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bitwize01

@ bitwize01 @reddthat.com

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20
Joined
12 mo. ago

  • “Would you believe if I told you I voted for this man?” she said, referring to Trump.

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  • This is parroted a lot by commentators online but I'm increasingly convinced it isn't true. I think showing pity or understanding for these kind of braindead bigots actually encourages the rare braindead bigot reading social media to hold on longer. I'm old enough to remember these statements made in 2016, pleading to gently convert conservatives into liberals. Instead we see a continual ratcheting of bigotry and hate against the left, because it appears not compassionate, but weak.

    I think that if instead people went online and saw universal derision and scorn for these people, they would quietly revise their worldview. As it is, it seems like each MAGA voter needs to experience consequences personally before they revise their stance. Folks need to remember that conservative media is telling these "low-information voters" that minorities and "liberals" desperately want to destroy them. So when we say "oh no, come on over!" it seems like a trap, or like we are disingenuous.

    You also need to consider that social media is so ideologically fractured by algorithm and media preference, you need to go out of your way to find a dissenting viewpoint. Basically all political punditry is performative at this point, with zero minds being swayed by logical arguments.

    This is why I've stopped feeling or expressing remorse for any MAGA folks who suffer under the regime.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • And sadly, despite how horrific it is- at the end of the day, it is legal. He didn’t hunt these people down and end them. He denied them coverage. This needs to change, but vigilantism clearly isn’t going to do it, and this is evident in the fact that it’s still happening. In fact, I believe it’s even worse now.

    In the aftermath of the killings, approval of claims skyrocketed. If CEOs kept getting deleted for their horrifically immoral actions, then I've no doubt we'd have a different healthcare system right now. Your bootlicking is exactly what they rely on to literally keep killing people. You are enabling them to kill people.

    It's a trolly car problem. If I'm confronted with this moral dilemma, I'm choosing the lever that kills the CEO to save millions of lives.

    Where do we draw the line where murder isn’t okay just because we don’t like what someone does?

    In this case, this person was so vile, so directly contributing to the misery of society, the slope aint slippery at all.

    There is a reason we have laws in place to stop slippery slopes like this from happening. And we are better than these assholes. They got to do what they do using our system of law- so we will need to use that system of law to stop them.

    The reason is that law enforcement is a tool to protect capital. The police and politicians will never step in for this issue, because they are captured by the capitalist class. Nothing you can do (well...) can change that fact, and they want you to waste your time on performative protests and attempts at legal reform.

    If Luigi had killed his health insurance claim worker instead, you'd never even have known his name. You don't need to remind me that I'm better than CEOs. I'm completely certain of it. Because I don't make my daily work harvesting money via the suffering of millions of people.

  • Zohran Mamdani states he will have Nazis in his administration

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  • Thanks for the reply! I was aware of these countries + their successes, and I think there's a mixed bag of advantages. As someone who has lived in Vietnam for a stretch I'm not sure it's a place we should all aspire to emulate, but I recognize the strengths of authoritarian governments alongside their drawbacks. I also respect the acknowledgement about Marx's ideals and I think honestly we're not too ideologically far apart from one another. Perhaps I'm more innately pessimistic about life under communism and you're more optimistic. But I can respect the ideological bridge. Thanks again!

  • Zohran Mamdani states he will have Nazis in his administration

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  • I'm interested in learning, and I'll keep an open mind: can you give me some examples?

  • Zohran Mamdani states he will have Nazis in his administration

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  • It's very arrogant to start from the position that your platform is correct and sensible, and then be completely unable to dismantle arguments to the contrary.

    Again, I support the ideal of communism as a model government. However I simultaneously believe that Full Communism is not workable. So I remain hopeful of seeing pragmatic plans to adopt the closest achievable, stable system.

  • Zohran Mamdani states he will have Nazis in his administration

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  • The denial of viable candidates at the national level of US politics by the far left has killed more Palestinians than liberals would have. You're the murderer here, not me. Why did you betray Palestine by letting yourself be neutered by Purity testing?

  • Zohran Mamdani states he will have Nazis in his administration

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  • does nobody know what prisoners dilemma means anymore? what are you talking about?

    You subscribe to the "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" communism Marx put forward, right? That model is a post-scarcity, Star Trek style communism system. The issue is there will always be a stratification of work. Statesman and Janitors. Artists and Engineers. Some individuals will be compelled to drive the trash truck. Will we have enough people that just love dirty jobs to do every dirty job out there? Will we be able to automate every undesirable task? No. Someone makes the post-scarcity world run on time, and Patriotism + Civic Duty sadly only takes us so far. Your model assumes that humans will let themselves fall into a system were some people get ground down as cogs, and others get to spend their day painting by the sea, and everyone will subscribe to the model because of the needs of the many.

    I argue that you end up with a Prisoners Dilemma where individuals will subvert that system and avoid contributions to their ability, while continuing to take according to their need. That enforcement of the political system will push you out of it. It's not attainable because of the inherent nature of humans to eventually betray each other in the Prisoner's dilemma. Someone will claim "I can only paint. I cannot harvest grain" and when others in the fields see the painter, your model disintegrates.

    yes because the point is not to present a candidate, the point is to build a workers party.

    Your party is unable to recruit membership of any significant slice of the population because of purity tests, so this isn't going to happen with your current outlook. I personally believe the Far Left has no actual desire to organize because that would require a real defense of their platform, vs. lobbing purity tests at others.

