Don't sell yourself short, queen. I think you nailed your values spot on.

Dark Brandon is an internet character created by Biden’s White House

Certainly not...

We're starting to normalize charging sitting politicians for their crimes again and I'm here for it

I wish Abscam had ushered in a whole new wave of the executive branch actively testing the corruption level of the legislative branch as part of its normal operating procedures

“American democracy simply cannot function without two equally healthy and equally strong political parties,” J Michael Luttig told CNN on Wednesday. “So today, in my view, there is no Republican party to counter the Democratic party in the country.

“And for that reason, American democracy is in grave peril.”

For that reason?

That's the reason?

You know what? Fuck 'em. I don't know what she was expecting other than chalky, chocolate-scented paste that only vaguely resembles the already cheerless designs on the packaging. But if she wants to wring some money out of the behemoth that's hoovering up cocoa beans from half of Africa for pennies, grown by people who've never tasted chocolate in their lives, and use it to buy herself a boat, I say go for it. Fuck 'em up, petty chocolate woman. From the photos it kind of looks like you have a point.

Why is this surprising? It's on. They already tried to steal the election and mobbed the capitol to try to kill the politicians that opposed the effort. They're threatening election workers, they're talking about civil war, they're posting the addresses of jury members.

It's on. The people prosecuting Trump understand the stakes, I think (or I hope). Trump and his close allies definitely understand the stakes. I get being chilled by it and wanting to report on it, but anyone who is surprised by it, at this point, has no business being in journalism.

The owner of a meat business in western Michigan was ordered to pay $1,143

“Two months later, we wouldn’t even be here,” the judge said, noting that the teen soon would have turned 18 years old.

“Ionia County is a farming county, and I know a lot of people in this county view children working, sometimes around dangerous machinery, as part of growing up,” [the judge] said.

He said the boy was warned to never put his hand inside the grinder.

What the FUCK

How on EARTH did the judge miss his chance to ask the obvious follow-up.

"Does this apply to Biden also? Can he murder his political rivals under your legal theory? Can he murder your client?"

"Why not?"

This commentary is reminiscent of the radical right’s reactions to the Ruby Ridge incident of 1992, an 11-day standoff in Idaho between federal agents and the family of Randy Weaver, a Christian fundamentalist affiliated with the far-right white separatist movement. The standoff resulted in the deaths of Weaver’s wife, son, and a federal marshal.

Dude... Ruby Ridge was a big deal because the FBI shot Randy Weaver in the back while he was lifting the latch to his shed to see his son's body, and then kept shooting at him as he and his family was running back to his cabin, hitting and killing his wife while she was holding their baby. It was a huge deal for a lot of people, Randy Weaver was found not guilty of any "siege-related charges" and awarded $3 million in damages, and the DOJ extensively revised their policies as a result.

Craig Deleeuw threatened to kill the president, and then according to the FBI and I see no reason to doubt them, was pointing his weapon at the FBI when they shot him. Whatever Randy Weaver did to create the Ruby Ridge confrontation, I don't think it's fair to compare the reaction to that to the reaction to this.

This dude on Youtube did an in-depth examination of the weird corporate reasons why the ice cream machines can't be maintained properly. Sorry for the Youtube link, but I honestly couldn't find a text story that went into the same type of analysis about it.

Edit: Timestamped the link to skip some folderol at the beginning

I was driving through Maryland, it was getting late, and I saw a hotel that was $45 per night. I literally thought to myself, "WTF, I just need a bed, how much could really go wrong if I stay here."

The room opened straight to the parking lot, and there were cats everywhere outside crying. I said hello to one of them, he was clearly in bad shape and so I went and got some cat food and invited him in and gave him some food. He bit me so I put him back outside and went to sleep.

I was most of the way on the drive home when I noticed I had red welts in a little line down my arm. You fucker, you have to be kidding me.

I basically stripped in the parking lot of my place, went in and took a long shower first thing, and put into the garbage all the clothes I'd had with me, suitcase, shoes, my backpack after taking the computer and notebook out. I put them all in a trash bag in the parking lot and then threw it in a dumpster that wasn't near any residence. Then I vacuumed my car and took a long shower again.

Fuckin bedbugs. I had no bedbugs carried back to my place after that and that's how I like it. $45 for the hotel cost me maybe $300 worth of stuff that I decided to get rid of.

And this is after they tried very very hard to rig the election to put obstacles in the way of people voting for the measure.

