retrospectology

retrospectology , 2 days ago

Clinton is super pro-corporate, what are you on about? She was unelectable and never should've run, she's directly responsible for Trump.

retrospectology , 2 days ago

It's possible to defeat a popular progressive like sabders when you have the backing of the party establishment and their corporate media apparatus.

Clinton won her primary through voter suppression by the DNC and corporate, that doesn't make her a better candidate. The General proved that.

If she "demolished" Sanders, and then lost to Donald Trump, that means Trump is therefore the "best" candidate. That's your logic here.

retrospectology , 2 days ago

Millions were swayed by lies spun by corporate media.

retrospectology , 2 days ago

Warren backstabbed Sanders in 2016 and 2020 even after she lost, she fell in line with the establushment instead of fighting for what she claims to believe. She's arguably worse than out and out conservative dems, she's there to sabotage the left and siphon away votes.

retrospectology , 2 days ago

Yes and the American people voted for Trump over Clinton, that doesn't mean he won due to his popularity, he won because he exploited a broken system, same as Clinton exploited a broken system within the DNC.

Clinton's primary win is not evidence that she was overwhelmingly popular, it's evidence that democratic voters was misled about Sanders (who we both supposedly agree is a better candidate). Clinton voters are low-information, a condition that's fostered deliberately by the DNC and Democrat-aligned corporate media, because if they didn't decieve people those voters would understand that Sanders is actually someone who would work to deliver the things that benefit all of us.

If you actually think Sanders is the better candidate then you should agree that most normal people aren't aware of why. On the other hand, if you think Sanders lost fair and square and democratic voters voted with full knowledge then that's basically just saying you think progressive policy is a failure on its own merits.

retrospectology , 1 day ago

I understand that everyone has differing priorities

And what, specifically, are those for Clinton? Protecting corporate oligarchy? What exactly do you believe Clinton truly offers to the average voter that Sanders does not?

The question i originally addressed was whether the DNC screwed Sanders. There is no evidence that they did anything to him that would have overcome the shellacking he took.

Yes, there is. He was painted as an "extremist" by the establishment, his supporters were repeatedly portrayed as "Bernie Bros" despite being a majority women in order to give the impression that his following has some kind of latent misogynist leanings (which Warren played on again in 2020 by lying about him saying that a woman can't be president). The party super delegates were allowed to pre-vote to give the impression Clinton had a greater lead than she really did. Primary debates between Sanders and Clinton were scheduled for times with the least viewership, he recieved very few interviews on major outlets and when he did it was almost always just some talking head aggressively criticizing his "extreme left wing" policies.

There was the email leak that demonstrated that there was hostility towards Sanders from within the DNC and that members were looking to help Clinton's campaign.

Do we not remember that it was concluded in court that the DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was working to sabotage Sanders. The court didnt deny the rigging was hapoening, it just decided it was ok to rig things against candidates because in its view the party can pick whatever candidates they want.

It's not a question of whether or not the DNC and their corporate media allies working to undermine the Sanders campaign, it's established, yes, they were. That's how public opinion is manufactured; by leveraging the media and party apparatus to create a false narrative to decieve voters and manipulate people's perception of who and what ideas are viable. Pretending there weren't powerful interests aligned against Sanders plays into that narrative.

retrospectology , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Ohh, a political "scientist" said it, must be a fact. I take back everything I posted, I will now pretend that Wasserman Schultz didn't actively admit to trying to rig the convention against Sanders and that the court literally said in plain english that's what was happening.

Must've just been a coincidence!

The way you people try to rewrite history is insane.

retrospectology , 1 day ago

So you ignore the facts you don't like, and take the ones you do. And I'm projecting...

Why the fuck do you think Wasserman Schultz stepped down? What is your explanation if it's not the scandal involving her bias as chair exposed in the emails? Coincidence?
What possible benefit to you gain from this denial of established reality?

retrospectology , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

How can I ignore that which you did not provide?

I literally pointed you to the court case where the court said the DNC was rigging the convention against Sanders. I provided you that. That's not my opinion, that's literally what happened in court and Wasserman Schultz resigned over it. Your eyes literally won't allow you to see it because it completely conflicts with the fantasy you want to believe is true (That the DNC isn't deeply corrupt and diametrically opposed to progressive values).

You've got to be a troll. We're done here.

retrospectology , 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

I linked you directly to an article discussing the lawsuit.

https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/

On August 25, 2017, Federal Judge William Zloch, dismissed the lawsuit after several months of litigation during which DNC attorneys argued that the DNC would be well within their rights to select their own candidate. “In evaluating Plaintiffs’ claims at this stage, the Court assumes their allegations are true—that the DNC and Wasserman Schultz held a palpable bias in favor Clinton and sought to propel her ahead of her Democratic opponent,” the court order dismissing the lawsuit stated. This assumption of a plaintiff’s allegation is the general legal standard in the motion to dismiss stage of any lawsuit. The allegations contained in the complaint must be taken as true unless they are merely conclusory allegations or are invalid on their face.

