claudeganon

I don’t think Republican opposition is the answer, as they’re demonstrably just as corrupt and self-serving. But California could certainly benefit from some primary challenges from the left. LA is seeing this happen with the election of Nithya Raman and George Gascón (who were vehemently opposed by mainstream Democrats). Interested to see how they might shift the terrain.

Prior to some big court cases and changes to repatriation law in the 80s and 90s, the mafia was heavily involved with looting archaeological heritage in places like Italy. Criminals would dig them up and move them through Swiss freeports using false provenance records and auction them off to museums and private collectors in other countries. This caused irreparable damage to our understanding of these objects history and context.

https://www.npr.org/2011/05/16/136252401/chasing-aphrodite-a...

It’s not often discussed, but much of what you can see of Greco-Roman artifacts in the permanent collections of American museums, for example, was likely to have been looted.

Pornhub was widely damaging to the “the vast majority of legitimate employees“ in the industry. It built itself by stealing their work using the paper-thin ruse of “user-uploaded” videos, pushing down wages, working conditions and establishing itself as a quasi-monopoly player who could further set terms to its advantage and against sex worker and smaller companies. This has all been quite well documented.

The conflation of puritanical objections to pornography with opposition to their regime of theft and worse is nothing other than a cynical maneuver meant to distract from the operation and consequences of their enterprise.

My experience in New York and Los Angeles is that the natives are perfectly pleasant, so long as you’re aware of the local mores.

The worst people are the people who move to cities and try and fit in by adopting some caricature of these customs, which is often accompanied by engaging in hideous games of one-upsmanship with their fellow new arrivals.

> My coworkers from mainland China were concerned about our well-being and started shipping us KN95 masks

My partner’s friend with family in China did the same thing for us. His dad was getting chemo and they had their family send a couple boxes of KN95s over to help protect him. Depressing, given how much America looks like a failed state relative to the two countries pandemic response, but good that interpersonal relationships trump all the BS “new Cold War” rhetoric.

Advertising has done more damage to people’s mental health and self-image then just about any other industry.

Larian does a great job with their early access releases, soliciting the community to report bugs, play testing etc. I put like 70 hours into the new Baldur’s Gate on different builds and it’s only like a third of the game. There were a lot of bugs and some crashes I reported, but has otherwise been a blast. Don’t understand why CDPR couldn’t have done the same.

Jon Ronson's podcast "The Butterfly Effect" also does a great job of breaking down how damaging MindGeek's practices have been to workers and legitimate players in the industry:

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...

I’d like to see some kind of platform penalties that are redistributed toward victims. Pornhub has made millions off things like pirated sex work and revenge uploads, while wiping out legitimate players in the industry and driving down wages and working conditions [0]

Now, having wrought all that destruction, they’re returning to what? Exactly what a regulated, verified industry looks like. It’s unconscionable that we’ve built an economy that equates to “do a lot of crime until you’re a monopoly and then behave as you should have in the first place.”

[0] https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Butterfly-Effect-with-Jon-Ron...

Using chemical weapons is already a war crime, so governments just decided that the chemical weapons they use on their own people are not chemical weapons. Tear Gas was the first chemical weapon used in World War I:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3103718?seq=1

Pinker’s use of statistics has been highly spurious, which is why he’s frequently drawn ire from N.N. Taleb and others:

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

> I find the holier than thou attitude based on European insecurity quite entertaining.

I’m an American and my sentiments are based on watching what this country has done to my working class friends and family. I’m glad those things don’t happen to people in Europe.

> But not everyone agrees, and in our country, you have the right to disagree and vote for who you want.

Just about every parliamentary democracy in Europe is more representative than the American system and nowhere near as corrupt.

> But don't doubt for a second how Europe got there - through colonial genocide.

Quite familiar with that history, as well as our own of chattel slavery and the genocide of indigenous people.

Will splitting off Instagram make a meaningful difference given how little protections there are around selling advertising data?

I agree we would’ve been better off if they had never been allowed to buy Instagram AND we had meaningful laws in place, but I don’t see how this fundamentally changes things given where we are now.

The US' "shitty conditions" aren't limited to healthcare or housing (but also last time I checked, having health insurance doesn't mean you're actually going to receive the healthcare you need). Look at measures like wealth inequality, police violence, parental and other forms of leave, infant mortality, child hunger and poverty. The US underperforms Europe on many of these metrics.

Also, that the US accepts more immigrants is not an argument for its inherent superiority, especially given how vilified and abused they've been in the past four years. All it means is that there are countries worse than the US, or that better ones have more restrictive immigration policies.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but watching someone who worked very hard their whole entire lives be blamed for their misfortune, humiliated, and denied access to treatment by the American system of benefits (not just healthcare, this included disability and other services) doesn't result in narrow-mindedness. It results in an accurate appraisal of what is happening to poor people in this country every day. You can find plenty of news stories, just post-pandemic, about people treated similarly by unemployment benefits systems that were designed to be punitive instead of helping people in need.

