Intralexical@lemmy.world

Twitter helped create ISIL, and also POTUS45. When actual autocracies see people even trying to organize on Twitter, they simply ban the whole site anyway. And it also played a major role in the Arab Spring, which while originally talking about high ideals like democracy, liberalisation, and human rights, is these days mostly notable for having ruined several countries for a generation.

In fact, that seems to be the trend: Twitter is very good at making its users feel like they're organizing and making changes in the world, when in reality all that is being accomplished is/was inflating their own stock price and throwing outrage around with neither factual context nor a long-term plan to turn it into meaningful positive change. People were able to effect social change before Twitter, but they didn't do it because they saw somebody's sarky hot take for five seconds right before getting their dopamine hit with the "Like" button and then scrolling past it; they did it because they got sick of the way things were. The public-facing data should be kept around for historians and the rest of the curious, but Twitter was always primarily a predatory ad marketplace that gained relevance by being useful for propaganda, and we'll all be better off with it gone.

EDIT: Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him. But he's done it as a petulant, self-destructive manchild, not as some scheme to stifle public discussion— Twitter was already stifling public discussion, just because of what it is.

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…Am I not allowed to use "y'all", north of the 49th parallel? Do we have to bring back "thou" so "you" can be plural again? Or is this part of the Quebecois plot to force everyone to parler en français donc nous pouvons utiliser "vous"? C'est bien, anyway, j'suppose.

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…That's a salt, though, right?

If you're counting non-NaCl salts as answers, then basically any "mineral" our body needs would probably be delivered at least partly in salt form. Just reading off some multivitamins here:

Calcium Carbonate
Chromium Chloride
Cupric Sulfate
Potassium Iodide
Ferrous Fumarate
Magnesium Oxide
Manganese Sulfate
Sodium Molybdate
Sodium Selenate
Zinc Oxide

(I haven't fully checked all of these are salts— But I mean, a lot of of them are blatantly chemical analogues of stuff that definitely is salt (E.G. "Potassium Iodide" vs. "Sodium Chloride"), plus they're metals bonded to ionic groups so they're definitely not alloys or covalent molecules or ceramics.)

This is probably because in order for our body to absorb stuff, it basically has be water-soluble, which means salts work quite well.

When eating real food (plants, animals, and fungi), I assume a lot of this won't be in salt form, but rather it will mostly be bound up in proteins and DNA and such. For example, iron should be primarily in hemoglobin instead of ferrous fumarate. But some of it, for example the potassium, will definitely be technically in the form of dissolved salts/minerals in the fluids inside the food.

You can of course also rearrange the compounds around. For example, this can of Windsor-brand "salt free salt substitute" I have here further lists:

Potassium Chloride
Calcium Silicate
Magnesium Carbonate

You'll note that these are some of the same components as in the list above, just a different combination. I'm pretty sure any ionic mineral that includes at least one ion that our body needs technically counts as "food", as long as the other half isn't poisonous— They should be basically the same when they dissolve in the water in our stomachs anyway.

Meats can also be preserved by adding nitrates and nitrites to it, though technically I guess that's more of a likely-carcinogenic additive than part of the "food".

Fun fact: Your body sorta knows when it's low on minerals, and will want to start eating dirt and rocks in order to make up for it! Over 100 different types of primate do it too. So in that case, you could probably argue that plain rocks and soil literally are food, in that they provide vital nutrients the body needs and that your brain is smart enough to know that. …These days it's apparently considered a mental disorder, but I swear it made much more sense back when the likeliest thing you were going to eat was some mud, rather than lead-contaminated radioactive refrigerants or whatever it is we've surrounded ourselves with.

Enjoy, also, this lovely video from a chemistry Youtuber and his friends taste-testing which alkaline-chloride salt tastes the best!

I am not a doctor. Don't go around eating rocks unless you're a bird or some other type of dinosaur.

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forced to register as a sex offender under some American laws.

the GOP would have to have feel shame and/or have honor to hold her accountable.

…Has the state of New Rome/South Ontario deteriorated to such an extent that your political parties now have direct executive control or veto over the executive aspects of law enforcement?

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It turned out to be nine pendants, three rings and 10 gold pearls in what was described as the country’s gold find of the century.

Huh. I knew gold is one of the few metals that you can find in pure elemental form in the Earth's crust, but I had no idea it was already forged into pendants and jewelry and stuff! Geology really is fascinating.

