One of the things I have of my father is an envelope which has some brass bits in it (I believe for a scale) which was mailed to my great uncle, addressed by hand, with only the county and state for an address in 1957 from Washington, D.C. with a postmark "Pray for peace" and in a box on the left of the envelope is written:
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House of Representatives, U.S.
Part of Congressional Record --- Free
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA
Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va
Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957
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U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.
and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement is.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
Gotta also remember that all these devoted segregationists didn't get removed from positions of power or influence, nor did they change their minds about the value of segregation.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
There's that infamous Lee Atwater quote (former RNC chariman who helped Bush I and Reagan win on their 'no taxes, cut social services' rhetoric) that I won't quote here but is foundational to modern conservative dogwhistle politics: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwa...
We live downstream of that where people often parrot the same dogwhistles uncritically 40 years later without understanding how deeply racist they are.
I don’t think the issue with Civil Rights legislation was the Civil War, I think the issue was equality.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, allowing southern states to gerrymander and reduce the voting power of minorities. Not even hypothetically, Texas did so moments after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA.
States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.
And mainstream conservative justification, including the US Supreme Court, is that because this is not overtly racist in its design, but just coincidentally racist in its impact, it has plausible deniability. Basically an extension of the “racism is over” school of thought.
And an extension of the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness.
Edit: funny, I pre-sniped the sibling responses to your comment.
I appreciate you called out the more fundamental disagreement here: "... the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness."
I think a lot of people miss this or pretend that the conservative position is just old-school racism (although it definitely is sometimes). But there are really hard philosophical, ethical, and political questions at the base of a lot our political problems. I think it helps keep people from arguing past each other if they can find out where the really "hard" part of their political disagreement actually is.
That's not "unfortunate". It was a deliberate choice. Any term used to describe the problem is treated as if it meant something bad, and then we're told we can't talk about it because it's "politicized". As if the entire point of the political process was about something other than resolving disagreements.
Progressive thinkers like Ibram X. Kendi believe every single policy issue must be evaluated on the basis of whether it happens to impact different races differently. Essentially turning the state into a gigantic social engineering project.
And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all? Why are we arguing at the extremes? What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses? Have you even heard about something like how nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
>And the alternative for you is to just ignore that any law (or government action) has any different impact on race at all?
I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
>What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses?
This seems like really sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
What we've seen in the US is the 90s "judge people as individuals" paradigm has been replaced by a "racial collectivism" paradigm. In recent years, this new paradigm was initially mainstream on the left, then became mainstream on the right:
The "racial collectivism" paradigm is corrosive to individual rights, no matter who wields it. Furthermore, collectivist activity on the part of one ethnic group ends up being countered by collectivist activity on the part of other ethnic groups, in a doom spiral. The result is descent into hateful sectarianism. Scroll through X on any Tuesday to see what I mean.
>nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
Consider a hypothetical where the town near the nuclear test has a population which is a perfect microcosm of the US in terms of race, gender, age, class, etc. No "disparate impact" argument can be possibly made in this hypothetical, since all of the racial "collectives" are equally harmed.
Does this change the fact that the nuclear tests are harming people? Or the best approaches to the problem?
Racial collectivism just isn't a good approach. People are more responsive to the needs of others when they view them as fellow humans or fellow citizens, not representatives of alien collectives.
I'm asking something that specifically targets black Americans as a group - the VRA doesn't target them (at least as my understanding goes) but rather as you said is allowing gerrymandering which more divides down political lines than racial ones unless you are suggesting that every person of a racial group thinks and votes the same.
I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.
Here's NPR, a notoriously left-wing news source in the US
"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report."
* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*
The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures
He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.
He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.
The only reason gerrymandering works as a tactic in the first place is that neighborhoods DON’T have a statistically uniform distribution of the population. So “Steven and Sally live in the same neighborhood” is not a very good way to look at issues like these.
That's the problem, none of the legislation says "black people can't be allowed to vote" but we know based on statistics that things like voter ID disproportionately harm people in lower income brackets, which are disproportionately minorities. So we get these wheedling "not racism actually" rulings. There's a massive compounding effect that the restriction of economic opportunity has had over generations.
One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.
Yes, in aggregate -- the whole group, not cherry-picked individuals -- racial groups vote differently from each other. In 2024, if only Black people had voted, we'd have President Harris now. This is beyond dispute.
>ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax)
The majority of non-US democracies require ID to vote, and it's considered normal and un-controversial. Here in the US, there is a tempest in a teakettle because this has been deemed a "civil rights issue". It really illustrates the role that "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
The nature of that ID is essential. If it used to authenticate someone for voting, which is a RIGHT, then every citizen must have a RIGHT to possess that ID. Not only that, but obtaining the ID must not pose any encumbrance beyond the effort to vote.
Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
The only form of government "ID" that could presently meet the bar is social security cards, as every citizen has one by right. That is obviously a bad idea. There is no "move fast and break things" when it comes to democratic process. If something as important as this cannot be done right, then it should not be done. The right to vote is sacred and cannot be infringed upon, period.
As someone from one of those non-US democracies, the reason why we can mandate IDs for votes is because they're basically trivial to get, whereas from what I've heard of the American hodgepodge of state-level IDs and "this one counts while this one doesn't" shenanigans, that doesn't seem to apply to the US. Now, I know that over there, the several states are responsible for running the elections within their borders -- that being in the US Constitution -- but some states seem to try to (and succeed in) making it unnecessarily difficult, and that may or may not be on purpose. Civil Rights groups certainly seem to think that it is, and that it affects minority populations disproportionately, because of course it does.
For a point of comparison, here in Finland we require that a voter has a valid ID, that is an ID card, a driver's licence with a photo in it, or a passport. Now what if you _don't_ have one of those IDs? Easy, you go to the police station and get yourself a temporary ID, which is by law given free of charge. You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
And of course there are other things outside of the ID issue which make the elections not rigged against minorities. Simple things like having the actual election day on a Sunday, the polling stations being usually in walking distance in cities -- people living in the countryside most likely have a car -- and that said polling stations tend to be in schools, shops, and other such places where people would be going anyway. Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
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The US could totally start doing ID mandates, but the problem is that in the US, their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns, but out of voter disenfranchisement, which again, hits minority populations disproportionately hard.
The US could make IDs free and then make election day a national holiday, in which case the resistance to ID requirements probably wouldn't be as strong. Currently voter ID laws will suppress voting, whereas the goal in a democracy should surely be that everyone has ample opportunity to vote and have their voice heard.
Yeah other democracies don’t have the historical baggage of literacy tests and poll taxes and other tactics that were used to prevent blacks from voting for a century.
I’m not being obtuse here. Have you opened a fucking history book, or are you just purposefully acting dense for political convenience?
Yearning for a day when conservatives, whether they identify as one or not, recognize that there’s a rich history of human suffering under the yoke of conservative thought leaders that could be easily avoided if they just opened a history book. Or just read the news. Because there’s no interruption between the two. Jerry Jones is in the background of a photo of the Little Rock 9. Donald Trump led a hate campaign against the Central Park 5 in 1989. These are contemporary issues.
You’re being downvoted, but it’s a fair criticism given they seemed to have a response locked and loaded to immediately give after they were given the most obvious response to their question.
I am much more circumspect on the civil rights movement and the top-down legislative results over the decades. There was good and bad. And the FBI telling MLK to kill yourself was heinous, just the same as to today as the FBI coercing Brian J. Cole Jr. (jan. 6 bomber suspect).
I was watching video the other day, compellingly showing Cole in a location that would completely exonerate him from the charges if verified. Not getting adequate attention.
And yet we are so quick to dismiss their own livd experience and/or not believe them. Frankly "this happens almost never, but it happened once to me" is far more real to pretty much every human on this planet. I was routinely beat up by a certain racial group of people growing up. I still cannot feel threatened by their presence, from what I know of the brain it's literally encoded in how body.
The whole "X can't be racist" claim is part of the broader class of intellectual ragebait--subverting the original meaning of a term to elicit reaction and thereby garner views (or in the academic realm, citations), but with more refined language and logic than the usual memes ragebait is found in. I find it frustrating and detracting from actual meaningful social/scientific efforts.
There’s two kinds of racism - systemic, or institutional, racism, and colloquial individual racism.
Of course anyone can be individually racist. But institutionally, no. The American institutions and systems have always been white-focused, black people simply do not have the power to be institutionally racist.
I mean, has there ever been any anti-white law ever written in the US? No, because it’s not possible. The institution which makes, and enforces, the law is itself white.
Should you've stopped at "everyone can be racist", the comment would've been an excellent, if oversimplified, synthesis of the issue.
E:
> No one wants to debate pedantic redefined terms
Some do, and we can give them the space to do that without implying that the effort is automatically deserving of consideration.
> pedantic redefined terms that liberal arts professors came up with so they could sell books
That's a somewhat silly thing to argue. That's not how it really works, and it's not a "liberal" thing, whatever that may mean. (I assume it's an American term meant to designate something that's not conservative.)
