“And so then Lemmy said ‘Hey you know what would be a good idea is if we copied that model exactly’” :-(

I absolutely have observed mods on Lemmy engaging in the same shitty behaviors (I am sitting on a post about a little cabal of !progressivepolitics@lemmy.world people who seem to be trying to rig the discourse in a particular direction to meet their electoral goals). But the simple fact of it being less centralized and more transparent (and with more of a culture of effective pushback against the mods) makes it a lot harder. They can’t just say “lol get fucked” like the mod from this post did and have that be the end of the story.

Oops, you are 100% correct, I fixed the title.

The one thing that this whole analysis is missing is this: There is a ton of work to do. The oceans are dying. The planet is boiling. The garbage is stacking up, endless and endless. There are crimes big and small going undiscovered, or un-processed and dealt with in a trustworthy fashion if they are discovered. There are wars, there are dangerous materials that need to be removed from the soil and the rivers, and the policies need to be set up and enforced to stop their cousins from replacing them within the year. WE’RE NOT FUCKING DONE. This illusion is wholly wrong that capitalism has created, that it is fine to drive the car off the cliff as long as we keep paying salaries and dividends up until the moment of impact comes

Yes, we’ve gotten more efficient and powerful in our ability to translate a human into an effective change in conditions at the earth’s surface. But the problems have gotten bigger, too, and more urgent to the point that they threaten our entire species. Just because we can now keep growing the food and doing layout for the advertisements with only 15 hours a week, doesn’t mean that’s all we need to fucking do.

There is a vital question coming up. When the machines do all the work, does that mean everyone eats? Or no one?

Right now it is “no one” roughly speaking. That must change. There is no future for anyone there, just nightmares unfolding and unfolding.

Oh, true that, I see now. Yeah, you’re right I think.

Did they? It does say “by Reddit.” Where did you learn this?

Oh… I get it. I looked more. So the issue and the complaint wasn’t just that an anime image of a totally naked cyborg woman was treated as NSFW and put behind a click-to-show thing or something. That would have been fine, I do feel like that’s normal. The issue is that they have some kind of image-alteration gimmick set up which interprets the red cables as blood or gore or something, and modifies the original photo to block out that section permanently. That’s weird, yes. I don’t think the issue is “even vaguely nude,” though.

I mean, in fairness, that’s pretty obviously a nipple.

“Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.”

This one is a wonderful concordance of pissing off the military because it was stupid orders they had to follow, pissing off law enforcement because they were placed directly in danger, pissing off state government because it’s obviously illegal and designed to threaten their citizens directly, and being an unambiguous example with absolutely no kind of excuse “oh we’re just deporting the rapists that’s why we took your neighborhood’s ice cream man away never to be seen again.”

Personally I would like to assure Trump that I’m super triggered and intimidated by this kind of show of force, and would really like to encourage him to order the Army to drive tanks around at random on blue state suburban streets next, just so I can be really triggered even harder and lead further to his great success.

“I did actually say: ‘Would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition?’ I did say that to him. I said it just that way,” Trump said, recounting the conversation.

They could literally just have 3 interns make hundreds of fake accounts on various instances, and flood the network with low-grade but ultimately harmless content.

My guess is that it is either that, or else bribing people who have existing positions of trust on the network (admins or moderators or powerusers) to undertake some kind of destructive action.

The first is cheaper and much more effective (and won’t get detected instantly), the second is more in line with reddit-exec-brained thinking. So kind of a toss-up. Something along the lines of those ideas would be my guess though. I thought about some kind of “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy like Facebook with Threads, but I think even Reddit isn’t stupid enough to try something like that (which would only result in a massive increase in the exodus of users from Reddit to Lemmy).

Edit: Well… something occurred to me. “Low-grade but ultimately harmless content” is exactly what they have been pushing Reddit towards, because they think it is better because it traps people in dopamine loops more effectively. Flooding Lemmy with that stuff (more so than it already is organically) would fuck it up from my point of view, but maybe from their point of view, something like really emotionally toxic random hatred in all directions. Maybe. Anyway, I think flooding Lemmy with content that turns people off via sockpuppet accounts is probably the easiest and most effective way, and I don’t see much way to prevent it.

190 min read

Hoo fuckin’ boy

I do have to say that including Hyprland in the original post is silly. Hyprland had a problem with ignorant users making ignorant speech in their community, and they didn’t police it, and once a shitstorm started, they recognized their error and started trying. It’s fine. Putting them up top, and Omarchy which is literally lead-developed by an open fascist, down below, is weird.

Holy God it’s a shitstorm… reading

I just want to point out there is nothing true in this statement. No such thing as far-right in current government (unless you consider anything right of your beliefs to be far-right, which is just silly), and immigration is completely fine, currently. My wife is an immigrant and non-us citizen and we have many immigrant friends. They are only deporting criminals, illegals, people who have broken the law.

Fuckin’ hell man. (That quote is from nobody in particular, just some random user chiming in… but still fuckin’ hell man.)

nrp’s reaction in the reply chain mostly just reads like he hasn’t picked up what’s going on. He still thinks fascism is “a political view” instead of “an active threat that might come for him and people he cares about right now, into his house and his safety, that needs resistance.” I don’t think DHH needs to be in prison or anything unless he’s done something. I do believe in free speech. But yes, the time has come for boycotts, strikes, marches, strengthening the organizations that we’ll need as things continue to get worse. It sounds like nrp is just privileged enough living his tech life that he doesn’t grasp that, and he can’t understand what people are mad about here.

Nobody remembers Switzerland as unsung heroes of World War 2, because of their commitment to freedom of expression and commerce for any side without prejudice. They’re lucky they got away with it, to be honest.

