The last angel

Did anybody ever figure out more on this? Because the whole instance does have a kinda… tankie takeover vibe going on

To be fair, I prefer apples form of innovation over most other tech companies. iPhones haven’t got much flashier, just a bunch of incremental improvements. The battery lasts longer. It’s a bit faster. The OS works with more third party apps and systems. Minor tweaks. They aren’t exciting, but they’re steady.

2 provisos: my newest iPhone is like, 5 years old. It does not have AI or any of the weird shit they’ve been pushing recently. And: it’s my spare phone. Because lol fuck apple. I like their products but not as much as I like having a decent phone in my daily life

Oh, I’m more of a pacifist, and someone on this platform recently convinced me that it’s kinda difficult to occupy the moral high ground while also laughing at jokes about killing the ‘right kind’ of people. It’s annoying, but if The Axis Of Evil are whipping up violent rhetoric about what a threat women / minorities/ experts / lefties / non conformists are, it wouldn’t really help to put up stickers about killing them.

Bit counterproductive.

(I absolutely reserve the right to keep proclaiming ‘eat the rich’ on a regular basis, because that’s not violence so much as a communal nourishment from the glorious circle of life).

‘Keep calm and convert nazis’ is more accurate, but it does sound a little like I’m pushing catholicism (weird) or the gay agenda (would be funny but best not encourage the delusion that sexuality is a choice). ‘Keep calm and re-educate / deradicalise / discourage’ also works, but gives the distressing impression that I’m aiming for more intelligent, moderate or temporarily glum nazis which, not really.

‘Keep calm and get off the internet’ would probably be the most helpful, concise message but somewhere between aspirational and hypocritical.

‘Keep calm and defend diversity’ captures the main problem with nazis, but it sounds a bit ‘placards and knitting’.

I’m struggling to find much beyond ‘keep calm and eat the rich, the intolerant, and the men who seek to enfeeble other men by creating a dependance on thinking machines which inevitably lead the newly unthinking masses into the servitude of the men who made the machines’, say which point it may as well just say ‘Join The Butlerian Jihad, meetings Thursdays at 19:00’.

Which actually works, but it is quite a long way from the original message.

Jesus, are people using the Express as a reliable source of anything nowadays?

I would honestly kinda like to print out a bunch of these and put them everywhere those knobs have put a flag.

But then it occurred to me that this pretty much how Elon and trump have wound up a bunch of mouth breathing idiots into a racist frenzy that is literally hell bent on destroying the country, and I’d need to write “mad about the racist fuckwits and government complicity”, which would rather dilute the message.

It also leads to uncomfortable questions like ‘hang on, is anger actually transformative or helpful, or does it just lead to more angry people’ and ‘hang on hang on, aren’t Musk and Tommy Ten Names spending an awful lot of money telling people to get mad? Isn’t that the driving force behind the most toxic social media platforms? Isn’t that just what rage bait is?’, and anyway long story short between the time I wrote the first paragraph and now, my view has changed to -

• Antisocial media and pro-nazi agitators want us to get angry (or ‘mad’, in American English) Zen the fuck up to resist. Wield calmness like a weapon. Refuse to emote on command

Fun fact: the countries to the north end east of the USA have a king, the countries to the south and west used to have a king and an emperor (respectively).

You’ll notice that none of them are overrun with tyrants.

In fact, most of the English speaking world shares a king, and many, many countries have a royal family who have bumbled along happily for centuries.

We think it’s deeply weird when one world leader is doing his very best to piss off everyone except Russia, deliberately destabilising the environment, the global media, all the agreements that every other country is working together on, and his citizens are split between those who support him and those who keep saying ‘this reminds me of how much I hate kings. No offense to the foundational identities of all our neighbours except Russia, but I can’t imagine sinking so low as to tolerate a king’.

Like, dude, watch your own kids before you bitch about everyone else’s. How does someone train an entire nation so well that they express displeasure at the flagrant atrocities of their president and say ‘fuck other countries and their shitty systems’.

It’s honestly like living next to someone who keeps playing their music too loud and throwing rubbish into your garden and every now and again he stands on your garden yelling about how much he hates your begonias. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was a sensible criticism, or something political, but it’s so random you waste a surprising amount of energy being offended on behalf of your begonias before realising, every time, that neither of you probably specifically care about the begonias. It’s the shouting.