>A person who believes a particular race is superior to others. A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others.
No where does it mention this new-age "prejudice + power" redefinition.
The word is race + -ism, IE literally "doctrine/practice based on race". The word has nothing to do with power. A black dude in America who chooses to beat up a white dude for his race is racist, even under the assumption he is a systematically oppressed minority.
Racism is believing that people can be divided into races (spoiler alert: races don't exist, ask a scientist) and, not only that, but also than some of those made up races are better than others.
Colloquially racist? Sure. Anyone can be, but racism is also a political structure which black people don't have access to in the US. Which is what OP is trying to get at.
My local school system was forcibly desegrated _less than 10 years before I was born_ [1]. You can still plainly see the impact of redlining on my city [2]. I think it goes without saying that this wasn't covered in our schools, public or private, and was something I only really understood the scope of as an adult.
I was born and raised in liberal west coast Oregon. We sure weren't taught about the racial implications of our state's history either. When Oregon was admitted to the union the state constitution prohibited blacks from living in the state. 100 years ago the Klan was big here, and even now African Americans are less than 2% of the population.
The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.
"I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm."
I mean... operation paperclip already tells you A LOT of what you need to understand about the USA for most of the 20th century. And I'm being kind because it would otherwise be unfair to most of the users of this site who were not even born then.
We, as Americans have had our “mask off” moment now and are openly declaring ourselves the preeminent empire on the planet. It’s simply that we are withdrawing from our globalist support structures due to a wide variety of forecast reasons along side that, which is confusing to many.
It was our liberal values and performance internally by the Democrats that gave our people as sort of comforting story before. We do it for the good of others we give we topple dictators etc.
I am a deeply “real politik” person and I don’t think you average right leaning American ever thought otherwise. It was somewhat ironically the hope yet no-change left Americans (who i have counted myself among) who tried to give it the thinnest veneer of responsibility.
The greatest thing we provided the world was order, for a time. That seems true of almost any mature empire.
The amazing thing DeepState has done or does properly is it controls the power centers of other countries, no need to deal with people or convincing others. Like using poison and neurotoxins to paralyse the other nation. Other people's trust on American order is weaponized against them.
I can understand your perspective here, and argue that, ultimately a market order was imposed on the world by America (and England) -- even when America interefered, removed, or otherwise altered democratic trajectories still resulted in a sort of networked world order. I'll not argue that they were not done, or even that they were done to benefit those targeted.
Simply that a type of order was enforced to build a global money-ist theory of society and and market + trade platform.
I might, wrongly, argue that many of these regions both would have continued in the chaos and death they otherwise were already participating in, but i'd also accept that the Dutch in Africa, English in the Caribbean and China, etc all introduced net new outside chaotic aspects on purpose. I'd also accept that attempts at order by the American's ultimately resulted in chaos, especially of course in the middle east.
As to south america, this I'll acknowledge of course was an history of interference, one that is hard to argue the contra-positive since communism in almost all regions of the world failed to develope a long term stable order which was both culturally, trade, and fiscally sustainable, with many falling to a worse state after these outcomes.
>Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
Its one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights - its another thing to remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago. What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
> It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover.
Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)
"I have a feeling in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people"
See, I happen to think that racists get some kind of perverse self-actualization from manifesting degradation of cultures they consider inferior - that there is a real 'buzz' to be had from such fallacious elevation as required to justify bombing another culture into oblivion. The murder is its own reward in such circles.
The "terrorism" tranche of this hate culture is particularly jarring, since the ones claiming moral altitude over 'terrorists' are delivering far, far more terrorism than their supposed enemies. It's just been homogenized.
>remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago.
Booker T Washington, a notable and well-known African American scholar and public intellectual who worked tirelessly to improve the lives of Black Americans and is considered an authority on these topics, said in an 1895 speech in Alanta that despite the civil rights challenges faced by African Americans, that America was the best place in the world for Africans to live and prosper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Exposition_Speech It is silly to present yourself as more knowledgeable or morally pure about civil rights than Booker T Washington.
so, no, you are wrong, without defending any of the injustices that occurred, America has literally not been the principle violator of civil rights at any point in its history. (The wars against Native Americans were wars just like the wars that the Native Americans inflicted on each other and which were and are still taking place in many other parts of the world, no other word to use than barbaric and indefensible. Yet, worst in the world? worst in that period? No.)
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror"...which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
you put "war on terror" in quotes, rightfully, because you recognize that it's just a catchphrase like the wars "on cancer", "on smoking", "on diabetes", etc. And you are using the term "racist" the same way. Most terrorism in the last 60ish years is associated with some Arabs and also some Islamists, and with or in cooperation with, anarcho-Marxists like Bader-Meinhof, Brigate Rosse/Red Brigades, antifa, etc. These people do not form a race or inasmuch as they do it's within the white "races", i.e. not much African and not much Asian. But like the "war on terror", you want to invest your misguided view of this struggle as beyond reproach so you say people who engage in it are Racists™. The PLO was not Islamic, the PLO was nationalistic. Islam isn't a race. Capitalism is not Christianity. Humans get into conflict about ideas more than anything else. Debate the ideas and don't contribute to strife by lashing out emotionally.
>"It's one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights"
yes, go on...
As your profile page says, "listen here, person, respect is mutual": none of us is perfect, but those are words to at least try to live by.
>said in an 1895 speech in Alanta that despite the civil rights challenges faced by African Americans, that America was the best place in the world for Africans to live and prosper.
Maybe because Americans, whether black like Booker T Washington or white like Donald J. Trump, are notoriously ignorant on living conditions elsewhere, and conditioned to believe their country is the greatest ever place to live, even if it's way behind dozens of life metrics most of the western world.
>Most terrorism in the last 60ish years is associated with some Arabs and also some Islamists, and with or in cooperation with, anarcho-Marxists like Bader-Meinhof, Brigate Rosse/Red Brigades, antifa, etc.
That is blatantly false and you are indeed manifesting the very example of the ideology I find utterly contemptible.
37 million refugees from America's heinously vile wars, this century alone, beg to differ. The two million dead Iraqi's - and the children born to their descendants, daily, with congenital birth defects as a result of the widespread distribution of depleted uranium, certainly have had their human rights utterly abrogated from a distance by America's overtly racist ruling class, also.
And then, there's Gaza.
I have no respect for a nation that justifies the constant, daily murder of children. A nation that has dropped one bomb, on average, every 15 minutes for the past 25 years - on mostly innocent people - deserves a lot less respect than you seem to imply. It is certainly no shining example of civil rights.
Your in-group is not my out-group, but it's not my in-group, either. I prefer to participate in cultures which protect human rights - at the level of children - above all else. America is not one of them.
If your state has to murder children - or supports states willfully murdering children - in "self defense", then it is a failed state.
Period.
As for Booker T Washington, that was over a century ago. His work nevertheless had to be continued via Martin Luther King and company.
Try to keep up to present time. The US is the worlds #1 funder and supporter of terrorism this century, bar none.
Loudly agreeing with this statement - for anyone who believes that the US and NATO countries were not actively supporting right wing terror groups in Europe (and beyond), read up on Operation Gladio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
What terrorist acts have "antifa" done, yet you dont bring up ANY of the right wing terrorism like oh I dont know, the Oklahoma bombing?? Your fly is open and your bias is showing.
Not to mention the criminal omission in their argument of the US' support for the willful, daily murder of children every single day for the past few years in Gaza.
on a daily basis, the people of Gaza are more oppressed by their own government. Gaza 60 or 70 years ago was territory claimed by Egypt just as the West Bank was territory claimed by Jordan; and Egypt and Jordan gave up their claims because of the hostility of the terrorist movement there.
If it's a question of ethnic strife, the condition of the West Bank and Gaza are due to strife between the West Bank and Jordan, and Gaza with Egypt as anything else.
Carefully side-stepping the responsibilities of the nation in the region with undeclared nukes, which was literally founded by active terrorist groups, does not help your argument...
The children of Gaza are being murdered by American bombs, dropped by Americas allies, with permission, in full view of the rest of the world. Because Americans and their allies have deemed those children inferior.
Claims of superiority on the issue of civil rights are, therefore, null and void.
You wrote a comment, I critiqued it with facts, and it is YOU who is changing the topic and carefully side-stepping that I showed you were wrong. (I replied to someone else about Gaza.)
I have to jump in some cabs now, so you now have time to contemplate the error of your ways rather than hoping I'll see what you write further.
I wasn't comparing brutal acts, I was arguing with facts against the literal language employed in the comment I was replying to.
antifa isn't a single organization, but groups under that umbrella do cooperate with, or are coopted front groups for, Marxist groups, and connect with any nationalist or sectarian strife in the world. You need to read up on "the theory of the revolutionary vanguard" and their self perceived role and techniques for fomenting revolution: that's who I'm talking about when I say antifa. Many people who consider themselves part of antifa for muh racism or muh increased minimum wage or muh ACAB might not be intellectual or well read about the history of Marxist revolutionaries, and they might beven be shocked to discover they intellectual Marxists are trying (and succeeding) in controlling their organizations toward a goal that's more likely to get a new Stalinist government.