I'm blocking you now. Good bye.

retrospectology , 7 days ago

Oohh, that's a good way to potentially break this. Just download a ton of useless stuff and upload it onto OneDrive. People could make this service really expensive for Microsoft.

retrospectology , 7 days ago

Double whammy is a good idea.

I want to take a picture of a brick and duplicate it over and over, then zip those up and duplicate that zip into OneDtive until it tells me I can't any more.

retrospectology , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

AI has a bad name because it is being pursued incredibly recklessly and any and all criticism is being waved away by its cult-like supporters.

Fascists taking up use of AI is one of the biggest threats it presents and people are even trying to shrugg that off. It's insanity the way people simply will not acknowledge the massive pitfalls that AI represents.

retrospectology , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

Yup, American manufacturers are still treating EVs as if they're this exotic new toy for upper-middle class people or silicon valley douche bros, rather than getting onboard with the concept of them just being a utilitarian thing that needs to be marketed to normal people.

Give me the EV equivalent of the Geo Metro and I'll buy it in a heart beat. I'm not taking out a second mortgage for a car that tries to drive itself and whatever dumb gimmicks they come up with, but I will 100% buy an affordable, practical EV designed with efficiency and economy in mind.

retrospectology , 15 days ago

And about 26% of voting age adults voted for Donald Trump in 2016/2020.

Almost like there's an intelligence threshold that keeps manifesting that ~30% number...

retrospectology , 15 days ago

European countries aren't totalitarian states. This isn't a question of culture, it's an issue regarding the one and only state power that's making decisions.

This is the danger of being lulled into thinking China is a normal country. Yes, there are long histories in China and are (vanishing) diverse cultures in China but that's irrelevant when talking about the actions of the state, which is all encompassing and overrules culture and diversity every time.

It's the state that owns and controls these companies, it's the state that dictates their policy and usage, and since the state is fascist and actively seeking to undermine democracy across the global, it is wise to treat the products of that state as a threat.

retrospectology , 15 days ago

I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia

Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.

Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships that approach anywhere near the all-encompassing control of the CCP. Hungary maybe I guess, which isn't a country I'd recommend taking tech from either.

Ireland is not comparable to China though, that's an extreme reach. We're not talking about right-wing groups seeking power within democracies, we're talking about uni-party state control.

I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.

Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation already. I got banned from lemmy.ml for discussing Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Pointing out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions of deaths was labeled "cia misinformation" by the mods. It's a throughly compromised instance.

Lemmy users are not immune to tankie and Rusdian trolls, and thinking that they are is actually a weakness that gets exploited by those bad actors.

Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.

Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business and using that control as part of a coercive campaign to suppress human rights, dissent and individual freedoms.

Whatever authoritarianism is festering in other countries, China is still on an entirely different level, it's not really a question.

retrospectology , 15 days ago

Totalitarianism is always when the other guy does it

No...totalitarianism is an actual distinct system of governance when the state controls every aspect of daily life, communication and economic activity. It's an actual word with meaning.

It’s got an anti-war infestation that’s regularly accused of being tankies for failing to clap for the correct set of tanks.

Ok, I'm not sure if we're talking through a translator app or something, but I didn't get banned from lemmy.ml for being "pro-war" I got banned for mentioning a historical fact about the Great Leap Forward and acknowledging other atrocities like the genocide occurring in Xinjiang.

If someone is anti-war they would be against those types of things as well. Tankies instead deny that those events occurred/are occurring, that's why they're so easy to spot and how people know they're on Lemmy -- they literally can't condemn the CCP for any of the things they purport to be against when it comes to other countries, since it's counter-productive to their true goals to criticize the CCP.

By contrast an honestly anti-war progressive type of person would be just as clear-eyed about their own government as they are the CCP. That's being anti-war, you can't be selective or try to ignore degrees of difference just because it's politically uncomfortable, that's just being a mouth-piece for a specific flavor of authoritarianism.

Calmly explaining this to my US Postal Service and my Tennessee Valley Authority

Again, running public services is not the same as the state owning and controlling all businness and industry. If the Post Office was used to control speech, that would be totalitarian use of a public service.

I think you're just being obtuse at this point. You might be down for totalitarianism and the abolishment of individual freedoms, most people are not. Since, you know, having no rights kind of suck ass.

retrospectology , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

I think the unskippable and autoplaying ads are the point for me where I start actively finding ways to avoid ads. Anything that tries to force itself in front of my eyes or eclipses the actual content is kind of a no go.

