Schadrach

I used to joke back in 2014 that if Milo Yian-whatever, Ben Shapiro and Gavin McInnes just had a biweekly meeting and decided on a hand sign, an image and a word to use heavily in social media for the following month that everything could be made into a dogwhistle within a year.

We really don’t do that here, because we skip the rehab part almost entirely because it’s bad for the profit margins of private prisons.

You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.

Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.

There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.

That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.

it would be nice if the democrats fucking tried.

They think they don’t have to, they just have to keep you scared enough of the GOP that you’ll vote for them out of terror. It’s how Biden won the first time, after all.

I’m just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.

The only thing I know about the procedure for tightening Usain Bolt is that I am not part of performing it.

I thought they had on several occasions dropped games from the store because they had DRM. Which DRM titles does GOG still have?

Last game I paid good money for was on GOG. Everything added to my steam account in the last few years has either been part of a humble bundle or a freebie from somewhere.

No, not at all. There is a single coherent timeline. The world as it exists now is the final total of all time travel that will ever be going to have occurred to points before now.

You could try to go back and kill Hitler, but we already know you failed.

it’ll summarize all of the top results for you, directly giving you the answer

This is literally what the Google AI thing that everyone has been mocking does. For example, it suggested gluing cheese onto a pizza because that was a highly up voted comment on the reddit thread that was the top search results.

The main difference is that you can choose to use an instance that doesn’t.

But to a user of an instance that defederated burggit it’s more or less a direct parallel to r/jailbait, just with the extra step of asking the instance to confirm and losing the rest of the instance and not just the one community.

I’m glad that this is the controversy on Lemmy, and not things like Reddit had with r/JailBait.

Lemmy already had a round of that, specifically over loli. It’s why a lot of instances block burghit.moe - they don’t ban loli and have a few loli specific subs.

The only other Lemmy server I know of that allows loli subs is the rad queer one and it’s tiny and also blocked by many other instances, though I don’t know if that’s for the loli or the general rad queer thing. Really, likely both.

Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?

Any idea which subs are banning like that already?

and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading

I’d say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they’re OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.

I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption.

Why? They explicitly haven’t baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don’t have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.

The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.

You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?

Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org.

Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.

Communities work the same way - so for example politics@lemmy.ml, politics@beehaw.org and politics@lemmy.world are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).

This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.

If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.

One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).

I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have whatever@otherserver.net instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.

It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.

At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.

Really no different than Reddit in that regard. At least we don’t have people automatically banning you for having ever interacted with specific other communities yet, at least I don’t think we do yet.

EDIT: Shit, somehow I forgot the don’t. Teach me not to proofread.

H1B skilled worker visas. You have to prove that you tried to hire locally and couldn’t find anyone qualified. The whole point is that the qualifications are impossible, so you are either under qualified or lying. Since no qualified candidate exists, you can bring someone over from overseas and hold the risk of being deported if you fire them over their heads - and you suddenly get less thorough about checking qualifications for your immigrant candidates.

Gaelic is worse about this. I’ve joked before that the best way to figure out Gaelic pronunciation is to look at the word and figure out the least likely pronunciation that still technically fits the letters, then try to chew on your tongue while saying that.

That has a lot to do with it being a Germanic language that borrows a huge amount of words from a Romance language (specifically French). So sometimes the rules resemble German, sometimes the rules resemble French, and the rest of the time is all about how it branched in a different direction than German did.

English is a Germanic language, with a lot of it’s vocabulary imported from a Romance language (French). Hilarity ensues.

The first name.that came.to my mind for someone like that was Hugo Schwyzer (I’m probably spelling that wrong) - he was very much a very outspoken feminist who made a point of drawing attention to how feminist he was at every opportunity. He was also a women’s studies professor.

Honestly, some of his writing gave me the vibe of what it would sound like if you were a recovering addict and chose feminism as the higher power in your 12 step program.

Eventually it comes out that he nearly decided to murder-suicide an ex, and that he was a women’s studies professor because it gave him access to an ever rotating stable of young, impressionable women to hook up with.

When he admitted to all that the wording again reminded me of 12 step program talk, like he was taking steps 5-7 publicly online because online feminism was the God he believed in for the program. It…didn’t get the response I think he hoped for. Less absolution and more ostracism and banishment.