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
I know you're going for the joke, but it's really not funny. There are a thousand things I could be labelled inferior for - terrorism is really not one of them.
Do you think that subsistence-working at Only Fans, or the local strip club is a better alternative?
For every 'women in sacks' argument that can be made, there is a street downtown where women put themselves in immense danger just to be able to feed their kids, pay their medical bill debts, get themselves some kind of safety net...
In America women can go to jail for their husbands' crimes, men are allowed to marry ten-year-olds, and abortions in some states are illegal, even in cases of rape.
I think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a pretty good framework by which to assess the longterm viability of a nation/state/group. States which violate the principles of the UDHR tend to be dreadful places to live in many ways - and this is as true of Western states as it is the non-Western ones.
I couldn't live in a state which allows its police forces to murder with impunity, for example.
The point is that the moral authority we claim over other states is a fallacy. Until we are actually protecting civil rights to the extent we expect of other nations, we are hypocritically justifying our own states heinous track record.
Alas, this seems to be understood pretty well by the ruling classes, who have subjugated human rights to mean "this gives us a right to justify the destruction of sovereign states and their peoples' we have deemed inferior".
Because if you want to eat an animal you have to properly remove the bits of it that will make you sick and spoil the meat.
We do it to pigs and chickens and cows too. Its a very early step in the slaughtering and butchering process - usually the first step after the animal has been killed.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
I remember reading the online news about those primaries as they happened. Bernie wins this state in a landslide. Bernie wins that state in a landslide. Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states. At the end he doesn't have enough votes, oh dear too bad so sad. Some sort of investigation happened, but concluded the DNC has the absolute right to run primaries any way it chooses to.
At some point during that primary season I was driving in my car listening to my local NPR station and they had a story about these two candidates. I shit you not: they were introduced as "Hillary Clinton" and "the socialist senator from Vermont".
For some reason I remember that moment as vividly as I remember pulling out in the car with my mom on the way to school and hearing that a plane had hit the WTC.
HRC was also given the power to effectively run the DNC (while a candidate in the primaries!) in exchange for some funraising. There were bunches of other shenanigans.
To me, it all seems to boil down to the notion that Bernie would credibly have "drained the swamp," which would have effectively tanked the careers of a lot of long-serving Democratic folks who were not aligned with his populist/progressive agenda. Simply by hiring people that would have aligned with his vision, this was such a threat to existing power, it had to be stopped. Yes, the Rs are worse (in my opinion), but this gives me plenty of distrust for the Ds. Institutions eventually become more about institutional survival than about their "core mission."
Yes, that was the Clinton-controlled ('wealthy donors') DNC that excluded Bernie from a fair competition to become the Democrat's Candidate - which by all metrics and polling from the party's base and non-party members he would have won.
So, the Clinton-controlled DNC from 2016 put Trump in the White House.
The positive message is that since then the Democrats have been infused by Sanders-like independent Democrats that want to do the right thing, but we must keep on pushing to rid and guard the DNC and party administration off the corrupt billionaire influences.
At a certain point you realize both parties ultimately serve the super rich. The DNC would rather have Republicans in office over electing real progressives.
If you look outside the US Bernie is actually a moderate. We're not talking about abolishing money or seizing the means of production. Just maybe, somewhere between minting a new trillionaire every year and pregnant women sleeping outside we can find a compromise.
Unlimited money for wars all over the planet, but if you lose your job and have a chronic illness you're screwed most of the time.
Sometimes your screwed even if you have a job and good health insurance. It's a magic game of musical chairs to see what's covered or not. What's out of pocket , etc.
Never said they stopped: industry 'leaders', authoritarians, will always try to keep and expand their abusive grip over others and claw as much power from the common people as possible. The methods are always the same: distraction, disinformation, abuse. The common people's only defense is transparent institutions and limiting power/wealth in general.
See also how the robber barons of the 1930s (Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc) already tried to overthrow the government to establish a fascist military dictatorship.
The democrats participate in this export strongly too. Biden shut down a really important union strike. They are less overt about it, but go watch Malcolm X talk about foxes and wolves.
Really all the comments about "white moderates/liberals." The exact sort of people who forgot the Civil Rights movement, Labor Rights movement, and Women's Suffrage, and really every movement by a marginalized group to gain power from the mainstream were packed full of organized political violence.
Non-violent protests have a place. On occasion though, you need to hit the system where it hurts in order for it to take you seriously.
The Democratic Party too had problematic 'wealthy supporters' that influenced them away from a people's real needs. However, Biden's initiatives were probably the most 'socialistic' since FDR. And if the DSA and Bernie Sanders' aligned forces are finally able to force the Democratic Party back to their roots of FDR, then there is good chance we might still make it.
Yep, Dems are just the good cop to the bad cop. And their only purpose is to placate the country into thinking we’re not 100% owned by billionaires and corporate interests.
The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
My step dad use to quote bible verses to me trying to prove Obama was the literal antichrist. Before that it was the evil Bush and his oil cronies. Now it’s Trump, in two years it will be someone else. Same as it ever was.
It is though? Like, every single election, someone runs on the platform of abolishing democracy. Every single election, it's important that person doesn't win, or there won't be a democracy any more.
By all rights there shouldn't be one already, but we're lucky the democracy abolitionists are fairly incompetent.
We are very substantially less democratic than we were in 2024. The admin has broken laws regarding impoundment and war powers, just to name two. The executive has no legal power to determine funding allocations, or to commit to wars long-term. Yet both have happened and are still happening.
Using the DOJ to interfere in state elections they have no jurisdiction in, and having masked men abduct people and ignore court orders regarding their disposition is just about as authoritarian as it gets.
Those are all new things that have substantially eroded - or removed all together the idea of democracy in less than two years.
On the other hand, it's possible to argue that America is still democratic, since it voted for all the stuff that's now happening. It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election, and it would become irreversibly undemocratic if a president actually stayed in office after losing an election.
If one side shuts the other out of power, that's when we'll finally get the civil war many have been predicting for a long time.
Hopefully the framework to limit power can stay in place, in spite of all the calls to change it, abolish the senate, pack the court, make sure to punish/"hold accountable" red voters, etc.
> it's possible to argue that America is still democratic, since it voted for all the stuff that's now happening
It's possible, but not very credible, to argue that in a situation where direct democracy doesn't exist.
The closest we have to voted for these things rather than voted for these people is polls, which overwhelmingly illustrate that most people oppose those things.
We'll know more after the election, if people supported those things.
> It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election
Yes, the current president tried exactly that, in a violent insurrection, and has interfered in national elections since regaining power.
I mean Karen Bass just said there's no need for an Election for the governor, it's Xavier Baccera. He's the governor already according to her. "You don't need an election on November 3. A Republican cannot win in this state."
Well it's important to you. It's evidently not important to the people you vote for, the people who fundraise off of this hostage situation, the people who have had trifectas multiple times during this era and have not even used them to permanently secure the "democracy", let alone the overwhelmingly popular policies with their base that would guarantee they win ever election but piss off their donors.
Oh, yeah, Bush wasn't that bad, right? Just hundreds of thousands of deaths and crippled veterans, and the complete destruction of global order that opened the door to Russia invading Ukraine. "Just worth a shrug", you say while you pass by a crack addicted veteran while on you way to pay 30% more for gas and food. "It wasn't worth getting worried about."
What a level-headed, reasonable know-nothing you are, sitting above all this unreasonable jockeying.
I am not surprised though, you live in a culture where people can lecture others that the Bible told them Obama was Satan. You don't know what actual politics is anymore.
I’d add the so-called “Patriot Act” to the list of damages from the GW Bush era. Massive consequences that can’t be shrugged off with some both-sides nonsense.
> The very foundation of Democracy is at stake!! …again for like 30 years straight now.
There's a very easy method to tell if someone making that claim is a liar: ask "what major ideological compromise are they making to save democracy?" if the answer is "none" or close to it, they're full of shit.
'Cause if fascism is really our doorstep, you'd think they'd be gunning for the broadest, most indefatigable anti-fascist coalition possible; instead of the narrowest, most pure one they think they can get away with.
I mean...I think people who oppose GMOs, permitting reform, hydroelectric, and nuclear power do care about the environment, despite actively working against it. People who oppose developers building more houses do want more affordable housing, despite actively working against it.
People, including individuals, aren't single-minded, rational, or scientifically literate.
In the case of anti-fascism, many on the left earnestly believe that a far-left candidate is the solution because their bubble tells them that their views are dominant. After all, they and many of their friends aren't excited to vote for the moderates, but would vote for someone more left.
