Cylinsier
Also /u/Cylinsier on Reddit. A bullshit aritst.
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Headline is very biased, source video is opinion piece from an unreliable right wing source. Here’s a neutral reporting on this story:
There is no reliable evidence that he is being tortured in any capacity. He is charged with violating several wartime laws and it appears he attempted to out the locations of Ukrainian soldiers as well as international journalists to hostile Russian invasion forces, implicitly making it easier to target them.
OP’s account appears to be associated with or wants people to believe it is associated with Project Veritas. Project Veritas has a long, very well established pattern of dishonest reporting including editing videos to make it appear as if people have said or done things they didn’t do as well as lying about the identities of their “agents” and behaving erratically or unethically in an attempt to elicit secretly recorded responses from their targets which can then be edited to appear incriminating of whatever illicit activity they will then be accused of. Project Veritas is not a credible source of fact-based reporting and if OP is not associated with them, it should still be a red flag that they want people to think they are.
The way it’s supposed to work is voters are supposed to notice and not reelect that person. But not enough voters participate in primaries and then when general elections roll around, we’re stuck electing the moderate dinosaur or the fascist. People need to stop asking Congress, a body conposed of grandparents, to outlaw grandparents (and therefore themselves) from running and start just not hiring them anymore. That way when you have an old person who still has their wits and does a good job, you can keep them around instead of it being all or nothing.
This is all about delegitimizing the impeachment process itself. Trump getting impeached twice was historically relevant because it stood as tangible evidence of him being one of the worst presidents in history and easily the worst of the last 50 years. The Republican narrative remains that those impeachments were politically motivated and not based on any valid legal or ethical concerns. So now they’re going to do what they accused Democrats of doing and deliberately make a mockery of impeachment.
The point of this isn’t to actually punish anyone in the Biden administration. It’s an inconvenience at worst and they know it. The point is to make impeachment a joke. Something one party in Congress does to the other in the White House as a regular and inconsequential thing, just part of the theater of it all. This retroactively defangs Trump’s impeachments in the eyes of people on both sides who aren’t dialed into politics and really only pay attention every 4 years and skim the occasional headline. It also preemptively reduces the gravity of any future impeachments of Republican Presidents because impeachment becomes routine and therefore mundane to the average person.
Basically the Republicans don’t like checks and balances that require them to behave like civilized, functional adults doing their jobs, so they’re just going to smear their shit on those checks and balances until the voters no longer take them seriously and forget they ever had any real meaning. And it will work too.
I think it’s down to a few reasons. One you touched on is exclusives. Most consumers aren’t going to have both consoles like you do, they’re going to pick one or the other and Xbox doesn’t really have many exclusives, even fewer than PS, and theirs are much more likely to end up on PC when they do have them. So for consumers who want the larger variety of games, PS5 currently wins.
Another is performance. While both the PS5 and Series X are comparable, the Series S offering has created a very odd phenomenon of accidental exclusivity for Sony because of performance limitations. It’s a relatively new thing but I suspect it’s going to be more common as the generation goes on. The current example is Baldur’s Gate III. It simply cannot run on the S. As a result the developer has put an Xbox release on hold indefinitely and it may never come out on Xbox because they don’t want to have to deal with the confusion of selling an Xbox game that is not playable on one of the two SKUs. They decided that if the S can’t run it then it just won’t come out for the X either.
Third, and probably more relevant earlier in the generation, Sony had some snappy gimmicks on their side that might have been a difference maker for some consumers on the fence. The advanced haptics of the Dual Sense for example. I think the novelty of that wore off pretty quickly but there was a lot of buzz around it closer to launch to the extent that it’s impact on sales is probably more than nothing at all. I think the PSVR2 was also briefly a console mover as Xbox doesn’t have comparable hardware. I don’t think anyone at this point is rushing out to get a PS5 just for VR now, but there was a brief period of time after the PSVR2 was announced where people were eager to have a PS5 because if they did want VR, Sony’s was the cheapest way into that market at modern performance levels without having to give Facebook your entire identity just to game. Again not significant on its own, but it’s impact is more than nothing at all.
