beyond the points brought up in the article, a good way to tell this is not a good change is that i’ve seen so, so much confusion about what the change here actually does from users of netflix. obviously, this is quite bad for a corporation because if even power users don’t know what’s happening, it’s really unlikely people who don’t use netflix very much will either

super interesting piece here. here’s a bit of it which illustrates just a handful of the many uses of a cellphone in prison, most of which are actually very banal or outright benevolent:

Most of what I knew about illicit electronics came from press releases and news stories that offered example after example of all the bad things people could do with contraband phones, things like trafficking drugs, making threats and running scams. While it’s true those things can happen, over the past three years I’ve also seen a lot of people use their phones for good. Some use them to self-publish books or take online college classes. Others become prison reform advocates, teach computer skills, trade bitcoin or write legal briefs. I’ve seen a whole plethora of savvy and creative uses that fly in the face of stereotypes about people behind bars. “Our cell phones have saved lives,” a man in prison in South Carolina told me.

i believe we’ve previously had a discussion on this here, but alas i cannot find it right now.

goes without saying: this is bad! practically speaking though, what is the utility here–is it the same principle as remote-controlled bombs that some PDs have?

more like “the society’s ridiculous standards made some men insecure about their heights”.

yeah this is a thing which is more or less directly caused by conventional beauty standards, it’s not a thing that happens in a vacuum! phrasing it like that is a weird choice.

not surprising at all, and in fact italy specifically is a really good example of how this can manifest. due to the widespread political conspiracies and corruption during the years of lead, the country has an equally widespread distrust of basically all its political figures, so conspiracism has taken a very strong root there. last year polling found 20% of the population suspicious of 5G, 11% of the population believing vaccination was useless, and almost 65% of italians believing big multinationals were “responsible for everything that happens to us”.

oh, how i wish jacobin would just stick primarily to stuff like this, because it really is where they excel as an outlet. pretty short, to the point, and not overly complicated; this feels like something i could quote to someone who isn’t really politically involved and they’d nod along.

one of the funny consequences of this downstream is it’s bled heavily into fascist aesthetic; no doubt if you’ve spent enough time on twitter or another such website you’ve run into the traditionalist who thinks the bleached roman statue or the great, bland roman building is the pinnacle of art and who doesn’t realize they weren’t like that before

i don’t watch her streams or content, but it’s been excellent to see keffals’s story get as much attention as it has and i hope it sets a precedent going forward

the wikipedia problem is a real one but to be honest, i think a more immediate problem is that right-wing media is often free (because it’s both cheap to produce, extremely profitable, and even if it isn’t has billionaires who very willingly subsidize it), and good reporting that is easier to read and challenges your worldview often is not.

Then, on July 20, 2022, in a post on the Minecraft website, developer Mojang Studios dropped a bombshell: Minecraft would not support integrations with NFTs. The company laid out its position and stated in bold text that “blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our Minecraft client and server applications nor may they be utilized to create NFTs associated with any in-game content, including worlds, skins, personal items, or other mods.”

For Critterz, the implication was existential. Although Mojang’s announcement did not detail how its new policy would be implemented, it seemed likely that a failure to comply with the new rules could lead to the end of the Critterz Minecraft server and the collapse of its in-game economy. Players who had paid thousands of dollars’ worth of cryptocurrency for Critterz NFTs saw their investments plummet in value, and those who had been making money playing the game had their incomes vanish.

i… have no idea why these people thought that Mojang was going to be amenable to the ponzi scheme-ass style of game this is, or even why they thought Minecraft would support NFT integration. what could possibly incline you to believe this is a thing Minecraft needs, and which you stake so much of your wealth on?

as you can expect: a whole lot of police crossover, and an alarming number of elected officials and overall members. the rot here is rather deep

The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism pored over more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepersmembership lists and identified more than 370 people it believes currently work in law enforcement agencies — including as police chiefs and sheriffs — and more than 100 people who are currently members of the military.

It also identified more than 80 people who were running for or served in public office as of early August. The membership information was compiled into a database published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets.

removed for the following reason: beyond being out of date, this appears to be incorrect on several fronts. as mentioned by heady even the article does not say this bans hentai–only certain forms of hentai–and furthermore if there is a ban it appears to no longer be in effect.

So from what I read online, Ecofascists act authoritarian and fascistically in the name of the environment? That sounds pretty alien to me, since I usually connect climate activists with leftists.

i would say more that they want fascism but instead of justifying it under the usual pretenses, they justify it with the logical consequence of such a genocidal ideology, which is fewer people (and fewer people = lesser impact on the environment overall).

