American corporations want an “easy” war. Like against a country like Iraq or Afghanistan. You know, someone that has no real capacity to fight back or strike foreign military targets (like a Lockheed martin manufacturing facility) and is more of a punching bag for the US military. A war with China would immediately spark World War 3 and trigger a global economic and military crisis. It is also extremely undesirable because China is a nuclear superpower and, uh…we tend not to get into shooting wars with those because they can potentially escalate into literal nuclear holocaust.

Sure. These things are products to be purchased, after all. Regardless of how you feel about the content of the books themselves, I’d be extraordinarily annoyed if a company could just edit on a whim the content I had paid for and expected to have in perpetuity. That said, you should never realistically buy anything from an online publisher that doesn’t let you save a static text copy of the book as a PDF or other file offline. More generally, if you want to buy a book, the best thing to do is to buy from a used bookstore, if you’re able. Not like Amazon needs any more money.

As an FYI, this is a very old thing that people are doing. There’s actually a term for it (beyond just “corporate censorship”). It’s bowdlerization or expurgation. And, on some level, I understand why people of a certain ethos would be opposed to it. Beyond the obvious reactionary agenda of being “anti-woke,” there are concerns here over artistic or authorial autonomy and the fear of a slippery slope in which previous cultural attitudes are historically white washed. And I think it’s good to acknowledge the past honestly. Not to celebrate those old attitudes, of course, but to let it stand as it is, scars and all, as a cultural artifact of a very different time. Editing the content of the original work to hide what is and was reduces it from that status of cultural artifact to just pure entertainment. That said, content warning wouldn’t really rob much from the book, unless you believe every book should be a complete and total surprise to the reader. I can’t comment too much on the beliefs of the author of this article, but their opposition to much of what they’re complaining about comes more from a place of “the woke mob is ruining books” rather than anything I would say is a more complete or salient examination of how we collectively relate to the art of the past.

Unique and interesting? I get budget Hunter S. Thompson vibes.

At nearly 6 hours long I can confidently say that some things should just be a very long blog post. There’s no way I can parse and digest a complex argument about popular media via a youtube video of that size. It’s just…I got stuff to do.

It’s one of those things where a lot of these tech startups make enormous promises but the technical challenges are just so far beyond what we’re capable of. Like I remember for years r/space on reddit functioned as, functionally, a duplicate of r/spacex. Every other article was about Elon Musk’s “totally real” Mission to Mars or about how “full self driving was right around the corner.” It’s all corporate pandering and wish fulfillment. We want to pretend like we live in a world of unrestrained scientific advancement and fantastic technology. We don’t. Science is hard and our understanding of how brains and sleep works is facile.

This feels like one of those situations where something is designed purely to absorb as much venture capital on the tiny, infinitesimally small chance it produces a viable product.

“If people don’t do what I say and defederate from this instance because I got banned from a community by a power tripping mod, then these hundreds of websites will inevitably die for it because it means they’re all fascist for some reason…and I will dance in their ashes!”

I want you to understand this is what you sound like when you talk. Get help.

The charter does matter. Because it’s a community driven document.

Yeah, that means functionally nothing.

And, no, my argument is really that you have no power here and the rules are, beyond the functional purpose of insulating the people who run the instances from any kind of legal accountability, largely meaningless in a physical sense. A document like the constitution means something because there are institutions that exist to enforce it. Lemmy doesn’t have that. Community rules and policy are more like weather vanes, pointing towards general guidelines of behavior. They’re not laws. There are no legal proceedings around them. And they apply differently from average commenter, to community moderator, to administrator. Also, you didn’t really say WHICH part of the charter you feel was violated. Just that the charter was violated. It’s like if I said my constitutional rights were violated by the police and someone asked me which ones and I said, “oh, you know, just generally speaking.”

When majorities in the community realize they’re being punked by the likes of you, the response will be to shun you and your instance with mass defederation.

I don’t know what punked means to you, but it means one of two things to me. Neither of which applies in this context. Regardless, yes, instances can defederate from one another. This was always allowed.

Lemmy has these problems partly because the interface design copied from Reddit incentivizes incivility and bad behavior.

There’s some foundational premises here that I don’t think would hold up under scrutiny. Yes, the interface is similar to reddit’s. I don’t know if you think that the structure of the interface hypnotizes people into being dicks, or you think that the interface attracts ne’er-do-wells because it reminds them of reddit and they’re drawn to it like flies are drawn to shit. In either case, I’m not sure if there’s enough argument there to really engage with.

Under circumstances like this, I believe mass defederation is exactly the right outcome. Lemmy is rushing head first to irrelevancy. Then ya’ll can go off and do your own hate thing, like UnTruth Anti-Social or Gab or whatever. Good luck with that.

I’m sorry you had a negative experience. Maybe you should start your own Lemmy instance in which you are better able to enforce your own ideals for the community. Y’know, really swing that ban hammer liberally. After all, banning people who dare question your very narrow, but functionally limitless authority is one of the few joys in life of your average internet forum moderator. Might as well live a little.

You got a particular clause you feel is being violated? Asking because I’ve read the document and I don’t see any parts specifically about mods not being allowed to be dicks. Not that it really matters. The “charter” in question is worth the paper it’s printed on. Federated instances are autonomous. Whether they federate with other instances or don’t is up to individual site governance.

Is that what the FediVerse is all about?

This is what forums on the internet have been about since, well…forever.

Cool. Somebody should let Richard Stallman know, I guess.

If it’s not OSI approved then it’s not open source.

OSI as an organization did not invent the concept of Open Source software. They just appointed themselves the arbiters of the term. There are other organizations and individuals that disagree with their definition.

Cuz’ at the end of the day, as long as there’s two people left on the planet, someone is gonna want someone dead.

American culture is, I believe, becoming more homogeneous over time as a result of information technology. Unless you’re from either rural Appalachia or some deep part of the South, you just don’t have an accent. Or rather, you have a generic “American” accent.