It's not that Youtube creators don't deserve to be compensated (many if whom provide content to YT for free just to share, let's remember) it's that Google needs to find less obnoxious means of serving ads.

I'd be really curious to see the actual numbers of how much Google gets in revenue from YT and how much actually goes to paying creators. I'm betting the ratio is not as slim as they make it sound.

retrospectology , 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago)

It's theft of labor without any compensation, aimed at cheapening the very value of that labor.

A human artist can, and often does, train simply by looking at the real world. The art they then produce is a result of that knowledge being interpreted and stylized by their own brain and perception. The decision making on how to represent a given subject, what details to add and leave out to achieve an effect, is done by the artist themselves. It's a product of their internal mental laboring.

By contrast, if you trained an AI on photos alone it would never, ever produce anything that looks like a drawing or a piece of art, it would never create a stylized piece of art or make a creative decision of its own.

In order to produce art the AI must be fueled with human created art, that humans labored to produce. The human artists are not being compensated for the use of that labor, and even worse the AI is leveraging that to make the human labor worth less. And what's more, that AI's ability will stagnate without further theft of newer, more novel art and concepts.

Without that keystone of human labor the AI simply can't function.

Ripping off so many people at once and so chaotically that you can't distinguish exactly how any given individual is being exploited doesn't mean those people aren't still being ripped off. The machine that the tech bros created could not exist without the stolen labor of the artists.

retrospectology , 24 days ago

I don't think it's really that simple from many trans peoples' perspective, as it places an obligation on them to out themselves before they even talk to a person. Many trans people's goal with transition is not to live as "trans" it's to live as their target gender, not some "other". Being trans is not a sexuality.

A better solution would be to have people who don't want to have the possibility of ever dating any trans person put that as part of their profile.

If people have an issue with doing that then it kind of reveals the truth of the issue for what it is.

retrospectology , 24 days ago

Representatives don't have a free mandate in a democracy, they're bound by laws and by their constituency.

How are your councils formed and what restricts their power?

retrospectology , 23 days ago (edited 23 days ago)

You can do a commandline "dir /s *.log" to search an entire directory it works better than the normal file search generally. Unless I misunderstand what you're asking.

retrospectology , 23 days ago

Oh, perhaps not. I may've just understood how you're using the search. /s is just a straight search if the directory, I don't know that it can be used to generate dynamic results like that. Go figure.

retrospectology , 25 days ago

I'm betting the reason they want access to "moderate" your projects is to train their AI. Literally looking to steal artists work before it's out the door.

retrospectology , 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

Not just dicks, but dicks mixed with other art so it just completely pollutes the training data and the AI has no idea how to draw anything without it kind of looking like a dick. Dicks with human and animal faces, boats shaped like dicks, dick buildings and landscapes etc.

It would take an immense amount of bad data to actually work, but it would be funny.

retrospectology , 29 days ago

There has certainly been a lot, but my gut still says China or maybe Soviet Union.

It really depends on how far back you are going and what criteria you're using to ascribe responsibility for any given type of death.

For example, if a CCP guard kills a Uyghur prisoner in one of the camps that's obviously a death under the CCP, but if China creates an economic crisis in some country via its Belt and Road debt colonialism campaign and someone there subsequently dies due to hardship stemming from those economic issues is the CCP responsible?

retrospectology , 29 days ago

I'd think so, yeah, the CCP alone has pretty insane numbers, which is saying a lot.

You have to keep in mind that there's something like a million Uighurs in China that got scooped up and put in concentration camps 2010s. There's Tianamen, Tibet, the purges during Xi's rise to power, the brutalization of HK and the literal millions dead under Mao through both intentional acts to purge the party and punish dissidents and simply the incompetance of the the failed economic theories.

retrospectology , 29 days ago

Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest[1] famine in human history.
[Wiki]

Pretty high number, and that's not even counting anything more contemporary.

Beginning in 2014, the Chinese government, under the administration of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, incarcerated more than an estimated one million Turkic Muslims without any legal process in internment camps. Operations from 2016 to 2021 were led by Xinjiang CCP Secretary Chen Quanguo.[2] It is the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
[Wiki]

So, yes, the genocide in Gaza is criminal, no less egregious or evil and those committing or supporting it should be brought before a tribunal, but they're still rookie numbers compared to the CCP. Even if you go all the way back to the Nakba. There's simply no way around it.

If you're going to act morally outraged about the US, you can't then just skip over China because it's politically uncomfortable. Xi had execution vans ffs.

retrospectology , 29 days ago

He's such an insufferable cringelord.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Ah, you must be talking about Stonetoss the Nazi.

