“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • China has executed 11 members of the notorious Ming family criminal gang, who ran mafia-like scam centers in Myanmar and killed workers who tried to escape, Chinese state media reported on Thursday.

    The Ming family was one of the so-called four families of northern Myanmar — crime syndicates accused of running hundreds of compounds dealing in internet fraud, prostitution and drug production, and whose members held prominent positions in the local government and militia aligned with Myanmar’s ruling junta.

    Still 100% against state-sanctioned murder and would’ve preferred life in prison, but I can’t shed any tears. Apparently Wikipedia has a whole article on scam centers in Myanmar for further reading.


  • More established Human Rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have refrained from reporting total death counts amid the uncertainty caused by the internet blackout.

    That’s fine, but they have been abundantly clear that there are ongoing country-wide massacres. HRW ten days ago, for example:

    In the capital, Tehran, videos show a heavily militarized response to the protests as they grew. Human Rights Watch verified videos that began to circulate on January 11 of body bags and bodies piled up in and around the Forensic Diagnostic and Laboratory Center in Kahrizak, south of the capital. The bodies were placed there for families to identify their loved ones. Human Rights Watch counted at least 400 bodies visible in several videos from that site alone. This number is an undercount, as bodies were piled on top of each other, making counting difficult.

    Witnesses also said that many bodies were at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery Complex, 600 meters from the Kahrizak morgue. One person who went to identify the body of a loved one on January 10 said: “When we got close to the [large] halls, we saw bodies piled on top of bodies. They were in body bags, and some had tags with identification details. From the size of the halls, I could estimate that between 1,500 to 2,000 bodies were held there.” The witness said that more bodies were arriving by refrigerated trucks in the late afternoon when they were leaving the cemetery.

    I think based on what you wrote that you do actually care about Iran’s civilians and denounce their massacre by Khamenei’s regime but don’t want fascists to use it as a pretext for invasion, so I assume you can, in good faith, acknowledge that this BBC News article isn’t just “manufacturing consent” and that civilians really are being murdered by the thousands by an authoritarian, theocratic regime.








  • The post is just an ad disguised as a guide

    Jack Nicholson nodding GIF

    That said:

    its obvious they want to be like google but with “privacy” as a gimmic because its only private until they get a government order telling them to do something to unmask a user or monitor an email.

    Besides the fact that Proton is based in Switzerland where government warrants aren’t issued willy-nilly, please learn how the mathematics behind encryption works – or, if not, at least trust that it does. For emails that are sent E2EE, Proton can only have garbled data that requires a key they don’t have.

    You’re just constantly talking out your ass, and I have no idea why; it’s so unearned. Like I’m not going to debate you on whether ads or corporations are good because a) I broadly agree and b) that’s just, like, our opinions, man, but then you just say shit that’s so demonstrably untrue that all I can think is: “I fucking hate what this decade has done to people.”


  • Before I address the substance: that’s not what an ad hominem is in the context of an argument. I’d already 100% finished attacking the substance of their argument. An ad hominem would be if I fallaciously appealed to a personal characteristic (real or otherwise) to attack an argument of theirs. “You’re wrong because you’re a dipshit”.

    Anyway: man, I dunno. It’s 2026, and I’ve gotten really fucking sick of being unilaterally bound by etiquette when the bullshit asymmetry principle and the Dunning–Kruger effect are being stretched to their limits by insufferable, insolent shitheads who’ve unburdened themselves of critical thinking and assume having a platform to the entire world makes them qualified to say anything about everything (I can fall into this trap too, but holy shit sometimes).

    I was still more polite than they were, still exercised more critical thought than they did, and still addressed the substance, and that’s fine enough by me not to tone police myself.


  • but i guess thats why I don’t work in marketing

    Yeah, I guess it is, because this article works in Proton’s favor on multiple levels:

    • Plenty of Proton users have switched over from Gmail, still have their old account, and still, even with forwarding, occasionally need to use those old addresses.
    • People who search for or are sent a guide who’ve never or rarely heard of Proton might end up on their site and read a guide that lambasts Google and its usage of AI.
    • Meanwhile, Proton’s alternative product is being advertised everywhere on the page outside the guide and even is advertised within it.
    • These guides are going to exist anyway (many, in fact). You’re acting like this is some extremely niche thing users might want to do. Having your own guide but poisoned with your marketing when you’re the underdog is a sound idea.
    • This gives a benevolent image of “Good Guy Proton” who just wants to keep people’s data private regardless of business – and a “Bad Guy Google” image because it’s apparently so dire that their competition has to do this.
    • Consumers becoming more privacy-conscious generally is a boon long-term for businesses like Proton.

    You’re so smarmy about this but just come off as a complete dipshit who gave this two seconds of thought.