c/Superbowl
For all your owl related needs!
I won't minimize any current issues, we are in the worst times the majority of people alive now have ever seen by far. But the world and even our own country has been through worse and survived. We aren't in a great depression. We aren't in a dust bowl. We aren't dropping nukes. We aren't lynching. We aren't mass killing workers or non-mainstream political people. We're way too close to many of those things, but all that stuff went on way longer in the last century or so alone than we've seen in our lives.
A year ago, most of us would have likely said we're not great, but we're making progress. I'm not ready to just say all of that is gone just yet. As far as anyone knows, we still have elections and some semblance of a judiciary, as flawed as both may be. We still have at least as many pro-democracy people as we have people in favor of what we have now, same as it's been for the last decade. Myself and many others have been really upset with the creeping power of the presidency for almost the last half a century through R or D presidents.
Again, I don't expect or want anyone to sit back and take abuse from those who are there to serve us. But preemptive attacks and defensive actions aren't the same thing, and the first will get you killed and make it harder for other movements to operate a bit more under the radar so they can build up numbers, support, and resources. Even something like this post is about, it's not my favorite thing, but nobody was hurt, and there weren't really any threats to individuals. But getting comfortable with this stuff only leads to worse things, even if they are justifiable.
The sad part is I'm not sure you ever get rapid societal change without a lot of people on both sides of an issue losing their lives. I'm cool for people here getting people mobilized but not radicalized. Anyone calling us to be violent publicly is just going to get people killed. I don't want to see more homegrown terror in America.
I'd much rather see those willing to wield weapons protecting things like polling places, protests, and the representatives we support. Whitmer's kidnapping plot, Shapiro's home arson, Pelosi's home invasion type events are things where some form of organized watch can try to prevent while looking like the good guys instead of vigilantes.
The increasing calls for physical violence on Lemmy are really getting concerning. I used to frequent the news and politics stuff more often, but lately it feels a bit too hot for me and I just try to add something when there's outright disinformation. I get things are bad for many, but this is a door that can't really be closed once it gets opened. I just want everyone here to be safe and not act recklessly, but some commentary here I feel is testing some boundaries.
Appreciate that! Was good to hear it right from them.
Yes, exactly, and once I read this yesterday I allowed myself to rule out that I was just thinking the worst.
Daniel Bertulis appeared on The Lead, joined by his attorney Andrew Bakaj, and explained the details of how he apparently uncovered a massive amount of missing data from the NLRB following DOGE’s efforts. He ostensibly mocked a White House statement touting the transparency at play, noting that none of the code used by DOGE technicians has been shared publicly.
But the most shocking allegations came from Bakaj, who not only claimed that accounts based in Russia were using newly created DOGE usernames and passwords to access sensitive data, but also directly tied the effort to Elon Musk and his Starlink concerns, which has a relationship with the Kremlin.
“There are two data points that I wanna point out that should give everybody pause,” Bakaj said. “The first thing, what Dan witnessed was that within 15 minutes of DOGE employees creating user accounts, i.e. Usernames and passwords, within 15 minutes of those accounts being created, somebody or something from Russia tried to log in with the right username and right passwords — that is to say — the right credentials. And that happened over 20 times.”
“The second data point, which is really critical, is that DOGE has also been using Starlink as a means to exfiltrate data,” he continued. “What that means is that, from our understanding, Russia has a direct pipeline of information through Starlink, which means that anything going through Starlink is going to Russia.”
I think I got this link from some Lemmy post yesterday, and I don't like that I don't know the source, but it seems to fit what is being talked about in regular mainstream reporting.
Almost had me excited there until I tried to look to see if they named who they were going to primary... Source
The military budget doesn't seem to have gone up by anything that hasnt been trending the last decade or 2, and despite all the talk about going to fight other countries, I don't think there is enough support for anything other than Iran, and even that I dont think would be done directly by the US military.
I do worry more about a more internally agro surveillance state, but with facial recognition and a camera on every doorbell, I think we've already long traded privacy for security. I keep learning about previous rebellions and having covert places to gather, plan, and stage have really been crucial, and I don't know how one does that in the modern world.
Well, username checks out.
But I enjoyed going back and listening to the Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff 2 parter about the hand-in-hand relationships between violent and non-violent protesting throughout the civil rights movement.
I'm thinking you will be able to find many more people willing to do non-violent and legal or civil disobedience type activities than you will people willing to face jailtime or death. But at the same time, there needs to be appreciation for people who will get their hands dirty to keep the peaceful co-protesters safe. It only takes so many armed people to be a deterrent, for example.
To dismiss one group or the other overlooks the historic contributions of many people, and who's going to be thrilled about a takeover by any group of solely violent and/or criminalistic individuals with no peaceful support? I don't want to live under left wing authoritarianism any more than the right wing variety.
I'm possibly more worried about what he didn't destroy at this point. What's gone will at least be rebuilt largely from scratch by people that care about restoring those institutions.
My huge worry now is what backdoors are now in systems like social security that impacts us all and we may not find out about for a long time. How much identity theft and scamming will go on now that outside actors likely have access to some or all of that data?
