because it’s way more convenient

Honestly, these laws are just gonna hurt old men in Republican states.

You know I think a lot more of their politics and general life outlook makes more sense when you understand that probably a lot of these super old guys are not computer literate enough to look up their niche fetishistic porn interests, and are probably still consuming porn the old fashioned way, which is becoming increasingly nonexistent even though it’s still something that actually exists. Plus the propagation of morally puritanical values means that if they kept any of that material around at all, they’d be hypocrites, so they can’t have that. Probably a lot of these dudes are walking around super pent up and sexually frustrated, I’d bet.

We need to introduce local community college and library courses to teach these elderly boomers how to goon

Expanding on this, a lot of this is very consistent in the amount by which it suppresses voters, and thus, much like gerrymandering, can be designed around or intentionally enacted. I mean, that’s sort of an obvious thing, but I think it’s still important to take note of and point out, much like gerrymandering and every other form of voter suppression, because it makes it all the more obvious that we do not live in a democracy, even by a little bit.

isn’t a slur more than that?

Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don’t really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn’t make a slur out of almost any word, then you’re not being creative enough, or, you haven’t acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.

Here, I’ll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.

You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you’re using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I’ve seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that’s basically a slur, in how they’re using it, and that’s like, just a sequence of numbers.

Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.

This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you’re exclusively calling one group “banana-eaters” based on their intrinsic traits, that’s gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he’s a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.

On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a “cracker”, despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn’t really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a “boomer”, because we all age over time, where it’s sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it’s usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You’ll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers “boomers”, in that context, but you won’t hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It’s a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.

There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren’t really slurs in how they’re being used in that subculture. I’m sure you can think of examples of that.

Sorry, you gotta upgrade everything every 5 years, because otherwise there’s a security vulnerability! Sorry, looks like there will be no new updates on your software, no compatibility! Surely, things have become so much more efficient in the last 5 years as a result of processing gains, and surely that will be passed onto the consumer rather than eaten up in the middle, and surely we need that increased processing power so you can run the increasingly dwindling number of social media sites that are actually relevant!

Sorry, looks like we got rid of the headphone jack because it takes up too much space and it’s too hard to make the phone water resistant! The IR blaster isn’t relevant anymore because everyone has unilaterally switched to wifi operated smart TVs! Surely! Sorry, the micro SD card slot took up too much space, we need to use that space for processing power! Same with irreplaceable batteries! Sorry, the 16:9 aspect ratio we used to have for phones isn’t available in any phone anymore, because we decided to replace the physical buttons and ugly bezels with basically unusable screen space! But we’re still gonna have a hole punched in the screen for the camera!

I dunno. Modern phones are fucking dogshit now, I hate them so much it’s unreal. Even the software is progressively getting worse year over year. Shit used to be so basically functional and it’s become so horrible.

I think a lot of people would cut contact with their family at times like this due to the ways in which these kinds of beliefs often intersect with massive amounts of interpersonal abuse and broadly dysfunctional and unhappy relationships. I think this is most especially true of people who are queer, neurodivergent, disabled, or a member of some other minority, who are easily going to be subject by that abuse from their family more and more, especially as they may be more dependent on them and as they’re more noticeably going to see that abuse well up as a result of those narratives. You know, people who get to see the “ugly sides” of their family.

I would say that if you’re not actively dependent on your family, and you’re not part of an actively hated minority which they will more easily discard, disrespect, and abuse, then that makes it easier to cut them out of your life, but that’s also definitely a time at which you will counterintuitively be in the best position to sway them, since you’re at your most secure.

So I would say that this is, in some part, a decision which you should probably make in reflection of your current material circumstances, the current state of your life. This also isn’t a decision which you need to make right now, really, to cut him out of your life or decide to blow this particular one up. You said he’s already married, and that your other two brothers aren’t going, so one more probably won’t hurt things that much even if you invent an excuse.