I'll sacrifice a lot of things I care about for leadership that would shore up democracy (I'm not sure how, though fixing redistricting is a big one), but it's seen as normal and admirable to refuse to compromise.
A slight challenge here. November is a sizable opportunity to move towards that aim. Every day after is another opportunity to live it out in your life, community, neighborhood, finances, religion, and family...
>Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
It's communism. Cold War. All there is to it. As with much other evil, this was done because the FBI feared that Big Bad Uncle Ivan will somehow gain influence over this leader and use it for leverage in the Cold War.
The same multitudes of extramarital affairs and other racy and embarrassing stuff that Dr King took part in, as a reverend, could be used by communists to blackmail him into working for them or making decisions that favour the Soviet Union. Is it far-fetched? Sure. Is it, in hindsight, paranoid and stupid? Yep. But can we say with certainty, without hindsight, that it was impossible, when you have an entire organization dedicated to rooting out hidden influence of the enemy in an existential covert global struggle?
And it wasn't all paranoia. The Soviet Union under Stalin was extremely good at infiltrating American academia, civil society and government. The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, etc. The US government went from ignoring the problem and dealing with it so incompetently actual Soviet spies were in almost cabinet-level positions, to hysterically over-reacting and ruining the lives of people like Dr King "just in case".
There's another country that has infiltrated the whole American government, and a third country that is often said to have infiltrated American academia and civil society, but we don't seem to worry about them. Why the distinction?
I'm not sure what your question is. Did someone draw a distinction? If you transplanted the 1960s FBI to modern times and told them to look for influence in favour of Russia or Israel or whoever you mean but for some reason don't name, and told them to use the same tactics, they probably would try.
The USS Liberty happened in the 1960s. It's downright silly to pretend the American state would ever have had a similar orientation towards a rival superpower vs its own unsinkable aircraft carrier.
You're now the second person doing this. I won't try to keep up with the conspiracies, and multiple levels of unstated implications based on the assumptions about those conspiracies being facts. Israel has never been, nor will likely ever be a superpower or anything akin to a near-peer adversary of the United States, so I'm not too sure what there is to talk about. Still waiting for anyone to propose a topic.
It's pretty good under Putin, too. Better, actually. They don't use the same narrative template, but they're picking tools with more power. It turns out it's really easy to manipulate narcissists and authoritarian followers.
> Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to prevent a multi-coalition, working class movement across ethnicity, unions, and religions that would have made the US a better democracy.
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to attack black civil rights movements. They also used it to attack things that were associated with the Soviet Union, including associating black civil rights with communism and socialism, like you're doing here.
Maybe this was not about everybody and not about you?
It's the excuse Communists used. It's also the same excuse Fascists used. Need I remind you: national socialist German worker's party.
There seems to be great demand for a party that actually makes life better for people, so great that you can just name your party that, win an election and do anything you want to. For some reason there's very little supply of parties that actually make life better and don't just pretend they want to.
It doesn't all hinge on this November. It hinges on all the moments where people do work to avoid fascism. Some of that happens at the polls. Some of that happens at home. Some of that happens online.
Feed people. Engage in mutual aid. Build communities. Prepare candidates. Grow networks. Then vote. Voting is the last and easiest part.
What's crazy is that most of the accusations against his moral character are true. He caused a great change to take place in the nation, but he was not an upstanding individual outside of that.
Good thing the FBI doesn't do this anymore hahaha yes we are certainly safe and they are definitely not infiltrating groups and people's minds in order to discredit and trick them into failure.....
The orgies? He shouldn't have gone to any if his wife didn't approve. But anybody that can go with their conscience in peace should have orgies more often than they have wine. "You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen. *Love* your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD." (Lev 19:17–18). What the priests and the FBI say is just politics :-).
Interesting, true citizen action only revealed the FBI was the author of the blackmailing of MLK.
> On March 8, 1971, an activist group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a local office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents. Parts of them exposed a secret FBI operation called COINTELPRO. Those documents were later sent to newspapers and members of the United States Congress.
COINTELPRO was the physical intimidation and enforcement operation when Operation Mockingbird's total information control of corporate media failed to convince people that democracy was real. Even when both got exposed, the corporate media basically ignored Mockingbird because they were complicit.
Fast forward to today, and the only difference is they now own all the Social Media and A.I. If you want truth in journalism, support small local journalists, and ignore corporate news.
Some might call this lawlessness, but in a society where the government is keeping secrets from its own constituents, this sort of actions are the only ones a citizen can realistically do to return from a lawless and corrupt government, sadly.
Shame some societies digress into this state in the first place, even bigger shame when they keep sliding deeper and deeper into it.
I think it's typically quite obvious, or maybe I haven't seen the psycopaths. However, SWEs can be real dick heads. Just made me think of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_5uVdy5YmA
Uploaded 16 years ago... I can't believe that a video I thought was so hilarious back then is dating me so hard.
> it's one of the most pleasurable places on public internet to be
I think we have different definitions of pleasure.
This is a relatively dry place for any kind of conversation other than hyper logic conversation devoid of empathy or humour.
On certain tech topics, it can be very informative. On anything where there is a conflict between the topic and how the base makes money, there's a lot of down voting and sad rhetoric. As a result, you rarely get to discuss the harms of AI or certain oligarchs, e.g. musk, zuck, bezos, Russia, Israel.
This is a place mostly for reinforcing your own beliefs, rather than finding new ones, unless it's around a very mild topic.
Not really, because a generic observation cannot be expressed specifically.
So that's a weird question to begin with.
It is true that this is heavily moderated and that this is one of the more pleasant spaces, but it is also precisely the moderation style that is being weaponized.
As I said, the toxicity gets hidden in layers and layers of jargon, misdirection and plausible deniability. It gets a veneer of civilty applied, which, somewhat surprisingly, makes it hit even harder, because fighting back is a lot harder, as there is nothing immediately visible to fight back against. It just stings.
It's not just attacking but simultaneously gaslighting.
Which has been what the whole internet has been doing since everything became twitter fwiw.
What I said is also not to be understood as "HN bad", because if I would feel that way, I would not be commenting here.
There must be some logical fallacy here where, reduced down to human existence, all toxicity is hidden under layers. This is both an ultimately true statement of any suspiciously viewed human interaction and it kind of makes the argument moot.
Reminds me of the recent thread about LLMs controversial take on humanity: we are all terribly cynical, hallucinate importance, and we are all bad/good deep down inside.
I guess they are saying people argue/comment in bad faith. That they don't really mean what they say, and at least, they say it not to discuss it but for some hidden agenda.
The problem is that outside of "where's my keys? what are we having for lunch?", most language is a symptom of people's agendas. Its a rarefied elite environment that takes things literally, and acts in good faith.
I don't think this is psychopathic, as much as we're apes -- and speaking literally and in good faith about relatively abstract topics takes a considerable amount of training and is, in general, psychologically fragile (ie., its easy to be tilted).
If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?
> If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?
Are we going to play "prove me right" here? :D
Come on, this is just a direct personal attack. Go play better. Hide it with a more elaborate construct.
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether someone is a troll "just asking questions" or actually just asking that question. More so on HN than in most of the world, I mean.
An interesting realisation there which I believe will shape the upcoming years of discussion spaces is that one can shift the burden of proof there.
Instead of leaving it with the moderation to prove without a doubt that someone is trolling, one can default to assume trolling and demand prove that it is not the case.
As it is impossible to bring up proof for either of those things, the house wins and people make damn sure to quintuple-check if their messaging is decent.
I don't think that that is a good solution, but the status quo was horrible, so maybe the pendulum swinging in another direction for a while might help us discover saner solutions.
It doesn't scale exponentially. Another user already gave the example of someone persistently using "he/she", talking about gay marriages as "partners" while straight ones are "husbands" and "wives", etc. How much effort do you think it takes to perform that versus to moderate it?
It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.
> It seems likely this comment is a waste but… no, that clearly was not a personal attack, and going through life treating comments like those as personal attacks seems like a good way to be miserable.
I'm not sure if can truly let this pass as a more sophisticated construct, but I do appreciate the opener that already invalidates dismissal.
This is completely crazy. How could someone point out that assuming evil intentions is not a good way to interact with people without being accused of doing the same thing as the FBI telling MLK to kill himself?
> This is completely crazy. How could someone point out that assuming evil intentions is not a good way to interact with people without being accused of doing the same thing as the FBI telling MLK to kill himself?
I was genuinely wondering if we would see the end of it, but of course, no.
But I like this, because it's such an obvious strawman and bad faith reinterpration by an account consisting of random jumbled letters.
Thank you. This is background radiation one can live with. Thanks for making things normal again.
Unlikely. Plenty of anti LGBTQ rhetoric is permissible here by mods, for example.
However, it often uses queer lingo - words that folks might think aren't notable, but queer folks will instantly recognize as an attack.
Refusing to call a gay man's husband a husband, but subsisting in friend or partner. Calling someone biologically male. Etc.