Actually getting abortion bans in place is the "dog that caught the car" moment for Republicans. The world is so complicated and people have so little attention to spare, that the GOP can get away with blaming "the economy" or "jobs" or "crime" on the Democrats, and for the most part, people who support them will go with it, even though they spend most of their time being in power making the problems worse and stealing money for themselves and their friends.

Abortion is dead simple. If people know someone who's suffering in a terrifying way, and it's because of something the Republicans have been banging their fists on the table about how bad they want to do it for the last fifty years, it becomes a lot harder to shift the blame.

Edit: I backwards

The consumers? But how could one of them create an advertising? They don't even have an FCC license. I don't get it.

Hence why I share with you, so you can be wiser than myself

Hopefully this time they’ll stay there.

The first rule of pursuing abhorrent policies for performative reasons is, they need to stay performative. The GOP used to understand this, and carefully pursue anti-abortion policies while carefully not achieving them. But now there's too high a proportion of people who are such nutcases that they genuinely don't understand or don't care that this will lose them elections, and the strategic Republicans are struggling more and more to keep control of their party.

It used to be the same with "anti-immigration" policies that were surgically careful to preserve the vulnerable workforce while making the right type of performative gestures, until DeSantis came in being enough of a true believer that he's willing to damage Florida's economy pretty significantly as long as it lets him be cruel to spanish people.

The safeties are getting disabled, basically.

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” -Barry Goldwater

Covid, strep throat, the flu, and other illnesses, i.e. covid covid covid and covid, but a lot of our parents have a very particular way of approaching what they're willing to accept about why their child is sick.

Tell me you never experienced Usenet or the internet before Facebook and friends fucked it up, without telling me. We literally used to have all the things he's talking about, with much less of the drawbacks, before the internet became commercialized. Now the commercial web's unsuitability has finally reached the point of undeniability, and we're trying to figure out how to get back to that.

I had to start up Google Chrome to see it. Here, you can benefit from my sacrifice:

Over the weekend he spoke at the Christian right "Pray, Vote, Stand" summit in Washington and mocked President Biden mercilessly over his alleged mental unfitness and then said this:

"We have a man who is totally corrupt and the worst president in the history of our country, who is cognitively impaired, in no condition to lead, and is now in charge of dealing with Rush-sha. And possible nuclear war. Just think of it. We would be... in World War 2, very quickly, if we're going to relying on this man, and far more devastating than any war, there will never be a war, if that happens, there will never be a war like this. It will... obliterate everything... there is. Every body. It will obliterate every country."

The spooky background music and his bizarre delivery made that downright chilling.

There is, in fact, slow piano and violin music overlaid, like the ending to an apocalyptic movie where everything is still.

He also said:

"As you know, crooked Joe Biden and the radical left thugs have weaponized law enforcement to arrest their leading political opponent, and leading by a lot, including Obam-- ep--- w-- I'll tell you what, you take a look at Obama, and take a look at some of the things that he's done. This is the same thing, the country is very divided. And we did, with Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn't be won, we beat ... ... Hilary Clinton. Now, you know I used to call her crooked Hilary..."

I wish so much that this type of headline would end with "Leads to Federal Election Tampering Charges".

This is an absolutely brutal and spot on analysis. This dude is great.

The overwhelming majority of this revenue was from advertising, but according to Musk’s thesis that revenue stream was garbage. He would deprioritise ads, reduce moderation, and boost the posts of people who would pay $8 a month for a blue tick.

... So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good.

It is exactly that content that Twitter’s new model relies on promoting – and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn’t a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.

“[T]he average user must recognize that YouTube content, unlike media content on other websites, cannot be downloaded with a simple right-click

Accurate

and must be aware that this is achieved using technology on YouTube

Accurate

and that youtube-dl ‘overrides’ this protection.

Accurate

It is therefore to be assumed that the average user acts in bad faith,” the Hamburg Court wrote.

If by "in bad faith," you mean, "with mostly benevolent intent but sadly in contradiction to the impotent dictates of the bad-faith-est of bad-faith actors in the music creation community for the last fifty years," then, accurate.

HOLY CRAP you're not kidding (vaguely NSFW)

I love how happy the lawyer sounds. Emotional people say dumb stuff and make mistakes; sometimes you have to manipulate people into getting emotional when they're testifying but Lindell went ahead and did it to himself. Not that the lawyer didn't help -- you could tell he was judging the perfect moment to ask a question about "lumpy pillows," and look how well it worked. 😁

To them pushback equals betrayal. If your boss says some bullshit (especially if it's some self serving bullshit), you're supposed to tell everyone you agree. True and false don't matter nearly as much; it's mostly where your loyalties are, and who will go to bat for you and who won't. I haven't seen the clip, but my guess is his body language is more or less as if some trusted friend had stolen money from him or something, because that's how pointing out someone who's "above you" is lying reads, in their world.

the lemmyverse is toxic and they were constantly facing attacks of various types

This is a very subtle but very powerful way of recasting what actually happened. I've dealt with this in conversations face-to-face with conservative people who've had interactions online, so I know how unfortunately powerful it is.

