1. At least on Lemmy, this is definitely what I’ve observed. If you look at any thread that’s full of sturm und drang, it’s usually a tiny handful of accounts that are creating all of it (and then roping other people into their hostility, like a little chain reaction, like Chernobyl.) If you look at the impact, it just looks like everyone’s an asshole, but if you look at the root of the trouble, you realize most people are fine and a tiny minority are noisy and hostile and they can just get everyone else spun up.
2. I agree, if you’re in NYC right at this moment in history and you can’t see a bigger picture of things worth getting heated up about than White Lotus, you should talk with people in your community more.

They might actually just care about the moral issues involved (or at least be worried enough about pushback to fake it).

They’re going to make a river of money regardless, and so maybe it’s not worth taking a reputational hit or risking some kind of legislation, just to preserve the 0.00000001% of their revenue stream that is deepfake porn based.

This is where my real concern lies, the suspension AND partial application of habeas corpus is essentially – in my view – a casus belli due the public. Habeas corpus must be universal in its application by the state, or the federal-state must be seen as a direct threat to the civilian public. They’ve tested the waters on this already in prior protests. At what point do we admit that it’s no longer being honored by the federal-state and realize that we’ve been stripped of our right to accuse those who have wronged us – also part of due process – and take matters into our own hands to restore our rights?

Yeah. The entire concept of American governance was that the people in the country fight to maintain control of their own government, and then take responsibility for it running properly. We’ve wandered pretty far from that at this point. To a large degree because the tools that we might use to coordinate and organize the fight have been co-opted by people who want to run the government on their own behalf.

Apologies for the long winded response, apparently I had more to say on this than I realized. TL;DR we agree, apparently – as I’ve just come to realize – the only difference is that I believe that we’re already at war, just not entirely de facto.

Agreed. Yeah, I was talking just about what the desired end state should be once democracy is reestablished, not saying we shouldn’t be vigorously defending ourselves right now.

I’m addressing what you said, in a succinct way. If it’s a little too unclear, then:

The real underlying question is ‘are those that violate social contacts due the protections of said social contracts’?

No, they’re not. But, you have no idea who has violated the social contract unless you have due process.

Those that you’re not sure yet have violated the social contract, because it hasn’t been proven, are due the protections of said social contracts. Yes. That’s the trial phase. Then, after that, we decide they might not be due the protection of the same social contract. That’s the punishment phase. They’re different. It is extremely popular in times of crisis to start to skip ahead to punishment without trial, as part of the official process, because things are so dire, and that’s explicitly what this person was advocating for. That is wrong. Because you’ll wind up punishing people who haven’t violated any social contract at all.

Are we still bound by the rules of a contract that another party actively violated, in regards to that party?

No. But once it gets to a broad scale, and due process breaks down on all sides as people start a big melee for their own safety against their enemies, things can get very very bad.

Sometimes there’s no way around that, of course. That’s what we call a war. Maybe that’s where we are headed. But deciding ahead of time that you’re going to abandon due process within a civil society, because of how dangerous it is that your opponents want to abandon due process, is just hastening the phase of “might makes right.” It’s pretty hard to come back from that once it happens. A lot of people have had to grapple with this, notably the allies after World War 2 trying to figure out how to punish the guilty. If they’d gone with this “they’re SO bad that they don’t deserve due process” type of thing, Oskar Schindler would probably be dead.

If you answer yes, this leads to the ‘paradox of tolerance.’

No. Not having the trial and doing nothing, or having the trial and then not doing the punishment, is tolerance. Having the trial and then punishing is justice. Not having the trial and doing the punishment anyway is terror. I’m not aware of a time when that was the solution that didn’t go horribly sideways almost instantly.

There are times when there was some massive crime against humanity and the paradox of tolerance prevented effective resolution, and it was very bad. Reconstruction is a good example. But just doing arbitrary punishment for anyone some random person decides is guilty is ten times worse. Even if you get it right 100% of the time, which you won’t, it sets a precedent that is horrifyingly hard to stop once people have gotten in the habit.

Seems a little more clear spelled out that way?

“I don’t want this guy setting fire to our shared apartment building. That’s a violation of the social contract. So I’m going to set fire to our shared apartment building. That’ll show him.”

“Nothing compares to the excitement of stepping foot in the airport for the start of a summer holiday, and this new soundtrack perfectly captures those feelings,”

This is what happens when you don’t have enough bullying in your schools

This whole situation is rotten. 😞

Completely agree. Democracy just can’t function if a third of the people in the country don’t want it, and just want their faction to rule by force, and that’s where we’re at right now.