I’m like 90% sure if I showed my dad the picture of elon musk hitting the five knuckle shuffle live on stage in 4k 60fps three times in a row, he’d probably flee to the “my heart goes out to you” comment, right before trying to find some sort of talking point he could throw down the hopper in order to justify this shit, which is really to say nothing of the fact that he basically just fundamentally agrees with elon’s actions on basically every level if he was to actually sit down and think about it for long enough. There’s some people which cannot be helped, because they will repeatedly choose not to be. There isn’t exactly a correct answer, here, I think the major thing is that if it goes sideways because of your decisions, you shouldn’t beat yourself up or crash out over it, or become overly callous.

I say all that in my comment, but, it’s not just that this guy is a techbro, there are some other factors that make it so he’s probably the guy. With those, I just think that it’s probably more likely that this is the guy, than that it isn’t. I don’t really see a need to theorize that this isn’t the guy based on how the guy in the video is some sort of crazy criminal mastermind, when he also hits up a starbucks right before, as well as a bunch of other evidence in the video itself that this is probably a somewhat average, if maybe uncommon, guy. i.e. it easily could just be a techbro.

From what the news has told us, which is really all we have, this guy fits the bill pretty solidly. We’ll see with the dna, ballistics, and fingerprint, but we also know that’s historically not really conclusive evidence either. The best you could do is that this guy fits the specific timeline, which we’ve heard less about relative to everything else, though from what we have heard, he does seem to fit pretty well. This entire issue, the issue of being able to conclusively tell who’s done a crime at what time, that’s part of why the justice system needs reform, because it’s very likely that you could just get this all wrong. I can acknowledge that reality, and also acknowledge that, based on what is publicly available so far, this guy is probably the guy.

I dunno, the idea that this random guy, who’s reading and posting shit about the unabomber’s manifesto on his goodreads, and happened to be passing through new york via hostel and then greyhound at this time, is just some random guy, I dunno. With modern social media, I think we really start to strain credibility that this isn’t the guy. You would have to have a very convenient fall guy for that to be the case. It probably would’ve been easier to just catch any random schizo techbro inside of new york and then throw a gun and prewritten manifesto at that guy, to be honest, if the nypd or fbi just wanted some random dude to bag and throw away to pretend like they’re capable. Like you said, you could find them by the thousands.

The crazy part about jury nullification is that if I was someone who was wanting to engage in it I probably wouldn’t be posting my opinions about the case online in a public fashion because that could easily be used as something to dismiss me from the case. That’s like a step away from bringing it up to the judge in the courtroom. They’re probably already gonna select a bunch of random boomers who have no idea what’s going on to comprise the jury anyways, since they can just do that if they want to, in the same way that the jury can just decide someone’s guilty or not. So that whole conversation is kind of moot.

Yeah, it’s been really crazy. People have been trueanoning on this one just like people did with the trump shooting, even though that one was obviously also a pretty clear cut case. I think partially, it’s because people are wanting to be half-funny, and are basically just iterating on the joke of “oh, I saw him at bible study at the time! that couldn’t have been him!” and then sharing photo edits, right.

I think part of it is that everyone has been trained by true crime and fiction to think of all of these events as though they’re living in a tom clancy book, or something. They’re enraptured by the spectacularization of this event, and of all of the past of history, enraptured by the transformation of this event into a spectacle, so they get the feeling that, oh, oooh, something’s off, but I just can’t tell what. It always has to be some sort of increasingly more dramatic escalation, until there’s some sort of release of tension, because that’s how things work in fiction. In fiction, a guy isn’t allowed to just pull off a hit on a random unprotected CEO, ride his bike to central park, leave a backpack full of monopoly cash because he’s kind of cracked, get on a bus, and then go to a shithole in pennsylvania and then get busted over a mcdonald’s hash brown. That shit doesn’t happen in fiction, so it’s not allowed to happen in real life.

I think part of it is also some sort of idiot idea about, somehow, if they just question the narrative on this enough, it will cause the guy to be innocent, somehow just them being conspiratorial on social media will cause that if they cook on it hard enough.

Most of all, though, I think it’s sort of this desire to have the guy who shot that CEO get away, or be a different guy because, in the mind of your average person, that guy is some agent 47 super CEO hitman, that’s going to liberate us brokies from our shitty healthcare problems, when obviously that’s kind of a delusional escapist fantasy.