I'd be very surprised if any substantial number of the users on exploding-heads got "attacked" -- as in, had child porn posted to their servers by their ideological enemies, or got doxxed, or anything like that. What they got was disagreed with, or defended against.

If you frame being disagreed with as an "attack," then it means that anything that your enemy says that makes sense is a threat. You have to double down and find a way to "strike back." Or you have to withdraw from the conversation and talk about you're "always getting attacked." If your whole mental model is that way, then anyone at all who might understand the world a little better than you is all of a sudden your enemy, and worst of all, if what they're saying makes sense, then you must withdraw from the conversation, because now you're in danger of becoming an "enemy" to your ideological friends, if you start agreeing with that person. It's like in a big fistfight if you all of a sudden switch sides and start beating up your friends. Why would you do that?

And so, your viewpoint can never change, because that's "defeat." That's the insidiousness of this whole framing.

Furthermore, if you're brigading or trolling or being offensive, and someone blocks you or defederates from you, then you're being "attacked" or "silenced" or whatever. Any offensive behavior of your own is just good clean fun, even if you're trying to ruin some feminist critic's life or posting child porn. Any action that makes it difficult to do that is just evidence that the whole system is rigged against you, and a reason to start whining about unfairness.

I have a couple of conservative views, and I actually sorta sympathize with the idea that the lemmyverse is pretty one-sided in how it views certain issues. But going beyond that to say exploding-heads was "constantly facing attacks" is only true if you torture the language in a very specific, deliberate, and insidious way.

The point was to have a place they could be free to talk about things the establishment were censoring.

I've deliberately made a point to express some views here that I know are extremely unpopular (very sincere views of mine, but ones that I know will cause controversy). Not once was I censored or prevented from speaking. On reddit, yes; certain subreddits "on the left" will ban you if you say certain things, although it's still way more common from the right. Here, I've been downvoted all to hell, but Lemmy's actually configured in a way where (at this scale of userbase) that doesn't really make much difference to how many people can see your stuff. Not banned or had my stuff removed for ideological reasons even a single time.

Again, it's an insidious reframing of language. Your saying "could be free to talk about things" only makes sense if that really means "could be free from anyone else's ability to disagree." They're free to talk here, today, and they always were. What they want is to be able to freely talk and no one else disagree (or to be able to freely threaten or bully anyone who disagrees.) Quite frankly, what you're saying is bullshit. I've gone to conservative forums on reddit and asked, hey, can I talk to you about this topic we're in, without me being censored? They said sure, we welcome all points of view here, we don't do censorship. Guess what happened literal minutes later?

Trump does the same. He literally had all his social media accounts in place, and a podium in the White House where he could literally stand up and say literally anything he wanted into the camera and it'd be broadcast, and he was still whining about censorship. He didn't mean anything of his was being censored. He meant he was being "censored" from everyone being forced to broadcast his stuff without being allowed to disagree.

Not only that, but he was definitely informed. White House counsel and other informed professionals were privy to a bunch of meetings where people were talking about these ideas, and they shared their opinions and sometimes got in shouting matches or resigned.

I think Trump's brain genuinely cannot process the concepts of "right" and "wrong" as distinct from whatever he feels like doing, and so you could say: Yes, people whose job it is to be informed experts told him very clearly that these things were illegal, but his brain is so rotten and single-minded that he couldn't absorb that their advice might be objectively true, any more than a dog can understand a "keep off the grass" sign.

Fortunately I think the chance of his lawyers advancing that as a defense is pretty remote.

4. McDonalds and Taylor are fighting tooth and nail to prevent people from circumventing their weird agreement and maintaining their machines successfully, in a Kafkaesque indictment of the whole concept that competition in a free market will lead to a sensible world

What they're trying to accomplish is to make people afraid to get involved in administering elections unless they're "on the right side."

This particular effort might or might not have any effect at all. But the point is, it's in concert with a thousand other things. And, more importantly, they're getting practice, and learning about what works and what doesn't and what they can get away with, and who they can trust as their allies when things get real.