Hey, would you look at that? This Lemmy thread is on the first page of Google search results about this.

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I’ve been telling people for years that the entire 21st century is at risk of being a lost century. Even personally I can’t guarantee my data will be with me 20 years from now even though I back it up. If you care about a photo or document, print it and throw it it a box. As I get older I find more of an obsession with physical media from a preservation point of view. Because I know my books and pictures will be around 50 years from now. Digital files not so much.

LOCKSS and KISS, though. Flash chips don't last forever but are pretty durable, and so are optical media as long as they're the right material. SSDs decay and HDDs fail, but for magnetic platter media even if the head or motor crashes there's always the old magnetic microscope in a pinch. USB's not going anywhere, and if you have four or five copies that you don't completely neglect and don't store in the same physical place, presumably you'll have the chance to notice and take corrective measures if any of them start failing or are at risk.

I don't actually know that an individual book or picture will still be around in 50 years; Fire, flooding, insects, acidic paper, low-quality ink maybe— Digital stuff's fragile, but so is physical stuff. Stick it in the attic, and the heat'll speed up any chemical reactions and probably make it cozier for insects; Stick it in the basement, and the condensation will get you mildew and rot. By contrast, having a flash drive accidentally survive a trip through a washer and dryer is a pretty common occurrence, and I've yet to lose a drive even with that level of negligence. Material compatibility's one of the very most basic parts of a set of very precise manufacturing techniques, tin whiskers seem pretty rare these days, the really scarily insidious stuff like hydrogen embrittlement is super improbable, and most biological forms of decay haven't adapted to eating cured epoxy and monocrystalline silicon yet.

At least I sorta know how a flash cell or hard drive platter is meant to be structured; Who knows what weird organic reactions and unstable or slowly diffusing molecules are happening in the pile of chemical pigments on a sheet of likely-acidic bleached cellulose and cheap ink or toner, and whether it will still be legible to human eyes in however many years? Plus, a printed photo or document starts fading the very instant it's created, and it gets a little worse every time you touch it with sweaty human hands or look at it while exhaling moist human breath and corrosive enzymatic saliva droplets under a white LED lamp or G-type star shooting out ionizing UV rays. Digital failures tend to be catastrophic, but at least up until the moment it fails, you can make sure that it is the exact same picture or text— And you can make many, many copies very cheaply, all of them very physically durable compared to paper, and know that they are all the exact same picture and text.

That said, I absolutely agree with your overall assessment that most of the information in the early 21st century, including most of the public Internet/WWW, most likely either will be or already is… Maybe not technically lost, per se, given how much caching and saving happens on private clients, but certainly rendered inaccessible.

Ideally I'd really love to see a return of microfiche, actually, using modern polymers and metallization. I've been meaning to look into that for a while now. At a reasonable scale for optical viewing, you could fit… much, much more content than you might expect, and do it several times over, in an entirely reasonable number of pages. Your comment actually spurred me to finally think of a practical way of printing that— for years before, I'd been trying to idly figure out a process based on photomasks and nanoparticles suspended in resin, which had always felt like a very messy and tricky idea, but I just thought of another idea– So thanks for providing some inspiration there.

I'm having difficulty finding a source because the information environment is thoroughly saturated on this topic. But IIRC, this has been tried before. There was a study where people who were thorough Trump supporters, the whole nine yards, when made to roleplay a mock jury and presented with the body of evidence available to the researchers at that point on one of Trump's crimes, still nonetheless felt they had no choice but to face a reality that they didn't want to believe.

Narcissists and liars thrive when they can dominate the narrative, and flounder when they can't. The Court system is designed around that. Hopefully it's up to the task.

"The grace of God knows no bounds. But my mercy has some practical limitations."

To zoom out even more: It's just one more incident showing how fragile investor-sustained digital information systems are.

Every website that came before the current crop of mega-scale privacy-invading behemoths also failed, and took down all their user data and history with them. Why would anyone expect Twitter to be any different?

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Eh. This is on us. URL shorteners and Twitter in particular have always been scarily brittle and opaque,. With nobody actively maintaining the data, why would you think that it would be around forever?

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Regardless of age, I think you could probably argue that the small, glowing rectangle in your palm is an inferior reading and dining experience compared to an actual menu.