These get deployed quite subtly here, and because none of the words are slurs, they don't get moderated. (Though HN also permits overt slur usage -- search for the r-slur and you'll find plenty of cases.)
FWIW, it may just be a colossal misconception of my own, but I’d been of the mind that “partner” was in some cases more polite to use because it doesn’t make assumptions about the individuals in question or about the dynamics of the relationship between them. I am not part of the LGBTQ world, however, and am happy to be corrected.
It can be used both ways, I suppose. I use it for my partner because legal marital status isn't important to me, but for those that had to fight to obtain the basic right to get married I can see why it would be hurtful.
I wonder how much of it is generational? I see something similar in the way second wave feminists rightly hated being called girls, whereas it's not as much of an issue for the younger generations because they didn't have those experiences.
Try to criticize the US' war machine as it relates to the US' tech industry, for example. You will incur the wrath of a thousand HN fascists.
Compare the actual human rights records of the Western sphere (war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights at massive scale) with those of the nations we are being taught are inferior: same effect.
Or for any of us who were around for the Snowden/Assange chapter of HN, who supported the effort to expose the US' heinous crimes - there are still massive sections of western culture who are fundamentalist in their superiority. You can find them in the downvoted and dead-flagged comments section.
This works the same way irl too. The US is one of the most heavily propagandized populations in history. You have to be talking to a very progressive, very politically savvy group to not constantly run into the usual knee jerk canned responses the second you bring up any criticism of military spending, foreign policy, or the panopticon. Probing of those responses in family or social settings for actual justification shows there’s no first principle reasoning behind them, just a vague unease about discussing the topics, like they’re sacrilege.
Yes, the frothy-mouthed ideation of the US cultural identity is just as frustrating to have to contend with as any other ideology. I've met great Iranian folks and great American folks, and great Russians too - and what they all have in common is the ability to reflect on the limits of their own cultures.
Ironically this is quite common on 4chan, although so are many other much more childish things, but there is an occasional flash of someone with real knowledge using it to be a clever asshole.
I'm convinced the only reason crimeflare continues to platform them is that it must be some kind of three letter honeypot.
They explicitly say they proactively work with LEOs to report any and all things illegal. I wouldn't be surprised if they had members of staff directly employed by some agencies, they wouldn't be opposed to it. They do not wait for a court order or subpoena, they will happily give them data and will not wait to be asked.
Their range of acceptable content is wider than other cleaner platforms which gives an impression of anarchy and freedom and anonymity, but actually those other more censored and speech restricted platforms may actually be more safer, private and free from government and legal interference!
The only strictness I have noticed is that captchas are way more annoying now, and they blanket ban entire residential IP networks (in addition to every possible datacenter/VPS/VPN/tor IP block on Earth). But somehow tons of people (not me) keep getting through.
But, they now allow NSFW content in regular boards like technology, and for the first time in 20 years I actually saw someone post cheese pizza... plus I regularly see more and more leaked data posted there first, so I wouldn't call it less lawless at all.
I think it's more that social standards of acceptability tend to continually degrade. There was a time when calling someone a scoundrel or a rascal was one of the most vile insults imaginable, potentially worth fighting to the death over, and I mean that completely literally.
I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.
So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.
the modern internet has given everyone a higher level of immunity to this kind of thing now that it's in the background everywhere at all times; the FBI would need to step up their game today
Or different tactics entirely. I've been getting ads recently saying "it's Qatar's fault". I don't understand at all what is supposed to be Qatar's fault, and I'm sure they can't say it in the ads because then it would be a lie and they could get sued, but I'm sure their target audience knows exactly what Qatar supposedly did.
I'm sure it helps, but there's definitely still way too many people [on social media] that have zero problems with publicly telling people to jump off a bridge while signing their full name with the message. Which is technically illegal in California now.
As much as I actually really love MLK's speeches, sermons, movement. I am afraid there appears to be some unfortunate truths about the man. None are perfect except God. That doesn't make the positives he did any less great, it just reminds us of the nature of humanity.
And that's not to detract from how gross it is that government abused it's power to attempt to get someone to commit suicide. Reminds me of Aaron Swartz case too.
I love my country but omg do we have so many shameful episodes. These things need to be brought out to the light of day so we can confront, admit and heal. The letter is the 2nd crime. The first crime is the tolerance of the hate behind the letter. The 3rd crime is concealing the facts till those responsible are out of the reach of justice.
Interesting angle of posing as a black man so Martin is being attacked by the in group. This is usually very effective and is essentially exactly what you see on racist forums/boards like 4chan and other more explicit supremacist boards.
I am astonished how someone could write something so despicable. Well, not entirely astonished; I've seen the works of many internet trolls and usenet flamewars, and this fits right in. But for an official organisation like the FBI to stoop to this, well, J Edgar Hoover, I guess.
I can imagine him sitting around with his buddies, taking turns reading it out loud, barely able to make it through a sentence without cracking up laughing until everybody was crying.
Sometime around 2010-2020 there were tons of spam messages arriving to gmail of type "I know and have recordings of what you were doing there you immoral filthy pervert!". Nowadays they only want to give away million dollars.
It's incredible how effective those messages are for some people. Some victims emptied their bank accounts because they were so ashamed of whatever porn they were watching and possibly afraid of legal consequences too. The amount of accounts on X that purportedly sell CSAM though telegram channels seems like an incredible opportunity for scammers beyond just normal fraud. Steal the money from the buyer first and then turn around and blackmail them for more.
I read it as regular spam message with slight laugh and without any anxiety, but if that was linked with or in response to some real payment or subscription then it would not be funny.
Apparently most of these huge spam waves originate from just one or two people which is why they're so similar. If a certain type of spam stops arriving it means that specific person got bored.
Gmail's spam filter has gotten noticeably worse in the last two months. I'm half-convinced they threw away whatever they used to be doing and just put Gemini in the loop.
Being paywalled is not an issue (better than ad-ridden), but not being able to have micro transaction in a browser with one click still is mind boggling. As a creator of a browser, taking some blame for that.
I can do that. I can click on my credit card autofill and then "pay", so two clicks.
But sites won't let me do that, they want me to make an account first and they want to verify my email address and phone number which means leaving my browser and restarting the process each time I do because the browser got unloaded and the website doesn't save state. Almost all of the friction here is the fault of the website, not the payment process.
Usually I just can't make an account on a mobile device because of the browser unloading, so if it's important I do it later with my PC and if it's not important I give up entirely.
Well, a micro-transaction on your credit card isn't a great solution, since the base fee is something like $0.10 per transaction. You'll want a system to fill a low-transaction-fee wallet and then distribute from there.
Youtube Premium is a pretty good system. I pay $16/mo, and 55% of that gets distributed to creators based on my watch time.
There are lots of ways to do the tech without a $0.10 fee. I think the issue is more the websites don't ask for that, probably because $10 a month in one easy annualised payment of $120 pays better.
I'm not sure if there's an actual website that did it? I've made micropayments for other things like PAYG phones and speculating on crypto.
There were attempts to bring micro-transactions to the browser via W3C standards - but guess who obstructed it? Yes, the big G that's running the browser with most market-share (Chrome) and who's entire business-model it having your data so only they can be the middle man between you and ads. Imagine if people could just support what they like with one click, instead of getting dumped on with paid propaganda and disinformation so that the middle men fill their pocket.
The very funny “presidents discuss anime” video opened my eyes and that was like 3 years ago. Audio is going to have to require some kind of proof of authenticity going forward.
-------------------------------------------
House of Representatives, U.S.
Part of Congressional Record --- Free
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND NAACP IN COLLUSION TO FORCE SCHOOL INTEGRATION IN VIRGINIA
Address by Honorable Harry Flood Byrd before the Richmond Kiwanis Club, Richmond, Va
Extension of remarks of HON. WATKINS M. ABBITT of Virginia IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Wednesday, April 3, 1957
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U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
Folks forget or underestimate how bitter the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement was.
I was taught to gut a squirrel by the son of a freed slave who lived behind the home in Virginia where my family retired to, he had worked alongside my grandfather as a sharecropper on my paternal grandmother's father's farm.
and it's worth noting that that county was one of the last to integrate in Virginia, facilitated by student teachers from a college in a nearby town whose post office is named for Watkins M. Abbitt.
White folks, that is. Black Americans are acutely aware of it.
Civil Rights legislation is being rolled back, to enthusiastic cheers. A lot of people never got over the Civil War, and are still trying to prove that somehow they were right all along.
You had a generation of people making legal, hiring, sentencing, admission, loan decisions that smoothly transitioned from enforcing the law to being very concerned about standards or however they personally decided was the best way to publicly approach it within their little political sphere.
Then they selected and trained the next generation of administrators, bureaucrats, and enforcers about the "right" way to do this work. A lot of things have changed but at no point did this process end in any meaningful way.
We live downstream of that where people often parrot the same dogwhistles uncritically 40 years later without understanding how deeply racist they are.
As President Lyndon Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.”
