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Cake day: February 9th, 2025

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  • stickly@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlFounding Pedos
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    29 days ago

    I get that a lot of this linked article is written to (correctly) change the narrative around slavery erasure but some of it delves into baseless hyperbole that can’t be anything but counter productive.

    For example:

    Evidence suggests that sexual abuse of slaves was so fundamental to chattel slavery that it’s reasonable to assume any histories of “kind” slave owners are complete fabrications designed to preserve the legacy of the masters.

    That is either playing fast and loose with wording or an absolutely incredible claim requiring incredible proof.

    On one hand, the “kind” slave owner is always a fabrication because the act of owning slaves is inherently immoral and reprehensible. This view makes the claim a borderline platitude; perpetuating an institution that enables rapists is very obviously unkind.

    On the latter interpretation, you’re claiming that rape was so universal that any slave owner was almost certainly a rapist (especially if they claimed they weren’t). This would require some sweeping evidence, think studies on the demographics of mixed race slaves or on medical records tied to sexual assaults.

    So what evidence follows? Excerpts from Frederick Douglas giving second hand accounts of rape and of Harriet Jacobs giving her first hand account. Nothing that incriminates slave owners broadly beyond Douglas’s phrasing “…in [rape] cases not a few,…”.

    I don’t even deny that the evidence might exist, and I would love to see it brought to light if it does. But the thing about slavery, and specifically the USA’s commercial cotton slavery: it’s fucking awful enough if you just list verifiable facts without aggrandizing. Even if everything in this article were true, it doesn’t move the needle much farther beyond the baseline of American slave ownership.

    If you’re going to broadly claim “America’s founding fathers were sex traffickers that raped children” then please, name names! Bring receipts! You can’t open with…

    These facts are not debatable. [Child sex trafficking] happened.

    …and then lay out a single link rehashing that Thomas Jefferson was a massive piece of shit. What do we know about the other 54+ Founding Fathers?








  • I view it as a philosophical difference more than anything. Only an absolute lunatic would actually push the button without an extreme amount of pressure; it’s just not a rational action of self preservation. A Solomon plan, as in the parable, is a choice that will kill you. Say what you will about the people pulling Israel’s strings but they have enough sanity and power lust to not throw it all away.

    All nuclear players are handling loaded guns. Any bluster or rhetoric is hot air because you don’t know what they’re made of until they pull the trigger. And that is the most unique decision in human history in the hands of a tiny group of people. Nobody should ever have been given the personal power to vaporize entire cities, you can’t generalize that failing to a state policy level.

    Complicated dead man switches don’t solve the problem or absolve the decision maker, it’s just a layer of abstraction. You still have to choose to enable it and accept the consequences of killing millions of people. Telling the world it’s enabled is just indicating your current line in the sand (a nuclear event). That’s no different than setting a line in the sand for a conventional threat to your capital city. Either may be an understandable and high pressure threat to the individual decision makers: both are reactions to the other belligerent, both end with the button pusher dead.

    And both sides always have the option to renege on their promise and launch first before that line. Even if they hold to their promise, saying “I warned you” doesn’t make a mass revenge holocaust or suicidal holocaust more ethical than the other. The only humane choice is total disarmament and deterrence with an empty gun, which will never happen of course.


  • Yes it would be damn near impossible because basically all communication would be dead as fast as it happens and any belligerents wouldn’t be in any shape to give convincing evidence (assuming they survive and it doesn’t trigger a worldwide exchange).

    If two countries are at the brink anything can happen: a radar blip, a failed first launch, fog of war, equipment malfunction, etc… Nobody’s official policy is “we’ll nuke anyone for any reason”, they always claim self preservation/retaliation. If a conventional war with Iran goes poorly it would be a rapid flurry of Israel maybe launches or threatens to launch => China (or whoever) retaliates => USA (or whoever) counters => comms are disrupted or locked down => troops are mobilized etc…

    The same events could be true of a purported dead man switch system: can anyone prove that the switch was improperly triggered? Does it matter now that most people involved are ashes?

    It would be over in about an hour or two and would take decades to properly reconstruct, if ever. Every state would jump at the chance to frame the tragedy in their favorite light and you personally will never ever know the truth.

    In that light it doesn’t make any sense to worry about speculation or opinion pieces or rumors. There never will be a way to prove or disprove theoretical apocalyptic policies. There are a billion reasons to criticize Israel and hate Zionists but this isn’t much better than a puff piece.


  • They’re two sides of the same coin and not functionally much different. In a world with nuclear weapons everyone must have a “last resort” strategy like this: the perception of the destruction of the state triggers nuclear annihilation (against anyone/everyone; you plan for all options). The only other theorized response is to voluntarily roll over and die so humanity can live, and nobody with nukes is going to admit to that.

    In a real scenario you could never verify if the first launch was from a credible threat retaliation or not. Even if you could, first strike vs retaliatory is cold comfort when everyone is starving in a nuclear winter. It’s not worth getting upset over a wikipedia article with a bunch of journalist quotes and opinion pieces. We’ve known about MAD since 1962.


  • stickly@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldThe long game
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    3 months ago

    …???

    Most games on steam are drm-free or have a very weak DRM which is easily removed.

    Blatantly false. Take a glance at all the novice/low budget devs who tightly couple their game to Steam’s proprietary multiplayer api.

    Lootboxes kinda suck, but at least they only use them for cosmetic items

    That doesn’t mean they weren’t trailblazers for one of the most parasitic features of the 21st century.

    Steam has parental controls implemented

    The controls don’t even work for this. Even if you scrutinize every game before white listing, the devs can patch in loot boxes (or any toxic mechanic) at any time without your knowledge.

    And putting that aside, “bad parenting” is such a shit cop out when Steam’s main page is devoted to high revenue [toxic] games. This is like blaming parents when cigarette companies made ads specifically appealing to children, as if the inability to legally buy their product absolves them from the damage done.


  • Sure, if you go in with the idea that the ban won’t impact their social media usage then it obviously follows that it won’t impact their usage. And that might be true for a while, but:

    • Declining usage compounds and any barrier to entry drops users. Reddit wouldn’t be suing to stop this if they didn’t think it was a major threat to their platform.
    • The single largest factor in platform membership is peer membership, and the most influential peers in adolescent development will always be real life friends
    • A cohort aging up doesn’t mean that the next cohorts will automatically follow. Late millennials weren’t tied to Facebook, Gen Z wasn’t married to Snapchat, a drop in TikTok usage will eventually precipitate a need to migrate somewhere else
    • Global social media usage, by human screen time, has been declining from its 2022 peak (excluding a North American exception), with the largest drop among younger users

    Putting all of this together, it seems very plausible that child bans could hasten this decline. It would probably work twice as well if more public money was directed to alternatives (third spaces, clubs, etc…).



  • IIRC master was the normal ass English word for your superior in any type of subservient role (employees, servants, indentured, school children, etc…). In the “Master Bedroom” instance, master makes sense as the title of a household patriarch.

    As soon as they started forcing non-whites into new world chattel slavery, all tiers of white classes suddenly thought it was degrading to use the same word they forced on the lesser races. This is where English started adapting new words for the old usage of master, such as boss from the Dutch baas.

    If anything, refusing to use master in any context is far more racist than normal usage. You’re perpetuating the idea that a word’s use by slaves automatically (and retroactively) sullies it for all time.