Walt J. Rimmer

I guess they’re trying to insinuate that there’s a conflict of interest because he worked for a government agency and Wikileaks leaked documents pertaining to that government agency.

But, like… That would be like saying no judge could oversee the case of someone who attacked a courthouse because they work for the same legal system. That would be a real loophole in the law if by breaking the right ones, you just couldn’t be tried anymore.

Well, time to fill my life with meaningless debauchery, because it’s not like there’s a future to plan for.

Wait, wait, wait… The average middle-class voter who is struggling to get by is starting to turn away from the Tories and their leader’s suggestion is to reduce taxes on the wealthiest people? Not to improve services or perhaps address the issues that drove former conservative party voters to Labour. No. Cutting the taxes of the elite, further reducing funding for services that the majority of voters use or rely on is the obvious answer.

You know… I was the last man to sleep with her.

• A frog, probably.

I also noticed that both here on Lemmy and over on Reddit that there’s been a push of pro-Russian talking points and a huge push towards Islamaphobia for the past few days, starting just before the attacks this weekend.

I understand there’s going to be some natural anger over the attack, but the amount of accounts I’ve seen, especially noticeable here on Lemmy because we just don’t have as many users, who are saying things like, “This is just what Muslims are like,” and, “Western countries accept these kinds of people, so expect them to do the same there,” and other racist bullshit talking points. They’ve also been painting the ongoing conflict as unquestionably one-sided in Israel’s favor.

It’s depressing but kind of to be expected that there’s a psyops campaign going on trying to get people outraged at not just Hamas, not just Palestine, but all of Islam right now while simultaneously trying to paint Ukrainian surrender and pro-Russian propaganda. This horrible act of terror was either in part planned by Russia or at the very least is seen as an easy opportunity to try and weaken Western support of repelling their invasion of Ukraine. Just spending a little time in the wrong circles on social media should make that obvious.

Is it actually reducing harm to fight to the last Ukrainian though?

When Russia is trying to commit genocide against Ukraine? Yes.

One of the things that made me really like Sanders when he was first campaigning for president was when I looked up his record on American war and he had a voting record that tended to follow a quote from him that amounted to something like (paraphrasing), “War should be the last resort, but if a war is started, we need to see it fully see it through.”

It’s not like siding with Ukraine and getting into that conflict is supporting warfare. It’s seeking to prevent warmongers from profiting off a senseless war. The idea that abandoning Ukraine to just be invaded and allowing Russia to get whatever they want by force is an, “Anti-war,” stance is fucking absurd.

I thought Lemmy was supposed to be the best free speech alternative

I don’t think there’s any useful definition of a “good” free speech website. Because everyone’s going to disagree on the criteria of what makes one good. Myself, I like more moderation, but I like that moderation to be held accountable in an attempt to keep the moderation higher quality and honest. Some people see free speech as no moderation, total anarchy, and I hate that, I’ve seen some websites that tried that, it turned into hate speech and revenge porn and other terrible things very quickly.

Twenty tracks? You whippershnappers don’t know how good you got it! When I was growing up, we only had eight!

See, your problem there is having people at your funeral. I’m so lonely, no one’s even going to notice when I’ve died! Ha! Take that!

I don’t really know how you can threaten someone when you need them more than they need you.

If you leave town, where are you going to go? The city doesn’t need you. If you’re not making what you want/need here, go ahead, leave, the city won’t be hurt by it. You will, though. Because you’ll have to pack up your business, set it up somewhere else, and hope that they do the things you want them to. It’ll be expensive for you, won’t mean a thing to the city.

So how is it a threat?

You joke, but I’ve seen those kinds of arguments, especially online.

Some time back, someone argued that global warming was a self-solving problem because the oceans reflect light and heat energy back out into space, so as the earth warms and the oceans rise, the ability to reflect that heat will increase and we could even go back into an ice age because of it.

That is, of course, not really how it’s going to go. Massive ecological collapse and possible human extinction would occur due to the initial warming, first off, even before you get to the arguments about… Everything else at the crux of that.

For a long time, one of the talking points of climate change denial wasn’t that it wasn’t happening but that it was normal for us to go through heating and cooling cycles, so just deal with it and wait it out, we survived the last ice age so we can survive this heat wave, right? But again, that’s mostly bullshit.

If Chicken can be a language, that can be a language!

And I don’t mean the actually useful programming language. I mean the esolang one where the only valid character is Chicken.

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Federal appeals are more difficult and more rare. The state charges he’ll have an easier time appealing against, though. Lots of questions still up in the air about how all that will go, though. Unless he’s barred from office, there’s a chance he does become president again, which would make things incredibly complicated. There’s also the question of him appealing to the Supreme Court and them simply overturning anything they can that’s been brought against him. I find these unlikely, but they’re possible. For the USA, this is the first time someone in that high of an office has gone to trial like this, and we’re going to be having to make some answers on the spot.

Even if he goes to prison, which if he’s convicted there’s a good chance he gets something more similar to house arrest due to his position as a former president, he is 100% not going to be in general population. I believe he’s guilty and hope that if the trial proves that that he’s convicted. But people imagining him in the chow line in an orange jumpsuit are fooling themselves.

Started out as co-workers in a university work-study job, had a short relationship.

She didn’t just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn’t reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it’s a non-issue.

She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that’s why she liked sex when she wasn’t supposed to.

That… That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath…

Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven’t; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I’m being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I’m still living with my folks. Don’t get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I’m fucking around on the internet because I can’t seem to make anything of myself.

He didn’t call us idiots. He called us unempathetic. And I’d say that’s been a fair assessment of a lot of the internet. I know that when I was on Reddit, I’d read a lot of comments that were filled with entitlement, people feeling they were owed something especially if that something was free, and very little empathy. For how much Redditors (and now that many of us have fled to Lemmy to build a new social media life, Lemmings) like to criticize the, “They’re just lazy, I’m really struggling,” mindset, they sure do like to ask for free things but complain if people treat them the same way.

I mean, it is a thing. I’m not saying that you’ll agree that it’s a right thing or that it’s justifiable. I understand arguments against it. But it’s more along the lines of Peter Sunde’s stuff. Piracy which fights for freedom of information, against things like corporate secrets and abuses, things like that. One of the examples of ethical piracy has been using piracy to share news and media with blackout countries, nations that are banned from getting any media that isn’t state approved. I would call that kind of piracy ethical piracy.

Protest piracy is where you pirate something in protest of the people who would otherwise be making a profit off of it. There’s a reason why that’s not under the same umbrella. People can call pirating Adobe products what they want, but it’s not at the same level of trying to effect social change as ethical piracy reaches for.