Only pedophiles defend pedophiles.
And I fucking HATE pedophiles.
Woody Allen is still a pedophile who raped one of his own young step-daughters and married another.
People who defend that shit are SICK.
For myself, I am spending less and less time online as the US midterms approach and I would not be surprised if others are doing the same. My time is better spent offline at the moment, but I haven’t really left. Just taking more and more breaks for now.
Oh, yeah, it absolutely does belong here. And the “reasons” we absolutely need this or that new incursion on our privacy are always something that ends up being inflated to cartoonish proportions, while everyone else is supposed to feel reassured.
Lol, no. What surveillance ends up being used for primarily – not even as an exception but as its primary goal – is backwards criminalization, where a person or organization in power has someone in front of them now that they wish to see rendered powerless, or disregarded, or silenced, so they just go back through the data looking for the points where that troublesome person stepped over some invisible line, charge them retroactively for their “crime”, and are done with them.
Even in the example of the article, surveillance doesn’t prevent anything. It only ever looks back. In a world (especially in the UK) where cameras already abound but crime rates stay the same or go higher, and regular police forces that supposedly exist to serve the community remain strapped, understaffed and underfunded, it is unrealistic to believe there will be some magical space where this collected surveillance data is processed, rings some alarm as designed, and the good guys come pouring out of a nearby substation to save the damsel in distress.
And we know this because there are already countless criminal alarms, and data, and specific cries for help that get ignored as a matter of routine. This new alarm will simply be added to the pile of those already ignored, while the people in power – who really want to just pre-emptively collect surveillance data on a supposedly free society – use it at-will and unseen to create and keep their own power by any means possible.
When talking about surveilling society at large, as this person is suggesting, it’s important to remember that there is no such thing as surveilling a subset of the population.
Everyone who crosses the boundaries of surveillance, without exception, gets surveilled.
When you point a camera at a crowd, it does not selectively exclude everyone but your chosen subject: a camera photographs all. People and systems behind the camera then manipulate and match that data to suit their objectives, and that’s where it becomes completely unaccountable, because the data has already been collected on all.
Today, supposedly, it’s dastardly men, the suggestion being that all others will be excluded and thus this extended surveillance of all public spaces must be benign for everyone who is not a dastardly man. But in other places and times, it was runaway slaves, or homosexuals. Recently it has been women seeking abortions and trans people and immigrants. Tomorrow it will be those guilty of wrongthink.
And all are surveilled, because everyone is surveilled.
This surveillance WILL be used to the maximum of its capability, and very quickly, regardless of whatever guidelines or original purpose or its stated goals are said to be in the beginning.
These are nothing but lines in the sand that will be washed away almost immediately, because there’s just no way to exclude specific groups from widespread surveillance, and our collective governments are far too corrupt and unstable and greedy for power to ever cut off their own access to it.
The benefits of just listening to music I think gets overlooked.
Hard agree. And it’s a shame because we have more music at our fingertips now than ever before, from every possible time and place in history. I’m from an era (70s) when just putting a record on and listening to it all the way through was a thing, but I’m not sure how many folks realize today that music can be an event in itself: not as background, but as foreground. Putting it on, sitting in a chair, and just listening while doing little to nothing else.
It’s hard to get time to do it, but when I do it’s heaven. And it absolutely resets my brain in positive ways: afterward, I just feel good. I actually think it might qualify as an ersatz form of meditation, in that a person is not mentally attending anything else while doing this, just listening and letting the auditory experience wash over them. It’s difficult to quantify, but the benefits are very real.
I was reading the original discussion on dbzer0 and kept wondering what the removed by mod was under every comment agreeing with either partial ban or defed, so I looked at the modlog. It was literally the same pigshit picture posted over and over again, almost twenty times, by the same user, though fortunately I only had to see it once, by choice.
That’s a serious personal commitment to assholery right there, and this is apparently just one of the people coming over to do this on dbzer0 comms. To be honest I can’t claim to understand some of the political nuance that was coming up in the thread, but that one dude sure did make a strong argument for defed via the modlog, lol. If that’s an example of what dbzer0 has to put up with from multiple individual users of another instance, then considering defederation is absolutely a legitimate discussion to have.
