i see a lot of people suggesting succession on both sides of the political aisle here nowadays.

it actually really hurts to read, hurts my heart, hurts my soul. every single time i see the opinion espoused.

we are one people.

i dont disagree with the general sentiment that the union shows signs of age, is falling apart, and for the most part serves to prop up places that are generally 3rd world shit holes (i.e alabama, the south) using the wealth of some of the richest economies to ever grace the earth (nyse, the entirety of california and the valley, etc.). in many ways, the union is an expression of imperialism over the american continent.

but again, we are one people.

to break apart the union would be tragic. millions would never see their dads and moms, brothers and sisters, family; ever again. many still yet would likely be forced to kill those very same people in order to wrought to reality the will of the “leadership with the balls to stop playing this failed experiment.” it is a mockery of the value of human life to compare something of this gravitas with defederating a Lemmy instance, but i can see why you would want to make the comparison. it really isn’t so easy, tho.

again, again, again; we are one people.

i will stand against secessionist rhetoric as long as i live. maybe some places in world would be better off without the union, for a time. overall, however, we as a people are far too intimately connected, far too ingratiated in each other’s lives for secession to ever be a valid argument again. the number of lives ruined and extinguished is far too great a cost to make pursuing a breakup of the union worthwhile within our lifetimes.

we don’t have to keep our relic from ole '76 forever, that isn’t what this means.

it just means a rote breakup of the union is such a bad idea as to be idiotic. maybe the states would be better served by european union style confederacy. i don’t know. i just know our destinies are extrinsically linked and we cannot change that;

we are one people.

The vast majority of protests are happening near the places where the people live. All the protests I have been too were not at the place of our government. It was our city and the next one. No long travel time and it still works.

maybe i could have phrased myself better. this is essentially what i mean by the first point. you only have the option of local protests in america, for the most part. the unfortunate reality is that for the millions of americans who’s locality doesn’t include those political seats of power, it actually doesn’t work.

how many times in the news have you seen americans sitting in tiny local protests with their signs? how many times have you seen it actually lead to anything happening, other than a live demonstration of police brutality?

it doesn’t work. americans by and large recognize this, their apathetic attitudes aren’t some weird form of jackassery they are a rational response to their situation.

i don’t know what we should do. but continually disparaging americans for their lack of will or protests isn’t it. they’re not protesting en masse because they live in a social and political climate that explicitly prevents them from doing so, and disarms them when they actually manage to do it.

“those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”

-jfk

“i, -er -uh, would like the party plattah!”

-also jfk, but in clone high (the cooler jfk imo)

haha. that’s fair. i’m a zoomer. seems really popular with younger english speakers to forgo the initial capitalization; it’s part of how they codeswitch to see who is or isn’t hip, or as the kids might say, “lit/cool/etc.” has it’s origins in like, early internet AOL, IRC, etc. and never seemed to die off going into modern forum/texting/internet culture. it promulgated into long-form writings with the pervasiveness of sites like facebook and reddit in the 2010s.

obviously, tho, you’ve been alive long enough to be making comments on lemmy so presumably you are aware of this to at least some degree and this whole comment is just more shittily capitalized sludge to sift through so i will digress.

i can see how if you are entirely used to reading english with proper capitalization rules it would be annoying and difficult to parse.

however, this style is definitely something that transcends myself or my personal trappings. i would recommend getting used to it because a large corpus of modern english media going forwards will feature it to varying degrees, like it or not.

my initial reply to you was flippant, reactionary, and misguided. for what it’s worth, i do genuinely apologize and shouldn’t have engaged in ad hominem. i won’t delete it because, despite regretting the comment, it would be contrary to my ideas of free information (lmao that sounded cringe in my head and it looks cringe on “paper” but idk how else to say it).

i appreciate your genuine response and discussion.

you are correct in your analysis of democracy as an institution and the observation that there does truly exist a large contingent of people in the West who really do support and encourage what is going on as of late.

i shouldn’t let my own feelings get in the way. i think my qualm is less about the claim “americans want this” and more about how it is phrased and the implications of that statement. it is reductionist in the same way a lot of actual fascist rhetoric is and it rubs me the wrong way.

i think there’s actually a very interesting social/political philosophy question that will be demanding an answer during our lifetimes. we have a cultural reverence for democracy and liberalism in the west. they are strongly associated ideas. however, recent advances in statistical analysis seemed to have spurred a pushback against this assumption in the cutting edge of sociopolitical thought (i say recent but these ideas have their origins in the 60s and 70s, even earlier depending on your bar. recent in a “meta,” societal sense). maybe democracy isn’t the most liberating form of politics, maybe it inherently lends to developing neofeudal fascism; and maybe if there exists a form of organization that offers the individual more freedom and liberty, we have an obligation to attempt to overthrow democracy and establish it.

