I don’t know specifically about Mastercard and Visa, or other jurisdictions, but I recall in my country that financial institutions have responsibility too. Finance is a major part of child exploitation just like it is with other organized crime, and they have a decent amount of power to analyze and flag suspicious finance networks, and governments benefit from compelling them to look into money instead of simply accepting it.

Lots of the people involved in CSAM are stupider than you might think, surprisingly bad at privacy/security given that almost everyone including governments hates them.

Well, I tried looking up videos of this and found one more reason not to: someone brought a bucket of hot water to their car and slipped on the icy driveway, spilling it on their face.

I was clarifying and adding more details, and also restating to make it clear I wasn’t disagreeing at all or trivializing it.

Is it because of pedestrians, or just heavy car traffic? [edit: just read the road details, looks like it’s a one-way ‘living street’ with pedestrians, capped at 20 mph]

(just posting OSM link for anyone else like me avoiding Google) https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/13526138

For what it’s worth: something I haven’t seen come up (so while this is a pragmatic perspective, don’t pretend I’m dismissing the importance of your relationship and your values! I’m only adding this for variety and discussion)

People can change. Many won’t, but some do. [vid: former white supremacists describing their process of leaving] Whether you think your brother is willing or able to change is your call, and whether it’s worth the emotional and mental strain is your call. You aren’t obliged, but it’s worth considering.

People who have left these ideologies, from what I’ve heard, often come back to two main points - they had someone in their life who cared about them, but was also unwilling to tolerate their bullshit, and they had to want to leave it by themselves. Honestly, I see parallels with people recovering from serious drug addictions and cults like QAnon.

But, again, this isn’t easy and there’s no guarantee of them changing, so do not feel obliged to even try. Your health is more important, and there are plenty of other ways you can help change the world.

Correct me if I’m wrong: IIRC the feds sent back mock pictures to ‘confirm’ the victims were killed, so I don’t know if anyone was assassinated in reality but, as you said, Ulbricht payed to have them murdered.

Some people who were in Special Ed report, like, major emotional trauma from it.

Is that with people also in Brazil? Because your experience sounds very different from the cases I’ve heard in some other countries where Special Ed students are isolated rather than given extra classes at the end of the school day.

for a service/site/mom-and-pop shop to be sustainable without unending growth.

I’ve been on somewhat niche sites which have lasted decades, with waves of people coming in whenever related sites screw up and trickles of people leaving when an alternative community becomes more popular. It’s a comfy, slow existence, which works for some communities, but not for ones like this which thrive on diversity and chattiness, rather than really well thought-out replies days apart from each other. On reddit-like sites, time penalizes how high a post goes (unlike a forum where years-long threads are very normal to see on a front page) so there is an inherent benefit in having consistent activity. That doesn’t imply boundless growth, but at least sustaining a decent level of activity. We’re not chasing ad revenue, growth for growth’s sake is not what we want or need.

But with that said, a community with no new visitors can only lose them. That can be a slow process, but it’s inevitable. Been there, done that. Again, doesn’t imply that pointless growth is a good thing.

I mean…if the movie is good you should support it

What is ‘it’? The movie is a published work, it can’t be financially supported. Who is being supported with the money you pay?

Vote with your wallet.

Unfortunately, consumer boycott (and conversely, support) usually isn’t an effective strategy at this scale you’re talking about. Unless you and all your friends are voting with a few thousand dollars, it’s hardly going to make a dent in the numbers.

Giving money to your enemy is idiotic tho. There is a class war out there and normies are too busy funding their oppressors

Absolutely. At the end of the day, most of the moral ideals being thrown around are, at the end of the day, nice ideas.

Giant corporations exist to get more money and, history shows, media companies will happily brainwash us and buy oppressive politicians just to push their profits up. Furthermore, they serve as a megaphone for the ideas of the owner class, who are historically the core force behind fascism when society is in crisis.

Giving them your resources is fucking suicidal.

It is always morally acceptable?

Morality is, literally, subjective. There is no universal answer to that question.

I personally consider anything being sold by a distributor to be fair game, no questions asked. If I pay for mainstream music, films or games, most of the time, zero of that money goes to the workers who created those artworks. It just makes rich owners richer, because they legally own rights. I would go as far as to say it’s morally wrong to pay for those things, it’s not neutral, it’s supporting a cycle of abuse at your own expense. So that’s my perspective on your ‘giant corporations’ question.

Digital copying isn’t stealing, unfortunately, because those giant companies deserve to have their hoard of capital expropriated.

[src]

Perhaps there’s a better term, because “communities” already means something else here. Last thing we need is another Discord-calling-groups-‘servers’ mess.

“Homes” could be alright? or even “towns”?

Maybe I’m getting alright at in-code documentation because when my code breaks after months of me not looking at it, I can return and get up to speed in a few minutes.

(or maybe these people are working on much more advanced stuff)

Trump promoting the best commie coffee

There’s only one better coffee promotion I’ve seen.

Soon we’ll be routing our internet connections like flight paths to get around sanctions.

If the CIA agents in Havana don’t get Cuban healthcare benefits, they should just quit.

Yes it’s somewhat sanitised, all social media is sanitised.

And it’s all sanitized for good reason - the closest places to unsanitized, such as freespeechextremist, are literally just spambots, molesters, troll neo-nazis and people mechanically incapable of holding a conversation without bursting into nonsense screeds in all caps. Effectively, just the people no-one else wants to talk to.

As for the RedNote sanitizing, some of the ones I’ve seen newcomers getting tripped up on are rules which would make our local social media better. They seem aimed at countering grifters/influencers, sexualization for popularity (not being a prude, rather, there are plenty of other places for that content) and similar negative trends associated with TikTok.

I’ll look around to see if I can find those show segments online, but as for ‘are they panicking?’, mass media has a vested interest in influencing public opinion (that’s effectively the only reason a private business bothers with news) and therefore control over public opinion. If the people who own the show and the channel give orders, the writers and actors probably won’t risk getting fired. (oh, and obligatory quick clip to demonstrate what ownership looks like, for those who haven’t seen it: “This Is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy”)

So, with that in mind, recall the reactions of almost all mass media to the UnitedHealthcare assassination: consistent critique and denouncement. Surely this wasn’t how all the news anchors felt, given how positive general opinion was! The people with ownership and executive power over these media channels obviously don’t want the idea of citizens shooting the dangerously rich and powerful to get popular, so we saw their ideas echoed in all the news.

Compare that to here: media channels outside of China don’t really want that counter-narrative to gain traction. It goes against their inherent interest of influencing public opinion, it’s a competitor which all the biggest media companies can agree to call bad news. So I have no doubt this unexpected and surprising turn would make them panic.

edit: the clips I found from Colbert and The Daily Show were a surprisingly mixed bag. For example, this Daily Show clip comes off more as a satirical jab at the US than any panic.

Personally, I suspect the bigger problem for their platform will be handling the contrasting values of Western social media norms against their own.

Even sinophobic reactionaries have been pointing out for years that “[Douyin] Chinese TikTok is Wholesome, American TikTok is Corrupting our Youths!” with product influencers/grifters, rampant sexualization up to and including pornography, etc., albeit the reactionaries are interpreting the difference from a conspiratorial moral-panic viewpoint claiming it’s weaponization by The Chinese Government to corrode Western society, rather than the difference being that the US TikTok is social media with liberalist freedoms combined with the capitalist pursuit of profit above society, and is in line with the content on Xitter, reddit and other familiar social media.

The point being, that people rise to the top of TikTok through sexual suggestion, flashing symbols of wealth and other normalized habits which I’ve heard are banned on Lil’RedBook (which sounds like a great decision!).