Basically, none of this is allowed to be actually real. This isn’t a real event, in the mind of your average person. This is a media event, it’s being treated like one. Much like that, you can cook up fanfictions, but it doesn’t change the base media product, and you have to know that you can’t do anything to affect the thing itself, it’s set in stone and it’s unchangeable and it’s totally ethereal and out of your grasp.

That’s sort of partially why I think this isn’t going to change anything, and, though I think maybe a repeat might happen, I’m not holding my breath. Because while everyone can recognize the problem, everyone, in classic american style, wants some superman to come and save them, and is willing to do nothing, or put anything on the line, in order to really save themselves or others.

I really find it to be quite absurd that people are still thinking this isn’t the guy. This is probably the guy. My basis for that is basically just that the shooter had a 200 dollar peak design redditor backpack and a uniqlo packable jacket when he shot that guy, and those are both heavily techbro-coded fashion items. That’s on top of all the internet history of this specific guy pretty much indicating that he’s the guy. Back problems, leading to a several month long disappearance, after he turns 26, and is no longer on his parent’s healthcare plan.

We can also look at it through the lens of just the assassination attempt itself. The news is saying they found either a 3d printed gun, or more commonly, a ghost gun (which I have not been able to find a consistent account of). In either case, that involves buying a mostly unregulated firearm upper, and then either finishing an “80%” pre-assembled lower with a drill press, or probably even a regular cordless drill, or just wholesale printing the entire lower of the gun yourself. Both of those, are also techbro-coded methods of obtaining a firearm. Compared to just buying a somewhat common firearm in a state where it’s pretty easy to get a gun a couple months before, and then shaving the serial numbers off the gun, or just getting a gun off the black market, or stealing one from someone, which all seem maybe easier than going the ghost gun route.

In the video itself, we see him struggle to cycle the gun manually, due what is probably a combination of using subsonic ammunition, and his suppressor, which I’m assuming did not have a nielsen device, or, a booster. Those are devices that are meant to help browning-style tilting barrel designs cycle much more reliably. They also tend to cycle less reliably with heavier baffled suppressors compared to much lighter, quieter, disposable, and easier to produce wipe-based suppressors.

His research and meticulously planned operation also consisted of shooting this guy in the back, in front of a camera, while this guy walked to his hotel. That’s a plan that has a high percentage chance of success, it’s the same way that you’d see many mob hits happen, but does it strike me as something which is particularly complicated or out of character for this guy, if he had a couple months to cook something up?

Based on the entire description of that chain of events, that would probably indicate that this is a somebody that’s had some amount of preparation but wasn’t some kind of professional or overwhelming genius. It could be the case that they dug around online for thirty minutes, happened to find a guy that had both disappeared for a couple months, had medical problems, was a little bit more conspiratorial, or rather, had incoherent politics, and would be the kind of guy who would dress in a peak design backpack and in a uniqlo jacket, and was ALSO a guy which was exiting new york at that time via bus. They would then have to plant evidence on him, which cops are known to do, but that’s all, legitimately, entirely possible. Is it more likely than this being the guy, based on everything we’ve seen from the video?

I would say no, probably not, this is probably the guy.

Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.

What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little removed? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.

it could be the combination of the two. suppressors commonly induce failures to eject in tilting barrel designs without the use of a nielson device, and if he had used subsonics, that would also be a contributing factor to a failure to eject.

The guy used a silencer and when his gun jammed he cleared the jam and got off a couple more shots.

that’s something you could do with about five minutes of training. if he was a “professional”, he probably would’ve used a nielson device, or, if he just had some shitty turkish oil filter, a non-tilting barrel design, like a hi-point, so the suppressor doesn’t induce malfunctions. he also probably would’ve waited a little bit further down the guy’s path. he pulled off his hit in broad view of a camera which was directly behind him, and he stopped for starbucks and a couple protein bars down the street, and left his garbage on site. none of these things matter too much since the police are pretty bad at their job, but if the feds get involved, things might take a different turn, and little mistakes like those add up. if his gun had jammed more severely, he might not have been successful at all. no, this speaks to me as a kind of amateur endeavor.

