nartimus

Lunar, 10 months ago

Thank you for pointing out that this is so much worse than just EEE. Meta has a long history of social and political engineering, and deliberately creating a toxic environment that turned all of our parents and grandparents into deranged conspiracy theorists. They don’t just let hate thrive on their platform, they artificially inflate it in the name of engagement and profit.

I see no reason to assume they won’t do all of this again, and should they do it all again it’s going to impact the entire Fediverse. Even if you just stick to instances that block Meta, if you’re federating with instances that aren’t, the toxic environment Meta is likely to build will come back to you. If the majority of instances fail to block them, I can’t bear to stay here and watch what has become the internet’s most healthy and vibrant community rot from the inside.

I honestly don’t understand why this is even a debate. If even a fraction of the shit meta has pulled was done by a smaller Fediverse instance, we all wouldn’t hesitate to defederate from them.

And to those of you who justify Threads because Meta is somehow the lesser of two evils compared to Twitter, please remember that while Twitter is owned by a raging and incompetent manchild, Meta has eroded democracies and played a major role in a genocide. Don’t fucking support these murderers. Meta is more than happy to spread even more hatred and killing in the world if it boosts their profits.

FlyingSquid, 10 months ago

If China wants to change it’s political nature then it’s up to it’s citizens to make that change through protests

I’m pretty sure they tried that…

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9c0b72a6-6304-4a1f-89f9-452f552fda72.png

silence7, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

If you’re in California, it’s worth giving your assemblymember a call and asking them to support SB253. It’s one of the few tools individuals have to offset the impact of lobbying.

ernest, 10 months ago

I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn't fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But... this is just the beginning ;) What's important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.

doctortofu, 10 months ago

I'm old enough to remember the peaceful times before video games - there were no wars, no protests, and people were all nice to each other. And then, Pong was released and everything changed...

BenGFHC, 10 months ago

Iirc many didn't want him as president, they just reeaally didn't want Marine Le Pen ( heavily right wing and known to be quite close w/ Russia )

lortikins, 10 months ago

One thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet is that at least in America, we have had a historic problem with minority groups (especially Black people) and distrust of the medical field in general that's pretty freaking justified. This study speaks about it in depth. but here's some relevant points from the abstract:

Given that the virus has hit the Black community the hardest, I am concerned now that vaccine hesitancy may perpetuate the health disparities that we are currently seeing in the numbers of infections and deaths taking place. Most studies, for instance, at this point, have found that Blacks as a community have the highest levels of individuals who state they will never get the vaccine or are not sure if they will get the vaccine, Fig. Fig.11 [7, 8]. Many studies have noted that Black people cite distrust in the government and in the medical profession. Black people cite our nation’s history of racism in medical research and in medical care as key reasons for their hesitancy [9, 10].

For some people it is a real, deep distrust in the government. Like I said though, it's justified. You don't have to look far to see examples of what they're talking about. J. Marion Sims was hailed as a medical hero for developing new surgical techniques, but he practiced and developed them on non consenting black slave women and immigrant Irish women. That's by far from the worst though, if you've never read of it, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is fucking horrifying.

The Public Health Service started the study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University (then the Tuskegee Institute), a historically Black college in Alabama. In the study, investigators enrolled a total of 600 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama.[6] Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control group of 201 men who were not infected.[5] As an incentive for participation in the study, the men were promised free medical care. While the men were provided with both medical and mental care that they otherwise would not have received,[7] they were deceived by the PHS, who never informed them of their syphilis diagnosis[6][8][9][10][11] and provided disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and diagnostic procedures as treatment for "bad blood".[12]

The men were initially told that the experiment was only going to last six months, but it was extended to 40 years.[5] After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men that they would never be treated. None of the infected men were treated with penicillin despite the fact that, by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available and had become the standard treatment for syphilis.[13]

The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year.[14] By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]

This study kept uneducated, rural black people from receiving adequate care for their known Syphilis infections for TWENTY FIVE YEARS after we knew about how to treat the disease. People were infected. Children were infected. People died from this study.

For background, I'm very pro-vaccine, so much so that I wanted to study biomedical sciences and immunology. But I think it's extremely important to realize the sociological backgrounds as to why some people distrust the system and are suspicious of "free medical care" especially when sponsored by the government. The first study I linked talks about it, and I definitely agree that there is SO much work to be done in the US around trust in public health institutions.

Girlparts, 10 months ago

Florida has a lot of phosphate mines and those mines have a lot of that waste. Bet money he was bribed

chaogomu, 10 months ago

They already said quite clearly that they're transphobic. The "I don't think children should undergo gender or sex transition" is almost verbatim an anti-trans talking point.

