HarkMahlberg

E-exhibit B?

Dennis Prager, Founder of PragerU which is now being taught to YOUR CHILDREN IN SCHOOL, NEVER spread his Urine at Arby’s!

Don’t worry I think his account is being facetious…

This would be REALLY Corrupt if the Current President, Elon Musk, had PRIVATE Business Interests in focusing on Mars! FORTUNATELY that’s NOT the Case!

I mean… I could be wrong…

This is what Medvedev and Putin did in the 2010’s, isn’t it?

Armchair general? NATO’s Article 5 is a collective defense pact: an attack on one member is an attack against all members. With the US being the aggressor, Denmark and Greenland would be the members invoking Article 5, and surely all other NATO members would enter the war against the US.

Trump could invoke Article 5 too I assume, but I doubt (I fucking pray) any NATO member would ally with the US.

These legal challenges are effectively bribes. The regime knows businesses would rather spend less money kowtowing than fighting a massive, nebulous lawsuit for years (with judges who are already in the their pocket, so you know which way they’ll rule regardless of evidence and arguments).

So all they have to do is toss out an executive order or lawsuit revoking funding, or revoking security clearances, or going after DEI policies. The natural conclusion, even to the target company, is that fighting would be more expensive and not even likely to result in a victory.

“Disney settles with the FCC for $500 million” is the headline you’ll read in June, which translates to “Disney paid Trump $500 million to leave them alone”.

Misskey has a massive Japanese population in part because it was written by Japanese speakers.

Now that’s a fucking gang tattoo if I’ve ever seen one. Not like the literal Awareness Ribbon. 🎗️

The US has a greater obsession with tattoos than Japan by this point. If you go to a place in Japan and show off a tattoo, the owner might ask you to leave. The US they’ll gulag your ass.

On the one hand, one of the things we often tout about the Old Internet was the ability for anyone to run their own website, forum, blog, etc, free from corporatization. On the other hand, running your website is a responsibility on your part, and in the convenience-focused Internet we have now, seems to be a forgotten lesson.

On the third, mutant hand growing out of our back, fedi software should be designed with security-by-default, i.e. no open registration, to prevent the forgotten lesson from being a huge problem.

In the wild, it’s far more common for them to just spin up a bunch of accounts across “good” instances (particularly those without registration applications) and coordinate.

In 2023, this happened to a ton of unsecured Misskey instances who then proceeded to spam most of the Fediverse. It was just a troll in reality, but revealed that the Fediverse is no less vulnerable to coordinated, sophisticated attacks (and with how politically minded it is, there’s plenty of incentive for nation state actors to do so).

Might be a great excuse to visit Denmark… I hear it’s wonderful there.

The papers we hold up and say “this will be the foundation of our government, society, and economy” can say anything we want, but none of the words on the page matter once the people in the system abdicate their responsibilities to point at something wrong, refuse to participate, and work against it.

SOX controls are the result of the Enron fraud, but those are also just words on a page. The US Constitution is just words on a page. SCOTUS may very well rule this year that the US government cannot deport native-born, tax-paying, passport-holding, lived-here-all-their-lives US citizens.

Watch as the Trump administration does it anyway. It’s all just words to them.

Well there’s the disaster that was hexbear…

The Baltics catching strays: “and I took that personally”

Yeah they were never learned to begin with.

Wow… That’s quite the journey. Thank you for sharing it.

It’s particularly enlightening is that the diversity of information presented to you is what helped you change. Not just one “gotcha” quote from some online commenter, one snippy remark about a noticeable hypocrisy. Not one source of disruption, but many. I think that’s fascinating, and extremely helpful for those of us with family who only get their news and opinions and politics from one place.

Again, thanks for telling your story.

If it helps you sleep at night…

Small world, I’m also on the balatro/other games modding discord boat, and it is a rough ocean out here. The perennial argument is that users don’t know how to use an old school forum, nobody wants to moderate it, nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure.

All those fall flat to me. Nobody even bothers to use discord’s “forums” or pinned messages for their bug reports/troubleshooting, no they just post straight to general, “this doesnt work can someone help” with no details whatsoever. Not like it would be any better or worse on a forum. It’s also not like BBS forums don’t have moderation tools, it’s not some lost art from an ancient civilization. As for paying for it… the whole discord server is propped up by nitro users. Like come on. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Pray tell what changed your view?

I wouldn’t say a monopoly, but my counterpoint is pointing to how discord swallowed up all the BBS forums that reddit hadn’t. So it’s not like that’s much better.