Fourth is just that Sony came into the generation ahead of Microsoft with the PS4. More PS4 owners with big libraries are going to want a new system that can play their old games rather than starting from scratch. So if you have a bunch of PS4 games that you still play, you’re going to choose PS5 and it’s kind of a no brainer.
And lastly I’d say Sony has just done a better job marketing it’s console as a must-have piece of consumer tech. From the jump there were a lot of people who already had gaming PCs questioning why they would ever need an Xbox. And Microsoft did little to address this narrative, it almost felt like they accepted that they were going to cannibalize their own console’s sales right from launch because everything gets ported to PC for them and just decided they didn’t care. There are plenty of reasons to own an Xbox but MS has pushed like none of them in advertising. Sony meanwhile did a great job early on marketing the PS5 as a status symbol and has kept in the public eye much more consistently with game exclusivity, and more recently media tie-ins with the Last of Us tv show. And while the exclusives may be few and far between, they are big draws like Final Fantasy, Horizon, and Spider-Man. When Xbox occasionally gets an exclusive, it’s always in the news for the wrong reasons like Halo almost universally agreed upon to be no longer good or Redfall being an absolutely embarrassing catastrophe of a release.
All just theatrics. Red meat for the base who will fall for it because they’re gullible and let their thirst for hate cloud their judgment. This is DOA in the Senate and McCarthy knows it but still has his caucus go through with this waste of time. Tells you exactly everything you need to know about his character and fitness for leadership. Both are, to put it mildly, lacking.
The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.
I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.
High speed glass cannons were always a fun build archetype to play around with in these games. I had tended to go the other way as a kid though, building hulking behemoths loaded to the teeth with bullets and bombs. Just don’t ask me to walk anywhere in any kind of efficient manner! Next mission waypoint a hundred steps that way? Meet you in an hour.
The US is far too large and powerful a nation to hide from. The consequences of four more years of Trump climate policy alone will find you anywhere on this planet. You cannot run away from the fallout of a second Trump term just by moving to a different continent. Only choice is to stay and help the fight against it.
Maybe a hot take here but if you’re going to engage in a war, whether directly or by supporting an ally with money and supplies, you don’t half-ass it. You don’t give your ally just enough bullets and fuel to get into the thick of it but leave them hanging when they need to keep going. Whether or not you support the US aiding Ukraine, you have to understand that once that support is given the strategically correct thing to do is to see it through. From the position that we are already engaged in supporting Ukraine, the continuation of that support with the goal of winning is itself justification enough to match the ante in response to your opponent raising it.
A number of factors would make that different. For example if we reached a point where our support started to become detrimental to our readiness to defend ourselves (which, despite arguments from the far right to the contrary, we are not remotely close to doing). Or if Ukraine showed a reapted track record of attacking civilians with our munitions. Or if the war was a losing or lost prospect or this was an escalation on Ukraine’s side. But none of those things are the case. Ukraine has not gone out of their way to attack civilians and has in fact fought essentially exclusively a defensive war, they are doing quite well at it and still control their own fates, and Russia escalated to cluster munitions first. This is only a response in kind. With all those factors taken into account, the decision to provide these munitions is justified simply by the fact that they make Ukraine’s odds of winning, and winning sooner, better. If Ukraine starts bombing civilians with them then we can discuss whether or not it was the right thing to do. But their track record so far suggests they have no intention of flipping this to an offensive war. Whatever Russian sites they attack on Russian soil can be assumed to be military targets that pose a direct threat to Ukraine and nothing more until proven otherwise.
God his dumb fucking grin is so phony. This asshole fires tons of hard working people keeping the lights on for him, won’t pay his bills, props up right wing talking points on one of the biggest public platforms on earth, and is a faux-intellectual bigot. But then he still thinks he can act like one of the cool kids and nobody will see through his charade. He mistakes gawking for admiration.
I don’t think I agree with that. I haven’t seen a single Democratic nominee who wasn’t also the lead vote getter in my lifetime. Pretty sure there hasn’t been one since the modern primary process was introduced in the 70s. Sure you can argue that the DNC throws it’s weight behind certain candidates in terms of money and exposure, sure the order of the primaries influences how the later ones tend to lead. And superdelegates will always be controversial. But you can’t argue in good faith that the DNC is choosing the candidates for us until you show me one who didn’t win the primary popular vote somehow getting the nomination.
