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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)P
Posts
127
Comments
432
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Yeah. I know 100% what you mean. It is hard to maintain good humor. If it helps:

    1. It's fun to deal with the ones that are doing a really shitty job. I was happy seeing this guy come in and instantly trip over his dick trying to say "all NATO's fault" in this obvious and incompetent manner. I don't think it actually needed debunking really, but maybe a larger number of people laughing at him in the comments will result in a bad performance review or something along those lines.
    2. Don't feel like you need to deal point-by-point with their horseshit. You don't need to be evasive or deceptive or anything, but they don't deserve the courtesy of a detailed and factual counterargument. If you answer one argument, they'll just pretend you didn't and raise another. You'll notice that except for the end, I basically ignored almost everything he said, because it's not like it really needs debunking. I just took the chance to talk about some stuff that counterbalanced their narrative and I felt like talking about.
    3. Don't feel like you need to be polite. I've actually seen some writings that dealing straightforward-factually with this kind of stuff actually is just not effective and more or less gives them a platform, and I can completely believe it. Don't be unhinged or hostile, but also, don't pretend you respect them. The social contract goes both ways, and honoring it with someone who's breaking it is just being a chump and sending the wrong message to people reading.
    4. If they do decide they want to debate, I love to just ask straight questions. I recently got banned again from Hexbear because of some participation that included:

    • Hey, quick question: Why did Russia swear before the invasion that they were not going to invade Ukraine, and any reports of that were just Western lies?
    • Why did they change the goal from “denazification and demilitarization” to “we need to keep all this extra land on the border because it’s ours now and we’ll keep killing people until someone gives up and lets us have it”?
    • Is Russia’s current set of actions more likely to produce the result: More motivation to join NATO by neighboring countries, or less motivation?

    There were a couple of other ones, sort of detail questions related to what we were talking about. They really get irritable when you just ask straight questions that their framework doesn't like the answers to. Zero of my questions got answered even when I pointed out that maybe they had overlooked the question or meant to respond to someone else and politely asked it again, and they accused me of "JAQing off" and said it was a horrible thing to do to ask them these things. (Killing people apparently is okay.)

    Be sarcastic. Be insulting. After all, they are wrong, and they're killing people. I'm not trying to be embittered about it or anything (and sometimes I am not successful in that) but it's okay not to be nice to them.

  • I think this falls into the "never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake" category.

    If they want to fill our channels with random malicious nonsense in service of the idea of killing a bunch of innocent people and taking away their home, and they want to do such a bad job of it that it's transparently obvious horseshit that everyone just laughs at or dunks on... I say welcome. Come on in. Tell us all about your theories, good sir, I can't wait to hear.

  • I don't think anyone is being fooled, based on the speed and unanimity of the downvotes.

  • Well… it’s filled with NATO arms and munitions

    Fun fact: Do you know what the ratio is of money Russia's spent on the war, as compared with Ukraine plus allies?

    It's about 2 to 1. When you factor in PPP, that means in real material terms it is somewhere in the neighborhood of ten to one. Russia has mobilized basically the entirety of its economy to try to win this thing, about half their federal budget every year now. While Ukraine is surviving on occasional drips of Western aid whenever their governments can get roused from their campaign-contribution-induced torpor of corruption to be reminded that there are actual real things happening in the world.

    Basically, it is a war of Russian money, Western technology / intelligence support, and Ukrainian blood. Also Ukrainian ingenuity. Necessity being the mother of invention, Ukraine is probably at the forefront of the world at this point in being able to fight a modern war (meaning a drone war) and produce and strategize based on what's needed for one (meaning drones).

    There's also the significant factor that without Western restrictions being put on Ukraine, stopping them from fighting back in several meaningful ways even to this day, they would have mopped the floor with Russia and been bombing strategic centers deep over the border for years now. Their invasion of Kursk and Belgorod isn't even the main thing, it is being able to blow up strategic centers inside Russia's borders.

    Having fought a country one-twentieth their size, outspending them ten to one, Russia has managed to get stuck on the border for longer than the US's involvement in World War 2 with Ukraine fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

    Think on that for a minute. It is a wonder. There are reasons, of course, mostly having to do with the inherent unfeasibility of a gangster-capitalist state to operate with any significant level of success against actual real challenges. We're about to become very familiar with that, in the US, I am sad to say.

    But not once from the US invading Iraq/Afghanistan. Or England’s occupation of Ireland. Or the Israeli presence in Palestine.

    Yeah I never heard any of those things. It's a wonder. You can look the length and breadth of American political thought, and never find even a single person who thought the Iraq War or the Israeli occupation was anything bad. You would think there would be some kind of dissenting voices somewhere to be found. Hell, you can't even talk about such things on Lemmy, you'll be banned for it.