now, it’s still somewhat unlikely, but it is, I suppose, possible, that he was still hired. actual hitmen would probably tend to be so professional that you will basically never see them, like the guy that probably killed the boeing whistleblower, or part of some obviously state sanctioned special forces unit. They can also be unprofessional schmucks that are willing to just eat the sentence for an organized crime syndicate, and in less high profile cases, they can just be random people down on their luck who are willing to kill for a couple thousand dollars and know someone who’s willing to pay that fee, which never really works out too well.

bait used to be much harder to do back in the day

Yeah, the broader point I’m making is that the federation doesn’t solve the entire encompassing system in which this all exists.

Federated projects both have their own problems in those shitty little fiefdoms, as said, and are probably never going to succeed in this broader economic context where huge, profit seeking, venture capital funded market actors are able to spin up a new twitter ripoff in no time at all. This is while similar market actors in the form of spam farms, bot farms, adversarial influencers looking to make a quick buck, and moderators themselves, have incentives to game whatever systems are in place on any platform, not just the large ones. This then increases the strain on smaller projects, and decreases their ability to actually be sustainable long-term, especially in comparison to these huge market actors and their platforms.

The systems that are gamed, in the modern internet, are cordoned off and channeled by a bunch of moderators that we all trust to kind of do the work for the rest of us, apply the rules, use the tools to their discretion. Federation just makes it so you can jump from one moderated section to the other, one administrated section to the other, while on the same “platform”. But it doesn’t solve the inherent problems at play here, where moderators and higher level administrators are incentivized to make their platforms shittier with the invitation of advertisers, the invitation of more bad faith posters which can increase engagement, the adoption of shorter form, less substantive content, things like that. Those drive up traffic, and make more money, money they can use to then make their platforms “better”, or basically, to eat up more of the market share. Eventually you play the short term gains game long enough, and then your platform’s growth sputters out, and then venture capital dries up, and then you end up making the moderation more lax as a last resort, and then nazis come flooding in. Then the platform either dies, or mutates into a horrible shambling corpse.

Even if you were to cut out all of that as a possibility, say, by trying to make your stuff copyleft, then you just cut out the route towards short term growth for anyone using your particular platform, and then you’ll just get outdone by all of the other market actors which lean into that short term growth, while still filling your platform’s niche, while using none of the specific parts of your platform.

It’s basically not going to succeed as an approach because it, as we keep learning on the internet over and over and over and over, it exists in a broader material context, the context of the market.

The problem is mostly that people see that as a natural progression of the free market, so they’re okay with it. That, and/or they’re totally blind to the fact that people like musk are symptomatic of a deeper problem with the system at work here. Myspace, early internet forums, any form of less explicitly centralized internet, those get blamed for not being “good enough” as a platform, compared to these other, more “successful” ventures, which inevitably use spam to make money or attract nazis to bolster their userbase in a short term bargain. It doesn’t matter to your average user that those platforms fell apart explicitly because larger market actors all swam around them like pirahnas and blasted them with spam and bots and all that shit in order to explicitly tear them apart and try to make a quick buck off of their shit.

In the market, that’s seen as a you problem, as a personal failing, if you can’t avoid that, or if you’re not willing to play along with that. That’s the average person’s view of any previous platform. These platforms rise and fall like, almost every decade or so at this point, more at the onset, obviously. People don’t have enough of a long term memory to remember why the last platform died and how it followed the exact same trajectory as the current thing.

People dislike it because it’s not federated, but hot take: federation doesn’t solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms. It doesn’t do anything to prevent the inherent problems that arise as a result of having everyone freeball a random moderation structure, where they can outsource their agency to some guy they don’t know, with the illusion that there’s some clear set of rules or useful tools that exist somewhere off in the distance, being used by the “correct” actors and moderators. Which in turn means that everything becomes vulnerable to any abuse of the static, singular, broad rules, inside of these walled gardens that people are basically locked into.

