Arotrios
For Amusement Purposes Only.
Changeling poet, musician and writer, born on the 13th floor. Left of counter-clockwise and right of the white rabbit, all twilight and sunrises, forever the inside outsider.
Seeks out and follows creative and brilliant minds. And crows. Occasional shadow librarian.
#music #poetry #politics #LGBTQ+ #magick #fiction #imagination #tech
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"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Had a feeling this is how the political dynamics would play out.
Trump made a lot of enemies in the GA GOP when he first dragged Raffensberger through the mud and then cost GA a senate seat by telling his supporters the special election was rigged. I’ve said it before - those good ole boys down south never forget a slight. Hell, they’re still pissed off at Sherman down there, and that was 170 years ago.
Kemp knows that stepping in now to disqualify Willis would give the Dems a lot of ammunition for turning GA blue in 2024 - I can’t see him sticking his neck out for Trump here.
Good ole mass media, telling you something big is going down, and giving you absolutely no clue as to how to get involved.
The FCC has made the comment process extremely difficult to navigate, but it looks like the hearing is on docket 23-293 (commenters, please correct me if I’m wrong). You should be able use the form here to place a comment on the proceeding. Use 23-293 in the proceedings field to bring it up for selection.
Here’s a more detailed view of the Media and Democracy Project’s petition, which includes a supporting filing from Jamie Kellner, former president of Fox Broadcasting.
Pretty much, although these days a lot of folks find it more convenient to have the rules in .pdf for easy access. There’s hundreds available. Here’s a listing I had posted last night on the @13thFloor magazine I run over here on kbin - happy to crosspost if you feel it fits.
It actually might - check out the second half of the article:
There are minimally six aspects revealed in the latest indictment that we believe justify Georgia – under Section 3 of the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment – keeping Trump off the ballot:
The racketeering scheme was a multifaceted attempt to subvert Georgia’s own part of the 2020 electoral process;
The officials on the receiving end of the unsuccessful racketeering scheme were elected and appointed Georgia officials. …
… whose actions to reject election subversion vindicated their own oaths to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States as well as Georgia’s;
Most of these officials were and are Republicans – including Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, Governor Brian Kemp and former Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan;
These officials will, in 2024 as in 2020, collectively determine who is qualified to be on Georgia’s presidential ballot; and
These officials’ testimony, and related evidence, is at the heart of the proof of the Georgia racketeering case against Trump.
In other words, the evidence to convict Trump in the Georgia racketeering case is the same evidence, coming from the same Georgia officials, who will be involved in determining whether, under the 14th Amendment, Trump is qualified to be on the 2024 presidential ballot – or not.
Little if any additional evidence or proceedings are needed. The Georgia officials already hold that evidence, because much of it comes from them. They don’t need a trial to establish what they already know.
How could Trump avoid this happening? A quick trial date in Atlanta with an acquittal on all counts might do it, but this runs counter to his strategy to delay all the pending criminal cases until after the 2024 election.
With no preelection trial, there will likely be no Trump on the 2024 Georgia ballot, and no chance for him to win Georgia’s 2024 electoral college votes.
Once Georgia bars him, other states may follow. That would leave Trump with no way to credibly appear on the ballot in all 50 states, giving him no chance to win the electoral votes required to claim the White House.
This indicates that the GOP of GA are done with Trump after he dragged Raffensberger through the mud and cost them a Senate seat. They might just be petty enough to give him the middle finger here. Those “good ole boys” down south never forget a slight.
I buy games based on the following tier scale:
Gameplay > Performance > Price > Expected time playing > Graphics
I agree with your point in the post, especially after playing Darktide, which chucked performance out the window for fog and lighting effects. It doesn’t matter how pretty your game is if it’s rendering at 3fps.
Lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and legal experts have since called for Roberts to face a subpoena that would force him to answer for Supreme Court corruption.
Stop talking about it and do it. Each day the issue goes unaddressed, the public’s confidence in the court decays. We’re at the point where in a normal political arena, there would already be an impeachment investigation in play. Roberts is betting on either Trump winning or having a divided legislature in 2024 so that everything can be swept under the rug.
This reduces the minuscule interest I had in replaying Paladins to a negative number. Smite’s been nothing but frustrating garbage, but I thought that with a bit of polish and a lot more character development, Paladins had promise when it came out. Starting a labor dispute to begin a practice that will degrade the overall quality of the game means it’s not worth my hard disk space to install their products - it’s clear things are only going to get worse for Hi-Rez titles from here.
