Yeah, blowing up satellites and cutting undersea internet cables would be (a short) prelude to world war III.

There is also a recent academic book (by an Ukrainian academic) about the maidan massacre: The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine: The Mass Killing that Changed the World | SpringerLink

Evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt the far right / oligarchs were behind the mass killing of over 100 people and blame it on the government in a false flag operation. But people in the west will never hear of this. And if they hear they will dismiss it as conspiracy theory or propaganda. So it’s really no wonder people like linus react like this.

Wikipedia relies on sources, and humans choosing the sources like newspapers. And those newspapers are more and more inside a “bubble” that rejects any evidence or reporting presented by a competing bubble.

Right now wikipedia is covering up one of the greatest acts of mass murder of our times, because the newspapers are covering it up, or rejecting evidence because it’s by the “enemy”. Part of this is a defensive posture against AI bots and enemy disinformation.

It also has to be a waste of some resource that is rare to not use up and throw away like this.

Shithole country. Honestly, together with the issues like voter roll purging and winner takes it all. How can you take this “pro/con” discussion even seriously?

The real question should be why the US is so undemocratic, what the forces are that drive this minority rule and prevent a more free and open society.

Thanks, this gemini protocol looks interesting! This would be an easy protocol for distributed p2p hosting / caching / archiving of websites similar to federalist. I just wish gemtext would support bold and italics and hyperlinks.

Oh I didn’t even mean trust as in maliciousness, and not even as in “do they know their shit” but do they have the time and money to do things right? And also do I have time to read and learn what all this is supposed to mean?

And the inconvenience with VPNs alone… What I really want is a kind of universal addon or browser project that just “cleans up most websites”. So many websites have bad behavior now and anti-features. I just want to read an article not get a slide in or blinky thing. Internet is becoming unusable even before the dead internet thing. Ironically for such a “website cleanup” you’d probably want advanced AI so Mozilla is probably on the right track.

I guess any used android smartphone should have plenty of apps. Then you can even have video com

What is “media freeze”?

I’ve looked at one or two variants but how do I trust them? They are also forked from some previous version so presumably somewhat out of date? And then also it’s not clear what they are doing what firefox isn’t.

Well that is part of the defense mechanism. There really are trolls, bots, agitprop etc. So we now anyone who is using an argument that Trump or Putin ever made, must be an enemy (genetic fallacy). And is hence is “fair game” to attack and lie about to protect the narrative. Being called a bot is like the ultimate dehumanization.

I don’t think it’s reddit culture, it’s bigger than that. People are just badly informed and the disinformation is total. Journalists who even slightly deviate are fired all over the world.

Maybe there is so much noise now that people rely more and more on mainstream media that are completely captured now.

The complete post-truth doublethink the liberals are doing these days is shocking. There is no difference between MAGA Trump supporters and the vast majority of liberals these days. I don’t think they are capable to be truthful any more.

It really shows what happens when the mainstream media is owned by oligarchs and use the right propaganda to hone in on the “emotional truths” of a group. For them it’s about justice and and evil and a good. US supporting Israel commit genocide is evil. US supporting Ukraine become demcoratic is good. Russia attacking because of NATO expansion is evil.

So everything that doesn’t fit with this narrative, that they are the good guys, is dismissed or rationalized. Easy when it just so happens if the arguments are made by their evil enemies. Historical facts simply don’t matter.

Where does that idea even come from?

Ironically it’s the same logic Israel uses against the Palestinians. They want to destroy us and can’t be reasoned with, so it has to be total war.

Yeah. Discord can create FAQ and “threads” now that I believe work better for this. You can take some question and the answer and discussion and put it in a threat in some channel for issues. Presumably once you have a quality chat server, it is easier to add threads / articles / issues to it than starting from a forum.

A good quality open source “federated discord” would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn’t much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.

Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.

The USA was designed for minority rule since forever.

Well in this case they used his likeness and brand to appear more legitimate and make money. So I’d argue this is trademark (even if not registered) so a legitimate complaint.

I don’t believe in “copyright” for a voice. See for example impersonators. But in this case it’s a deliberate deception which is pretty simple.

I don’t believe in intellectual property at all and think it is a form of theft, to deprive others from common knowledge or information just to seek rent. In case of patents I equate it even to aiding in genocide, since most advances in more energy efficiency use are patented and exploited for profit and slowing down adaptation. Without exhaustive attempts to try other systems to pay creators, copyright law is a moral abomination. That is a philosophical or ethical argument, not a legal one.

IMDB used to be independent and have a pretty amazing forum for movies. Like people would have lots of debate and discussion and insight. I loved going there after watching a movie. It was sort of “secondary literature” and nothing like this existed before. Then they just decided to delete countless contributions and shut it down. Instead of paying for moderation for the few trolls.

Of course there are plenty of other movie forums, some even copies the old posts and there is r/movies, but it’s much more fractured now. There are certain network effects for social media that need to reach a critical size.

Peaceful contact with aliens would tell us something fundamental about the nature of ethics and the universe.

Advanced aliens do not need any material resources or real estate from humanity. We can already interpolate that from existing science. So that is not the reason why there are here. And we know they haven’t exterminated us already centuries ago.

Instead it would tell that we share some fundamental values like curiosity and diversity with alien species - as long as they evolved through natural selection and had to raise and teach and love their children. As long as they had to find productive ways to work together as a people.

We would realize that we are not alone and that we are being judged. That we can’t just endlessly bulldoze the galaxy and that there are limits to acceptable behavior. Because there is always someone more powerful that could smash us, but they already didn’t. That certain ethical ideals are fundamental properties emerging from the universe itself.

It would be a powerful counter to the current nihilistic materialism, that we need to start working to improve our culture.

Yeah the book has an amazing depiction of a truly alien mind that is fundamentally different because of how it functions.