You get bait, you get ragebait, people taking advantage of the singular “algorithms” in order to game the system for maximum attention, and you incentivize that behavior because you make it way too easy to engage in. You get people paying to get on the front page of reddit, and you get eglin air force base being the most reddit addicted town. People think that AI abuse is some recent phenomenon, but it’s not, bots have been on the internet forever, and people have been incentivized to engage in bot-like behaviors forever. Eventually you get a huge, hollow system, where everything has the guise of legitimate human interaction at the surface level, but is really just subject to this huge system of incentives and planned interactions which people are made subconscious of.

You’d really need the ability to have account migration for a better decentralized network, and you’d probably actually just need self-hosting for everyone. You’d probably want blocklists to easily propagate around (+2 for bluesky), and you’d probably actually want those to have easily copied and pasted rules that could be shared between users to prevent spam and make it so abuse is less common and easily prevented before it happens.

Which is what the usenet already had/has. It’s just that the common consensus (which I believe to be false), is that the usenet is too hard to use, and requires demands too much intellectually from its users. If you decide to take this philosophy to the extreme, you end up with something like tiktok, where the idea is that people use their premade google account, scroll downwards forever, and that’s it.

I wouldn’t mistake this as being some sort of like, natural occurrence, though, that’s an intentional decision, made by businessmen, that want to maximize sales through an in-app store and control a massive cultural space. That’s a specific decision that they’ve made, and they’ve tuned their platforms to take advantage of people’s worst instincts in order to perpetuate that. Often with the assistance and explicit consent of governments which want these platforms to be used to track everything.

They pour money into that system, it’s an explicit decision they’re making to push that onto people as a result of current economic and political structures, and it’s due to those structures that they have that power to be able to do that, and due to those structures that these shit systems succeed, keep being cycled out in boom and bust cycles, over the better systems that people create.

Yeah this is kinda what I’ve never understood. We have these sorts of, complaints about the demographic movements of these platforms, sure, but their actual core structure is inherently optimized to prey on people’s worst instincts, make discussion basically impossible. To prioritize pithy remarks and one-liners over productive conversations, they prioritize public facing ideologues blowing up much smaller individuals. Lemmy’s slightly better in that regard, but I feel like we’re always somehow descending in quality from what even a basic forum would be capable of.

Manipulation only really works so far as it’s actually grounded in something. Like, sure, that sounds epic and evil and a machiavillanous type of thing, but it’s usually just easier straight up to actually come up with a compelling argument that “manipulates” people into seeing it from a real angle, than to have to try to do backflips in order to come up with some totally fake argument that isn’t real but also appeals to them specifically and slots into their worldview and directs them where you want them to go. It’s easier just to start with the reality of the situation and your authentic belief and then come up with a package for that which they will find acceptable.

At that point, where you’re actually basing your argument in something, “manipulation” becomes “framing”. We move from a false construction, to just selling a new angle on the reality. Maybe that’s the same thing, to you, but there’s definitely a meaningful difference there.

In this case, the false construction is the idea that data is similar to property, and you need to own your property rather than give it away. Sure, this might push people in the right direction, but they’re also just as likely to find it acceptable to trade their property for a service (as is what these social media companies do, if the metaphor was extended), or to sell their property for a return in a more straight kind of way.

Then you start getting into problematic ideals where people prize their art for its economic returns and hate AI (or stable diffusion) for “stealing” from them. For “stealing” their “intellectual property”, and for stealing potential economic value they could’ve extracted out of that. This, rather than hating it for being a huge investor level scam, that tarnishes the core technology’s viability, for being massive undirected energy drain, and for enabling mass internet botting more than what we already had.

It’s better to deconstruct the idea of intellectual property, while also advocating for user privacy as a kind of right that exists, and actually gives something or does something useful to those which have it, those which have real privacy. Selling it as something good for the individual, to the individualist, selling it as good for society, to the collectivist.

Beyond that, if you’re arguing against someone who believes in the market, and in this sort of meritocratic lassiez-faire intellectual utopian cyberspace ideal, then that’s the real core of the issue you must solve, rather than getting into this privacy/intellectual property debate, where it’s impossible to really change their minds because their core values are incompatible with the idea itself.