Here's some actual research on the subject of trans people, including trans youth, and suicide risk. With citations;

Bauer, et al., 2015: Transition vastly reduces risks of suicide attempts, and the farther along in transition someone is the lower that risk gets.

de Vries, et al, 2014: A clinical protocol of a multidisciplinary team with mental health professionals, physicians, and surgeons, including puberty suppression, followed by cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery, provides trans youth the opportunity to develop into well-functioning young adults. All showed significant improvement in their psychological health, and they had notably lower rates of internalizing psychopathology than previously reported among trans children living as their natal sex. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population.

Gorton, 2011 (Prepared for the San Francisco Department of Public Health): “In a cross-sectional study of 141 transgender patients, Kuiper and Cohen-Kittenis found that after medical intervention and treatments, suicide fell from 19 percent to zero percent in transgender men and from 24 percent to 6 percent in transgender women.)”

Murad, et al., 2010: "Significant decrease in suicidality post-treatment. The average reduction was from 30% pretreatment to 8% post treatment."

De Cuypere, et al., 2006: Rate of suicide attempts dropped dramatically from 29.3% to 5.1% after receiving medical and surgical treatment among Dutch patients treated from 1986-2001.

UK study: "Suicidal ideation and actual attempts reduced after transition, with 63% thinking about or attempting suicide more before they transitioned and only 3% thinking about or attempting suicide more post-transition.

Heylens, 2014: Found that the psychological state of transgender people "resembled those of a general population after hormone therapy was initiated."

Perez-Brumer, 2017: "These findings suggest that interventions that address depression and school-based victimization could decrease gender identity-based disparities in suicidal ideation."

Here's a study showing that children know what gender they prefer and don't change their minds on it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35951394/

Here's another meta study on trans youth who received gender-affirming care, and who saw a decrease in suicide risk.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33320999/

Anomander, 10 months ago

Except that's a sidestep. The viewpoint you were defending was saying that this one specific option, that has substantial academic backing for positive outcomes for kids, should not happen or should be prohibited.

That's not "discuss other options" - that's discussing this option and arguing that society should take it away.

That you're now trying to argue that it's just discussion and it's reasonable debate and - forgive my bluntness - being openly dishonest about what the original speech was that you're defending with "free-speech" and anti-censorship talking points is like ... the example case for how this thread started. The nazis and the transphobes and the hateful bigots can always, easily, spin their own takes as righteous and reasonable debate - if you let them lead the dialogue and frame their discourse through the most-appealing lenses possible. And they can make valid-sounding and appealing arguments for why you, too, should defend them and their right to speak.

But inevitably they are also going to use any and all space you clear for them to be hateful and bigoted and call for harm to other people - that is their goal. Everything else is just a setup play.

gorkette, 10 months ago

@frankyboi Can we please stop pushing these tiny changes onto normal everyday people, when the real changes need to be made by Corporations?

ThunderQuack, 10 months ago

What about Freespace 2? I see it on sale on GOG right now for 20% off

Sharmat, 10 months ago

I’d say the Donation of Constantine

It was a forged Imperial Roman decree supposedly from Emperor Constantine the Great, which gave all temporal power over the Western Roman Empire to the Pope. Now, how is this important? This was how the papacy came into possession of the Lateran Palace, which was the Pope’s residence for much of history. It also served as the justification for the pope to break the formal convention of the five episcopal sees (i.e in the early church, Rome was just one of the important seats of power, the others were: Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch and all had equal authority) and declare itself supreme over the other centres. It also played an important role in the events of the Great Schism of 1054 (which formally separated the Western Latin church from the Eastern Greek church) and the investiture crisis in the 11th to 13th centuries.

entropicshart, 11 months ago

As a longtime Apollo user, I would love to know when this hits Test Flight!

DarkGamer, 11 months ago

Inspiring? Elon Musk's cost cutting strategy was he just decided not to pay people, not to pay his landlord, not to pay his janitors, not to pay his hosting companies, not to pay many Twitter employees, and not to bother following laws, because, presumably, "fuck you, I'm a billionaire." If that's inspiring to spez, I'm feeling really good about leaving his platform. Aaron Swartz must be spinning in his grave so fast we could generate power from it.

minnieo, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

IMPORTANT: I have talked to this mod one on one, they are in my server. I'll refer to them as T. What we were told is that T doesn't know exactly who demodded them, just that the top mods did not agree to the protest (they are inactive power mods, one of them mods 60+ subs), and when T made the sub read-only because the members of the sub voted to go private, they were demodded. Then the sub went private anyway for unknown reasons (speculated it was to quell the drama after mods got caught removing T's comments). We do not know, nor did anyone or T say that this has something to do with admins.