Racism isn’t about race at its core, it’s redirected anger from being exploited and abused by people in power. There is a reason people in power always blame “the immigrants” or “the Jews”; it’s redirection.
States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.
And an extension of the progressive / conservative disagreement between how a system is designed vs. the impacts of a system determines its fairness and justness.
Edit: funny, I pre-sniped the sibling responses to your comment.
I think a lot of people miss this or pretend that the conservative position is just old-school racism (although it definitely is sometimes). But there are really hard philosophical, ethical, and political questions at the base of a lot our political problems. I think it helps keep people from arguing past each other if they can find out where the really "hard" part of their political disagreement actually is.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-racial-crossroads/
I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
>What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses?
This seems like really sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
What we've seen in the US is the 90s "judge people as individuals" paradigm has been replaced by a "racial collectivism" paradigm. In recent years, this new paradigm was initially mainstream on the left, then became mainstream on the right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
The "racial collectivism" paradigm is corrosive to individual rights, no matter who wields it. Furthermore, collectivist activity on the part of one ethnic group ends up being countered by collectivist activity on the part of other ethnic groups, in a doom spiral. The result is descent into hateful sectarianism. Scroll through X on any Tuesday to see what I mean.
>nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
Consider a hypothetical where the town near the nuclear test has a population which is a perfect microcosm of the US in terms of race, gender, age, class, etc. No "disparate impact" argument can be possibly made in this hypothetical, since all of the racial "collectives" are equally harmed.
Does this change the fact that the nuclear tests are harming people? Or the best approaches to the problem?
Racial collectivism just isn't a good approach. People are more responsive to the needs of others when they view them as fellow humans or fellow citizens, not representatives of alien collectives.
I guess to put it more directly if we took a hypothetical black male named Steven and a hypothetical white female named Sally who have the same job, live in the same neighborhood, etc - what rights has been rolled back on Steven that were not on Sally.
Meanwhile a white neighborhood has dozens of polling places, each with many machines.
"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report."
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1238646047/voting-options-ear...
* real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins*
The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures
He says that they "almost all" failed -- meaning some are succeeding, and they're always disenfranchising the same people. The average is better, but that doesn't tell you anything about those worst affected.
He's also not talking about gerrymandering, which has gotten worse and worse over time.
One of the more direct actions was the dismantling of affirmative action, which was an intentional set of rules set to undo some of this historical aggregated harm.
The majority of non-US democracies require ID to vote, and it's considered normal and un-controversial. Here in the US, there is a tempest in a teakettle because this has been deemed a "civil rights issue". It really illustrates the role that "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
Americans manifestly do not have a right to possess a driver's license, it's a privilege. The process for obtaining one requires expenditure of time, energy, and money.
The only form of government "ID" that could presently meet the bar is social security cards, as every citizen has one by right. That is obviously a bad idea. There is no "move fast and break things" when it comes to democratic process. If something as important as this cannot be done right, then it should not be done. The right to vote is sacred and cannot be infringed upon, period.
For a point of comparison, here in Finland we require that a voter has a valid ID, that is an ID card, a driver's licence with a photo in it, or a passport. Now what if you _don't_ have one of those IDs? Easy, you go to the police station and get yourself a temporary ID, which is by law given free of charge. You do need to get a passport photo taken for that, but those can usually be done in about 10 minutes for around 10 Euros.
And of course there are other things outside of the ID issue which make the elections not rigged against minorities. Simple things like having the actual election day on a Sunday, the polling stations being usually in walking distance in cities -- people living in the countryside most likely have a car -- and that said polling stations tend to be in schools, shops, and other such places where people would be going anyway. Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
---
The US could totally start doing ID mandates, but the problem is that in the US, their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns, but out of voter disenfranchisement, which again, hits minority populations disproportionately hard.
I’m not being obtuse here. Have you opened a fucking history book, or are you just purposefully acting dense for political convenience?
I appreciate you illustrating my point about the role "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
Yearning for a day when self-identified "progressives" look to the future instead of obsessing about the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/14/southern-sta...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/justice-depar...
Meaningful systemic racism is far more problematic than your experience with a few rural black males.
Everyone can be racist. No one wants to debate pedantic redefined terms that liberal arts professors came up with so they could sell books.
Of course anyone can be individually racist. But institutionally, no. The American institutions and systems have always been white-focused, black people simply do not have the power to be institutionally racist.
I mean, has there ever been any anti-white law ever written in the US? No, because it’s not possible. The institution which makes, and enforces, the law is itself white.
E:
> No one wants to debate pedantic redefined terms
Some do, and we can give them the space to do that without implying that the effort is automatically deserving of consideration.
> pedantic redefined terms that liberal arts professors came up with so they could sell books
That's a somewhat silly thing to argue. That's not how it really works, and it's not a "liberal" thing, whatever that may mean. (I assume it's an American term meant to designate something that's not conservative.)
Otherwise, what you say is correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
>A person who believes a particular race is superior to others. A person with a prejudiced belief that one race is superior to others.
No where does it mention this new-age "prejudice + power" redefinition.
The word is race + -ism, IE literally "doctrine/practice based on race". The word has nothing to do with power. A black dude in America who chooses to beat up a white dude for his race is racist, even under the assumption he is a systematically oppressed minority.
You are clearly misinformed.
1: https://www.wlky.com/article/forced-busing-anniversary-50-lo...
2: https://www.louisville.com/redlining-louisville-dividing-lin...
The Warmth of Other Suns is a very good book for filling some of that hole in your education. I am not sure if I wasn't taught about the Great Migration at all or was taught about it for 10 minutes but definitely did not get out of school with much understanding of this aspect of American history.
i have a blog post about this: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different/
When you are used to privilege, equality looks like oppression.
Sounds bucolic.
We, as Americans have had our “mask off” moment now and are openly declaring ourselves the preeminent empire on the planet. It’s simply that we are withdrawing from our globalist support structures due to a wide variety of forecast reasons along side that, which is confusing to many.
It was our liberal values and performance internally by the Democrats that gave our people as sort of comforting story before. We do it for the good of others we give we topple dictators etc.
I am a deeply “real politik” person and I don’t think you average right leaning American ever thought otherwise. It was somewhat ironically the hope yet no-change left Americans (who i have counted myself among) who tried to give it the thinnest veneer of responsibility.
The greatest thing we provided the world was order, for a time. That seems true of almost any mature empire.
Simply that a type of order was enforced to build a global money-ist theory of society and and market + trade platform.
I might, wrongly, argue that many of these regions both would have continued in the chaos and death they otherwise were already participating in, but i'd also accept that the Dutch in Africa, English in the Caribbean and China, etc all introduced net new outside chaotic aspects on purpose. I'd also accept that attempts at order by the American's ultimately resulted in chaos, especially of course in the middle east.
As to south america, this I'll acknowledge of course was an history of interference, one that is hard to argue the contra-positive since communism in almost all regions of the world failed to develope a long term stable order which was both culturally, trade, and fiscally sustainable, with many falling to a worse state after these outcomes.
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror", which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
Its one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights - its another thing to remember that our governments were the principle violators of civil rights, just a few short decades ago. What the hate-leaders tell us to think about the mullahs and Iran, we could easily have thought about our own nations just a half a lifetime ago...
Not under that much cover, just the more overt part of it directed at a different demographic than the primary foci of earlier rounds of US racism (though it provided a lot of excuse for actions directed more in line with classic US racism, and set the stage for the renaissance of more classicly directed, out-and-proud racism that has characterized the Trump era.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQGiEbj_GR0
"I have a feeling in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people"
The "terrorism" tranche of this hate culture is particularly jarring, since the ones claiming moral altitude over 'terrorists' are delivering far, far more terrorism than their supposed enemies. It's just been homogenized.
Booker T Washington, a notable and well-known African American scholar and public intellectual who worked tirelessly to improve the lives of Black Americans and is considered an authority on these topics, said in an 1895 speech in Alanta that despite the civil rights challenges faced by African Americans, that America was the best place in the world for Africans to live and prosper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Exposition_Speech It is silly to present yourself as more knowledgeable or morally pure about civil rights than Booker T Washington.
so, no, you are wrong, without defending any of the injustices that occurred, America has literally not been the principle violator of civil rights at any point in its history. (The wars against Native Americans were wars just like the wars that the Native Americans inflicted on each other and which were and are still taking place in many other parts of the world, no other word to use than barbaric and indefensible. Yet, worst in the world? worst in that period? No.)
