mozz

mozz, 1 hour ago

Bill Burr's straightforward response to a morning show host asking if he went too far making fun of religion will always be worth watching.

mozz, 1 hour ago

Dozens? Surely a lot more than that. He was pretty enthused when it seemed like his political opponents were going to die, last time around; he's just too timid and thick to be able to make it happen through his own volition. In a next time around I think a lot of the guard rails that stopped it from happening would be removed.

mozz, 1 hour ago

Finally a reasonable voice on the issue. Biden has and will continue to show his willingness to parrot the talking points of big business over the reality most Americans face.

That's not at all what Alexrod said. He said, Biden's done a great job on the economy, but people don't feel like that's true because prices are high, and so his messaging (correctly taking credit for the gains) is wrong. Subtly sliding that over into saying Biden doesn't care about the reality, when the whole issue is that he's been working on the reality and fucking up the messaging, is misleading.

mozz, 8 hours ago

"Oh man. What did they get him for?"

"Wife corruption."

"Oh, shit. Worst kind."

mozz, 20 hours ago

The Equestria font can be disabled from the bootloader menu.

mozz, 23 hours ago

If you're the team that's banning songs, you're on the wrong team

mozz, 10 hours ago

As far as I know, there is no neo-Nazi song that is illegal in the US. I can buy Mein Kampf, I can sing whatever I want.

Back when Substack wasn't banning Nazis, more than one person told me that that was definitely the right way to do it, and pointed to laws in countries like Germany that prohibited Nazi content as an example of a good approach (sometimes, for some reason, claiming incorrectly that the US had the same laws).

When I said that those laws would invariably classify speech that the ruling party didn't like as "hate speech," they told me I was talking pure nonsense and that they were only classifying actual hate speech, so there was no problem.

Guess which country in the Schengen Area has classified speech against Israel as "hate speech" and prevented a doctor from coming to a university and giving a speech on what he witnessed in Gaza.

The point is not that Nazi songs are okay. The point is that people are going to sing what they want to sing, whether their songs are good things or bad, and that laws telling them they can't is (a) a big waste of time in the big picture (b) a lot more likely to be used against songs that are on the right side of history than the wrong side.

mozz, 1 hour ago

Yeah, I mean, I agree on principle sure. If I was running the music festival I would probably take that attitude sure. The issue with when it becomes the law, is that it's never going to be you or me deciding what might be the first step towards radicalization and what needs to be kept away lest it influence people; it'll always be people who think the Palestine protest songs or Rage Against the Machine are the first step towards radicalization that we really need to be looking out for. So better not to give them the power to shut down the music they think is dangerous.

mozz, 21 hours ago

I literally had this happen to me; it's why I don't use Verizon anymore. Youtube, too. There's a technical breakdown somewhere of precisely how they did it (roughly speaking, "accidentally" underprovisioning the exact exits from their network that would lead to Netflix's servers for no possible reason except to fuck with Netflix and degrade that service and only that service, which it accomplished very effectively.)

mozz, 21 hours ago

"Fast lanes" have always been bullshit.

If you're paying for 100mbps, and the person you're talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you're not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off. This reality where you can pay extra money to make sure the poors don't get in the way of your packets has never been the one we live in.

Of course, there are definitely people who are getting ripped off, but "fast lanes" are just an additional avenue by which to rip them off a little more; not a single provider who's currently failing to provide the speed they advertise is planning to suddenly spend money fixing that and offering a new tier on their suddenly-properly-provisioned internet, if only net neutrality would go away.

As Bill Burr said, I don't know all the ins and outs, but I know you're not trying to make less money.

mozz, 10 hours ago

Incorrect, and that was exactly my point

This is like saying that if the fruit at a store is rotten sometimes, it's not the grocer's fault, because the fruit had to come a long way and went bad in transit. The exact job you are paying the ISP for, is to deal with the hops and give you good internet. It's actually a lot easier at the trunk level (because the pipes are bigger and more reliable and there are more of them / more redundancy and predictability and they get more attention.)

I won't say there isn't some isolated exception, but in reality it's a small small small minority of the time. Take an internet connection that's having difficulty getting the advertised speed and run mtr or something, and I can almost guarantee that you'll find that the problem is near one or the other of the ends where there's only one pipe and maybe it's having hardware trouble or individually underprovisioned or something.

Actually Verizon deliberately underprovisioning Netflix is the exception that proves the rule -- that was a case where it actually was an upstream pipe that wasn't big enough to carry all the needed traffic, but it was perfectly visible to them and they could easily have solved it if they wanted to, and chose not to, and the result was visibly different from normal internet performance in almost any other case.

mozz, 1 hour ago

Yeah, makes sense, that's a little different. In that case there is actually congestion on the trunk that makes things slow for the customers.