He's a nazi.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

That's the one

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Does anyone yet know how to break stuff like Copilot?

I don't have Win11, but I also never really trust that MS won't surreptiously push this kind of thing in the background to legacy systems, and I don't trust UI toggles within Windows to actually do anything.

Do we know if there are services or files that Co-pilot needs to function?

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Only voting for Trump is giving him your vote.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Eh, the founders more or less ensured that a wealthy land-owning aristocracy would be able to overrule the will of the people if need be. That's more or less what the SCOTUS is there for, to ensure things don't get too democratic.

The US was an early modern democracy, but has never been a particularly good one.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

"Vote for my genocide supporting candidate or you're not serious about change!"

retrospectology , 1 month ago

So should people who are not going to vote for a Trump or Biden actively cast their vote for Trump then? It's the same thing, after all, right?

Is not casting a vote for Trump actually a vote for Biden?

retrospectology , 1 month ago

You're kind of avoiding the question.

If I "fail to support Trump" then I am defacto supporting Biden, right?

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Just following your logic.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

This situation is more like seeing two people murdering others and getting told you're supporting the one who has killed eight people instead of seven because I'm not helping either of them kill people.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Yes, both mass murderers are bad. The fuck kind of neolib crack have you been smoking?

retrospectology , 1 month ago

So, for my own sake since I'm such a dumb pleb, you are saying not voting for Trump is a vote for Biden? Or is it not?

I kind of missed your answer to that.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

The technical distinction are becoming less and less compelling. The whole "Things will get better if you just vote for our chosen establishment democrat one more time." starts to wear thin after decades of 0 substantial results and, more often than not, straight up complicity in the worst crimes of the far-right.

Establishment democrats support the corporate aristocracy and banks just the same, they barely fight for really basic stuff like civil rights and only enough so they have something to point to, not to actually fundamentally change anything in a way that the right can't just reverse. That's why we are where we are right now, the Conservative Democrats' greed and lack of spine has allowed the far-right to capture the courts and undermine our institutions, unopposed over the course of 40-ish years.

The Democratic party is the only one with potential to change, but that's never going to happen if they can just keep doing the pied piper shit and getting re-elected. For all intents and purposes they are identical.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Christ, why is this such a difficult question to answer? Is not voting for Trump a vote for Biden? Or is it not?

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Well, at least that's a cogent basis for an argument, thank you.

Though I still think this is something Democratic strategists should understand at this point -- ultimately it's Biden's responsibility to drive out voters, not play chicken with his base in defense of unrepentant war criminals.

I don't think voters can be blamed for being unable to support the politics of the party moving so far to the right, especially when Biden's presidency itself is already representative of a massive compromise by progressive voters. If Biden loses, the blame and pressure needs to be put onto the DNC and Biden for failing to do what it takes to keep their base fed, not on the voters, or we are going to end up in this same cycle forever.

A lot of our most prominent progressive representatives came into office after 2016, as a result of Clinton's failure. The party strategists understand when they lose, they do post-mortems even if they're not public about them. So I still hold that it's a valid strategy to allow democrats to fail when they end up going to far to the right, especially in such an egregious case as what we see with Gaza. Democratic support for the genocide can't continue, it's beyond the pale.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

In terms of establishment conservative Democrats and Republicans? Yes, they represent the same path to fascism. So it's not both sides, more like same side.

Progressives would be the only non-fascist side.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

Here’s the problem, people don’t vote down ticket, and they only vote every 4 years instead of every 2 years.

In no small part due to DNC suppression and interference. This is why people say the neoliberals need to be allowed to fail until they have no option but to tlstop suppression tactics (or leave and go to the GOP where they belong)

The base cannot reform the DNC they can only starve the power structure until it's desperate enough to stop sniping progressives. It worked after Clinton's failure, we got a ton of progressives in office after that.

retrospectology , 1 month ago

You speak as if the democrats cooperating with republicans is a flaw on their part. They don’t exist in a vacuum — they have to deal with the American public.

The majority of Americans are for basically all progressive policies, particularly when asked directly about a policy rather than a party or politician.

The issue is not the American people (of who MAGA chuds are 30% at best) the issue is that Democrats and Republicans work in concert to rig the system and deny the people access to politicians who are actually willing to implement popular policy.

This corporate circle jerk game (fueled not inconsiderably by Citizens United) is why the fascist roght is able to keep pushing our institutions further t9 the right. Establushment Democrats and Republicans are so busy gorging on lobby payouts and shoving AIPAC money ip their asses that they literally put up no resustance except when it comes to changing the status quo. Which is when they turn and will snarl and bite at anyone who tries to interrupt them.

So no, it is not "dealing with the American people" it's deliberately side stepping and suppressing them to loot our nation's legacy.