Wikipedia relies on sources, and humans choosing the sources like newspapers. And those newspapers are more and more inside a “bubble” that rejects any evidence or reporting presented by a competing bubble.

Right now wikipedia is covering up one of the greatest acts of mass murder of our times, because the newspapers are covering it up, or rejecting evidence because it’s by the “enemy”. Part of this is a defensive posture against AI bots and enemy disinformation.

It also has to be a waste of some resource that is rare to not use up and throw away like this.

Financing.

Yes but the issue is that any technology will be used to maximize profit, which results in almost always the worst case outcome. We already have the technology for a global post-scarcity civilization with a circular economy.

Those 4 things are just random ideas but anything that is unprofitable or decreases power or destroys massive wealth of capitalists is basically censored in mainstream political discourse. And today effective countermeasures have been developed to make protests useless and reform or revolutions impossible.

But I do agree that this doesn’t justify radical anti-natalism. Just teach your children profitable skills, multiple languages, subsistence farming, electronics and how to build electric motors and windmills, how to build a cozy tiny house or a boat. I also hope for technological advancements (like 3D printers, genetic engineering) that allow for a more democratic industrial base.

PS: Kurzgesagt has a new video on this: Is Our World Broken?. TLDW: We need to tell ourselves a new story (but that requires we stop believing in the old ones)

Thanks, this gemini protocol looks interesting! This would be an easy protocol for distributed p2p hosting / caching / archiving of websites similar to federalist. I just wish gemtext would support bold and italics and hyperlinks.

How closed minded they must be, to think everyone shares the exact same despair they do, as well as the inability or lack of creativity needed to envision a better future and a path that takes us there.

Lets do a test. Could you imagine supporting:

1. Banning of commercial advertising
2. Abolishing patents or making them free or extremely low cost to use to quickly adopt new / better technology
3. Nationalize all big news and social media companies and turning them over to the democratic control of their own workers (a cooperative)
4. Massive wealth and land redistribution

Most people can’t because they have been programmed to see these as “holy touchstones” of their true religion, capitalism. And that means only economic power may rule, and there are no paths to the future except the profitable ones. They rather de-federate call socialists tankies and than to deal with the angry dirtbag left. They prefer to exist in a calm apolitical space with a total war on good vs evil.

So please don’t insult people who can imagine many paths but also have the wisdom why all these paths are shut. It’s just like a physics problem, you can’t overcome the political energy worth trillions of dollars with a few measly millions of dollars of political energy we could muster.

Oh I didn’t even mean trust as in maliciousness, and not even as in “do they know their shit” but do they have the time and money to do things right? And also do I have time to read and learn what all this is supposed to mean?

And the inconvenience with VPNs alone… What I really want is a kind of universal addon or browser project that just “cleans up most websites”. So many websites have bad behavior now and anti-features. I just want to read an article not get a slide in or blinky thing. Internet is becoming unusable even before the dead internet thing. Ironically for such a “website cleanup” you’d probably want advanced AI so Mozilla is probably on the right track.

Ah those were the good old days, when we still made quarks in this country!

There are people who cheer for this stuff to fail, it’s absurd

There is money in it, just a grift.

I mean the protons and neutrons are never new, all of this stuff is just second hand, cobbled together recycled garbage!

I’ve looked at one or two variants but how do I trust them? They are also forked from some previous version so presumably somewhat out of date? And then also it’s not clear what they are doing what firefox isn’t.

Yeah. Discord can create FAQ and “threads” now that I believe work better for this. You can take some question and the answer and discussion and put it in a threat in some channel for issues. Presumably once you have a quality chat server, it is easier to add threads / articles / issues to it than starting from a forum.

Well, I believe the marxist-leninist definition of liberalism and “fascism is capitalism in decline” just means that everyone not calling for the overthrow of capitalism is a fascist. I don’t find those definitions that helpful. And it doesn’t really tell you how you should use your limited political power.

But I do understand arab americans who just can’t bring themselves to vote for democrats. So there would be a reason 3. you’re just so revolted and you just can’t stand the disgusting feeling of supporting them.

For example Jake Tapper just spread racist lies about Tlaib. Tlaib criticized the Michigan US attorney office for prosecuting and showing biases against Pro-Palestinian Protesters (including Jewish protesters). Now they are smearing her as anti-semitic. CNN Hosts BUSTED Manufacturing Quote To Smear Democrat

A good quality open source “federated discord” would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn’t much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.

Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.

The USA was designed for minority rule since forever.

This is just incorrect mathematically. I get the argument - in foreign policy both parties ARE fascists. But they are not equal. Especially internally they are not. But there is a huge difference in ideology between liberals and fascists, and one of them is much worse, and much harder for revolution or reform.

I believe there are only two reasons for your position: 1. is you stick to principles absolutely, refusing to acknowledge the consequences of your actions - which is wrong and stupid. 2. You believe in accelerationism and believe Trump leading to collapse of the US empire faster is the better outcome.

Neither has to do with ideology. I’d love someone to explain how an actual fascism is a better outcome than a neoliberalism or “capitalism-in-decline” fascism. This is simply about outcome and using the little power we have.

Another consequence of this tactic of arguing for not-voting is that it creates a rift between mainstream and socialists or “tankies”. The actual fascists love that.

Hmm this made me wonder why something like this wouldn’t melt the rock and then sink into the crust and then into the planet. Probably not hot enough.
And that made me think if we could build something like a big pellet of fissile material, encase it in tungsten or something so that it is hot enough to do so but remains stable, and then let it sink into the earth. Maybe that could be tracked? Then we could learn something about how it moves and where it ends up. But probably can’t be tracked since this isn’t star trek 🖖

Well in this case they used his likeness and brand to appear more legitimate and make money. So I’d argue this is trademark (even if not registered) so a legitimate complaint.

I don’t believe in “copyright” for a voice. See for example impersonators. But in this case it’s a deliberate deception which is pretty simple.

I don’t believe in intellectual property at all and think it is a form of theft, to deprive others from common knowledge or information just to seek rent. In case of patents I equate it even to aiding in genocide, since most advances in more energy efficiency use are patented and exploited for profit and slowing down adaptation. Without exhaustive attempts to try other systems to pay creators, copyright law is a moral abomination. That is a philosophical or ethical argument, not a legal one.

IMDB used to be independent and have a pretty amazing forum for movies. Like people would have lots of debate and discussion and insight. I loved going there after watching a movie. It was sort of “secondary literature” and nothing like this existed before. Then they just decided to delete countless contributions and shut it down. Instead of paying for moderation for the few trolls.

Of course there are plenty of other movie forums, some even copies the old posts and there is r/movies, but it’s much more fractured now. There are certain network effects for social media that need to reach a critical size.

Peaceful contact with aliens would tell us something fundamental about the nature of ethics and the universe.

Advanced aliens do not need any material resources or real estate from humanity. We can already interpolate that from existing science. So that is not the reason why there are here. And we know they haven’t exterminated us already centuries ago.

Instead it would tell that we share some fundamental values like curiosity and diversity with alien species - as long as they evolved through natural selection and had to raise and teach and love their children. As long as they had to find productive ways to work together as a people.

We would realize that we are not alone and that we are being judged. That we can’t just endlessly bulldoze the galaxy and that there are limits to acceptable behavior. Because there is always someone more powerful that could smash us, but they already didn’t. That certain ethical ideals are fundamental properties emerging from the universe itself.

It would be a powerful counter to the current nihilistic materialism, that we need to start working to improve our culture.