• 1 Post
  • 9 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • It’'s because the overall intent is not to unify the country under one government. It’s to keep the America fighting with itself so that it can’t interfere in Russian, Saudi and Chinese ambitions for an autocratic oligarchy. It’s in their best interests if America descends into the worst version of fascism that the world can dream up, and Trump’s GOP is entirely on their payroll.

    Any potential positive government action by the GOP for the American people runs contrary to those goals, so they’ve turned to the tactics of fear and intimidation to maintain their hold on the population. Each public nazi salute is intentional, designed to strike fear and controversy into the hearts of the citizenry and publicly tarnish America’s image on the world stage.

    Look at how Trump ran on inflation, but the only actions he’s taken have been to attack people’s livelihood or erode trust in federal and state institutions. He’s literally dismantling the federal government from the inside, but all anyone wants to talk about is the nazi salutes.

    This is an intentional distraction.

    This sort of thing doesn’t work in a strong democracy with an un-compromised media, but our democracy has been hollowed out by the cancer of Citizen’s United, rendering the power of a citizen’s vote near worthless, and by the likely election fraud performed by Musk. So they’re gloating and glorifying the symbol as a sign that no one can stop them.

    See, the people in charge right now don’t care if the US collapses. They WANT it to. America has been the symbol of democratic freedom for the entire world. With the US abandoning that fight, there’s no real geopolitical power strong enough to take its place.

    Which is exactly what Russia, China, and the Saudis want.






  • To quote a bit of context from your link:

    MintPress News supported former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia and Iran. It opposes the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia, and reports geopolitical events from an anti-Western perspective.[6] In one contentious article, MintPress News asserted that the Ghouta chemical attack in Syria was perpetrated by rebel groups rather than by the Syrian government, a claim pushed by the Russian and Syrian governments and rejected by much of the international community.[4]

    MintPress News was a major media domain that spread disinformation about the White Helmets, a Syrian volunteer organization.[7] The site has been accused of regularly publishing pro-Russian propaganda,[8] and has been described as a conspiratorial website by media studies and disinformation scholars.[9][10]

    MintPress News is headquartered in Minnesota, where it operated one office location until 2014.


  • This is a core issue with ActivityPub, one that I noticed myself when I started working with it. Unless a server is setup to keep a user’s private marked posts completely off the ActivityPub feed, they’re accessible within it to any script that ignores the opt-out request.

    My personal example was setting up wordpress to interact with a Mastodon instance, and suddenly finding private conversations published from Mastodon to my wordpress site that weren’t visible to me at all on Mastodon.

    Needless to say, that gave me pause about building anything with the protocol until I really understand the access control behind publishing, because even instance owners don’t seem to fully grasp it themselves.


  • I say somewhat - it really depends on which server you’re on, because that defines the initial community that will be immediately available to you. There’s also plenty of mods and admins that have very pronounced political views and will exercise their power according to them.

    I’ve found that the discussion is better here, although slower, and there are far fewer bots and trolls (although Fediverse trolls tend to be heartier and more persistent than their Reddit cousins).


  • It’s an amazing tool if only one person is updating / maintaining the file. The moment collaboration starts, you’re all fucked. I’m currently maintaining one that I inherited that is at least 10 years old and comes with a 50 page instruction manual on how to run it every month… that then gets posted to a shared drive where anyone can edit.

    And then the rest of the month is spent explaining to the end users how they fucked it up this time.

    On the flip side, I’ve also built sheets that could parse data between Nav, MySQL, and SQL ERP systems with tables of over 5million rows each on a single button refresh that ran flawlessly for years… because I was the only maintainer and the sheets were locked from accepting changes from other users.