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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I have no real idea with Navalnvy, and only dim memories of news reports about Magnitsky which went into a little more detail, but I’ll tell you how I assume it operates: It’s basically mistreatment to the point that it’ll kill you, just slowly. Your cell’s cold all the time, in the arctic winter with no blankets. You get bad food and bad sleep and beatings and no medical care of any kind. Once your body starts to malfunction (Magnitsky started having kidney failure), they go on beating you severely enough to cause additional organ damage, but then just continue to put you in your cell day after day with no medicine. Basically, you’re going to die, but they’re drawing the process out enough that it’s indirectly, because of “medical issues” related to what they’re doing to you, instead of just from blunt force trauma or something. So it’s incredibly painful and long and drawn-out, a slow death of constant suffering from which you can’t escape or get any relief.





  • What THE FUCK. I knew this stuff but for some reason reading it again made me all furious again.

    Eva Mireles, from inside the adjoining classrooms where the shooter was, called her husband, Ruben Ruiz, a Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District officer, who was outside the school. According to DPS Director Steven McCraw, during the call Mireles told Ruiz that she had been shot and was dying; when Ruiz “tried to move forward into the hallway, he was detained [by law enforcement] and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.” Mireles eventually died from her gunshot wounds.[82][83]

    After the police cordoned off the outside of the school, parents pleaded with officers to enter the building. When they did not, parents offered to enter the building themselves.[84][85] Officers held back and tackled parents who tried to enter the school, further warning that they would use tasers if the parents did not comply with directions. Video clips of these interactions were uploaded to social media, including one that depicted a parent being pinned to the ground.[86] Police pepper-sprayed a parent trying to get to their child, and an officer tackled the father of another student. Police reportedly used a taser on a parent who approached a bus to get their child.[13] A mother of two students at the school was placed in handcuffs by officers for attempting to enter the school.[13][87] When released from the handcuffs, she jumped the fence and retrieved her children, exiting before police entered.[88] A video clip showed parents questioning why police were not trying to save their children, to which an officer replies: “Because I’m having to deal with you!”[89]

    And, they harassed her afterwards because she was giving interviews that made them look bad.

    Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, said he arrived at the school thinking he was the first law enforcement officer on the scene. He claimed he abandoned his police and campus radios because he wanted his hands free to shoot the gunman, and stated he also thought the radios would slow him down. He said one radio’s antenna would hit him when he ran, while the other radio was prone to falling off his belt when he ran, and that he knew from experience that the radios did not work in some school buildings. Arredondo said he was unaware of 9-1-1 calls being made from the classrooms the gunman was in because he did not have a radio and no one told him; the other officers in the school hallway were not in radio communication either.[97]








  • That’s how Linux happened. Microsoft got so good at eliminating competition, and so lazy about making a product that was more than barely-passable, that it created a unique combination of “we want something good” and “something good cannot be constructed” that drove a whole generation of techies to get familiar with Linux simply because there was no good alternative for certain types of serious computing. The selection pressure of “any competitor company will get destroyed” eventually produced a competitor that wasn’t a company.

    I think that’s what’s happening right now in social media. For a long time ActivityPub went nowhere, and then the big players all got so godawful that you couldn’t ignore the godawfulness, and now look what’s happening. It’s not because Mastodon and Lemmy are great “products” as such; mostly, people just want something that’s not shit. Then in the longer run the selection pressure will create something that’ll be a lot harder to kill or control.

    It would have been easier for Facebook and Twitter not to be shit, but apparently that’s too much to ask. I think the ultimate outcome will be way for the better this way.








  • Not only that, but he was definitely informed. White House counsel and other informed professionals were privy to a bunch of meetings where people were talking about these ideas, and they shared their opinions and sometimes got in shouting matches or resigned.

    I think Trump’s brain genuinely cannot process the concepts of “right” and “wrong” as distinct from whatever he feels like doing, and so you could say: Yes, people whose job it is to be informed experts told him very clearly that these things were illegal, but his brain is so rotten and single-minded that he couldn’t absorb that their advice might be objectively true, any more than a dog can understand a “keep off the grass” sign.

    Fortunately I think the chance of his lawyers advancing that as a defense is pretty remote.