Anyone else remember 2019 when Matt Gaetz and a bunch of other MAGA fuckwits breached the SCIF in the basement of the House carrying their cell phones and tweeting out selfies from there?
Thought security of a SCIF didn’t matter anymore. But now I guess they claim to actually give a shit. Huh. Maybe that’s just another part of our government they’re selling and they want to restrict access to paying customers now, because they sure didn’t give a fuck in 2019.
I think blanket downvoting happens regularly in political communities and discussions, and a lot of time you can see it without even looking up any votes: if every single comment in a six-comment thread has two downvotes and three upvotes, it’s pretty clear. I looked those political ones up a few times but don’t even bother anymore. Everywhere else, by which I mean non-political and/or non-controversial topics, it genuinely seems to be just a core handful of users.
And no, you’re not an outlier, just a decent person. I like to think most of us vote for actual cause, and that it’s only a handful who don’t. But at some point I do think the admins are going to have to deal with it, because downvoting just to downvote IS toxic and does tend to have a stifling effect on the discussion and community as a whole.
These single downvotes were never followed up by further commentary, and at least one of them looks like a voting-only account with zero posts, so the more I looked the more they just seemed like fuck you votes.
I really don’t think there’s any link to content at all because I did this across multiple communities (whatever I don’t have actively blocked that crosses my feed) and it was largely the same handful of downvoters throughout, but with outliers here and there. I wasn’t taking notes, but when I started to see the same names over and over in wildly disparate communities it seemed less and less likely it had anything to do with content.
Because the fediverse is still fairly small, downvotes stick out a lot more. A number of them I think, “How could anybody downvote that?” and just wonder because often they seem to be “I had a shitty day and I particularly don’t like YOU” downvotes.
I often sort a thread by Top, and even the highest voted posts are often +(big number) -1. Because I personally do not downvote without cause, I assume they are sincere, but then it becomes a question of why, and I could never figure it out. Okay, whatever, no biggie.
But recently I had some time on my hands and I am aware of lemvotes.org, so one day I saw this again and decided to just informally start looking up these weird ass loner downvotes. Nothing sustained, just whenever one stuck out to me as being why??? I’d go and look it up. I’ve been doing this for roughly 2-3 months now, no schedule or commitment other than whenever I felt like it, across the board, no attention paid to community or post content (other than anything political pretty much not being worth the trouble, lol).
What I expected was a variety of usernames attached to these single downvotes.
But what I saw was a core handful of users across the board, with the occasional outlier.
Kinda pathetic, honestly.
this is just dumb and you should feel bad for spending so much time writing it
I don’t think he did, though he may have touched it up. It’s old. I remember seeing it in the 90s with a number of “if [OS] were an airplane” schticks along the same line. Unix was the one where passengers all brought parts and tools and assembled it on the runway.
If you allow artists to display their work in various communities along with the ability to post links in their profiles, but you restrict actual posts to disallow self-promotion, it’s the best of both worlds, IMO.
In other words, if you can’t include self-promotion in your community posts, but everyone knows you have the links in your profile, it attracts less grifters and keeps the feed clean, while allowing anyone interested to contact a poster directly or ask them promotional questions via DMs.
That said, hosting a full-fledged marketplace is not a good idea, IMO. There are laws and banks involved, which mean lawyers and taxes, and volunteer management does not work for that. There are already marketplaces that do that well, and allowing artists to post their own links of choice in their profiles will let them steer actual business to other platforms, while keeping the fediverse for display, review, share and critique. My opinion, anyway.
I hear ya. I had to get away from MS for the same reason: I can’t have my PCs turned into data collection points for MS to make a withdrawal from whenever they like. But these old MacBooks are fire on Linux.
If you can successfully navigate the average Windows setup and you don’t have any non-standard partitioning needs you’re golden, especially if you start with a beginner-friendly distro like Zorin or Mint, both of which worked perfectly without further configuration on my 2010 MacBooks that have 64-bit Intel processors. You learn as you go along. I watched a lot of install videos too, especially when I knew I was working with distros that I knew were going to ask me for knowledge I do not now have (Arch, btw, and honestly the latest Fedora KDE that was insisting on Btrfs volumes for whatever reason and I was trying to do it without a working mouse, lol).