So what exactly is the difference between the two if there even is one? And what are your overall thoughts on this topic?

as i understand, the two are not mutually exclusive and substantially overlap; some people would probably say degrowth is also an inherent and necessary aspect of ecosocialism, and therefore not distinct from ecosocialism so much as a strategy of mitigation within it. i don’t think this is quite the case–there’s probably at least a few non-socialist degrowthers out there, especially as ecofascism becomes more normal on the right–but in general yeah, degrowthers will overwhelmingly also be ecosocialists.

unfortunately as we’ve seen time and time again, the UN is a completely toothless agency if the crimes are being done by a major nation because of the veto power they hold. barring a structural reform, the USes and Chinas of the world will always be able to basically get away with this stuff. and honestly, even Rwanda and Myanmar have shown you can be a small country and basically get away with state-sanction mass murder or cultural annihilation if the payoff for intervening doesn’t have an immediate benefit

although peltola will only serve for about 4 months (unless she’s elected in the november general election), this is a big breakthrough for democrats in the state. she is also the first alaska native to be elected to the house of representatives.

the details of this are particularly infuriating. in at least one case someone was raided by a SWAT team over this even though they can probably vote and are reasonably likely to be acquitted. from Slate:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made a spectacle out of the round of arrests made by his election police force earlier this month, jailing 20 people on charges of voter fraud and promising more prosecutions to come. At least one target was dragged to jail in his underwear by a SWAT team at 6 a.m. But it turns out that the individuals ensnared in DeSantis’ dragnet had no idea that they could not lawfully vote. The governor’s own appointees flubbed their legal duty to stop them from registering. And because of their sloppy errors, all 20 defendants may well be acquitted of crimes they did not intend to commit.

As of July 1, 2015, more than 70 million people have records indexed by the III.

that is an astronomical amount, jesus

i wouldn’t say i’m surprised that the financial management of this company is incompetent, but for all the big names involved with this and the fact that it is de facto trump’s social media website, you’d think someone would at least be trying to steer it in a financially solvent direction. there are no shortage of billionaires on the right willing to bankroll stuff like this.

an interesting piece for consideration; i’m generally of the mind that this is correct, but there are some people who simply need to be imprisoned for life. to its credit this article does mention it here:

Of course, some offenders may have to stay locked up for life because they remain dangerous. How to assess and manage their sentences is an important question I will ignore here. But such cases account for a very small fraction of the nearly quarter of a million people incarcerated for life in the US today.

but i think it downplays the necessity of doing this, in spite of the few cases it does apply to. i think it’s probably fine to sentence your anders breiviks and jeffrey dahmers to life imprisonment and keep them there, for example, because it is very unlikely that they’ll be rehabilitated even in the best prison system conceivable.

the energy “price cap” could hit as high as £7,000, which seems like a pretty good way to have people rioting in the streets because they literally can’t afford power

All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent. Now all of that said I want to reiterate that the industrial revolution only happened once in one place so may well could have happened somewhere else in a different way with different preconditions; we’ll never really know because our one industrial revolution spread over the whole globe before any other industrial revolutions happened. But we can still note that the required precursors for the one sample we have didn’t exist in the Roman economy.

this is a particularly interesting point to consider–what other ways might an industrial revolution (or series of them) happen besides the way in which ours did? i’m sure someone out there has written alternate history to this effect, since there’s alt history for almost everything you can think of.

i would encourage you to actually engage with the article, which is actually quite interesting, instead of flippantly dismissing it in a way that leaves no avenue for discussion at all.

Because, at the end of the day, deference epistemology tells you not to evaluate certain things in certain situations. I think the potential of that for particularly egregious kinds of exploitation is obvious.

If you say, well, this person’s perspective is what we’re going with, kind of regardless of what I privately feel, I think you’re going to encourage very recognizable forms of abuse, very recognizable forms of bullying.

this specific point gets at the heart of the problem imo: fundamentally, you are outsourcing your position/analysis/evaluation to someone else, and you are doing so in a implies that person’s position is unimpeachable–but that’s obviously illogical and unreasonable to expect of anyone. nobody is correct on every issue, and furthermore someone’s lived experiences may be extremely important and priceless, but they don’t guarantee a person will come to a right or reasonable conclusion about an issue either. so when we normalize this kind of shorthand thinking, we ensure that our future analysis will somehow be errant, because a point that should be challenged will eventually go unchallenged, or similar.

I like how you conveniently ignored the second sentence in my comment.

yes: because it’s wrong, unless you think absolutely nobody pays for porn (and that most people don’t accordingly do porn because they are being paid to engage in an on-camera sexual behavior). you are making a distinction in the causal actions that lead to the creation of most on-camera sexual acts and the causal actions that lead to most sex work being done, when there practically isn’t one. both are being done as a voluntary exchange of services and/or goods between consenting people.

This is just obtuse - sex on camera isn’t done for the gratification of the participants.

…have you talked to any person who has sex on camera? i would venture to guess that at least a supermajority of them do it at least partially for the reasons you describe. i’m also pretty sure most people do not or would not find “getting paid to have sex on camera” an undesirable profession to have.

almost certainly yeah. this frees a lot of money that otherwise goes to monthly payments to go toward literally anything else.

estimates are in now that this wipes out 20 million people’s debt, and impacts another 27 million people, which is crazy. that’s a ton of people who will be out from underneath this

this seems extremely substantial, beyond what i expected of biden. a lot of people are pell grant recipients so a ton of people will be getting $20k here instead of $10k. the 5% monthly cap appears to be a halving of the current federal payment cap, which is 10%, so that’s also substantial. they doubled household income for joint filers, so this applies to couples with an income below $250k; also, none of this is taxable.

one of the big wins of last night’s primaries in NY/FL (there were a few) is this guy, who is associated with March for Our Lives, was the favored candidate of progressives in this seat, and is just 25(!) right now. he’s in a safe Democratic seat, so he is de facto a congressman already.