My point I guess is that the people who want to sell a "fast lane" to their customers, or want to say Net Neutrality is the reason your home internet is slow when you're accessing North America, are lying. Neutrally-applied traffic shaping to make things work is allowed, of course; just want to throttle their competitors and they're annoyed that the government is allowed to tell them not to.

mozz, 1 day ago

I like better the video showing the moment she first introduced the motion, to instant booing

mozz, 1 day ago

I like how she doubles down and pretends she's not bothered, but she's absolutely bothered

mozz, 21 hours ago

It is a safe bet that if MTG is for it, it's bad for the country.

She is clearly looking to punish him for the Ukraine aid vote. Her losing that battle is a good thing. Winning the house in November so that we don't have to deal with this as much going forward would be even better than that.

mozz, 1 day ago

Yeah agreed. In particular I really like that feditest exists even if I haven't done anything to check it out / learn about it for myself yet.

mozz, 1 day ago

Yeah. 😢 IDK what to tell you about the toxic culture or how to navigate it.

Probably based on the details you described, it's not a crime and maybe better to leave it alone... IDK. Maybe good to get some feedback from people closer to the situation? It just sounds creepy as hell.

mozz, 21 hours ago

Now do fish in the ocean and CO2

mozz, 7 hours ago

It's set to fade in from 0 opacity, for some sort of unnecessary "ooh look it's fancy" effect. My guess is that if you check the console you'll find that it hit some exception before it completed its little fade-in effect.

mozz, 7 hours ago

Might be worth reaching out to the addon authors. Hard to say whether the page or the addon is at fault, but they might be interested to know it even if it's the page's fault.

mozz, 8 hours ago

Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.

If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?

-David Ben-Gurion

mozz, 6 hours ago

Heh. Your strategy of simply announcing that you're offended and you refuse to continue to talk along a couple of the lines of discussion, has worked. Now with no transition away from "Hamas is definitely using human shields" "Here's a UN report saying they're not" and similar lines that weren't going how you wanted them to, we're into a whole new line of argument.

But sure.

1. The Jews were engaged in a life or death struggle

Absolutely true.

with the Arabs of Palestine

Er... not entirely true, at the outset, but it became true over time, yes.

mostly because of the choice of the latter

?

Can you explain a little more what was their choice here that caused the struggle to take place?

2. Selected quotes of one leader are not representative of an entire spectrum of parties and factions that equally saw themselves as “Zionist.”

Absolutely true. Do you mind if I go back through things you sent me and find some times when something a Hamas leader (and not even necessarily the founder of Hamas), was picked out as representative of the motives of Hamas as a whole?

It's starting to feel like this is just nitpicking over individual details and getting lost in the details... somewhere far far away from thousands upon thousands of dead children, and safely in semantics, where we can go back and forth, safe in our climate controlled homes.

But sure, I'm happy to continue for a little while at least.

3. When is the bigotry, intolerance, ignorance and violence of the Arab world going to become PC for the left to examine honestly and completely?

I had a pretty extensive argument not long ago with someone who was trying to downplay Hamas's atrocities on October 7th, and sent them some documents demonstrating otherwise.

The IDF's atrocities and Hamas's atrocities do not exist in some weird zero-sum universe where only one can be true, and to affirm one means to deny the other. Anyone who's paying attention to the reality will see some bigotry, intolerance, and violence in the Arab world.

4. How many countries in the world were not born of historical “sin” of some sort or other?

Every family has some murderers in its history. Does that mean we shouldn't prosecute murder when it happens in the present?

5. When are we going to stop talking ancient history?

I started out talking about dead civilians in the last 6 months, and going forward this month and next. I only brought up Ben-Gurion's thoughts on the intent behind Israel's foundation and the assignation of "blame" if you want to call it that, because you wanted to stop talking about the present day atrocities and start talking about intent, instead, and I thought his viewpoint was relevant (for example how an innocent Arab family who lost their home last month or this month might reasonably react.)

6. Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians have to see each other as fellow human beings entitled to equal respect, rights and protections.

Absolutely. This I 100% agree with. This is, pretty much, the core of what I think would need to happen to stop the continued bloodshed and suffering by innocent people in both countries.

Related question.

"The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights endorsed the report and supported the call for Israel and Hamas to investigate and prosecute those who committed war crimes. ... The resolution called on the bloc’s member states to 'publicly demand the implementation of [the report’s] recommendations and accountability for all violations of international law, including alleged war crimes.' These declarations, as well as others, demonstrate Hamas’ triumph in controlling the narrative. Hamas’ ability to control the narrative limits Israel’s strategic choices."

Would it be fair to say you agree with that? You sent it to me.