All I’m saying is that postwar Germany is probably the best I am aware of out of a selection of bad historical precedents for how you recover from that situation into something approximating a stable and safe society. Organized trials with due process for anyone who killed innocent people or otherwise participated in the worst of the horrors, and acceptance of the idea that a lot of people, especially at the bottom of the org chart, just aren’t going to “get it” that anything that they did was wrong.

I think once the tribalism gets engaged firmly in people’s heads, where their faction is the one with God on its side and anyone who’s an enemy deserves to be snuffed out, you can’t really fix them from the outside. They have to either come to it themselves, or not, and in the meantime life has to move on as best it can. The problem with Germany as a precedent is that there was someone from outside to come and impose it…

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCHeFjADTTs

I would 10 times rather have lived in postwar Germany than in post revolution France, China, Russia…

Reconstruction is probably the one time that I know of when they were too lenient. Jefferson Davis of all people basically just walked free, and then on down. We’re still paying the price to this day for the betrayal of everything the union soldiers died for. But IDK how you can look at the history of blood thirst and lack of due process, after the revolution, and say “Yeah let’s do that I sure super want to live in that country.”

Grok responded to X users’ questions about public figures by generating foul and violent rape fantasies, including one targeting progressive activist and policy analyst Will Stancil. (Stancil has indicated he may sue X.)

When you fine-tune a coding AI on code that has deliberate flaws in it, and then switch it back to having conversations in English, it starts praising Hitler and constructing other deliberately hateful content. It wouldn’t surprise me if fine-tuning Grok to be Nazi also led it to “generalize” some additional things that weren’t intended by the operators.

You messaged me, my good gentleperson, I’m just responding

They killed thirty thousand people. It was only that small because eventually a counterrevolution killed off all the people who were defining who lives and dies according to what side you’re on, and then instituted a reign of terror equally bad.

I wasn’t making any point about the Jacobins. I was making a point about arbitrarily killing people without due process. I didn’t expect anyone to come in and say “come on it wasn’t that bad and anyway look at this other time when things were bad, so who cares,” because of who it was holding the axes, but you do you.

I’ve been learning a lot about how the .ml people look at politics and life, and it honestly makes it make a lot of sense why communist revolutions so reliably start slaughtering people like leaves in autumn once they get control. Once “your side” is always right, and everything has to be twisted around and perceived that way, why wouldn’t you?

I am so gratified to see the rate of downvotes on your nonsense, and the number of people trying to talk sense into you in addition.

That is, in fact, exactly how some revolutions with good intentions turned into nightmares far worse than the evils they were revolutioning against.

If you’re going to punish someone, you need to prove they did something wrong. 100% of the time. It doesn’t matter if you “already know” and it’s frustrating to have to go through this slow process where they get to fight back. It doesn’t matter if you’re “on the right side” or whatever. That whole thinking needs to go right the fuck out the window, even if it is satisfyingly simple in the moment.

Edit: To bring some specifics to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_White_Terror

And so on. It also happened in China, the USSR, lots of places. The structures of law are fragile and slow, and just executing the person that someone accused of being a former ICE agent is easy. Until someone with a grudge accuses you, or your family…

This is why jury trials are super important. They’re one of those last-ditch safety measures against a police state.

That’s why the people ICE arrests usually don’t get to have a trial. They’re trying to make a new system where they just get to decide what happens to people.

Oh, I thought you meant no email address required to make an account.

Just having to register in order to read the feed is probably just for server load reasons, if I had to guess.

That’s not how it works though.

I actually agree that registration is silly. It’s trivial to create fake email addresses; all it does is present obstacles and slight privacy implications for legitimate users, while forming an incredibly mild speedbump for malicious users. But, it’s probably not going away, every little tool in the toolbox that can be deployed by overworked volunteer admins against the unending tide of malicious users trying to make their lives more difficult is probably going to get deployed if it is easy to do.

Hey did anyone say loops yet?

Q: What about that massive photo of Trump and the backpack checks for DEI literature

A: That’s fine why do you ask

You can just read the article.

ICE was doing their thing as they do, a group of people were doing something outside the facility, ICE called the local cops, and then someone from the group shot at the local cops when they came up to investigate.

That’s the official statement right now. Who knows whether it’s accurate, but if it is accurate, then no, he wasn’t acting as an ICE officer.

!DownvotedToOblivion@lemmings.world