Excellent article that really looks at the history of antitrust law and draws a pretty spot-on analysis of the current case, and how the presiding judge, Amit Mehta, compares to Harold Greene, who broke up AT&T:
There is also a loss of faith in American institutions writ broadly, which differs from the 1980s. At the same time as he’s been dealing with Google, Mehta is presiding over trials of January 6th perpetrators, a showcase of the deep fissures that simply did not exist decades earlier. One result is that the politics of corporate power is very different, and that antitrust is on a generational and bipartisan upswing. (Indeed, Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr brought the case, Biden’s antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, is continuing it.)
The net effect is that Mehta is an important actor here, but not as important as Greene. The case is likely to be appealed, probably all the way to the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court erodes antitrust caselaw against Google, then Congress will be confronted with the reality that it is hard to use the existing antitrust laws to address big tech. But ultimately if no cases against dominant firms succeed, then eventually Congress will change the law. Moreover, this case isn’t a one-off; the environment is less like AT&T in 1982, or even Microsoft in 1998, and more like that of the turn of the 19th century, when Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson brought dozens of cases against dominant firms. This is one chapter in the fight over corporate power, but not the only one.
I think the author is being a bit too hopeful here that Congress will enact stronger anti-trust legislation if the case fails, but he’s likely right about this eventually ending up in front of the Supreme Court.
Holy shit, this is beyond fucking vile:
After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.
“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.
“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”
To make matters worse:
Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.
For those you wanting to make a statement regarding publishing and promoting Nazi filth, here’s the link to contact the Stanford Ombudsman, the Harvard Ombdusman and here’s the contact info for Harper Collins Publishing:
ADDRESS
HarperCollins Publishers
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
HARPERCOLLINS RECEPTIONIST
212-207-7000
HARPERCOLLINS CUSTOMER SERVICE
800-242-7737
Make sure they know exactly who they’re promoting and supporting, and that we know it now, too.
Don’t bother talking to Musk or Thiel, they’ll take it as encouragement.
Y’all are beginning to crack me up. You know each time you drop a reply, you’re increasing the exposure of this particular theoretical site right? I didn’t say they had perfect plausible deniability, just an extra layer of it, and whatever action taken against it won’t stop the servers they’re aggregating from, which are accessed by a lot of other apps that do exactly the same thing. Nuking this theoretical aggregator is like plucking a dandelion and thinking you’re done with weeding the lawn - it’s really just not worth the time unless they go after the servers themselves.
Possibly true, but what you’re theoretically looking at isn’t hosting pirated content. It’s a link aggregator that finds an available file to stream to you from servers that already have the full file, which may or may not have been assembled from a legitimate source or torrent. Legally, this gives them a layer of plausible deniability - disclaimer IANAL.
So if this one goes down, as it probably will, someone else will just build another streaming link aggregator that does the exact same thing - there’s more than few out there. This is just basically round 238,592,394,321 of internet whack-a-mole.
For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.
Except that it’s never worked that way throughout the history of United States.
The Supreme Court itself is established by an act of Congress, the Judiciary Act of 1789. The Congress has always had the power to not only set the number of justices (last paragraph on that link), but to impeach them as well.
A misplaced comma doesn’t trump 240 years of legal precedent, no matter how much Alioto might wish it did.
Agreed - it’s clear he’s just trying to throw out something to take the heat off. I hope that this particular mangling of the Constitution will backfire on him, because even a first year law student would find the argument facetious and self-serving at best, and it gives his critics further fuel to not only attack his position as justice, but grounds to call for disbarment.
He’s flat out lying.
US Constitution Article 3, first fucking line:
Section 1
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
I also would like to point out the “good Behaviour” clause in the next line that determines the length of a justice’s tenure, and under which Alioto has clearly disqualified himself from serving as a justice.
Wow - bit overblown all in all. While it sounds like the quinoa guy is kinda a jerk, I’m not seeing any proof of racism on his part. He just boosted a legitimate news article (the Fediverse servers being seized that popped up yesterday) posted by this Eris character, who had been flagged as a racist troll in the past. This isn’t confirmed or denied in the various posts aside from a profile link on thebadplace.com - which has no information aside from a few racist tags on that profile (can’t tell who the profile is for).