  • I mean that is one among a few different things that's wrong with his mental model lol

  • I would really encourage the Trump administration to do as much of this as possible.

    Military people can make their peace with malicious people, even ones dangerous to the constitutional order some of the time. And being friendly with incompetents is their daily bread and butter. But asking them to give friendly allegiance to foppishness, I think, will be universally revolting to all, regardless of their political feelings.

  • “We didn’t mean to send you that stupid letter, it was so so stupid, you should have known it was stupid when we sent it to you.”

    • “That sounds like a you problem”
    • “So if we’d agreed you would have said never mind don’t worry about it forget all that?”
    • “Apology accepted. Contact us if you need anything else”
  • I feel like this is the kind of question that needs a whole lot of details before it is answerable.

    Tax fraud? Absolutely fuck not.

    Drunk driving? Probably I would give them a single "Hey next time I find out you're doing that I am calling the cops on you" warning shot.

    Stealing from their company? Depends, what does the company do and who owns it? Again almost certainly not.

    And so on.

  • I feel like you actually probably can drive air into the empty spaces (that's exactly how your lungs work), if you can somehow make a tight enough seal on the person's nipple, but it would be incredibly dangerous because of embolism. Don't do it.

  • Lemmy’s core development team are communists, of a very bizarre and inconsistent type that is openly or semi-openly in favor of massive command-economy-capitalist countries like China and Russia even when they are engaged in imperialist conduct. They’re weird. Idk what’s up with it. A lot of the core historical instances still have that mindset and are sometimes so obnoxious about demanding that everyone else needs to also that they are banned from the more recent more mainstream-thinking instances.

    Generalizations are tough but I think it’s safe to say that 90% of everyone else on Lemmy is some variety of vague-leftist roughly in the mold of Bernie Sanders, which depending on your personal Overton window you may define anywhere from “disgusting liberal who betrayed the movement by voting for Kamala Harris” to “Communist.”

    Hope this helps

  • The scenes I've seen of people around Trump, making sure to kiss his ass and over-emphasize with nervous straight faces what a genius he is and how well things are going, are the stuff of nightmares.

  • In the speech, Kratsios emphasized the importance of American leadership in emerging technologies and criticized regulatory burdens that, in his view, had slowed progress. "We have weighed down our builders and innovators," he said. "But we are capable of so much more."

    "Can we get some comments from the innovators?"

    "No we fired them."

  • Dude I didn't pick this weird pedantic fight and get all upset about what Wikipedia says and what a problem it is. You did. Now that it turned out you were making it up, it's all of a sudden weird for people to care about it. Okay.

  • Wait, so up there it looks like the actual truth is not "Some years later I tried again but you could no longer make changes IIRC. Just checked, info still missing." but in fact that the exact information is already in the article.

    Glad we had this talk lol. I mean it's a pretty trivial thing to get upset about even if it were true, I can somewhat believe that some random person might have reverted your edits for bad reasons, but I am wholly unsurprised to learn that there was no grand conspiracy and the information in the article has been corrected now even though you specifically said that it wasn't.

  • It strongly looks like you're making things up lol

    It is trivial to check what changes someone did or didn't make 10 years ago on Wikipedia, if you know which page of Wikipedia it was on. Which page was it on?

  • What does the article mean “Juniper Networks, despite being a “Good Article”, is also mostly PR”?

    It's all part of their various horseshit attempt at making something which is pretty simple an innocuous into something that it isn't.

    Within the last few days, it looks like someone raised the issue on this guy's page, the arbitration committee is getting in touch with him, and he's saying he'll get back to them. Presumably there's a minor conflict of interest and they'll look over the article and make sure he didn't do anything slanty to it and then tell him to stay away from COI-adjacent articles in the future.

    There's absolutely nothing sinister here, and they are stringing together a bunch of misleading stuff (like "mostly PR") to make a mountain out of a molehill to discredit Wikipedia. I've noticed a bunch of people doing this, presumably there is some organized campaign which actually is sinister in the way they're implying WP is, that is trying to make people think badly of them.

  • Never change, MuntedCrocodile

  • I know it's only vaguely related, since they're not US-funded, but at some point I think it would be hilarious (in a particularly poignant way) if the Lemmy developers' funding got cut off by the process of the explicitly rabid governments they are fans of finally succeeding at destabilizing the friendly Western countries where they live to the point that NLNet wasn't funded anymore. As I understand it, NLNet is already facing some headwinds because the friendly liberal elements in EU politics are getting replaced by the same kind of "fuck everyone just give money to rich people and also anyone who disagrees with me dies" elements that Russia likes to give money and social-media-shilling campaigns to support.

    Surely Russia and China will jump to the front and fund basic infrastructure work for the good of everyone, if that happened. They could count on it happening, instead of having to get jobs.

    Surely.