i think these were some of the most interesting ideas i was permitted to explore during college sociopolitical courses. of course, in retrospect, we very intentionally explored these ideas. because, as i said, these are questions that will likely be demanding an answer before we die, for better or worse. what do you think? how should we organize, as humans?

sure, because wanting people to recognize the exact nature of what is going on right now means i’m a stereotypical fat american imperialist pig-dog.

grow up.

it’s happening here. it’ll happen to whatever corner of this godforsaken world you had the (mis)fortune of being born to. stop it before it is too late. i know how easy it is to react flippantly. i watched people for the past 20 years of my life in america do the same thing and it led us directly down the path to neofascism. living in a world where the preeminent powers have fallen to authoritarian ideologues, you would be a fucking fool to be throwing stones.

your response genuinely meant a lot to me.

sanity needle in the insane haystack and all.

good luck from across the pond. you guys are in one of the least forgiving geopolitical positions on the world-stage. whatever the future holds for germany, it is significant.

i dreamed as a highschooler of “amerexiting” to germany in order to complete a program at one of the hochschulen. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t still fantasize about it. i have an associate’s degree and am working on a bachelor’s here. maybe getting out is still possible, idk. i want to fix my home. not to be lame but i genuinely cried a little writing that. i don’t want to leave. i want things to be better here, the people i care about to be cared for.

that seems less and less possible as the days drag on.

Either because some people didn’t bother to vote, or because on average, Americans really do support this bullshit.

no, americans do not “on average” support this. it wasn’t just “some” people who “didn’t bother to vote,” it was the vast majority of our nation that did not vote. and it isn’t strictly because of voter apathy. how fucking stupid do you have to be to believe 2/3 of americans are simply so apathetic and careless about their lives as to produce this level of electoral non-participation? occam’s fucking razor my guy. it is significantly more likely and makes much more sense to recognize the reality that our democracy is a farce and most people practically were not allowed/given the opportunity to vote.

https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslidefor-did-not-vote

americans do not “really support this bulshit.” this is the exact sort of awful fascist-apologist misinformation that spurred me to make my post in the first place.

fuck you, you fucking fascist rat. stop outright lying to people to argue your point…

for those of you who aren’t hellbent on spreading shit and misinformation, we’re all in this together. good luck in the coming years guys.

nah WASP work ethic and the clock are the single greatest tools of oppression ever invented.

the propaganda of the clock is the most deeply entrenched enemy of the revolution.

if my fellow commies even recognized this i would be harping about it 24/7; but unfortunately even the crazies think you’re crazy on this one for some reason.

the clock isn’t real. it is unnatural to track minutes and doesn’t serve to increase productivity on an individual level at all. it was very, very recent in the west that the clock’s true form as the oppressor was well known and well fought against. i wonder how the bourgeballs managed to normalize schizophrenic timekeeping behaviors within 1-2 generations? not a topic that is easy to research.

i just see so many europeans online under the impression that the situation in america is uniquely american and not like, the rational end conclusion of a capitalist society (like the ones they also live in omg :ooo)

this is dangerous to think.

this exact rhetorical mistake is why my country has fallen to the fascist. don’t let it happen again

i made my comment pretty early before getting up to go vote in our election. i’ll admit i was premature on having an opinion as i just skimmed the content here and didn’t look into things much.

this project is definitely interesting. i suppose my sentiment initially was less that i don’t trust the cryptography, and more a general weariness of new open source projects. after reading more about the implementation there isn’t anything that jumps out at me as particularly egregious.

i support FOSS and the related philosophies a whole lot, i believe it to be one of the only ways to take our lives and communities back these days.

however, with that said, i have to disagree with this sentiment:

Nobody will be justifying their existence in front of a random internet user.

random internet users are the open source movement. new projects must justify their existence and trustworthy nature to the community. not that these people haven’t, obviously they haven’t had the chance yet.

an open mind, absolutely. but history has shown bad actors are abound, as well. i’m not sure what the proper solution here is, and i don’t think anyone else is absolutely 100% certain either. removing trust from the equation isn’t easy.

idk i’m kind of just babbling at this point tho. thanks for the civil discussion

that still isn’t an explanation of how the server supposedly “does not have the means to decrypt them [the messages]”, which isn’t me saying it’s impossible. i’m well aware of possible cryptographic solutions here. but, it isn’t wrong to be sus of this application until the organization/developers have demonstrated a degree of trustworthiness. i honestly don’t see why you would use this over just encrypting and transfering the data yourself using more traditional methods that involve the minimum number of parties. i might just be ignorant of this project, but i’m weary of it until i have a chance for further investigation

that’s fair, my absolute statement doesn’t reflect the exclusive way anti fraud laws are written. you certainly might find and successfully exploit legal ways to lie for financial gain, but at best it’s unethical and at worst you’ll have to defend why your deceit isn’t criminal fraud in a lawsuit. it kind of depends on who you piss off the most, imo.

