Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t have an example for you. I see another left hook coming your way unexpectedly and that is from the term “genocide.” It’s fairly new. It was coined during WW2. And people still argue about the definition. We have killed each other for time immemorial but we didn’t have that label that stuck to slap onto the most egregious cases. So anything before the Holocaust is given the label after the fact. And that will have some historians at the ready contesting it. So most genocides are contested not because they don’t want to admit a lot of killing was going on. But because they cannot agree on what genocide means.

    They hold ten-year trials in The Hague to figure out if a Milosevic or similar asshole is guilty of it. There is wiggle room in the definition. Were enough people killed? Was it targeted enough? And other distasteful questions.

    We talk about genocide like it’s a fixed term and everybody knows what it means. But it’s more in that “I know it when I see it” category and the resulting wiggle room will make any argument you’re having harder. You can’t get to the slam dunk of your argument when your opponent withdraws from it on this technicality.


  • Registration is mandatory and registry may be checked on the street if they see you’re missing a wheel reflector etc. I’m not sure if that’s by local or national ordinance. Japan has a mountain problem, i.e. most of the country consists of them pushing most of the 100-something million people into the two major plains and a handful of other big cities. Where people live in shoe boxes and converge around train busy stations. Where space is doubly at a premium and most cities have no parking zones for bicycles on the streets. If they didn’t force people into paid parking arrangements, the streets or more specifically the often conically narrow sidewalks would become impassable with bicycles. I’ve seen bicycle “tow trucks” in action in Tokyo. It’s just a big open truck with an outfit of lock pickers/cutters that impound illegally parked bicycles. The registry helps reunite owners with their bikes and a nice fine. Theft is less of a problem here and depending on the area you’ll see bikes that are locked but not locked to anything immovable and people leaving helmets or other items in the basket because chances are nobody will take it.





  • You can discuss any war you like in any forum that will discuss this subject.

    The national media wherever you are will discuss certain conflicts and maybe strive others but the attention will really be elsewhere. As humans we have a limited attention span. Until last decade we had outsourced the sorting of importance to editors in newsrooms. With social media it’s been a hybrid of editors and algorithms. A lot of algorithms are fed by traditional, trusted news organisations so the biases persist. This is very generalized but I would describe the formula like this: far away, no oil, no business interests? No news.

    Also, people like having opinions. But there is also an ignorance level the majority of people will stay under. You’ll always have a-holes that just parrot stuff unreflected. They live these days mostly but not exclusively on Xwitter. I’m not talking about those guys. The more level headed will not want to discuss certain things for lack of knowledge.

    On Lemmy, you’ll find more level headed people that are influenced by biases that persist in the Anglosphere - we speak English after all. Also, people are not willing to walk into wood chippers. There is no comment on the internet that doesn’t have the potential to trigger a shit storm.

    Journalism is also about narrative. Aung San Suu Kyi’s journey from imprisoned freedom fighter to de facto head of government, to looking away from genocide - the hero journey was aborted and with it attention waned. Most white people don’t want to look too closely at Africa for fear of finding contemporary conflicts with their roots in the era of colonisation. Since our attention is limited, those are the conflicts we gladly let go of first. Also, we need to stay focused on whether or not an octogenarian shat himself in Washington.




  • It’s a comedy movie parodying the stylistic exaggeration that is part of the Bond movies.

    It’s going to be a hard math problem to get this bomb to go off near molten lava but not in it. The bomb will probably not be able to generate its full destructive potential if it melts first. Also, there is more atmospheric pressure down there and we didn’t build bombs for that. But even if you accounted for all that, worldwide eruptions sound like a stretch. The shock wave in air of a 50 kiloton explosion would probably be in the 10 mile range. That’s going to be lower in a thick liquid medium and a not insignificant part of that energy would also want to travel back up the drilled shaft. So this will probably affect an area of the world but far from all of it. And there is no guarantee it would work or be instantaneous. Pressure buildups that lead to eruptions can take ages. It’s a bad plan.



  • They probably looked at who users burner phones and quickly realized it’s mostly people cheating on their spouses or people of the criminal variety. None of these groups are going to start a political movement. And cheaters gonna cheat and one more obstacle for the criminal folks isn’t a bad thing. Tourists are a rounding error.

    Sure, in the past we had phone booths and boxes. The majority of landlines were registered to a name, a business, or an institution. There isn’t really a long established right to have a burner number. People used to voluntarily list their names and numbers in a book. And no cheating farmer Bob had a secret line put in the barn so he could talk to his side piece.

    I’m going to guess the Aussie rules apply to most of the countries we group under the label western. And there is a danger that they harvest your data but it is more likely a government requirement to register ID. Like with private car ownership in the US as well if I’m not mistaken. It’s not wildly outlandish as a concept.

    Don’t look into what they make you do if you want to own a firearm.


  • There are few feces filled salvoes flung at Melon Usk that I would object to. This is not one of them. The question I have though is this: do we need a new Twitter? It had its time in the sun but most people look back at it through rose tinted glasses. Before the takeover by the son of South African emerald mine owners, Twitter was in deep trouble. It had cultural relevance but was a financial flop. It benefited from being the first service of its kind with sufficient reach. I don’t think Twitter would have survived without the Nazi saluting shithead either. Its decline would have been more graceful by comparison. It would have done it without the bullshit tsunami emanating from the top, it wouldn’t have had the money to digitally undress people or other adventures in so-called AI, but I believe it would have faded anyway. People have split up from the one consensus platform to many different ones and making people switch is hard. So coming back now with a new Twitter is like announcing we will electrocute another Topsy next week. That turned heads more than a century ago but we have moved on.


  • The “why no more risky video games?” post was mentioned in this thread. If it was moderator intervention and you remember the post title and instance it was on you can try to look up the modlog and see if you can find it there. Open the web version and scroll down to the bottom to see the link.

    I use a third-party client that puts the baby emoji by the user name for new accounts. In the age of bots and repeat sock puppet account offenders, you reply to baby emojis in great detail at your own peril. You could make it part of your routine that if you wrote more than 100 words in reply to somebody you snap a quick screenshot of the post before you move on.