It's especially jarring to understand this in the context of the utterly racist "war on terror"...which is just racism under cover. Racists can't use the n-word any more, so they invented "terrorist" to continue their bigotry and hatred of cultures they've deemed inferior.
you put "war on terror" in quotes, rightfully, because you recognize that it's just a catchphrase like the wars "on cancer", "on smoking", "on diabetes", etc. And you are using the term "racist" the same way. Most terrorism in the last 60ish years is associated with some Arabs and also some Islamists, and with or in cooperation with, anarcho-Marxists like Bader-Meinhof, Brigate Rosse/Red Brigades, antifa, etc. These people do not form a race or inasmuch as they do it's within the white "races", i.e. not much African and not much Asian. But like the "war on terror", you want to invest your misguided view of this struggle as beyond reproach so you say people who engage in it are Racists™. The PLO was not Islamic, the PLO was nationalistic. Islam isn't a race. Capitalism is not Christianity. Humans get into conflict about ideas more than anything else. Debate the ideas and don't contribute to strife by lashing out emotionally.
>"It's one thing to consider the West to be morally and technologically superior with regards to civil rights"
yes, go on...
As your profile page says, "listen here, person, respect is mutual": none of us is perfect, but those are words to at least try to live by.
Maybe because Americans, whether black like Booker T Washington or white like Donald J. Trump, are notoriously ignorant on living conditions elsewhere, and conditioned to believe their country is the greatest ever place to live, even if it's way behind dozens of life metrics most of the western world.
Doesn't mean the US, with KKK, Jim Crow, seggregation, and the rest was the best country in the world for blacks to live.
That is blatantly false and you are indeed manifesting the very example of the ideology I find utterly contemptible.
37 million refugees from America's heinously vile wars, this century alone, beg to differ. The two million dead Iraqi's - and the children born to their descendants, daily, with congenital birth defects as a result of the widespread distribution of depleted uranium, certainly have had their human rights utterly abrogated from a distance by America's overtly racist ruling class, also.
And then, there's Gaza.
I have no respect for a nation that justifies the constant, daily murder of children. A nation that has dropped one bomb, on average, every 15 minutes for the past 25 years - on mostly innocent people - deserves a lot less respect than you seem to imply. It is certainly no shining example of civil rights.
Your in-group is not my out-group, but it's not my in-group, either. I prefer to participate in cultures which protect human rights - at the level of children - above all else. America is not one of them.
If your state has to murder children - or supports states willfully murdering children - in "self defense", then it is a failed state.
Period.
As for Booker T Washington, that was over a century ago. His work nevertheless had to be continued via Martin Luther King and company.
Try to keep up to present time. The US is the worlds #1 funder and supporter of terrorism this century, bar none.
Contemptible.
If it's a question of ethnic strife, the condition of the West Bank and Gaza are due to strife between the West Bank and Jordan, and Gaza with Egypt as anything else.
The children of Gaza are being murdered by American bombs, dropped by Americas allies, with permission, in full view of the rest of the world. Because Americans and their allies have deemed those children inferior.
Claims of superiority on the issue of civil rights are, therefore, null and void.
You wrote a comment, I critiqued it with facts, and it is YOU who is changing the topic and carefully side-stepping that I showed you were wrong. (I replied to someone else about Gaza.)
I have to jump in some cabs now, so you now have time to contemplate the error of your ways rather than hoping I'll see what you write further.
antifa isn't a single organization, but groups under that umbrella do cooperate with, or are coopted front groups for, Marxist groups, and connect with any nationalist or sectarian strife in the world. You need to read up on "the theory of the revolutionary vanguard" and their self perceived role and techniques for fomenting revolution: that's who I'm talking about when I say antifa. Many people who consider themselves part of antifa for muh racism or muh increased minimum wage or muh ACAB might not be intellectual or well read about the history of Marxist revolutionaries, and they might beven be shocked to discover they intellectual Marxists are trying (and succeeding) in controlling their organizations toward a goal that's more likely to get a new Stalinist government.
Think they give a shit about civil rights?
Lee Atwater, Republican party strategist, 1981:
> You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
He predates the war on terror though.
It's truly amazing how well it works.
Or where they'd still like to take us. The only problem they have with Ayatollahs is that they call God by the wrong name.
Do you think that subsistence-working at Only Fans, or the local strip club is a better alternative?
For every 'women in sacks' argument that can be made, there is a street downtown where women put themselves in immense danger just to be able to feed their kids, pay their medical bill debts, get themselves some kind of safety net...
Same shit, different social flavor.
https://letterboxd.com/film/americas-war-against-women/watch...
I couldn't live in a state which allows its police forces to murder with impunity, for example.
The point is that the moral authority we claim over other states is a fallacy. Until we are actually protecting civil rights to the extent we expect of other nations, we are hypocritically justifying our own states heinous track record.
Alas, this seems to be understood pretty well by the ruling classes, who have subjugated human rights to mean "this gives us a right to justify the destruction of sovereign states and their peoples' we have deemed inferior".
Why gut squirrels
We do it to pigs and chickens and cows too. Its a very early step in the slaughtering and butchering process - usually the first step after the animal has been killed.
The battle of the present (ICE abuse, Social media speech suppression, ..) to win the government back by the people and for the people can still be won - but it hinges all on this November.
What makes you think they've stopped?
I remember reading the online news about those primaries as they happened. Bernie wins this state in a landslide. Bernie wins that state in a landslide. Suddenly he's not on the ballot in most of the remaining states. At the end he doesn't have enough votes, oh dear too bad so sad. Some sort of investigation happened, but concluded the DNC has the absolute right to run primaries any way it chooses to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Democratic...
Why are you just completely making things up?
For some reason I remember that moment as vividly as I remember pulling out in the car with my mom on the way to school and hearing that a plane had hit the WTC.
To me, it all seems to boil down to the notion that Bernie would credibly have "drained the swamp," which would have effectively tanked the careers of a lot of long-serving Democratic folks who were not aligned with his populist/progressive agenda. Simply by hiring people that would have aligned with his vision, this was such a threat to existing power, it had to be stopped. Yes, the Rs are worse (in my opinion), but this gives me plenty of distrust for the Ds. Institutions eventually become more about institutional survival than about their "core mission."
So, the Clinton-controlled DNC from 2016 put Trump in the White House.
The positive message is that since then the Democrats have been infused by Sanders-like independent Democrats that want to do the right thing, but we must keep on pushing to rid and guard the DNC and party administration off the corrupt billionaire influences.
If you look outside the US Bernie is actually a moderate. We're not talking about abolishing money or seizing the means of production. Just maybe, somewhere between minting a new trillionaire every year and pregnant women sleeping outside we can find a compromise.
Unlimited money for wars all over the planet, but if you lose your job and have a chronic illness you're screwed most of the time.
Sometimes your screwed even if you have a job and good health insurance. It's a magic game of musical chairs to see what's covered or not. What's out of pocket , etc.
See also how the robber barons of the 1930s (Rockefeller, JP Morgan, etc) already tried to overthrow the government to establish a fascist military dictatorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
Non-violent protests have a place. On occasion though, you need to hit the system where it hurts in order for it to take you seriously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
My step dad use to quote bible verses to me trying to prove Obama was the literal antichrist. Before that it was the evil Bush and his oil cronies. Now it’s Trump, in two years it will be someone else. Same as it ever was.
By all rights there shouldn't be one already, but we're lucky the democracy abolitionists are fairly incompetent.
Or, alternatively, did we cease to have a democracy?
Using the DOJ to interfere in state elections they have no jurisdiction in, and having masked men abduct people and ignore court orders regarding their disposition is just about as authoritarian as it gets.
Those are all new things that have substantially eroded - or removed all together the idea of democracy in less than two years.
If one side shuts the other out of power, that's when we'll finally get the civil war many have been predicting for a long time.
Hopefully the framework to limit power can stay in place, in spite of all the calls to change it, abolish the senate, pack the court, make sure to punish/"hold accountable" red voters, etc.
It's possible, but not very credible, to argue that in a situation where direct democracy doesn't exist.
The closest we have to voted for these things rather than voted for these people is polls, which overwhelmingly illustrate that most people oppose those things.
We'll know more after the election, if people supported those things.
> It would be pretty undemocratic if a president tries to stay in office age losing an election
Yes, the current president tried exactly that, in a violent insurrection, and has interfered in national elections since regaining power.
What a level-headed, reasonable know-nothing you are, sitting above all this unreasonable jockeying.
I am not surprised though, you live in a culture where people can lecture others that the Bible told them Obama was Satan. You don't know what actual politics is anymore.
There's a very easy method to tell if someone making that claim is a liar: ask "what major ideological compromise are they making to save democracy?" if the answer is "none" or close to it, they're full of shit.
'Cause if fascism is really our doorstep, you'd think they'd be gunning for the broadest, most indefatigable anti-fascist coalition possible; instead of the narrowest, most pure one they think they can get away with.
People, including individuals, aren't single-minded, rational, or scientifically literate.
In the case of anti-fascism, many on the left earnestly believe that a far-left candidate is the solution because their bubble tells them that their views are dominant. After all, they and many of their friends aren't excited to vote for the moderates, but would vote for someone more left.
I'll sacrifice a lot of things I care about for leadership that would shore up democracy (I'm not sure how, though fixing redistricting is a big one), but it's seen as normal and admirable to refuse to compromise.