Ironically the closest we’ve gotten to that in recent years was 2016 when Bernie won very few primary elections but won many of the caucuses. The caucuses are inarguably less small-d democratic than primaries but the same people arguing that the DNC rigged those primaries against Bernie conveniently ignore that actual voters didn’t want him.
At the end of the day it’s still the voters who pick the nominee. And voters can easily pick more progressive candidates if they want to, but the numbers don’t lie. Turnout in the primary in 2016 for Dems was 14.4 percent of eligible voters. In the general it was over 40%. In 2020 primary and general participation among Democrats both went up which is good, but the relative gap between primary and general participation more or less stayed the same. Biden won the Presidency with over 80 million votes. He won the primary cleanly, more than doubling second place Sanders’ total… with 19 million votes. That’s a massive, massive discrepancy.
Saying the DNC hand picks their candidates when younger and more progressive voters can’t be bothered to participate is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or moderates simply still outnumber progressives. Those are really the only two possible conclusions you can draw. I don’t really think the latter is true personally so what it comes down to is primary turnout. All the money and exposure and power brokering within the DNC doesn’t change the fact that nobody is going into these voters’ houses in primary season and physically restraining them to keep them from voting. They are simply choosing not to. And you can’t really expect to be taken seriously if you’re going to complain about the outcome of a process that you willingly abstain from. That’s like going into a restaurant, telling the waiter to surprise you, then being angry that you get served a burger when you wanted chicken. Next time order the goddamn chicken.
The single biggest problem standing between the left and sustained and meaningful control of the federal government is the complete lack of ability of voters to circle around a consensus candidate. There are several valid reasons to be critical of Harris just as there are pretty much every single Democratic Presidential decade basically of my lifetime. But Republicans vote consistently for candidates they dislike or even hate just to beat Democrats. Every single candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, 2020, and undoubtedly in 2028 will have some vocal subset of registered Democrat voters telling you exactly why they will never in a million years vote for them. I saw it constantly on Reddit and I don’t see any reason why it won’t continue.
Until somebody drops the magic “consensus candidate” name that somehow pleases everyone, Democratic voters are always going to be a major hurdle to their own success. And frankly I don’t think that “consensus candidate” name exists. Such is the curse of being the big tent party opposite the GOP. Republicans know they can continue winning elections for at least a little longer thanks to Democratic infighting alone.
Absolutely zero percent chance that happens. The only outcome of this is undisguised dictatorship. The only thing we don’t know yet is whether it’s Wagner succeeding and installing a military junta or Putin surviving and using this as an excuse to dissolve whatever semblance of a democracy they pretended to have.
Yes, less qualified pilots that are likely underpaid, that’s what air travel needs. Just rake in the profits until a couple of high profile fatal airline accidents happen, then apologize and let the regulations come back for another decade before doing it again. Whatever the ultimate cost of that ends up being, including court settlements, will almost certainly be less than the profits made in the interim.
I think House Republicans are walking a very thin line here. They know rushing ahead with this impeachment or any against Biden risks a backlash in next year’s election because people are mostly smart enough to tell when something is being done legitimately as opposed to being political brinkmanship. As such they have to slow roll this and at least put on the appearance of doing due diligence.
But secretly even the “cooler heads” like McCarthy (who publicly urged his conference to vote against it) want this and other impeachments against Biden to go through. And it’s not because they even believe he did anything wrong. It’s because they know full well that Trump or DeSantis or whoever the next GOP President might be will be committing many impeachable offenses as a matter of course. And if Democrats control the House then they will submit articles of impeachment. That was certainly damaging to Trump during the previous term and they don’t want it to happen to them again.
They want to break rules without facing consequences. And the best way to do that is to simply trivialize the act of impeachment itself, to make it a game. Now every President will get impeached a couple times as a matter of course. It’s not an indicator of anything serious anymore, it’s just part of your regularly scheduled political theater. Republicans don’t want to impeach Biden to break the Biden administration. They want to impeach Biden to delegitimize the impeachment process itself.