But that’s the cool thing about live trials: boot off the USB and test drive the OS experience, with no need to install anything at all until you’re certain.
Hit me up if you get stuck and I’ll help however I can. First, though, start with your Mac hardware: figure out what you already have. Then go from there.
As someone running two 2010 MacBooks on Linux, most of it is straightforward but I would add a few notes:
It was helpful for me, as someone very familiar with OSes and hardware but NOT Linux, to pull detailed hardware reports off my Macs before I wiped MacOS off all the way, and to have the specs either memorized or within easy reach whenever I started reading the technical stuff, because there’s a good bit of that unless you happen to find a first distro that matches your hardware exactly. Instead, it’s more likely you’ll kiss some frogs before you find The One. Some distros are worth the trouble of making them work, some are not, but either way know your exact specs, especially for your wifi chip, so you can recognize them when you see them mentioned.
If you think you may ever run MacOS on them again, for any reason, but do not have another Mac handy, go ahead and make a MacOS bootable install drive now of the latest supported OS and throw it in a drawer. I never thought I would need it, but I did it out of an abundance of precaution and ended up using it multiple times, to my own surprise. But it’s damned difficult to do without another Mac around to create the install media for you, so cover your ass and do it anyway if that MacBook is the last Mac you have.
I made a GParted Live USB and it’s become one of the most used USB drives I own. No matter the OS, no matter the fuckery you’ve gotten yourself into (and clearly I have), if you can boot off USB it submits to the magic of GParted. Strong recommend.
Know that you cannot use Ventoy on MacBooks. At all. It kept crapping out on me, I spent hours on it, but when I read the forum (and the dev’s comments to others with the same problem) turns out that nope, Ventoy does not work with MacBooks. Don’t waste your time – or do, if your nihilistic enjoyment of futility needs a strenuous workout.
If you don’t already have a handful of available USBs, buy a ten (or more) pack of 8GB USB drives somewhere cheap, and just start rolling. They will all get used and reused as you go about trying out various distros and then comparing the ones you liked best, and you will appreciate not having to reformat the same USB every time you want to go to something different.
You’ve been told about Live USBs, but the thing with these older MacBooks is that a lot of it’s just a pure crapshoot when it comes to a specific distro making happy times with your specific hardware. Usually it’s the older Broadcom wifi chips, but I’ve had other problems. So when you boot into a live trial, you really want to make sure you’re testing ALL the hardware that matters to you (wifi, Ethernet, sound, mouse, trackpad, display, camera, etc) and not just assuming.
And even then it’s not certain: I just recently put Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my mid-2010 MacBook and it sped through the Live USB trial and even the netinstall process on wifi, but as soon as it was running on the installed OS I had download speeds in the fucking bytes before I understood that the Live USB and the OS were using different Broadcom drivers. I found a guide and it was an easy enough fix, but definitely a pain in the ass. These things happen, so expect them.
Linux will recognize memory that MacOS will not, so go ahead and fill your actual motherboard capacity even if Apple says it’s unsupported. Chances are good you’ll want to upgrade other hardware as well; I’ve had good luck using iFixit for guides and it’s worth the trouble to ask around for recommendations on where to buy, but in general avoid Amazon, especially for batteries.
After you’ve installed Linux, run it on a stand for good airflow, open the case and really clean your fan, and/or replace your thermal grease (which it’s past time for anyway) because Linux does tend to run warm on these old MacBooks.
That said, these are excellent machines, a fun project, and honestly I think I like them more now than when I first got them: I never knew how versatile they could be. Hope some of this helps you.
Not saying you’re wrong, but if you’re running a VPN it could be that as well. More and more sites are demanding CAPTCHA tests and verification holds or just returning 403 for VPN access no matter what OS you are running.
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As someone who engages in good-faith discussions, I like participating in those comms. Bad-faith participants do not limit themselves in the same way.
I can understand how you might think your proposal is a solution, but in the US the amount of political content is overwhelming and comes from every direction, especially online.
There is NO such thing as just blocking when it’s everywhere, and if you can downvote it you’ve already read it. I need to not see it at all when I am not in the fact-checking kind of mood for it.
So the most perfect way to avoid the firehose of propaganda is to remove oneself from it altogether. See y’all in November – or December, if shit gets real.