This sounds more like the admins got snippy at each other in off-site discord drama and decided to take their toys and go home. Interesting for the /popcorn, but hey, if mastodon.art doesn’t wanna play with firefish, that’s their decision, regardless of the reasoning, end of story.
Yeah, I know, it’s just not really worth the time, as it’s gonna be a completely unscientific poll anyway. Plus, looks like they’re tying your vote to the email address via the submission form - I’m guessing that’s a single post to the database, so not terribly convinced they have privacy in mind. That they’ve got a checkmark to confirm that you’re not an EU citizen means the submission form doesn’t meet GDPR privacy standards.
Lol - my family being on Facebook is one of the reasons I post here instead.
I actually think the dynamic you speak of helps the quality of the Fediverse specifically. I’ve seen it in play with other emerging platforms, where the adventurous sorts leap onto the new software and start creating content, while the more social sorts like to hang on to what they’re familiar with because they value the community… up until the content begins to dry out, because all the adventurous sorts are usually the ones driving the creative soul of a platform.
Then the real migration begins (which I believe we’re at the beginning of with Reddit & Twitter), and you see an influx of the social sorts. This is the point at which you and I chuckle and say “cool, you’ve got a new Fediverse account? I’ve been posting there for awhile - I’ll follow you - can’t wait to see what you’ve got”.
Then you have that sweet spot where both the creative/adventurous sorts live in harmony with the social sorts and that’s what makes a vibrant internet community, until Spez spazzes or Elon buys it out, making the community miserable. That is until, like Leif Erikson seeking a warm land to grow grapes on to make wine to have a fuckin’ raging party, the adventurous sorts once again venture out into the great wide expanse of Open Source to find the next digital kegger.
Such is the circle of life.
They didn’t eat it up, although they certainly want you to think they did, and it’s clear they convinced you.
I’ve been on the internet since the BBS days. Centralized services rise and fall, and people said the internet was dead when AOL became the big portal, and then they said it with Yahoo, and Digg, and Facebook, and now Reddit and Twitter. It’s kinda like people who are always saying the world is gonna end - it never ends - it just changes.
I’d actually argue that we’re at a point of an internet renaissance spurred by the combined failures of Reddit, Twitter, and Meta to maintain contributor trust. They can’t control the flow of human imagination that pulses through the internet, they can only channel it. If they try to dam it, well, it’s just gonna overflow into fuckSpezicles all over /r/place and carry the cream to the Fediverse and beyond.
I’m not saying that big corporations aren’t a problem, I’m saying they don’t have to be our problem now that we’re here, and anyone who says the internet is dead isn’t looking in the right places.
Blog writer with vague complaint and no solutions stumbles across popular headline - more at 11.
The issue at play is the big corporate companies, that pretended to be public services, had their venture capital dry up and felt pressure to become profitable. The subsequent monetization and censorship within those systems had significant impact on the quality of content, but outside of those systems the internet has continued to flourish. I suggest the author get off of Reddit/Meta/TwitX, use a better search engine than Google, and start checking out the Fediverse.
Remember kids, the big social media companies will always want you to think that they are the entirety of the internet. But the internet is not a network of machines. It’s a network of human minds, and no organization will ever be able to contain the raw chaos that is the collective force of human imagination.
I think the issue was that the ones Google offered at a bulk discount to schools were the low-end models that didn’t have any memory upgrades, and there was a bunch of school-specific bloatware on it that compounded the issue. Multitasking flat out killed them, which made it difficult for my son to do anything with more than one window open. It even had issues with multiple browser tabs. I think he would have done better with a pen and paper and his library card than trying to use that thing for his schoolwork.
My pleasure and I completely agree - there’s not a single minority population that doesn’t suffer under one or more of these riders, and the full out assault on environmental protections is sickening given the climate devastation we’re experiencing.
The other thing that came to me while I pulled this out was that the Republican party hasn’t published a policy platform update since 2016.
This list of riders details what their unpublished policy is pretty thoroughly, and it’s clear why they won’t make it public.
These things are such junk - even when new they were so slow and bloated that they couldn’t load my kid’s schoolwork half the time. I had to make sure he had an alternate laptop for use so he wouldn’t fall behind. I felt really bad for the school district, it was clear they were being ripped off, and that most of the machines were going to be in a landfill within 3 years time.
It is on Kbin. Lemmy doesn’t have that capacity yet as far as I know. It’s one of the main reasons I recommend the former - Kbin bridges the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy, and includes functionality from both types of instances. Following users increases your feed content here exponentially.