I mean, I’m pretty sure that Disney makes at least a little money outside the USA. I’m willing to bet that there are at least 2 other countries whose subscribers won’t all cancel their subscriptions because the American political shitshow has touched upon a person they’ve never heard of (source: I’m in an English speaking country where people have Disney+ and watch Disney films and as far as I know, virtually nobody has heard of this guy and virtually everybody has exhausted their supply of ‘wtf is the USA doing, surely they can’t get away with that’ for the year).

So unless you honestly think that the entire American user base is going to cancel - which seems wildly unlikely, given the political scene - AND that the number of Americans with subscriptions is at least equal to the number of subscribers outside the USA, then sorry bud, you aren’t going to defeat fascism by pausing your Disney+ subscription for a few months.

It’s a great start, and I personally think it’s healthy to ethically curate one’s free time where possible, but when October rolls around and Disney is still solvent, don’t throw up your hands and say you gave it your best shot but the fight is clearly hopeless. You guys have let your corporations run unchecked for decades, if you want them to suddenly find a moral compass you need to settle in for a long game.

If we lose the 1st amendment we will lose everything because our very knowledge that those other two issues exist is because of our constitution.

Which is why no country outside the USA has free speech, truth, or media that is in any way connected to reality. We’re all just bumbling around in the epistemological darkness, relying on the USA for information about our own countries, wishing we had a first amendment too so we had a media landscape.

Alternative perspective: truth, freedom, and communication are inherent to the human existence. They exist outside the US constitution. If your government decides to rip up all your laws, it won’t suddenly be ok to run amok murdering and stealing (which is why there are countries outside the USA where the citizens survive).

A lot of Americans seem to have a kind of cargo cult idea of human rights and laws. They do not exist because they are written in the constitution. The constitution has no value outside the rights it contains, and the antique paper. It does not create or contain free speech, it doesn’t even guarantee it, it merely documents a broad consensus of values.

I personally think a lot of Americans would understand a lot more about the world, and their own country, if they realised that. Your constitution doesn’t give you anything, any more than a shopping list has nutritional value or an inventory guarantees your furniture.

TLDR: I don’t know if it’s a phrasing thing or an actual misconception among Americans, but saying the first amendment ‘gives you’ free speech is a really dangerous mindset. It’s like saying, the first rule in my instance on Lemmy is ‘don’t be a dick’ so if they delete that rule or, God forbid, the instance / Lemmy gets shut down, the entire world will just run around being dicks. No.

You should behave in moral ways because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s written down. Anybody who stops obeying a repealed law didn’t want to obey it in the first place. The vast majority of the world is out there not being dicks, despite not being part of your online instance. You are human, you have rights and responsibilities as a human, not just as an American. You do not have rights because of the constitution: the constitution is only valid because, and as long as, the citizens agree with what it says.

(Also you guys have been killing people for saying things like ‘I kinda think black people deserve rights’ and ‘hey guys look at this pharma company’s accounts’, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise that your constitution isn’t a magic force amulet against all wrong. It’s an old terms and conditions document that’s not always enforced)

“look alright I’m sorry about the petty fraud thing but I was a victim of sexism. They wouldn’t let me have equal access to the accounts, which can only be explained by an old boys club (look I said I’m sorry about the fraud thing, alright?!)”

I was ready for another smear campaign, so at this point it seems obvious that this whole fiasco is a media set-up. Either ZS is a hostile plant playing the long game to discrete the left, or the email list has been hacked and all this is coming from Russian bots.

We’ve clearly passed the stage of things needing to be realistic or evidenced, I give up. This is a deliberate farce to test the faithful, Davids Attenborough and Bowie founded the party and are taking to announce their little jest soon, musk is lashing out on anger because he only has weeks to live after being infected by a rat bite, and those surgery rumours about Zuckerberg are true.

It doesn’t matter. I’m going to do all the right things and follow the rules, but nobody can stop me concocting am alternative reality and it’s going to be more ridiculous and imaginative every time I see nonsense like this.

If we make it as a country, probably invest in the mental health market. I suspect it’ll have a lot of business

So peacefully projecting an unedited picture that doesn’t breach anyone’s privacy or spill any secrets, is ‘malicious communication’.

And telling thousands of rioters-in-waiting that they need to ‘kill or be killed’ isn’t.

We’re all eager to see the quality of letters you’ve written to the Prime minister with your urgent plans to save national security.