Two SDNY prosecutors involved in the charges against Trump resigned, and a third who refused to resign was fired. By Trump. Just like in Georgia, you don't get to illegally delay and interfere with the proceedings against you and then complain that they're taking too long.

This is clearly concerning as hell. It's extremely dangerous. But that said, I think it's hilarious how this same grouping that wants violence to be okay in their politics still gets extremely bent out of shape when any violence happens towards them.

"HANG MIKE PENCE (if he doesn't do exactly what we want under threat of violence)!"

(Ashli Babbit)

"HOW DARE THEY! THEY HAVE BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS!"

Like, my guy, if Biden had some agents show up at your door and point guns at you and asked "Oh okay, so we can kill politically inconvenient people if we feel like now?" you'd feel a completely different way.

* If the law and the facts are against you, threaten the judge and jurors, double down on everything, and hope your nascent fascistic movement has arrived at its takeoff speed

Whataboutism is shifting focus away from something person A did, by bringing some action by person B into it when it doesn't belong.

Asking how a legal theory would apply in some other context, to highlight the absurdity of what the lawyer is saying because the answer would be absurd, is a very different thing.

I can see maybe saying it without the word "Biden" but focusing it on Trump would be better, yeah. E.g. asking if some other president would be allowed to murder his political rivals (specifically including Trump), without opening to door to complications. Obviously the answer is that Trump thinks he should have a special set of rules that don't apply to anyone else, but the closer you can get to forcing his lawyer to explain out loud that that's what they're asking for seems like it'd be a good thing.

Consider the consequences, says journalist Kashmir Hill, of everyone deciding to use this technology at all times in public places.

"Something happens on the train, you bump into someone, or you're wearing something embarrassing, somebody could just take your photo, and find out who you are and maybe tweet about you, or call you out by name, or write nasty things about you online," said Hill

In an interview with NPR, he said the abuse of the tool has been overstated, noting that the site's detection tools intercepted just a few hundreds instances of people misusing the service for things like stalking

Y'all are angling for a gold medal at the understatement olympics.

There are potential uses of the technology that could be beneficial. For instance, for people who are blind, or for quickly identifying someone whose name you forgot and, as the company highlights, keeping tabs on one's own images on the web.

He continued: "PimEyes can be used for many legitimate purposes, like to protect yourself from scams," he said. "Or to figure out if you or a family member has been targeted by identity thieves."

OH, COME ON

I love how they really have to dig to even come up with some legitimate ways to use the technology.

• Scott Smith's daughter was allegedly assaulted in a bathroom by someone identifying as genderfluid
• At a school board meeting, Smith got into an argument with a woman, I guess related to this incident in some way, during which he was arguing loudly, clenching his fist, leaning toward and swearing at the woman.
• Deputies arrested him, taking him to the ground and busting his face up a little bit
• He struggled with the deputies while being removed, and video got distributed of him with a bloodied face struggling and threatening to "kick their teeth in"
• He was found guilty of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest
• The governor of Virginia pardoned him

Basically, Republicans were super excited about this whole thing because it backs up two things they particularly like: (1) A rare and exciting confirmation of their almost-totally-hallucinatory claim that we urgently need to keep transgender people out of bathrooms to protect the children (2) People on their team being above the law, and justified in violently resisting law enforcement if someone tries to subject them to the same rules as everyone else (the fascist playbook of replacing "what did you do?" with "which team are you on?" when deciding whether someone is guilty of a crime).

I'm not surprised it was ordered to be unsealed. I'll be more than a little surprised if an accurate list is actually unsealed. But, anything's possible I guess.

It is not uncommon for defense attorneys to meet with federal prosecutors prior to them seeking an indictment, in the hopes of convincing them not to bring charges against their client.

Citing the doctrine of "C'mon, dude, I said I was sorry."

Edit: Also Trump: "I'M NOT SORRY AND I'LL FUCKIN DO IT AGAIN AND SOME BRAVE PATRIOT NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING TO YOUR LOVELY FAMILY"

If someone learns something bad about you, and your first reaction is not "this is why it's not true" but "how did you find that out, we must punish the person who told you," you might be a violent POS.

I know this is not gonna be some revelation, but: I have literally never encountered someone who makes their whole identity about being an Alpha for the sake of getting women, being superior to other men, etc, who doesn't have some deep insecurity at the heart of it (and not very well hidden).

Mostly the dudes who are what Andrew Tate wants to be have interests like fishing or carpentry or business or some particular sports team. They don't spend all their time in the "war room" scheming with other dudes how they can work together to trick women into having sex with them.