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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Are we still going to refer to them as Putin’s puppets, when the US has been angling for a while now to become the greatest exporter of alt-right ideology? Doesn’t this detract from the fact that the US isn’t exporting democracy anymore (if it ever did) and is instead exporting its degeneration into whatever Bannon/Trump/Musk/Thiel and others want it to become?

    Maybe calling them Putin’s puppets helps discredit them on US soil, but the rest of us see the US go the way of Russia and China. And a bleak future in which most of us will only get to choose between different flavors of authoritarianism…







  • While he comes off as a jerk, and possibly is one, I can understand the sentiment, having spent a few years of my life among ethnically Chinese people in Asia. There is this drive and aspiration to be recognized by leading brands in the West as equals, perhaps even betters. Due to a history of subservience and shame and a strong nationalistic current seeking to undo that.

    This game is one of the most ambitious and accomplished to come out of China and they’re hungering for that kind of recognition. So it is likely that fans of the game feel it was ‘stolen’ from them and he seems to be responding to that sentiment. To us it looks petty, but to some of the game’s most ardent Chinese fans this may have been an appropriate response. Not sure how this was received in China though, just speculating.






  • Doesn’t the very concept of jury nullification only apply to cases where a crime has already been committed and then a jury is called upon to reach a verdict on said crime? This honestly reads as mental gymnastics. Or perhaps it could be worded better. Do you mean to say that jury nullification will be fine going forward, no matter what the crime, but you still must forbid calls to violence against named or otherwise identifiable individuals or specific groups or people and/or the glorification of violence in general? This would be better wording I think, though still hard to distinguish and enforce consistently. I find the concept of “jury nullification for future crimes” hard to grasp.


  • I wish people in general stopped looking for good guys and bad guys. My maxim as I grow older and weary is everyone is awful, unless proven otherwise. Or, in other words, it’s all geopolitics and a complex web of conflicting interests. Combating factions choose their alliances less on principle and more on what serves their long term goals and immediate tactical aims. In the meantime we are fed whatever narrative paints one or the other side “good” and depending on our politics and possible stake in a conflict convince ourselves that we are “on the right side of history”. But history is largely written by the victor and in hindsight it is always easier to say what was good or bad. In the heat of the moment, when lives, money, and land are at stake, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.


  • Because when US politicians advocate for a single, global market, and a single, global internet, it is with the understanding that US firms and allied parties will dominate the space anyway. When that is no longer the case they get about as nervous as the Chinese got when they went and built the Great Firewall and made a clone of every popular western platform. Now that US/Western dominance is seriously challenged, we are seeing more and more signs of protectionism.






  • Yes I know, when all else fails it’s “what’s good for the community”. Oh well, thank you for bothering to make the case for the ban, I understand your points but really do wish more people saw that the splintering into ever more siloed “communities” where no one is seriously challenged (and consequently the lack of common spaces for exposure to radically different perspectives and the challenging of one’s own) is part of what’s wrong with the world right now.

    The more you hear your own views echoed back at you on a regular basis, the more shocking it becomes when you suddenly read something radically different and the harder it is for you then to come to any sort of rapprochement with the other. This is noticeable everywhere today, left and right, sadly also quite a lot in “liberal” spaces, leading many to think that liberals have become intolerant of anything other than the smell of their own farts. Where is this leading us? Nowhere good I think.

    So perhaps we should seek to challenge bans by default rather than find justification for them. I reflexively tend to scrutinize the censoring of posts and people for that reason. And do wish more ‘heretical’ viewpoints were allowed in here. It’s not like “neocon” (it’s in the name, so hardly a troll) expressed any fringe or criminally insane views or like he attacked other users. Ah anyway, why do I bother I do not know, it’s probably already too late. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to bring the world back from the brink of collapse. It is easier to let it slide.