That's not even to mention the unholy abomination of a tech stack that a system like this would be— Camera, QR decoder, web browser, WiFi/cellular, their web server— That signal might travel hundreds of miles to your ISP, their host, and then back— Probably a couple layers of outsourcing/contracting/helper apps they used to set it up— Though it's apparently normal to take all that for granted these days, it's still sorta ridiculous.

Ugh. This "global town square" nonsense needs to die.

Twitter's business was selling ads. They don't give a flying festerooni about fostering a healthy public discourse. Nearly every part of the technical and UX design was actively hostile to "the people" being able to express themselves in a meaningful way— The entire premise was a character limit that while fun also made it literally impossible to provide meaningful context or nuance to anything, and whether you were just scrolling or trying to reply to people, you never got to see anybody else's honest opinions either but instead you were fed a carefully algorithmically curated drip of out-of-context ragebait and feelgood fuzzies designed only to keep you stimulated enough to keep on scrolling so they could report a higher number to investors in their next quarterly report and sell you to more ads.

The entire place was always an artificial environment designed to prey on and monetize your attention span; Unless you were replying to somebody you knew, it was never a place for any kind of authentic interaction, much less some kind of grandiose "global town square" that "gave power to the people".

Twitter may have given certain individuals the tools at some points to trigger positive change. The insulin example was probably the best-case-possible outcome from Musk's fumbling of the verification system, but it was an accident. And in the meantime, when Twitter does get used deliberately, it has spawned a terrorist group that has murdered and enslaved thousands of people, turbocharged the decline of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world towards either autocratization or polarized paralysis, and fueled many, many actual full-blown civil wars. (This is what happens when your revolution isn't built on solid foundations.) Plus, you know, all the harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, political interference, privacy concerns, mental health effects, and actual bots used by malicious actors (which reputable sources tend to estimate at tens of millions in number).

Twitter's a corporation. They never cared about being a "town square", only about being seen as such by users so they could line their own pockets. And Elon Musk is just an idiot. He's not some scheming genius (though he clearly tries to be); he's the same as any rich idiot discovering the hard way that no amount of ego will make up indefinitely for lack of competence.

It's just the way they are, no silly conspiracies or battle between good and evil required. Twitter's amoral, rather than immoral, and Musk is immoral, but it's in a flailing self-destructive way rather than a conniving Machiavellian way. They're acting out their nature, and we get caught up in it.

How many actual terrorist groups were we going to let this corporation create in their pursuit for profit before finally admitting that maybe the entire idea was bad from the start? Currently, the immoral idiot is destroying both his own credibility and also the amoral corporation for us all, and really, this is probably almost the best possible outcome.

Apologies for the Facebook link

Equivalent content from first four search results for "Trae Crowder Lauren Boebert":

Twitter.

Youtube. (Longer.)

Facebook. (Landscape.)

TokClockTikTok.

::: spoiler Youtube automatic transcription. Click to expand:

y'all every time I hear something else
about Lauren bobert I've become more and
more convinced that we somehow went to
high school together you know like I
know this person man I do because see
I'm of the Whiskey Tango persuasion and
as such I know another trash monster
when I see one okay I mean you know it's
not like she tries to hide it she just
got kicked out of a theater in Denver
for vaping and hollering stuff you know
my fellow trailer Americans I ask you
who Among Us right I mean we do that we
do you know get a little too excited at
a public event start cussing in front of
the eight-year-olds then acting dignant
when the bouncer shows up but what is it
illegal to have a good time now I
thought this was America right I know
I've been there myself I have now
granted I wasn't a congressperson at the
time I was 22 Hammer drunk and the
Titans were losing again but still I've
been there now but I'm just saying
bobert checks so many red ass boxes it's
insane you know like she was born in
Florida aka the Fertile Crescent of
crazy crackers right to attain mom natch
she grew up on welfare and food stamps
she dropped out High School when she
herself got knocked up now that baby's
having a baby so she's a 36 year old
mammal she married then divorced a guy
who wouldn't stop pulling his dick out
in public she's always talking [&nbsp;__&nbsp;]
about having a gun in her purse and she
has an ongoing feud with the other
craziest [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] in town that is some top
shelf trashery right there y'all like
you just know she claims her Grandma's
one-quarter Cherokee right you just know
it and I'm saying all that makes me wish
that I could root for this person kinda
I do you know like if she was out here
actually standing up for the little guy
taking the elites down a peg Reed and
stuff knowing facts [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] like that I'd
be all for it I'm like hell yeah finally
some representation right but she's not
no bobert's dedicated her life to being
wrong out loud every time she talks it's
like the chat GPT of harmful ignorance
she outwardly hates other marginalized
groups she screws over our own people by
trying to take away the same government
benefit programs that kept her alive as
a child Lord I cannot stand a ladder
puller y'all drives me crazy around like
I'm saying I don't I don't hate Lauren
bobert because she's white trash I hate
her because she's a piece of [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] right
and I know some of y'all are going to
hear that and be like well that's a
little redundant but it's not it's
really not okay some of the most genuine
kindest most empathetic people I've ever
known were trailer babies and an
affinity for Mountain Dew and the early
works of Limp Biscuit does not change
that fact okay this country would do
well to have a chamber full of them but
alas it is not to be no instead we're
stuck with boberts and bobert is just
another loudmouth vindictive [&nbsp;__&nbsp;] who
somehow took all the wrong lessons away
from her life and now spends her time
spewing misplaced rage and making us all
look bad it's a damn shame
what's up YouTube back with more in just
a second but I wanted to let you know
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what's up YouTube we're back hope you
didn't mind that ad too much this I was
thinking I was trying to think like do
we have any good you know like trailer
trash representation in Congress you
know and I couldn't I figured I might be
forgetting somebody I tried to Google it
but that's hard if you Google Congress
and trash you mostly just get a bunch of
articles about either Republicans being
called trash or Republicans being mad
that they were called trash you know or
like journalistic socioeconomic you know
studies about how it's bad to call
people trash which I firmly disagree
with look I mean as long as you're trash
you can call people track anyway made it
hard to come up with any good results
and I might be forgetting somebody but I
was thinking I don't know who we have we
need some representation in there at
first I thought it was fetterman you
know that one of the reasons I love
fetterman so much is I was like this is
one of my people right here looked it up
still think Federal is great but like
his daddy was rich he's from an affluent
suburb he went to Harvard all this stuff
it's actually kind of typical
senatorship but I but I thought about it
you know what no I don't care I'm
anointed again he's honorary trash all
right look he's earned it he's not he's
done all that Real Deal Blue Collar
working class stuff you got all them
tattoos he looks like he wrestles at the
county fair right he's always wearing a
hoodie and cargo shorts the official
attire of Burley winter time trash
everywhere all right he's one of us
we're claiming him okay that's why I
decided we're claiming John Federman
whether he likes it or not he's trash
now but in a good way the good kind you
know what I'm saying he's a trash
Champion that's what he is trash
champion John Federman put that on a
sign anyway
thank y'all for being here I appreciate
it I'm gonna put these little uh icons
up on the screen here get you uh check
out the special if you haven't or
whatever this video is it should be
funny so watch it also subscribe to the
channel it's one of the other circles
and the main circle from my perspective
it takes you to trackrider.com where you
can see my tour dates you can come see
me do stand-up comedy live you can also
pre-order my book around here and Over
Yonder coming very soon a funny travel
guide I wrote with Corey Forster but
mostly come see me but the main thing is
you keep watching these silly things and
I'll keep making them I love you like
chicken see you bye

:::

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There’s a slim chance someone with a regular American flag isn’t a nationalist twat.

Y'all should really reclaim that. It's a good flag, and it's supposed to mean some things that are actually quite nice.

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Usually rated "Gold" or "Platinum" on AppDB:

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=12274

Platinum: "Applications which install and run flawlessly on an out-of-the-box Wine installation"
Gold: "Applications that work flawlessly with some special configuration"

Click on a version. Apparently it works perfectly, but you need to winetricks corefont, vcrun6, speechsdk, and sapi for the initial install.

Honestly, I'm glad to see the EU and its constituent countries realize it needs to be able to assert itself without counting fully on the US.

Granted, I don't have to live in the US myself, so… Sorry about that.

TAPR or CERN OHL, probably— Kit cars do already exist, though are apparently aimed at hobbyists, and usually just partial cosmetic customizations. "Metal box on wheels with motor" ain't exactly rocket science, although quality could be challenging and that's especially important when it comes to safety.

That said, surely the production costs of modern vehicles needed to do their basic job— Efficient-ish and safe-ish transportation from point A to point B— Can't possibly be worth their increasingly inflated costs? There's probably something to be said about the marketability of a sub-$10,000 basic OHL car that you can choose to scratch build or kit-build or buy fully built.