If those realities are uncomfortable for you and you want to dismiss them, that's perfectly fine, but these stories are out there in plain sight, across the US, for you to observe.

I know. My mother was an immigrant to the US. I've also seen family members go broke and commit suicide after being unable to afford medical care that would otherwise would have been provided to them in more humane countries. Apologies if this colors my view of America's "humanity."

Some people don't want to maintain the kind off dissonance required to turn a blind eye to the widespread failings and cruelty of American society. If I had to choose between going to sleep at night knowing that the people around me wouldn't be made bankrupt or homelessness should they have the misfortune of becoming sick, over circumstances where I was slightly more wealthy, but forced to justify all this, I'd choose the former every time.

I don't mean to restate the point, but how else do you arrive at these shifts in world democracies without these ideologies spreading faster or becoming more prevalent? The former happening is contingent on the latter...

>Ok, so what are the indications that violent, racist ideologies are spreading faster or to a greater degree today than at other times?

Read the news? There’s been a huge upswing in far right politics dominating democracies worldwide, post-2008. The world’s largest democracy, India, is currently controlled by an explicitly enthnonationalist party whose leader has praised Hitler. The US, Australia, Hungary, Austria, Brazil, Japan, and many others have lurched further rightward.

> Furthermore, if that is indeed the case, what makes you think that publishing platforms are the cause?

In historical terms, there is not ever a single cause, but multiple forces coalescing to push things in one direction or another. Obviously, the 2008 financial crisis and it’s impact on the world economy created a ground that was fertile for all kinds of populism. Because of their long standing alliance with Capital owners, however, the right was better positioned to make use of these technologies as they emerged. You can also read any number of stories about the role that Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube etc served in successful right wing political campaigns across the world. Google “”WhatsApp Brazil Bolsonaro” or “Trump 2016 Facebook” of you need further insight. It’s pretty much common knowledge at this point.

If you have the study, I'd consider it, but second-hand anecdotes from the "nazi-adjacent" aren't really compelling evidence. Google did take some minor steps toward curbing things a year or two ago, but I don't know that anyone has done a comparative analysis of the current and former state of YouTube's recommendation system.

Yes. Historically, new forms of mass communication have been always been used to stir up insanity and violence, dating back to the invention of the printing press. Wide distribution of Martin Luther's antisemitic screeds led to pogroms across Europe, the Nazis picked up where he left off using the new inventions of film and radio broadcasts, and now violent, racist ideologies are once again gaining mainstream purchase thanks to platforms like YouTube.

Given that YouTube's algorithms have been shown to push people toward content with more and more extreme views, I'm not sure why'd you'd think it would ever serve that purpose.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3351095.3372879?download=...

It's been running as a defacto radicalization engine for years at this point.

Do we actually know all the details of who they’ve contracted with? I wouldn’t be surprised if private healthcare providers in the UK already got their place in line.

Not to be pedantic, but Star Trek predicted that America would experience an extreme period of inequality and social decay in the 21st century, only finding its way out of its selfish, destructive ideology after being ravaged by nuclear war. Seems pretty accurate to me (minus the whole genetic engineering war interregnum, but who knows, it’s only 2020...)

https://www.startrek.com/news/ds9s-take-on-homelessness-is-a...

Other people’s labor is not a company’s private property. That was known as slavery and we have mostly abolished it in the developed world.

But my point is that all of your arguments rest on an unquestioned assumption about how ownership translates to authoritarian control of others without explaining how or by what justification that power is arrived at.

The answer of course is that it’s a social construct enforced by states to varying degrees, present and historically, and thus no way inherent to the thing itself. Appeals to status quo are therefore not justifications for the validity of the relationship, as it has changed over time, proving malleable to all kinds of political and social forces (e.g. the abolition of slavery, the formation of unions, worker collectives). Defending an authoritarian relation to property as it relates to other people’s labor thus require an actual and explicit defense, which you have so far not provided.

I would assume that NSA spying is used primarily for insider trading and other forms of market manipulation.

The entertainment industry makes plenty of money, they just disguise the profits through all kinds of trickery that make what tech companies do with tax shelters look childish by comparison. There’s a whole colloquial term for it, “Hollywood accounting”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

"Los Angeles County contributed $656 billion in gross domestic product, or 27 percent of California’s economic output, in 2015, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the most-recent data available from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s the largest amount of goods and services produced among 3,000-plus counties in the U.S. and equal to the economic might of Saudi Arabia."

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:atHjZM...

So just blanket appeals to authoritarianism then. Completely rational.

Literally any country with strong laws protecting strikes and work stoppages? In many parts of Europe, I can convince my coworkers that our bosses are treating us unfairly, unsafely, etc, we can walk off the job and not get fired. I doubt any employer would want us to do that, so it would be entirely against their “direction.”