  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Russia excluded from US tariff list due to ongoing ceasefire negotiations, White House says

    kyivindependent.com /russia-excluded-from-us-tariff-list-due-to-ongoing-ceasefire-negotiations-white-house-says
  • if you assume the network is badly behaved, fedi breaks down. it makes no sense to me that everything is taken for granted, except privacy.

    This is backwards in my opinion.

    What you described is exactly how it works. Everything in the network is potentially badly behaved. You need to put on rate limits, digital signatures for activities back to actors, blocks for particular instances, and so on, specifically because whenever you are talking with someone else on the network, they might be badly behaved.

    In general, it’s okay in practice to be a little bit loose with it. If you get some spam from a not-yet-blocked instance, or you send some server a message which it has a bug and it doesn’t deliver, then it is okay. But, if you’re sending a message which can compromise someone’s privacy if mishandled, then all of a sudden you have to care on a stricter level. Because it’s not harmless anymore if the server which is receiving the message is broken (or malicious).

    So yes, privacy is different. In practice it’s usually okay to just let users know that nothing they’re sending is really private. Email works that way, Lemmy DMs work that way, it’s okay. But if you start telling people their stuff is really private, and you’re still letting it interact with untrusted servers (which is all of them), you have to suddenly care on this whole other level and do all sorts of E2EE and verification stuff, or else you’re lying to your users. In my opinion.

  • I’m pretty sure they do not. However, ActivityPub specifically says that no particular secrecy behavior is defined for even posts with no recipients at all (it’s in a green highlighted note under 7.1 I think). I would interpret that to mean that no particular secrecy behavior is guaranteed for posts without public as a recipient, also.

  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    US revokes all visas for South Sudanese over country’s failure to repatriate citizens

    www.theguardian.com /us-news/2025/apr/06/us-revokes-all-visas-for-south-sudanese-over-countrys-failure-to-repatriate-citizens
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    The Trump Administration Issues Its Next Assault on the Nation’s Public Forests

    insideclimatenews.org /news/04042025/trump-administration-public-forest-emergency/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Senate parliamentarian rules against GOP on California waivers

    www.eenews.net /articles/senate-parliamentarian-rules-against-gop-on-california-waivers/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Suspense mounts at USDA as staff cuts and restructuring loom

    www.eenews.net /articles/suspense-mounts-at-usda-as-staff-cuts-and-restructuring-loom/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Justice Department challenges order on probationary employees

    www.eenews.net /articles/justice-department-challenges-order-on-probationary-employees/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Trump's team advises against calling Putin, NBC reports

    kyivindependent.com /trumps-team-advises-against-calling-putin-nbc-reports
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Democratic attorneys general sue Trump over elections executive order

    www.votebeat.org /2025/04/03/democratic-attorneys-general-sue-trump-executive-order-elections/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    US Senate confirms Trump loyalist to lead Justice Department civil rights unit

    www.reuters.com /world/us/us-senate-confirms-trump-loyalist-lead-justice-department-civil-rights-unit-2025-04-04/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    War-torn and struggling countries among those facing steepest Trump reciprocal tariffs

    www.theguardian.com /us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-us-administration-countries-biggest-rates-china-myanmar-mandalay
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    How the Trump administration is targeting green transportation in blue states

    grist.org /transportation/trump-duffy-department-of-transportation-congestion-pricing-subway-train-new-york-california-dc/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Trump and his family are reaping a fortune from his presidency — starting with cryptocurrencies

    robertreich.substack.com /p/trumps-crypto-inc
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Trump admin aims to undo crackdown on cancer-causing air emissions

    www.eenews.net /articles/trump-admin-aims-to-undo-crackdown-on-cancer-causing-air-emissions/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    USDA asks employees if they want to resign. Again.

    www.eenews.net /articles/usda-asks-employees-if-they-want-to-resign-again/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Doge employee allegedly has history of misogyny, racism and violent outbursts

    www.theguardian.com /us-news/2025/apr/01/doge-employee-misogyny-racism-violence
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Democrats sue Trump over ‘unlawful’ plan to overhaul US elections

    www.theguardian.com /us-news/2025/mar/31/democrats-sue-trump-elections
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world

    The fediverse has a bullying problem

  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Trump gets $100M deal with Skadden law firm amid pressure campaign

    thehill.com /homenews/administration/5220137-trump-skadden-100-million-pro-bono/
  • Trump Watch @lemm.ee

    Trump SEC chair pick vows to target ‘woke’ investing

    www.eenews.net /articles/trump-sec-chair-pick-vows-to-target-woke-investing/
  • World News @quokk.au

    Putin says North Korea, BRICS should join Ukraine ceasefire talks

    www.aljazeera.com /news/2025/3/28/russias-putin-says-north-korea-brics-should-join-ukraine-ceasefire-talks