I agree, but I don’t see the point in this context?

I think they meant Musk thought managing development of the Twitter software would be easier than it was, given his prior… Involvement with Tesla and SpaceX.

I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software.

It was the circus, not "our global town square".

https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/mLv9uIQ1vO

That just redirects to thread 16j21jg. They're generating opaque unique IDs so they can track permalinks now?

For example there is no proper pdf reader that can sign a pdf and add or remove a page.

Xournal++ should be a proper PDF reader that can sign a PDF and add and remove pages. Haven't tried doing the latter personally though. It looks a bit old and might be hard to find, but it's always worked suspiciously fine for me and is still in active development.

The "Adobe Acrobat" brand apparently also has a web app for signing PDFs. This is like, the first web search result for "PDF signing".

I've also tried Inkscape import as vector and then reexport, which works fine for visually signing single pages. Just make sure you render the text to paths on import, instead of converting them to SVG text— And don't actually do this, because it's kinda dumb, so just use Xournal++ or the Adobe website instead, but there are options.

Granted, depending on how your experience with Xournal goes, these options are indeed not as convenient or easy as they should be.

Web3 is really helping linux out.

No! This term refers to, like, three three different things already, all of which have largely been either practical failures or grifts. Prescriptivism is usually just pedantry, but HTML5 web apps aren't even on that inauspicious list.

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Welcome to Cascadia, land of trees, salmon, and hydroelectric dams.

"Science" ≠ Technology!

If you give them the technology without giving them stuff like empiricism and cultural acceptance of critical thinking, they'll just worship it like any other faith, and stagnate for the next thousand years.

Inversely, you don't even need to give them too much technology, because if you just give them stuff like evidence-based medicine, the printing press, rigorous experimentation and reproducibility, and a couple institutes dedicated to the craft, plus a couple starting points, then they'll figure it on their own soon enough (assuming an overall stable civilization).

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…I really wish I had a magnetic microscope.

They are branded, so effort would have to be put into making them appear to be authentic.

Not really. Branded QR codes are just regular, unbranded QR codes but messed up— You basically just stick the the branding right on top, and then let the built-in error correction take care of the rest. Should take all of 5 minutes to set up, or maybe 20-30 if you wanna be a stickler for detail.

And I think it’s improbable that staff wouldn’t notice.

If I were working at the restaurant— I think I'd notice after a couple weeks— They'd have impunity up to then— But even then, I'd just assume the management switched it out or patched it up because they wanted to change the link for metrics or messed up something backend or something like that.

The staff is paid to wait tables, not to audit cybersec from the perspective of the customers.

And again, the roi for the bad actor seems incredibly poor.

Probably highly variable.

If the restaurant has a lot of patrons that are wealthy and technologically illiterate, with banking apps on unupdated phones with known exploits, then you'd think "ROI" is basically everything in the bank accounts of the patrons.

Same if the online menu includes online payment options for whatever reason.

Aligning power over systems with stackholders impacted by those systems is usually good for avoiding hostile incentives which result in hurting people, yes. Plus to some it might axiomatically be morally good.

Nissan also said it collected information on “sexual activity.” It didn’t explain how.

Nissan doesn’t provide a detailed explanation of how the data is collected, but they say that the source they collect the data is "Direct contact with users and Nissan employees," Whatever that means.

Based on this information, I can only infer that the Nissan sales handbook has a section on using seduction for particularly difficult and/or hot potential customers.

…I used to work at a pizza shop. Oh, so that's why we got so many orders from the local Nissan dealership!

This thread has, predictably, devolved into a hugely disrespectful exchange given the linked post.

But as an aside, I shudder to think of trying to design an additively manufactured part that would reliably contain a propellant blast using anything less than an industrial $100k-$1m DMLS or at least really really good SLS machine. If the goal is to harm somebody using a 3D printer, you'd probably be better off bashing them over the head with it.

Donate to the Internet Archive, y'all.

Ideally you duct-tape a grenade to each of your "decoys" so it doesn't really matter either way which target they choose to prioritize

Why would they want you to have a working program? How does that help sell you more stuff?