uh, yes? it’s at the least fraud fs? the article says the doj is charging mike smith with three money laundering charges and one count of wire fraud. obviously the wire fraud charge comes from an argument that smith defrauded the distribution companies into illegitimately paying out royalties for false streams. note that the artificial intelligence solution only comes into the argument for the purposes of how he committed the crime, it really had nothing to do with the crime itself, at least intrinsically. if you read the press release from the doj, you can see that they make a pretty airtight argument that, quote:

SMITH made numerous misrepresentations to the Streaming Platforms in furtherance of the fraud scheme. For example, SMITH repeatedly lied to the Streaming Platforms when he used false names and other information to create the Bot Accounts and when he agreed to abide by terms and conditions that prohibited streaming manipulation. SMITH also deceived the Streaming Platforms by making it appear as if legitimate users were in control of the Bot Accounts and streaming music when, in fact, the Bot Accounts were hard coded to stream SMITH’s music billions of times. SMITH also caused the Streaming Platforms to falsely report billions of streams of his music, even though SMITH knew that those streams were in fact caused by the Bot Accounts rather than real human listeners.

SMITH’s hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his Bot Accounts billions of times, which allowed him to fraudulently obtain more than $10 million in royalties.

it is not illegal to lie. it is absolutely illegal to lie for the purposes of financial gain. sure, i’m not disagreeing that what he did could not somehow be construed as something of a robin hood character arc (even tho he most certainly did this for the purposes of his own personal enrichment). but he almost definitely is guilty of the wire fraud charge and i do have a strong feeling, based on the prosecutorial level of this case, the involvement of a specialized division of the fbi, and his purported co-conspirators; that the money laundering charges are ironclad as well. frankly, i’m hoping his co-conspirators actually do end up going to trial and we get to learn what the company that aided in his fraud actually was. on fucking god it’d be one thing if he ran this grift machine for a little while, paid off a lil bit of his debts and all, maybe even lived off of it. but to steal $10 million fucking dollars with it, even when he knew he was committing fraud and had to explicitly hide his criminal activity??? no shit the fbi was hot on your trail. what an absolutely, colossal dipshit michael smith must be. i respect the ingenuity but it is so blindingly obvious that 10 million dollars was egregiously too many times to press a “free money button” you just invented in a capitalist autocratic hellscape.

QUICK EDIT: i do just wanna say also i did not downvote u/shani66 and i just wanted to contribute to discussion. just noticed after i posted someone had downvoted them which is kinda goofy of whoever that is.

that’s a monistic point of view. you clearly have never lived in or near a food desert, or somewhere where fast food is the only option, because oftentimes at a local scale restaurants do buy up all available food resources. sure. these people could subsist off of wild fucking berries outside instead. why not. the choices of large restaurant megacorps weigh heavy on millions.

restaurants provide a service the same way landlords do. just bc you privatized an essential commodity does not immediately make your privatized entity a useful or essential service, and i detest the notion that it does. it’s circular logic.

EDIT: i’m getting downvoted but idc. i still think im right. weep all you want, but at its core, the buying and selling of goods/services represents an ethical dilemma at best and an atrocity at worst. the argument that restaurants are entirely a choice to go to is both overly broad and a straw man. restaurants often do impact people’s budgets and lifestyles, believe it or not. you can’t just blanket say they have no culpability in this arena because reasons. it is the mechanisms of the market and economy themselves that oppress us. it is not inherently human. it is not the only way to organize ourselves. we can do better, and we deserve better. who the fuck cares how much “value” literally anything has? i’ll trade you five smogels for a smilji. yay, everyone magically gained bc of the incantation! grow the fuck up. outdated ideas have no place in modern, civilized society. any imagined net benefits of money you can come up with are a drop in the bucket compared to its power as a stupid fucking thoughtworm

we call the 2 cuts of meat we traditionally take off of poultry’s arms “wings.” typically you’ll get one half of the arm versus another. you’d either get a drumstick wing, with all the meat on one bone; or flats, which have less meat & two bones, much like your lower arm.

chicken wings served this way are very popular here but many do not like or do not want to deal with the bones. so additionally, processed “boneless” chicken wings are available. they’re exactly the same thing as chicken nuggets usually, just bigger. ground poultry reconstituted into morsels

Lmao, what a wild assumption that they could take whatever icons they like, with no basis in reality.

that’s…. exactly what they do buddy. you don’t seem the type to care for counter-examples so i won’t even try and list any of the many, many fucking instances of this happening irl