WesternInfidels

So, next up, the way things have been going: “Windex cured my kid’s autism, now Google is censoring me!”

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If this trend annoys you, check out A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites.

That headline, “left him at a cafe,” is offering the regime some scrap of moral cover that is not justified by any facts of the case, as far as I can see. There is barely a reason to bring this up in the story, let alone the headline. That’s just the NYT kissing the regime’s ass.

This takes some effort, some talent. If you asked me to write a headline that made ICE look ever so slightly less evil, I would not have considered this, I wouldn’t have that creative capacity. Someone has made this their mission in life, to paint the murderous thugs of ICE in a gentler light.

So the national anthem tells us we’re “free” and “brave.” Maybe it’s time to update that.

The Center for Biological Diversity noted that this order would mark the first time that the Defense Production Act was used to force an oil company to restart out-of-use Infrastructure and to disregard the state permitting process.

So this must be that “free market” I hear so much about?

I’m concerned in a general way that the federated design of Lemmy / Mastodon etc. is by its nature (arguably even by its intent) likely to lead users to construct isolated media bubbles. But I don’t know how to improve it. I’m not going to subscribe to a (hypothetical as far as I know) fascist community just to “broaden my mind,” that wouldn’t work.

It’s hard to know how much of the division we see and feel is meatspace division facilitated by social media, and how much of it is social media reflecting divisions in meatspace. There’s no reason to suppose the answer would be simple or easy.

Remember when the alt-right guys were prosecuted for their khakis-and-polo-shirts, escape-by-blending-into-a-crowd uniforms that demonstrated malice aforethought?

No, me neither.

Its not climate its just weather, bro. The climate has always been changing, bro. Solar? The sun doesn’t even shine at night, bro. Your insurance company is just ripping you off, bro. Not every species deserves to make it, bro. How about this April snowball, bro?

…it wasnt a slippery slope. They didnt make laws a little bit invasive … before slowly nudging it further

I disagree.

There was a certain (large) amount of government surveillance and eavesdropping going on before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to massively expand it. There was already inspection and security and traveler record-keeping at airports before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to expand those. CBP had long had the legislative authority to do all kinds of nastiness within 100 miles of a border before the GWOT, which was used as an excuse to step their activities up, to legal limits and beyond.

In every case, an initial claim of urgent, exceptional authority was used to create both the physical infrastructure and the cultural permission required to make later, expanded claims of urgent, exceptional authority much easier to implement when an excuse presented itself. That is the slippery slope, we really slid way down it, it’s a real phenomenon. It doesn’t have to be smooth or gradual, it can happen in jerks and waves. It doesn’t have to come as a result of a plot, a plan, a deliberate conspiracy, it can be an accretion of individually opportunistic acts.

“The utility” has never had a way to prevent you from doing something dangerous with your wiring or with the electricity they send you. The best we’ve managed has been to encourage appliance manufacturers to design their products with safety in mind, through the UL program (which is voluntary). This is why the writer talked to the “vice president of engineering at UL Solutions.”

It doesnt make it easier for them down the road, if anything it makes it harder as there’s the ability to say “but we already have that”.

This is perfectly reasonable, but my feeling is that the real world isn’t reasonable in this way.

Consider all the infractions of liberty that have been approved in the name of combating “terrorism.” The no-fly lists. The universal warrant-less searches. All domestic communications recorded and archived for who-knows how long. The pervasive surveillance. The huge extension of CBP power to do things like raid Greyhound busses that aren’t even crossing borders.

None of these steps were prevented with the argument “But we’re already doing something about that issue.” That argument never even came up, to any noteworthy degree, in the public discourse.

Look at it this way: All sorts of websites that aren’t for kids already have banners requiring the visitor to affirm that they’re legal adults. So, we’re there: “We already have that.” But no one is seriously making that argument. Because, of course, those banners do next to nothing: Visitors can just lie. So it will probably be for OS level age verification. Thus, in creating a system that doesn’t work, the excuse for extending the system, to exert more control in the future, is built in from the start.

People who are interested in asserting more control over others are never content with the amount of control they have. They always want more. It is the gaining of more control that motivates them.

The first ambulance called to take Best to the hospital arrived at the scene … However, at the urging of other officers, that ambulance was used to take away a white police officer … who had been involved in the foot chase, the report said.

That sure sounds like a deliberate stratagem.

Putting a dollar figure on your schadenfreude? Do you want a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude? That’s how you get a block chain based “prediction market” for schadenfreude.

A “pushover” is someone whose mind is easily changed by pressure, not someone who is pushy or who pushes other people around.

“Flood the zone with shit” means it’s more important to tell many lies fast than to tell any lies well.

So the suggestion here (and it is only a suggestion) is that the veteran prison-operator companies (wow yeah I guess we have those) didn’t want to get involved, didn’t even bid on these contracts. So that’s certainly food for thought. Or for speculation, anyway.

The kind of thing only your grandparents would fall for

But evidently not.

Last week I helped someone navigate their bank’s tech support to regain access to an account they’d been locked out of. I believe the bank was having some technical difficulties that they weren’t admitting to (or which the support people weren’t even aware of). Many standard approaches did not work, and we kept getting escalated. The top person we talked to eventually asked for some information that didn’t conform to the usual security question / answer format (“What year what the account opened?” for a ~50 year old account that had been opened many bank mergers ago) and wound up reading us a new password over the phone.

This approach alarmed me, it seemed to violate some security rules of thumb that I thought I understood. But this is what the bank does, sometimes. Given the sort of nonsense that goes on legitimately sometimes, expecting the general public to understand which information flows to be suspicious of – expecting them to think in terms of information flows at all – may be asking too much. We’d all hope journalists would be more savvy, I guess, but “government officials?” Nope. I used to think “Oh, I wouldn’t fall for that” when I read stories like these, but now I’m less sure.

…our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

– Paul Weyrich, 1980

The stated reasoning sounds okay in isolation, but:

1. Why didn’t they start the blackout when the conflict began, as opposed to waiting like this?
2. Why is it just a delay, instead of a real blackout?