Mmm…no

It’s “some random guy with a working moral framework, the ability to feel empathy, and some measure of respect for the rights of other humans and simple human decency calling a bunch of murderous xenophobic psychopaths murderous xenophobic psychopaths.” So it’s in fact nothing like that.

Paper Mario

Jet Force Gemini

Majora’s Mask / Ocarina of Time

Blast Corps

Custom Robo

Mario Golf

Space Station Silicon Valley

Goemon’s Great Adventure

No - it’s actually not like that at all.

Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.

Mm… no. It’s really not.

The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.

So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.

Yep.

The goal is to be able to say something while evading responsibility for having said it.

Yes - he framed his statement with one of the stock phrases that people use when they want to be able to say something, then later, if necessary, claim that that’s not really what they said

I don’t think a news source has a responsibility to include that bit of transparent rhetorical trickery in a headline.

So… is he desperately dishonest or insane?

Because none of that hysterical gibberish made even the slightest bit of sense.

Best of luck to them.

It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”

Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.

How deliciously ironic that this is paywalled.

Yes - there have been widely differing accounts of events throughout this war.

On the one hand, there’s been Israel’s account. And on the other hand, there’s been the truth.

I think the whole idea of a “right to privacy” is misleading and destructive, since it places the focus incorrectly.

The question shouldn’t be whether or not people have a “right to privacy,” but whether or not other people should have the right to violate their privacy.

And the clear answer to that, IMO, is no.

So for instance, if you provide personal information to a website, the concept is that they have the right to do as they please with it unless and until you are declared to have a right to maintain the privacy of that information.

But I think that starts with a flawed presumption - the company should NOT have an inherent right to do as they please with that information. That information is not their property - it’s yours. You shared access to it with them for a specific purpose, and the presumption right from the start should be that the only right THEY possess regarding that information is to use it for that specific purpose. You shouldn’t need a right to stop them from doing any more with it because they shouldn’t be seen to have the right to do so in the first place.

Of course that’s not going to happen in our surveillence autocracy - the last thing in the world the wealthy and empowered few want is to have to make a case for a right to every abuse they want to pursue rather than being able to do as they please save for the bare handful of rights to be free from abuse that they grudgingly allow us plebes to claim, but still…

And I stand by everything I said there.

And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.

And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.

And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”

If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

I doubt you’d even get a coherent sentence. Just random strings of emotive nouns and adjectives with irrelevant verbs sprinkled in here and there.

No - anarchism, by definition, is the complete absence of institutionalized authority.

Those around here who are calling for the destruction of institutions have no intention of creating a society free from the hierarchy of authority - they want to destroy the current authority merely so that they can replace it with their own.

Again, they’re about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists. They’re as authoritarian as fascists - they just have a different set of norms they want to forcibly impose, and a different set of people they’re eager to oppress and murder along the way.

I haven’t seen a single anarchist on Lemmy. Not even one.

The most obvious group, and the one this thread is about, is about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists.

Neurotypical does mean pretty much exactly that, with only the clarification that while communication is significant, it extends beyond that.

That’s a lot of why the terminology “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” exists in the first place - because at this point, it doesn’t even pretend to be an objective measure of mental health, but simply a pair of labels with which to describe the degrees to which people do or do not accord to current societal standards.

For example - posit a society in which it has become socially acceptable and even expected, when you meet someone, to punch them in the face.

If one were to ask a person how they feel about punching other people in the face, it’s fairly obvious that the objectively psychologically sound view is that that’s a thing they would not and likely could not do.

But to actually act in that way - to be unwilling or even unable to do it in a society in which it’s the norm and thus the expected and sanctioned behavior - would be “neurodivergent.” The conclusion would be that one must suffer from some psychological or physiological affliction that makes it so that one is unwilling or unable to act in a way that accords with expected behavior or societal norms. That one is “neurodivergent” instead of “neurotypical.”

Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?

I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go.

The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.

“Authoritarian” is fairly meaningless in this context. All societies and political structures rely on authority to maintain social control to greater or lesser extents.

“Authoritarian” doesn’t refer merely to the existence of authority. It refers to a system under which, on balance, individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority - a system under which there is more likelihood that an individual will be constrained by authority than that theybwill be free to act as they choose.

And note, before you even go there, that that doesn’t mean or imply no individual liberty. Again, the issue is the balance between individual liberty and governmental authority.

Where does liberal “democracy” derive its authority from?

Why are we suddenly talking about democracy?

Why then do studies repeatedly show that there is no correlation between popular opinion and policy? Why do the majority of Americans want public health care and yet it never passes?

Why are we now suddenly talking about representative “democracy” instead?

Yes - of course there’s a gap between actual public sentiment and the machinations of representatuve "democracy - that’s most of the point. It’s a system that’s been sold to the unwary to give them an illusion of self-determination behind which the oligarchs can hide.

How is that relevant to anything? (Other than a broad argument against institutionalized authority in general, which I’d agree with).

There is no such thing as a distinction between “democracy” and “authoritarian”

Not necessarily, but as a general rule, there is, simply because it’s more difficult for oligarchs in a representative democracy to enact their will. There’s a number of hoops that they have to jump through in order to maintain at least some semblance of serving the will of the people, and that specifically because the people still retain some significant freedoms (remember - it’s about the balance between freedom and authority).

In effect, oligarchs in a representative democracy have to trick or coerce people into not exercising their freedoms or exercising them poorly.

In an authoritarian system, the balance favors the government in the first place, so they’re far more likely to be able to simply issue decrees and then enforce them, without having to muck about with all of the pretending to be serving the will of the people stuff.

Granted that it’s not as significant a difference as gung-ho Americans might wish to believe it to be, there is still a difference.

Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing

Actually, I would say that it is inherently a bad thing.

That’s an awful lot of why I’m an anarchist - I believe that institutionalized authority cannot be justified and is inevitably destructive.

But that’s sort of beside the point.

People always justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn’t “authoritarian”.

This reads like classic projection.

And in fact, I just wrote another post in which I pointed to what I believe to be the fundamental flaw at the heart of the tankie position, and it was pretty much exactly what you wrote here.

My position is that if you’re going to hold that authority is legitimate, then that means that you are legitimately subject to it. You don’t get to pick and choose, just as you wouldn’t allow those who would be subject to your authority pick and choose. Just as you hold that they’re rightly subjugated if those with whom you agree are in power, you’re rightly subjugated if those with whom they agree are in power.

It’s either that or you carry your aversion to being made subject to someone else’s authority to its logical conclusion and cede to others the exact same freedom you wish to have yourself.

You can’t have it both ways. You’re not some sort of demi-god, deserving of special treatment. If you can rightly oppress others they can rightly oppress you. If they can’t rightly oppress you, you can’t rightly oppress them.

That last is the main reason I’m an anarchist.