No matter what it is you're doing, I'm sure it's important to your clients. With the news this week that all the government data is going over Starlink and likely collected by Russia, I'm waiting for a waterfall of things like identity theft and all sorts of scams and who knows what else, you may be even more important. You're still in a position to help people, and that's something very important in unsure times.
Give 'em hell! 🔥
Thank you for what you do.
I read your other reply to this thread and appreciated it.
It gets frustrating to see people say "well just do the questionable things they do back to them and ignore the rules like they do." I get the desire to give them a taste of their own medicine, but building a lefty authoritarian regime isn't any more desirable to me than a righty one.
We don't all need to become radicals, but we don't need to roll out the carpet to those trying to twist the legal and political systems for corrupt purposes.
So what would move the needle in your view?
How does one judge what is false hope in a struggle that never ends?
There have been countless people through history that have been way more brutal, violent, and irrational than probably anyone alive now. But we as humans have survived as a whole. Some tyrannical rules have carried on for multiple generations of victims, but they all end. People will never get over being oppressed. A lot of successful control is done by people who learn to balance exploiting people with giving them enough to make it not feel worth it.
In America, 2016-2020 was tempered by enough rational people, but I don't think people on either side would say 2025 feels the same as the previous term did. This is pure recklessness and disregard for order, and that is going to be harder and harder to justify to the masses. Actions already bring taken haven't had enough time for the repercussions to be felt yet for most people they will affect. Red voters in blue states will suffer. Farmers will suffer. The unskilled and uneducated will suffer. They won't be any happier being played for fools than anyone else would be. You can already see pretty hardcore Repubs asking if giving complete control of tariffs to this guy was a bad idea. Hardly any have even gone into effect as scheduled and people have seen there is no logic to it and it will hurt every group of people.
Having 1% of the population be satisfied with the current status quo is unsustainable. That doesn't mean life may not suck for the next 4 or longer. If you were a modern Repub, you may have thought life sucked since Reagan, Nixon, or Lincoln. But they persisted. And now that the tide has turned, now we have to keep doing our thing until our vision of order is achieved. And we won't even always know what that even is.
Would you be happy now if we went back to how things were under Biden? We probably would have been if the last 3 months hadn't happened. But we still had everything in place to allow an administration like this to happen. And now who know what hasn't been compromised by Musk now at this point. So I don't think we can "just go back" even if every MAGA person vanished into the ether. But we can make tomorrow a little bit better than today. And when you set realistic goals, you can find hope, and sometimes an opportunity will present itself to take a bigger slice back than you expected, and you will be ready for it because you aren't mired in nihilism.
You're allowed to feel beaten, tired, and depressed, and you can and should discuss that with people, but seeing every comment on all the threads be marked by comments of hopelessness is just not great for anything. You guys all have good things to say, and I like when that feels like the overall vibe of the threads.
I'm glad to see your original comment. There is a lot of pessimism going around and it feels like a guy spitting on a forest fire to try and put it out. But we won't get through this in one dramatic event. There's got to be a ton of this little stuff first. We've watched countless other judges just give in, but this one said, nah, do it right or don't do it. Every bit of resistance adds up. Authoritarianism only stays strong when people don't do the most basic of things to oppose it.
I'd like to see less people adding the statements of hopelessness to their comments though. These people have no divine right to run our countries, and we don't need to accept their injustice. We're each welcome to express our tolerance of their actions to the extent we feel comfortable doing. To some that will be just saying no to illegal or unjust things. Some people will discover direct action. Some will be the protection for those that can't or won't take a more aggressive position. But there is a role for everyone to take if we want to change what we have right now.
Even after something like John Brown's rebellion attempt, it took a long time for anything to come of that extreme event, but it had to start somewhere, and we can all be a spark of rebellion in our own social circles.
Just following the boss's example...
Donald Trump is facing backlash after he was seen giving a thumbs-up and smiling while posing for photos at Arlington National Cemetery. The ‘controversial’ gestures were made at the graves of soldiers who were killed during the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
I get what you're saying. I've made that mistake before.
We were a remote team and never even got a new manager when the old one left, and me and the supervisor are friends IRL.
Good times.
I'm not a programmer, but I learned how to write a number of Excel macros to automate repetitive and tedious tasks.
There were quite a number that really saved a ton of time, but the best were a pair took about 3 full days work for 3 or 4 people and made it into 10 minute jobs for 2 people.
It freed up so much time every month, and the job went from miserable and error prone to being much more reliable and let us spend time improving related processes rather than trudging through piles of data to get it formatted and sent to the right people.
The It Could Happen Here podcast just discussed why people like Elon have been trying to present themselves as gamers.
They state video games are played by 3 billion people, and gaming generates more revenue than movies, tv, and music combined. It is a huge, untapped group of people that is misunderstood by most politicians.
People like Musk of Sam Altman present themselves as gamers to try to get the support/money/etc of this massive group of people. It's also a way to spread a narrative within a group that will fly under the radar of politicians.
GamerGate showed the power of a potential stoking of the fire of this group of otherwise unrelated individuals.
Exposing Elon as the fake he is in this arena takes away his power within that group. He is a poser, so it isn't hard, but it cuts him off of an avenue of power he's wishing to grasp and manipulate.
SS numbers seemed compromised enough pre-Musk. I feel we should all get a new one that isn't just tossed blindly onto any form we have to fill out on a daily basis.