And you needn’t worry about posting it here, because I doubt anyone (else) would find bizarre flaws to pick at in an achievement they could never really hope to achieve. That would be statistically unlikely.

Boycotts aren’t effective alone. Neither is one person deciding to vote for the other party. Telling your boss ‘Uh, no, I’m not going to do that, that’s illegal and immoral and probably a war crime or something’ is not actually effective. Sure, I could switch providers or go sailing the high seas but that won’t eradicate fascism, so why bother?

So I guess the only solutions are 1, carry right on supporting, validating, and participating in any bad practice or evil that comes your way, 2, some hitherto undiscovered way to Stop Evil in one fell stroke, or 3, engage in change as a process, on the understanding that the bad guys are hopefully not the only type of people who can work together to get shit done over a longer timeframe than ‘now or never’.

I’m going for 3, because frankly if there aren’t enough decent people in my community to put in a fraction of the effort the dangerous idiots are putting in, it’s not worth saving. And I can’t be bothered to do the whole ‘judging myself, my family and friends and neighbours and country and society and finding it wanting’ at the moment, so it’s easier to just do what little good I can, wherever I see the chance

This week has passed in about 24 hours. I swear it’s still July, maybe August. I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but I think there’s something wrong with the passage of time.

(Why yes, I am getting old, why do you ask?)

Fun thought experiment: have you ever met anyone who has replied to opinion polls?

I asked my dear 80 year old mother that a while ago, she hadn’t. I haven’t.

They are generally conducted by phone, cold calling landlines, or by someone going door to door with a clipboard.

Many unofficial (but still very influencial, including gov.uk) polls are online, and users have to complete hundreds of them to get a nominal payment, £5 I believe.

Now imagine the sort of person who answers their ringing landline/ door and says ‘why yes, stranger, yes I do have 10 minutes to discuss my voting intentions’, and you have the entire ‘over 40 years old’ demographic represented in these results.

Imagine someone who has actively sought out survey websites and sits though at least 100, over 6 months or so, for a tiny amount of pocket money - or even weirder, someone who just decided to do it anyway - and you have the entire ‘under 40 years old’ demographic in these results.

And now, thinking of those door-answerers and survey-clickers, imagine how colourful and exciting their lives must be, and then ask yourself what possible incentive they have to tell the truth when absolutely nobody will ever know if they liven up the tedium slightly by claiming to be a 45 year old self made millionaire with 12 lovely children all planning to vote Jedi in the next election.

And that is why opinion polls always come out way, way more fringe than the reality ever is. Because normal people do not answer them unless they have a strong opinion or an incentive, and those with an incentive generally have no incentive to be honest.

(For reference, I’m not dunking on people who have done these things. I spent about a year answering yougov surveys until it dawned on me that it worked out at less than 5p an hour. If you’re bored or just want to contribute to the national knowledge pool, awesome, but you probably already know you’re not exactly an average voter)

we aim to reflect voices in the UK proportionally to current voting intention

Was there a national poll that I don’t recall? Because the last one I was aware of, a majority of people voted Labour, and the BBC have never, ever been pro-labour. Maybe they’re claiming that tons of people intended to vote for Farage and co but couldn’t figure out how ballots work, which is remotely credible, but it would take some serious research to back that up so I don’t think that’s it.

How on earth are they claiming to know people’s voting intentions in the first place, let alone the rather groundbreaking idea that the election was wrong.

This has a worrying air of the Trump style, post-truth ‘any official, scientific, pro-equality and / or leftie information is fake news’ that we saw before trump was elected. I remember being amazed that a public figure could so blatantly, confidently lie about important constitutional processes and not be arrested for - Idk but if fraud, libel, aiding and abetting, misrepresentation etc are crimes, then misleading an entire country to disenfranchise them and mis-sell a political position must be quite serious.

We are all legally obliged to pay the BBC if we want to watch live news. That is quasi-governmental, and hella powerful. If I want to watch live TV in this country and don’t want to pay to fund a corporation that’s flagrantly misrepresenting the existence/ validity of an actual national election, I kinda feel there should be more recourse than ‘Dear Sir / Madam, we have received your complaint and will take it on board if and when we ever have the slightest reason to’.

The BBC are telling the world that most people in the UK ‘intend’ to vote for Farage. That is not just untrue, or biased, or impossible for them to know. It’s such an absurd claim that I think the scariest part is the fact that they are getting away with it.