter competitors going about the whole thing bass-ackwards?

I saw a broadly similar article the other day about some sort of shakeup in the Mastodon board of directors.

It’s as if they think the way do do an internet startup is to first appoint a board of directors and hire a raft of executives, then… um… you know… um… do some business… kinda… stuff…

The idea of a libertarian party has always been a bit self-contradictory, though not entirely. The basic idea of libertarianism (narrowly defined - not the broader use of the term in things like the political compass) is specifically to minimize but not entirely eliminate government. That’s what distinguishes it from anarchism.

So there’s necessarily an immediate issue - which specific functions of government need to be kept in its minimized form? And that’s where a party (or something like it) can legitimately come into play. It’s still a bit self-defeating though, since such a party obviously should be sharply limited in scope and influence, but that’s not the nature of hierarchical organizations. It’s not that the idea is immediately contrary to the espoused ideals of the movement, but that it pretty much inevitably will one day grow into something that is.

I don’t and never have held with no-true-scotsmanning the supposed wing alignment of whatever it is that one or another person thinks needs to be kept in a “libertarian” system. I always leaned much more toward the left than the right as far as that goes, but I never felt any particular threat from those (the majority even 40 or 50 years ago) who leaned to the right more than the left. Like me, they were fundamentally simply opposed to the whole idea of institutionalized hierarchy, but believed that some amount of it was unavoidable, so they, like me, were prepared to argue for their preference, rather than just taking the fundamentally authoritarian position of, “This is the way it’s going to be because we say so, and if you oppose us, we’ll shoot you.”

I think that the transition to the latter stage was inevitable regardless of which wing the US movement leaned toward. It’s not really a trait of the right or the left per se, but a trait of the dominant group, when it’s reached the point that its dominance is so well-established that it comes to be seen as a justified state rightfully defended. And unfortunately, as history has shown repeatedly, both political wings are entirely able to reach that point, and at that point, the specific ideology doesn’t even really matter any more, since the actual point of the organization is protecting and furthering its own privilege and power, and ideology just determines the rhetoric with which they surround that entirely self-serving endeavour.

Or more simply, I think that if US libertarianism had come to be dominated by left-wingers rather than right-wingers, it’s likely that all that would mean in the long run is that the current version of it would be dominated by tankies instead of… whatever the current lot should be called (neo-feudalists? anarcho-fascists? gun nuts? mall ninjas?)

It’s not surprising at all.

The Libertarian party has never been particularly libertarian (I discovered that when I briefly worked for them back in the '80s).

For a while there, through the 90s, the libertarian movement in the US was still relatively libertarian, which is to say, advocates for the liberty of each and all, and it was fairly common to see a distinction made between “libertarians” - advocates of the ideology - and “Libertarians” - followers of the party, who were pretty much just misled idealists and the opportunists who were misleading them.

That all started to change with 9/11 and the Bush presidency, as the movement as a whole started shifting toward right-wing authoritarianism and the party stopped pretending that it had ever been anything else.

Even then though, there was still a vestige of true libertarianism here and there.

That ended though when the GOP co-opted the Tea Party movement and transformed it from a series of protests against Bush’s Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. Virtually overnight, any pretense that US libertarians valued individual liberty (other than their own) entirely vanished, and the few remaining genuine advocates of liberty abandoned the movement.

At this point, the US libertarian movement as a whole has morphed entirely into an especially toxic version of right-wing authoritarianism, and I would fully expect them to support whoever seems most likely to let them shoot people. And that’s Trump.

Nicely clarified.

Yes - the way I said it leaves the possibility that they have to pay at minimum their profit, and no - that should not be the case. They should have to pay at minimum their total revenue.

This shouldn’t be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they’re fined less than they made off of it, it’s not even really a fine. It’s just the government taking a cut of the action.

Civilizations, just like individuals, have a finite lifespan.

Just like individuals, the details vary from one to another. All are born at a specific moment and all then grow, but their deaths, like individual deaths, come in a myriad of ways.

The US is relatively young, but it’s almost certainly not going to get a chance to peacefully grow into old age, because it’s effectively riddled with cancer, which is growing and spreading almost entirely unchecked.

Wrong about what? I don’t even get what the point is supposed to be.

Are you saying that people transition from Linux to Windows? That seems obviously backwards.

Are you saying that Linux is female and Windows is male? That’s not even coherent.

What am I supposed to be trying to prove wrong?

So saying the quiet part out loud has now extended to bragging about being a psychopath.

It seems that nearly every day I see another thing that future historians will be able to cite as an example of the alarmingly self-destructive behavior in the days leading up to the collapse of the US.

Ten bucks says he has snuff porn on his D drive…

They in fact are weird people with mental health issues.

I think a case can be made that a considerable amount of the ugliness we see in the world is a fairly direct consequence of the simple fact that a significant number of people in positions of power and influence are profoundly mentally ill.

Traffic narcotics.

Would you refuse to visit websites that force registration even if the account is free?

I already generally do.

What’s all the fuss about, you don’t care?

I honestly don’t much care, but that’s because western civilization is circling the drain, warped and undermined at every turn by wealthy and powerful psychopaths, and it’s just not worth it to care, since there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop them

Is advertising a necessary evil in fair trade for content?

Some sort of revenue stream is potentially necessary, but that’s the extent of it. Advertising is just one revenue stream, and even if we limit the choices to that, there are still many different ways it could be implemented.

The specific forms of advertising to which we’re subjected on the internet are very much not necessary. And they don’t exist as they do because the costs of serving content require that much revenue - they exist as they do to pay for corporate bloat - ludicrously expensive real estate and facilities and grotesquely inflated salaries for mostly useless executive shitheads.

Would this limit your visiting of websites to only a narrow few you are willing to trade personal details for?

Again, that’s what I already do, so it would just add more sites to those I won’t visit.

Is this a bad thing for the internet experience as whole, or just another progression of technology?

At this point, the two are almost always one and the same. Internet technology is primarily harnessed to the goal of maximizing income for the well-positioned few, and all other considerations are secondary.

Is this no different from using any other technology platform that’s free (If it’s free, you’re the product)?

This is cynically amusing on Lemmy.

Should website owners just accept a lower revenue model and adapt their business, rather than seeking higher / unfair revenues from privacy invasive practices of the past?

Of course they should, but they won’t, because they’re psychopaths. They’ll never give up any of their grotesque and destructive privilege, even if that means that they ultimately destroy the host on which they’re parasites.

I find that the most dependable way to make sense of Trump’s statements is to start with the presumption that, contrary to the physical evidence, he’s actually about 10 years old.

Like with this one - just imagine him as a fat, spoiled little 10 year old, out on the school playground at recess, dejectedly kicking at rocks and whining.

“I think some financing should be investigated.”

So do I. I want to know who’s paying Pelosi.