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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2024

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  • The internet. It led to the following:

    • Good social change occurred very rapidly from the 1990s-2010s, causing highly motivated pushback from those who didn’t like the changes
    • Rising wealth inequality caused by tech billionaires increased incentives and capability for a small number of extremely wealthy people to seize control of media and political power centers
    • Foreign dictator governments became more able to more easily spread pro-dictator propaganda
    • Media became more decentralized, leading to some good things but also the hijacking of our psychology to spread fear and disgust for the sake of grabbing attention


  • It would be highly immoral to do any actual vandalism because that would give them sympathy and therefore would further the goals of Elon and others who want their bootlickers to be seen as some sort of rebels against wokeness.

    But mocking them by writing dust or adding your own bumper stickers without doing any serious permanent damage is at least defensible.




  • shutting out a significant portion of your community without seeking their input first isn’t a sensible move for such a foundational open source project.

    Ironic when X shuts out anyone who isn’t logged in and shuts out anyone who doesn’t pay for a blue checkmark from having visible replies.

    Having an X account isn’t consequence-free - if it becomes where updates occur, people have to sign up for an account and subject themselves to nazis everywhere and all manner of crypto spam just to see updates. And they have to pay Elon tribute to be heard in response. It’s crazy that anyone sees it as being friendly to users.






  • I’m all for satire, but I also think this was kind of bullying in that they did something that was offensive specifically to a particular marginalized minority group.

    So it’s not something that should be illegal or warrant a shooting, but I’m not exactly surprised. Just as if they published a story like “Fuck this one guy’s mother” showing a drawing of some random guy’s mother being fucked.* That guy doesn’t then have a right to shoot them and should go straight to prison if he does - but I wouldn’t be surprised and I don’t think we all need to identify with the paper or anything because they were being total pricks.

    *And I know the response will be along the lines of “You can’t compare that drawing with a mere drawing of mohammed”. But that betrays a failure to take another perspective. Who’s to say that in a society even more liberal than our own, “fuck your mother” might be seen as not particularly insulting? After all, take away expectations of women being pure and you basically have “fuck your dad” which really doesn’t seem too insulting, it’s like sure if that’s what you’re into weirdo, but let me check with my dad first.






  • 3 explanations, in order from what I believe most likely to least:

    1. It could be selection bias. All communist nations originated from dictatorships, and as democracy isn’t a key part of communism, any democratic ideas get kicked to the side. It may require a dictatorship in the first place for a communist revolution to occur, as democracy may lead to people feeling content enough with the system that they may not feel it needs fundamental change.

    2. The inevitable need for concentration of power in the hands of a few. Assume that the powerful will always try to concentrate power in their own hands one way or another. Capitalist societies use wealth (a.k.a. purchasing power) to replace the concentration of political power that a dictator would enjoy. As communist societies lack such a mechanism, the powers-that-be can only use political power to force their own superiority.

    3. The centralization of economics leads to concentration of economic power that can be used effectively to buy loyalty from would-be challengers to a dictator’s power.