I tried to create a blog on substack once, I got literally zero views across a few posts. I feel like the only blogs there that get recommended are by people who are already semi-famous, suggesting the usual problem of recommendation algorithms killing entry for new creators. It also strongly encourages a paid model, you also usually have to subscribe to comment on others’ posts which makes it hard to get your blog out there. I’d say it’s more a publishing platform for people who are already well known than for ordinary people.

Of course the point of likening it to a virus is to compare it the involuntary nature of a viral infection, even though must people have a voluntary role to play in accepting ideas. So if you take something into your body with full consent, knowing it will reproduce itself, I guess that’s more mind sex? That sounds a lot less harmful.

What if I agree with neither of them? What if I can’t avoid the thought that if either of them wanted peace, this conflict would’ve ended a long time ago? My criticism of both sides is the same. If either of them truly cared about the innocent on the other side to even 10% of the degree they care about their own, their actions would be completely different.

Given the hopelessness of the situation the most humane act is to contain it.

I’m downvoting every Israel/Palestine story. I’m just sick of it, from all sides. The posters, the graffiti, speeches in congress, everything. Keep that holy war shit in the holy-war-designated-area please.

There were 2 things:

1. Over time it became obvious the site was promoting mass market fluff over the unique content that made reddit what it used to be. In particular having r/all as a default sub and no option to remove it seemed particularly egregious. Seemed like an attempt to impose a monoculture on the user base, and I didn’t like that culture which was mostly images of tweets which is a trend I especially hate.
2. The API pricing and going public was the last straw. I looked at reddit as a wikipedia-like place where information was shared freely, for whomever and even whatever wanted to see it. I even bought gold in my younger and more naive years. But if the officers were so keen on making profits for themselves on my shitposting, why am I not getting paid? Injecting greed ruined the whole thing.

And promoting disinfo. The blue checkmarks are basically just a way to pay for prioritized disinformation-spreading.

I’d suspect it’s reaction to large cultural shifts in the last couple of decades - including gay and trans rights, George Floyd and increased racial integration in media, me too, etc. For whatever reason, perhaps loss aversion, many people tend to react angrily and violently to change and the threat of change. Perhaps it’s analogous to how communist movements in the early 20th century led to fascist movements a decade or two later.

I also don’t think it’s the US only, so you can’t put it all on Trump. I’d argue Trump and similar figures around the world are the result of the above counter-reaction.

The heat hasn’t killed me yet

We talk about positive things.

Like Linux.

The current war is in Gaza (controlled by Hamas), she’s talking about starting a new war with the West Bank (controlled by the Palestinian Authority).

The sheer fact that she was allowed to use a self hosted email server instead of a secure .mail.mil address means a whole bunch of people should have faced charges

I gotta disagree on the facts with this one, I don’t like Hillary either but the attempt to make the email thing criminal was in legal terms, bullshit. I agree that she broke the law, but there’s civil law (that a court can order government officials to stop breaking, but you can’t be thrown in jail for) and criminal law (that you can be thrown in jail for). The private email server was the former, not the latter.

This article around 8 paragraphs down goes through the specific criminal laws at issue, but the summary is these laws are clearly designed to punish actually stealing documents with the intent to conceal or distribute them (like say, if she took them to a private bathroom in Florida), not to dictate criminal penalties for an insecure email setup.

The reality of what happened is the FBI is a very Republican part of government, Comey is himself a lifelong Republican, and no one got more hate from Republicans than Hillary Clinton. They wanted to prosecute very badly, they just couldn’t.

Biden’s proposal from yesterday was supposedly drafted at Netanyahu’s cabinet, according to the US government itself.

Source on that? It’s interesting that you say “supposedly…according to the US government itself.” If the government says something, usually it’s easily verifiable.

If he wants to destroy Hamas, what’s the plan for someone else to take over after Hamas? Oh right, there is no plan for that. Whenever this war ends, Hamas will still be there and more powerful than ever, because that’s exactly the strategy that is Israel is (wittingly or unwittingly) following.

I gotta wonder if there’s one of those internet laws like “The dumber the opinion, the more attention it gets”

I’ve been using deepstatemap.live which has proven accurate and reasonably up to date in the past. When things are moving fast though it may fall behind.

There’s a bit of uncertainty principle at work. The more accurate the data, the less up to date it’s gonna be.

This is the problem with social media. The dumbest opinions get spread not because they have a good point or even advance the discussion, but because they’re dumb and we like to look at dumb opinions for entertainment value.

According to wikipedia:

Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections.

Feel free to edit if you disagree.

The First Amendment means the government can’t punish you for speech. That’s a good rule, and yes it means that even deplorable speech shouldn’t be punished by the government. Because “deplorable” speech at various times in American history could have meant anti-slavery speech, pro-lgbt speech, anti-war speech, etc.

He clearly has no personal convictions. He acts entirely like someone who is working a job, and that job is to help Trump get elected.