WatDabney

Wat Dabney is a minor character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie, Jabberwocky.

The protagonist, Dennis (Michael Palin) goes to the city to make his fortune as a cooper. One of the first people he meets there is a legendary cooper named Wat Dabney (“the inventor of the inverted firkin”) who’s been reduced to begging because he’s not a member of the guild that controls the trade.

I first adopted the name on IMDb, back in the late 90s, but retired it when IMDb shut down their general interest forums, and didn’t use it on Reddit. I revived it for Lemmy.

Citizens United was a death sentence for the ideal of the government representing the will of the people.

Trump’s election is the final nail in its coffin. He hasn’t even taken office yet and he’s already brazenly selling influence

And if he and the oligarchs have their way about it, it won’t he long before we won’t even be able to say things like that. Not because the oligarchy will do something so doomed to failure as trying to censor it themselves, but because sites that don’t “choose” to censor whatever they want censored will be banned.

The point of taking down TikTok is twofold. One, they have a Boogeyman they can use to push it through. Two, if they can shut down an app with 170 million users then they can shut down anyone.

Exactly.

They needed a pretense for taking down a social media site in spite of the fact that it’s not violating any existing laws and in spite of widespread opposition to the takedown,and TikTok served both of those purposes.

And now, armed with Supreme Court approval, they can set about barring access to pretty much any site they want, for whatever reason they want, regardless of public opinion.

That’s true, and that’s why so many internet censorship it spying bills are officially to counter pedophiles.

Yes.

But that was just an interim strategy, and could never serve their long-term goal, since all it could allow them to do is to institutionalize the authority to censor in cases of activity already deemed criminal.

The difference with the TikTok ban is that neither TikTok nor its users have been accused of any crime. This ban is being enacted in spite of the fact that there’s nothing criminal about the site, and that’s a new power.

I honestly don’t think it’s trying to soften people up to the government banning social media.

I guarantee that that’s exactly what it’s about.

It’s not a coincidence that all of the domestic social media overlords have already lined up to swear their fealty to Trump (and to hand him big piles of money). They know which way the wind is blowing, and they’re ensuring that they don’t get TikToked.

Pornhub is different though, because they could base it in existing laws barring minors from accessing pornography. It didn’t really establish any new precedents, but instead simply expanded enforcement of existing statutes to the internet.

That’s not to say it was a good thing - it just doesn’t pose the same sort of existential threat that this poses.

The difference here is that there are no existing laws that pertain to TikTok, so it’s not justvthe application of existing law to the internet. This is an entirely new power - the authority to simply pass a law decreeing that a particular site is to be banned in the US, entirely regardless of the legal standing of the site or its content, but solely because those with the authority to do so have decided that that’s what they want to do

No government ever oppresses its citizenry by announcing that they’re setting out to oppress the citizenry.

They always, without exception, do it by first targeting someone the bulk of the populace thinks deserves it, and then only later incrementally expanding their reach.

Whether or not this particular ban is enforced is irrelevant. The point was simply to establish the precedent that the government can restrict citizens’ access to social media.

A government that can ban social media sites is going to base their choices of which ones to ban on their preferences - not yours.

Meta has officially adopted the Musk/Trump conception of free expression - promoting bigotry and hate and silencing dissent.

We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. Of course.

Antisemitism gets harder to resist every day.

It’s really not.

It really is.

It’s mostly nepotism and reproducing the an untouchable ruling class that creates an autocracy.

And all along the way, people protecting the budding autocracy from criticism by diverting attention to the faults of some other system in some other place and/or time.

Put simply; when one system goes too far into autocracy, you should entertain the values of another system.

Um… sure. But that’s neither what you were doing nor what I was criticizing, so it’s not relevant.

Condemning that is approving of the current autocrats.

So… condemning people trying to shift attention away from the current autocrats by bitching about some totally different aurocrats is protecting the current autocrats?

Are you even trying to make sense any more, or are you just desperately stringing together random claims?

But perhaps you’re a particular fan of Trump/Musk.

Just desperately stringing together random claims. Got it.

The road to autocracy is paved with people who meet every criticism of the system with, “But look at how bad this other system is!”

Any system that gives a relative few authority over everyone else will sooner or later become autocratic, simply because that power inevitably comes to be held by those who desire it the most and are most willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold it, and they tend to be greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes.

As far as that goes, the only real differences between systems are the specific hoops the assholes have to jump through.

Broadly, in a capitalist system, political power is awarded to the wealthy, while in a communist system, wealth is awarded to the politically powerful.

So the greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes follow different paths in different cases - accumulating wealth with which to buy access to political power in one or climbing the ranks of the ruling party in order to gain wealth in another - but the overall dynamic is always the same.

And that’s a large part of the reason that I’m an anarchist.

Nobody ever told you that “only” Trump was bad for Palestine.

If you need to lie to promote your viewpoint, then your viewpoint is shit.

No.

This isn’t about Hamas or the hostages - it’s about the Israeli hard right’s desire to utterly destroy the Palestinians and rule over all the land from the river to the sea, and Netanyahu’s need to maintain enough support to stay in office and out of prison.

I am a ghost.

I’m extremely introverted and non-confrontational, so if a situation is too unpleasant or stressful, I vanish. It’s what I’ve pretty much always done. I have no idea how many times I’ve had someone say to me, " Hey - what happened to you? I just looked around and you were gone."

It’s sort of a trap. A lot of it is that, in addition to being introverted and generally non-confrontational, I’m hyper aware of people’s emotions, so if I expect that they’re going to be angry or hurt, I especially don’t want to deal with it. But of course, then I introduce the chance that they’re going to be angry or hurt because I “ghosted” them (or as it was most commonly known before the social media era, I “blew them off”). And yes - I feel bad about that.

All in all though, it’s still generally less unpleasant than the alternatives.

Which neatly sums up why I do not and will not even have a Steam account, but buy many games from GOG.

rogue state

noun

1. A state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.