A slight challenge here. November is a sizable opportunity to move towards that aim. Every day after is another opportunity to live it out in your life, community, neighborhood, finances, religion, and family...
It's communism. Cold War. All there is to it. As with much other evil, this was done because the FBI feared that Big Bad Uncle Ivan will somehow gain influence over this leader and use it for leverage in the Cold War.
The same multitudes of extramarital affairs and other racy and embarrassing stuff that Dr King took part in, as a reverend, could be used by communists to blackmail him into working for them or making decisions that favour the Soviet Union. Is it far-fetched? Sure. Is it, in hindsight, paranoid and stupid? Yep. But can we say with certainty, without hindsight, that it was impossible, when you have an entire organization dedicated to rooting out hidden influence of the enemy in an existential covert global struggle?
And it wasn't all paranoia. The Soviet Union under Stalin was extremely good at infiltrating American academia, civil society and government. The Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, etc. The US government went from ignoring the problem and dealing with it so incompetently actual Soviet spies were in almost cabinet-level positions, to hysterically over-reacting and ruining the lives of people like Dr King "just in case".
(well, the Russian Federation, not the USSR)
Back then the establishment used the CIA/FBI to attack black civil rights movements. They also used it to attack things that were associated with the Soviet Union, including associating black civil rights with communism and socialism, like you're doing here.
Maybe this was not about everybody and not about you?
That is how Communists get their cultural revolution, you know.
There seems to be great demand for a party that actually makes life better for people, so great that you can just name your party that, win an election and do anything you want to. For some reason there's very little supply of parties that actually make life better and don't just pretend they want to.
That is how blowhards get Red-Scares and Cold Wars, you know. And exactly the abuses OP posting is decrying.
Feed people. Engage in mutual aid. Build communities. Prepare candidates. Grow networks. Then vote. Voting is the last and easiest part.
Good thing the FBI doesn't do this anymore hahaha yes we are certainly safe and they are definitely not infiltrating groups and people's minds in order to discredit and trick them into failure.....
> On March 8, 1971, an activist group called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burglarized a local office of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole classified documents. Parts of them exposed a secret FBI operation called COINTELPRO. Those documents were later sent to newspapers and members of the United States Congress.
Fast forward to today, and the only difference is they now own all the Social Media and A.I. If you want truth in journalism, support small local journalists, and ignore corporate news.
Shame some societies digress into this state in the first place, even bigger shame when they keep sliding deeper and deeper into it.
At least now we have LLMs that can produce this kind of stuff at human-overwhelming rates, so that is progress.
the corners of the internet that you frequent have much more eloquent haters than the ones I'm used to
There are quite a few covert psychopaths on here that happily twist knives and hurt people.
It's just hidden under layers and layers of indirection, jargon and plausible deniability. Not unlike your standard boardroom I guess.
Uploaded 16 years ago... I can't believe that a video I thought was so hilarious back then is dating me so hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wpjWVRSoQM
Gold pot of a channel.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is not a criticism of their moderation style, this is simply reporting how they describe it.
I think we have different definitions of pleasure.
This is a relatively dry place for any kind of conversation other than hyper logic conversation devoid of empathy or humour.
On certain tech topics, it can be very informative. On anything where there is a conflict between the topic and how the base makes money, there's a lot of down voting and sad rhetoric. As a result, you rarely get to discuss the harms of AI or certain oligarchs, e.g. musk, zuck, bezos, Russia, Israel.
This is a place mostly for reinforcing your own beliefs, rather than finding new ones, unless it's around a very mild topic.
It is true that this is heavily moderated and that this is one of the more pleasant spaces, but it is also precisely the moderation style that is being weaponized.
As I said, the toxicity gets hidden in layers and layers of jargon, misdirection and plausible deniability. It gets a veneer of civilty applied, which, somewhat surprisingly, makes it hit even harder, because fighting back is a lot harder, as there is nothing immediately visible to fight back against. It just stings.
It's not just attacking but simultaneously gaslighting. Which has been what the whole internet has been doing since everything became twitter fwiw.
What I said is also not to be understood as "HN bad", because if I would feel that way, I would not be commenting here.
Reminds me of the recent thread about LLMs controversial take on humanity: we are all terribly cynical, hallucinate importance, and we are all bad/good deep down inside.
The problem is that outside of "where's my keys? what are we having for lunch?", most language is a symptom of people's agendas. Its a rarefied elite environment that takes things literally, and acts in good faith.
I don't think this is psychopathic, as much as we're apes -- and speaking literally and in good faith about relatively abstract topics takes a considerable amount of training and is, in general, psychologically fragile (ie., its easy to be tilted).
Are we going to play "prove me right" here? :D
Come on, this is just a direct personal attack. Go play better. Hide it with a more elaborate construct.
Instead of leaving it with the moderation to prove without a doubt that someone is trolling, one can default to assume trolling and demand prove that it is not the case.
As it is impossible to bring up proof for either of those things, the house wins and people make damn sure to quintuple-check if their messaging is decent.
I don't think that that is a good solution, but the status quo was horrible, so maybe the pendulum swinging in another direction for a while might help us discover saner solutions.
That and the fact that each increase in difficulty filters out people that do not have the capability to pass it. So the pool shrinks every time.
Though, valid counterpoint: Eventually prefabs emerge and get shared.
But then we innovate once more. We always did. We always will
Do not even try?
I'm not sure if can truly let this pass as a more sophisticated construct, but I do appreciate the opener that already invalidates dismissal.
That's a good tactic. Thank you for playing.
I feel great btw :) Thank you for your concern.
I was genuinely wondering if we would see the end of it, but of course, no.
But I like this, because it's such an obvious strawman and bad faith reinterpration by an account consisting of random jumbled letters.
Thank you. This is background radiation one can live with. Thanks for making things normal again.
However, it often uses queer lingo - words that folks might think aren't notable, but queer folks will instantly recognize as an attack.
Refusing to call a gay man's husband a husband, but subsisting in friend or partner. Calling someone biologically male. Etc.
These get deployed quite subtly here, and because none of the words are slurs, they don't get moderated. (Though HN also permits overt slur usage -- search for the r-slur and you'll find plenty of cases.)
I wonder how much of it is generational? I see something similar in the way second wave feminists rightly hated being called girls, whereas it's not as much of an issue for the younger generations because they didn't have those experiences.
Compare the actual human rights records of the Western sphere (war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of human rights at massive scale) with those of the nations we are being taught are inferior: same effect.
Or for any of us who were around for the Snowden/Assange chapter of HN, who supported the effort to expose the US' heinous crimes - there are still massive sections of western culture who are fundamentalist in their superiority. You can find them in the downvoted and dead-flagged comments section.
I'm convinced the only reason crimeflare continues to platform them is that it must be some kind of three letter honeypot.
They explicitly say they proactively work with LEOs to report any and all things illegal. I wouldn't be surprised if they had members of staff directly employed by some agencies, they wouldn't be opposed to it. They do not wait for a court order or subpoena, they will happily give them data and will not wait to be asked.
Their range of acceptable content is wider than other cleaner platforms which gives an impression of anarchy and freedom and anonymity, but actually those other more censored and speech restricted platforms may actually be more safer, private and free from government and legal interference!
But, they now allow NSFW content in regular boards like technology, and for the first time in 20 years I actually saw someone post cheese pizza... plus I regularly see more and more leaked data posted there first, so I wouldn't call it less lawless at all.
Don't know what this means, gonna keep it that way.
I used the word 'degrade' earlier and I'm not sure fighting to the death over rascal is a higher state of enlightenment, but I do think words should have meaning, and now they mostly no longer do because everything is always hyperbolized to the most ridiculous degree.
So if the FBI was doing something akin in modern times they'd probably weaponize their knowledge by framing him as a viable rapist or other sort of sexual predator as opposed to a simple womanizer.
And that's not to detract from how gross it is that government abused it's power to attempt to get someone to commit suicide. Reminds me of Aaron Swartz case too.
In some aspects, times have changed..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterterrorism
"Kill Yourself" is very similar in verse to "You Are Done."
I can imagine him sitting around with his buddies, taking turns reading it out loud, barely able to make it through a sentence without cracking up laughing until everybody was crying.
so weird that it somehow got through the spam filter
it doesn't paywall for me
But sites won't let me do that, they want me to make an account first and they want to verify my email address and phone number which means leaving my browser and restarting the process each time I do because the browser got unloaded and the website doesn't save state. Almost all of the friction here is the fault of the website, not the payment process.
Usually I just can't make an account on a mobile device because of the browser unloading, so if it's important I do it later with my PC and if it's not important I give up entirely.
Youtube Premium is a pretty good system. I pay $16/mo, and 55% of that gets distributed to creators based on my watch time.
I'm not sure if there's an actual website that did it? I've made micropayments for other things like PAYG phones and speculating on crypto.
Apparently the audio tapes get released in 2027 so we may find out for sure then.
I mean...