Pretty sure there is a pretty generous window where you can just return the thing for a refund no questions asked. It might be worth looking into.

Depending on the wording of the return policy, you might even be able to request one and tell them the reason is “The far right has taken over the world’s biggest government and they’re snatching people in the streets. The time to hide support for them behind ‘everyone’s welcome to their opinion’ is over. If at this moment in history you’re not willing to exclude far-right people from your circle, then go fuck yourself, fuck your hardware, give me my money back, in hindsight people should have done this to BMW and IG Farben both before and after the war. I hope you wake the fuck up. You will not be safe indefinitely from them coming for you, unless people braver than yourself stop them before they reach you.”

Usually I am against bullying people into saying the political views or taking the political decisions you want them to take. You can think they’re wrong about this (as obviously do I, for the reasons stated above) and say so without needing to try to strong-arm them. But, in this case, fuck 'em, for the reasons stated above. Read the return policy first of course to make sure you’re on solid ground, I don’t really know what it is.

A billion in EU buys many times less than the same billion does in russia.

Think about why it does

Because no one in their right mind wants rubles, so money comparisons that involve rubles have to be corrected back to reality before the values actually match. If you go by the exchange rate alone, you might as well be comparing dollars to lollipops or something.

1. I was talking about how much they’re spending on the Ukraine war, not how much they’re spending in general. Obviously the EU’s economy dwarfs Russia’s so of course they’re going to spend more on their military in general, it’s only even competitive because of PPP and because Russia has mobilized its entire country more or less into a war economy for the Ukraine war
2. PPP is the correct way to compare dollar values between countries, most of the time, doing otherwise gives wildly misleading values for a lot of comparisons
3. “It sound foolish to believe Russia has plans to attack” my guy they are literally “attacking,” they are literally moving their units into enemy territory (and then back out) right now
4. “they would be heading for a war they have no guarantee of winning” I have bad news for you about what it means historically when the massive nation is invading a small country that didn’t do anything to it, and the war is still going on with no progress several years in. That’s not just “no guarantee of winning” territory at that point…

I actually do see another possibility beyond what I said: I think it’s also possible that Russia has decided on war with NATO, and is doing provocations so the other party will have to be the one to “officially start” the war and then they can “retaliate.” That’s part of why I was saying it would be smart for NATO to establish very clear ahead-of-time guidelines and then stick to them, so there’s no escalation by mistake once missiles do start flying around. Anyway that type of behavior is a time-honored tradition especially for democratic countries that have to worry about the public perception (US with Japan before WW2, US with Vietnam at Tonkin Gulf, Israel at all times…). I don’t think that’s what they are doing for a couple of reasons, but it’s the only other explanation besides what I said that makes any sense to me.

Yeah. I’m not exactly a geopolitics-man, but my best guess for what’s going on with Putin and Russia’s strategy here is:

1. He’d been doing fine with taking over small countries up until 2022, and it generally gave him opportunities for new goodies to give away to his friends and also it’s exciting and makes him look like a winner
2. He’s been surrounded by yes men for so long that he’s lost his ability to really tell what are good strategies, what is happening, or what’s likely to happen in the future

I think the combination means that he’s just kind of telling his military to do whatever, including invading Ukraine thinking it would go about the same way as Georgia, Crimea, Chechnya, and the US elections. I do think he benefits from a certain amount of native cunning in this particular brinksmanship with NATO, and of course it doesn’t take too much detailed understanding of facts on the ground to just fly some planes around in their airspace and flip people off, but also I think in general this latest chapter of Russia is just a pretty good demonstration of why authoritarianism doesn’t make for effective countries.

EU countries combined are matching already russia military expenses

Check the data

The US plus all partners has sent about $150 billion in total, it looks like, up until the middle of last year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-aid-to-ukraine/ About half of that is EU, so say $75 billion from the EU.

Russia spends about $500 billion per year: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/02/12/russias-2024-military-spending-surpassed-eu-uk-combined-in-ppp-terms-study-a87974 They have mobilized basically their entire economy to try to win this thing.

What is your source for saying the EU alone is matching Russia? The EU is barely paying attention to the war, because of complacency and a subtle racism. But the idea that the EU is pulling out all the stops like Russia is, or prioritizing making their “defense” contractors rich in this as the US is wont to do, is absurd.

and watch out for propaganda.

Can do! I think I might have found some, I’m not sure.

Oh wait lol

Russia is already shooting down anything that enters their airspace (or trying to, mostly succeeding). As well as lots and lots of things which are outside their airspace including civilian airliners sometimes. It’s only in NATO-land that it’s this big crisis like “oh no oh no whatever shall we do.”

See, now you’ve got a problem. If you’d shot down the first one, Russia would have made a big noise and then it would have been fine. Now that you didn’t, now it’s weird if you start shooting them down.

My advice is to just be straight about it: Publicly announce what the line is where you’ll shoot them down, and then stick to it. Even if you just announced a date when the shooting-down will start any time they enter NATO airspace, that might be fine. But you have to stick to it. Right now you’re trying to figure out how to make them stop without shooting them down, and that approach just doesn’t work. Like you’re all surprised they don’t establish radio contact. Bro… that is not the game you are engaged in.

(You might also want to confiscate $10 billion in frozen Russian assets to give to Ukraine for each incursion, just to respond to what’s already happened… but again without shooting them down it’s not going to accomplish anything. The money’s already gone honestly, and they know that, they’re just waiting for you to figure it out and go through your whole “process” and make it official, and they think you’re stupid and weak for every year that goes by that you’re not doing that.)