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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • It isn’t theft, it’s copyright infringement. Otherwise known as a bullshit crime that corporations invented to force the state to protect their bottom line. An individual infringing on a corporations copyright is, at worst, neutral. The artists working on these movies, games, albums, etc are either salaried, contracted, or having the majority of their profits siphoned off from their publisher. If you really care about supporting artists, throw independent artists a few bucks where you can and “steal” to your hearts content from the companies that already exploit their creative workforce.

    Honestly, I wish pirating measurably hurt corporations bottom lines. They need to go down and that would be the easiest way to do it. But decades of rampant piracy have shown that piracy actually helps these companies in most instances, as people who have pirated a product and like it are more likely to purchase the product in the future compared to someone who simply hasn’t used the product in question.

    Additionally, many smaller or independent creators either don’t give a shit about piracy or actively encourage those without the means to pay to pirate it anyway. People who are doing it for the love of their craft aren’t profit centered ghouls who only care about enriching themselves and create things to contribute to our shared culture and entertainment. Pull your head out of your ass





  • I see two goals in that paragraph:

    Fundraiser for Kamala

    Encourage Kamala to make a mastodon account and promote on it over other social media

    People have already donated hundreds of millions of dollars to her via more official channels. This is a grassroots fundraiser targeted specifically at mastodon users (and now the fediverse at large because of this post) with the stated incentive of trying to encourage Kamala to use mastodon over other platforms. You could chalk the mastodon but up as secondary but there isn’t even a third thing in that paragraph for the mastodon portion to be less important than. Given the amount of press the Harris campaign has already received, it seems like this fundraiser’s primary purpose is to promote mastodon via contributing to the campaign and tacitly asking Kamala to sign up.

    If mastodon users wanted to donate to the campaign, they have probably been exposed to several other avenues to do that before they would have even seen this. So what’s the point of doing a special “fediverse only” fundraiser? Apparently it’s to encourage her to create an account. It’s pandering and I don’t see a point in shilling a super special fediverse fundraiser for a candidate who’s already drowning in small donation money when that money could be used to promote the fediverse in a much more meaningful way


  • If the point of the fundraiser is to convince her to join mastodon, wouldn’t 450k send just as strong of a message as 500k? Do what you want with your money, but why? Why are we dumping hundreds of grand towards a politician (who’s just raised over 300mil in two weeks) on the off chance they will decide to make a mastodon account? The fundraiser even says “encourage her to create a distinct presence on mastodon”. The language is so noncommittal it seems like even the people who organized this don’t expect anything to happen after they dump a cool half mil into a campaign that’s already wildly successful.

    Imo if the point of this fundraiser is to promote and grow mastodon/the fediverse then why isn’t the money put towards ads, funding instances, developing the fediverse, or a million other things. That amount of money could go a very long way for the fediverse if it were put towards something other than a plea to Kamala Harris to pretty please maybe think about possibly signing up for mastodon







  • You should look a little deeper into the history of modern Israel and Zionism. It’s always been a colonial project that necessitates genocide of the local population. I’m not going to get further into it here as it’s not really the place for this and people have already done the work. If you haven’t seen shaun’s video id recommend at least giving it a watch. I’ll leave the iron wall as well. It’s a short essay from one of the founders of Zionism. His views were quite explicit and highly influential at the time and his legacy is obvious in modern Israel. And lastly The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It’s a good book that plainly lays out the history of the Zionist colonial project from 1917-2017. I’m only halfway through it but it’s worth your time. Or just watch the video, it’s cites both the essay and book (among other things) and ties it all together very well.