Imagine what a soulless piece of shit excuse for a human being you have to be to know climate change is coming but instead of accepting that, you pour money into a political party which sows social discord among the population, spreads election misinformation, foments violent insurrectionist tendencies, promotes hate, and most importantly does absolutely fuck all to address or even acknowledge the significant threat to a livable future facing your kids and grandkids as a direct result of your business practices because hypothetically that costs you a little less than pivoting to a different climate-friendly business model and all those billions of dollars you can’t take with you into your grave and can’t reasonably spend in ten lifetimes will be ever so slightly less impacted for the brief amount of time you have in life so that you can take that money and give some of it to your shitty, entitled kids while spending more of it on your pet projects that amount to nothing, don’t make the world a better place, and leave your legacy as one that will be forgotten within weeks of your death.
It’s amazing how much of this fallout could have been avoided if Reddit had just developed a competent mobile app at literally any point over THE LAST TEN YEARS. You had plenty of time Reddit. Posted from Jerboa, a mobile app which already works better for Lemmy than the official app for Reddit works for Reddit and was developed by one tankie in his spare time for peanuts.
And yes I know I am talking from a regular user perspective and not a moderator perspective and I can’t speak to the mod capabilities of Jerboa, but I work in IT and have developed apps, it’s not that hard to pay someone to make a decent one or just buy out an existing one and don’t shit it up. The solution to this problem has been available for Reddit for literally years. Almost like if Huffman was a legitimate businessman instead of a tech bro who fell ass backwards into internet relevance, he would understand the concept of investing in the future rather than just doing nothing until a few months before IPO and then flinging shit directly into the fan in front of him.
IMO the best possible case scenario here is DeSantis and Trump remain so close that they go into the convention without a clear winner. Then the GOP tips the scale in favor of DeSantis because he’s the more establishment-friendly candidate and Trump decides to run 3rd party out of spite. He gets on the ballot in just enough sympathetic red states and inspires just enough down-ballot 3rd party challengers to run as “Trump party” options that the GOP suffers a historically embarrassing loss up and down the ballot across the country. Then Democrats get actual concrete majorities both in several states and federally and the younger more progressive members drag some of the dinosaurs kicking and screaming into reestablishing a right to abortion access, reinforcing voting access rights, reforming campaign finance laws, reapportioning the House to be actually a representation of the population like the Constitution says it is, and expanding the SCOTUS to 13 seats so they can’t legislate away any of these reforms from the bench.
Of course the odds of that happening aren’t actually very good, it seems much more likely we’re just going to get a Trump primary victory followed by another contentious general election, a narrow Biden reelection amidst threats of violence (and possibly J6 repeats), and basically these last two years all over again with stubborn center-right Dems crippling the Senate agenda while Republicans cling to a very narrow majority in the House and basically shit up the Congressional session with pointless hearings for political theater, threats of crashing the entire economy out of spite, and otherwise throwing up non-stop hurdles in front of attempts to address even the most basic, non-controversial issues facing normal people in day to day life. Basically the only thing Republicans are good at, making government as dysfunctional as possible. Still preferable to a DeSantis presidency though. Complete dysfunction for two years beats christofascist authoritarianism.
The enshitification of the internet continues. How can we offer our content, but without having to pay anyone for it and at a much higher rate of delivery? By not giving a fuck about the quality anymore and not having any real competition so people have no choice. Except people always have a choice. We can walk away.
Modern conservative ideology in the US and Europe is entirely irrational and unappealing to younger people who have even a modicum of real world exposure. As such, conservatives have had to accept that they cannot win support from newer generations on the merits of their beliefs and opinions, and their core demographic is aging out. The alternative is to simply remove the availability of conflicting worldviews altogether. They can’t win the argument, so they want to prevent people from being able to have it at all.
This is also why Republicans have recently started calling for raising the voting age. 18 year olds are coming to voting age in a world where they fear for their lives and where they see their freedoms being eroded. The Republican position on this essentially amounts to “yeah, and?” Which isn’t a particularly compelling argument to support them. So the GOP’s solution is to just remove the voices of the people they disagree with.
Well Republicans control the House so…he gets a pat on the back for his successful grift and McCarthy pretends nothing ever happened?