A chance to change, sure. But it would be a mistake to pretend it's not also a chance to kill again. And it turns out people actually can't change, meaningfully, without remorse for their past deeds— And you can't ever actually know whether they feel that. Mercy feels very good until you realize ten years later how much pain you could have avoided otherwise.

Also, you're presenting a false dichotomy between "Set them loose on the world" versus "Isolation and torture for the rest of their life".

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Monarchs cares about power. Give the ruler some more metallurgy or siege engines first, so you have their favour. Then split the Royal Court's physicians into two groups, one that washes their hands, and one that doesn't. Do the same for leeches, bloodletting, hydration, etc. It'll be hard to argue with the resulting death rates. And in the long run, you'll have a much bigger impact by introducing empricism/A-B testing/evidence-based medicine than any one thing specific thing you could have done.

C'est un trait quebecois, je pense.... les cowboys fringants la dit ("anyway"), donc je ne sais, c'est probablement ok.... J'ai entendu "j'suppose" avant aussi, vraiment, je pense..? Est-ce que ça n'est pas comme "I'spose" en anglais? Reverso a beaucoup des examples pour "j'suppose", quand même. (Je ne suis pas quebecois ou francophone, si tu ne peut pas voir pour quelque raison; je suis un idiot anglophone.)

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Other than the 3.5mm still being universal basically everywhere except for phones, it's also universal in a purist physical sense.

Any old piece of scrap copper wire connected to a 3.5mm jack, wrapped vaguely into a coil, and placed next to something magnetic, should form a working speaker compatible with the 3.5mm jack. It won't sound hi-fi, but it will work, because unlike Bluetooth or USB-C where you have to read hundreds of pages of standards and do a bunch of engineering just to figure out how to understand the signal, the signal in the 3.5mm jack basically is the sound.

This has direct practical implications as well: The transparent simplicity vs opaque complexity is why wired headphones can be so cheap and yet so reliable, or as hi-fi as your DAC and the speaker cone will allow, whereas Bluetooth devices are comparatively expensive, a mess to connect, fragile, bandwidth-limited, and environmentally and ethically dubious.

Bluetooth, and even USB-C, is basically black magic— Which wouldn't be so bad, except that it's also glitchy black magic. And this remains true regardless of device availability, because it's determined by the physics of the technology itself is implemented.

I love how villainous they look oh my god

Yes. Protecting tankies is explicitly part of the original purpose of Lemmy. It's almost like the anti-Parler/Gab/Voat, in that it was made by left-wing people as a haven for political views that would be too radical to be tolerated on the mainstream platforms:

Leftists know that our position on these platforms is tenuous at best; we’re currently tolerated, but that will not always be the case.

…Naturally, this meant that it ended up attracting people who unironically identify as "leftist" while cheerleading the genocidal imperialist war led by the right-leaning conservative United Russia Party of the RF, or the also-rather-genocidal ethnocratic state capitalism of the PRC.

Somebody's damned no matter what. The victim deserves justice. The survivors deserve peace. The perpetrator deserves a chance to do better. And the rest of us deserve safety.

And these things cannot be reconciled. But I'm not willing to just give upon on any of them. So yes, if you could guarantee that it would give us a decent shot at having all of these things, I would be willing and honoured to live as that person's neighbour or roommate. ..I've repeatedly made decisions before in my life that I think prove this, without even realising it. My life is worth less too if theirs is ruined, and I don't actually innately care about my own safety if I think I can help someone else.

But nobody can currently guarantee that. So, I honestly don't care anymore. Lock them up for good and throw away the key, or kill the survivors too and then kill me too for good measure; I don't care. Just don't make me choose who to damn, because what I want to see is for the victim to be alive, not avenged, and for the criminal to be helped, not brutally crushed— but we can't have that anyway.

And Ffs, don't let a known dangerous criminal have the chance to kill again and pretend it's just mercy or kindness or whatever without a dangerous level of foolishness behind it while condescending at anyone who would want to see a more cautious approach. And don't pretend that ruining one more life for some perverse ideal of "punishment" or revenge is going to fix anything either.

This is a shitty situation, and we've already lost to end up in it. People have already been hurt, and no matter what you choose, more people are probably going to end up being hurt before it's over. Pretending mercy will magically fix everything is almost just as stupid and evil as pretending "punishment" serves any moral purpose other than cruelty.

....I'd want some kind of mercy for the man or woman who murders me. But it's not my place to demand it for someone else's killer, who may well go around being a threat to more and more people.

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