    Don't get me wrong. I want to live in the Star Trek society. I just accept we will never get there. So I want to get as close as possible. I think a key difference is my willingness to iterate over the flawed system rather than attempt a full re-creation of our society from whole cloth. Because I can read a history book and see the risk level with power vacuums. Maybe that's cowardice. Maybe it's pragmatism. I guess that's why I'm not a hexbear or .ml user :)

  • Zohran Mamdani states he will have Nazis in his administration

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  • You believe that Mamdani, an actual socialist, is running to move people to the right? I think it's very clear the actual political right feels the opposite. I also think it's clear from his previous statements that he's not a Zionist, nor is he seeking to move people that way. This is someone who said he'd turn Netanyahu over to the ICC.

  • Zohran Mamdani states he will have Nazis in his administration

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  • But that's all you have, theory. It's literally impossible in practice because of the 'prisoners dilemma' of working, living, and labor. This is why I'm convinced all communists who smear the leftmost american politicians are delusional and not worth collaborating with. No one is far left enough. No one is pure enough. Not AoC, not Mamdani, not Sanders, it's impossible to actually present a candidate who would be accepted by ya'll.

    No one on the far left can put together a tent of any number of people, and therefore participate meaningfully in political society, because Full Communism is so ideologically pure as to be impossible to implement. You reject the "perfect is the enemy of good" argument and instead propose accelerationist revolution, which nearly always results in a Junta instead of your ideal political system.

    It makes me believe you have no desire to actual productive results, and instead would rather lob critisims without ever participating in meaningful change. That you actually prefer if we all destroy ourselves rather than build a coalition of the willing.

    We'll be arguing about who was unelectable all the way up to the gallows.

  • [Video] Kamala Harris becomes visibly shaken and furious after being called a “right-wing war criminal”

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  • What's the status on Wikipedia donations?

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  • Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.

    On the subject of "Free as in Freedom" - I don't agree that a site is 'not free' if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that's not the main thrust of your argument so let's set that aside.

    Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation "doing very little," and concerns about fairness, doesn't seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia's scale impractical to produce in-house, it's also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I'd still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.

    Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don't need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you're wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.

    Lastly, I'm very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you'd be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.

    Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#Comment_by_Selena_Deckelmann,_Wikimedia_Foundation

    I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that's marketing, not politics.

  • What's the status on Wikipedia donations?

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  • Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: "There's no such thing as a free lunch."

    The whole point of Wikipedia is that the "IP" is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn't exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.

    In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I've never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That's why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.

    Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That's humanity for you. We fuck things up. It's up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that's a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn't that, and it's old enough to have proven it won't be captured in that way.

    I think maybe you're confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.

  • What's the status on Wikipedia donations?

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  • What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.

  • AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds

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  • Not that I agree, but if you believe that the LLMs will continuously improve, then in 5-10 years you may only need 1/3rd the seniors, to oversee and prompt. Again, that's what these CEOs are relying on.

  • Duh i take my phone out to the protest

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  • Aren't the people ICE kidnaps being deported to concentration camps regardless? So the frying of an ICE machine is purely a value-added service.

  • 'Russian bombers are burning en masse' — Ukraine's SBU drones hit 'more than 40' aircraft in mass attack, source claims

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  • It's a bad day to be a Putin apologist. How's the weather in St. Petersburg today?

    None of what you said is relevant or coherent. 9/11 was an attack against civilians by terrorists. This was an attack against military targets by state actors at war. NATO exists for soft and hard power projection, and to discourage intra-state conflict within Europe. Further, the weakness of the Russian Military as contrasted by their posturing has been stark. I don't personally believe Russia remains a superpower, with their ability to project power now restricted to digital battlefields and hard power only adjacent to their borders.

  • Locked

    [Serious] Jews of Lemmy, what are your family conversations about the war like?

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  • Thanks for the direct quote, I appreciate you citing a source. The letter has quite a few grievances and meanders a bit, but at it's core it's really all about Islamic Eschatology - hastening the final day of judgement by sparking a worldwide holy war. The targets of Al Qaeda were basically "any target of opportunity" with a preference towards the west if possible. If (obviously impossible) Israel had suddenly reconciled and left all of Palestine, imo 9/11 would still have occurred and much of the antisemitic screed in the letter would still be there.

    For me personally (as a secular, non-jewish westerner), I acknowledge the genocide occurring and the evil being done, and I think the sanewashing of the genocide further reinforces the absolute moral deprivation of those persecuting it.

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    [Serious] Jews of Lemmy, what are your family conversations about the war like?

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  • Can you elaborate on how 9/11 was the fault of the Jewish occupation? It seems like your claim is "Terrorists were striking back in response to a series of aggressions dating back to 1948/even earlier Jewish transgressions" then I don't buy it. Islamic eschatology is the reason for 9/11, combined with classic power struggles and posturing within that subculture.

    I do agree that the settler movement and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is why Oct. 7th happened tho, 100%. Hamas is a terror organization fueled by Israel's racist, ethnic cleansing movement. That dynamic is never going to be solved until Israel completes its inevitable genocide of the Palestinian people.

  • The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent

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  • The server I subscribe to is completely transparent about their costs and displays how much lead time they have at their current spend. Per-user server cost is about $5 per year per paying user (as in, users that pay to keep the server running put in about $5, and there are many freeloaders). The admin to my knowledge doesn't make any money on his labor.

    To make $5/user in ads per year at a CPC of $0.38 or a CPM of $6 (twitter prices, which is being pretty generous for something as small as Lemmy) would mean I'd receive 833 ads per year. An ad runs until it's CPM is hit, which means some of those ads would drag on for weeks until enough hapless fools clicked them. You might end up with one in five posts being an ad, leading to more adblocker use, which exacerbates your problem. It could end up being a significant cost to even deliver the ad content at that load.

    This is all to make like $2k in hosting costs per year - imagine if you were trying to make a living running a Lemmy server, which people definitely will - it would be a hellscape. I'm happy to not deal with that.