Uriel238

This raises one of the problems with company-sponsored media that has been a problem since Pulitzer and Hearst. Your bosses and sponsors will always have opinions about what news is fit to print.

So during the cold war never a bad thing was said about GE (we bring good things to life!) despite how they were pushing our elected officials to buy more nuclear warheads, even when we had plenty. GE bought a lot of commercial time from all three networks and no one wanted to disrupt that cash flow.

This might be a benefit from federated social media, that burying a story becomes impossible requiring only a bit of vigilance from its end users.

My dad was an astronomer, and as a toddler I thought it was the funniest name for a star. Then the movie came out and I was bugged that they misspelled the name for the promotional posters (but not in the movie itself).

In a pluralistic society it is as bad as racisim or prejudice against Muslims or misogyny. If your fear of a given group informs a change of a long-term friendship just from that friend coming out, then yeah, it's not only a social dysfunction but informs what job positions you can have that are public-facing or public-serving.

For instance, transphobes shouldn't be doctors, pharmacists or defense attorneys if their transphobia might affect their regard to clients.

Maybe in a police state where citizens are expected to adhere to an extreme level of conformity then being transphobic might not cause additional harm, but no one would want to live in such a society.

Edit: Cleaned up typos

Copyright infringement is not a crime [in the United States]. It's grounds for a civil suit, but it looks really bad for Sony entertainment to try to bleed tens of thousands of dollars from a poor family trying to watch a movie they couldn't afford to watch in theaters.

Possessing or viewing CSAM is so severe a crime, you need a lawyer to dispose of it. To not do so is to stay in possession of it, which is a felony. To destroy it is destruction of evidence, which is a felony. Your only recourse is to stuff it in an unmarked box, and ask your lawyer to anonymously hand it over to the local precinct. It is essentially social toxic waste.

ETA [rant] Note that a) Sony (and all the other major studios and publishers and record labels) gladly pirates IP that is not theirs, and also underpays the people that produce their content. And b) Sony freely engages in dark patterns and odious TOSes which is one of the reasons I haven't been able to play Sony games in years. So it is actually more ethical to pirate Sony content (or again, that of any major studio, record label, publishing house or AAA game company) than it is to pay the company and support their ongoing abuse of workers, end consumers and the market.

Also there is one thing you can do to them that is worse than pirating their content, and that is not pirating their content. [/rant]

Edit: Specified that in the United States, copyright is not a crime. It can be a crime in other parts of the world (such as within the EU) and it can be treated as a crime in the US if a company is annoyed enough at you, and has done so to recover / stop the distribution of pre-release content. (A beta iPhone model comes to mind.)

Whenever we can

So far, Republicans are happy enough to stress-test the mutual loyalty doctrine with obnoxious officials embarrassing the integrity of their office, pushing / voting for odious bills that are poorly written and that overreach, or saying the incitement-to-violence and bigotry / exclusionist rhetoric out loud.

To clarify, there are no good, public-serving Republican subdivisions today: GOP and conservative values since the 1960s have pushed for policy that has led us to where we are now, where precarity (when not poverty) is so pervasive that Mussolini-wannabes and purge politics (culture wars) are popular. Every conservative alive who's been voting either to cut social safety nets, cut taxes or elect officials to do so have bought tickets to ride this train. (Not to mention stock in the proverbial railroad company). The never-Trumpers and OG fiscal conservative Republicans are essentially members who wish there was still more altitude from which to plummet, and the impact point wasn't so close.

So, it's more that no-one wants to take responsibility for the consequences of their own voting histories, now that the train is rocketing forward at high speed, so they're blaming each other.

But yeah, whether we meme this up to wedge the factions further apart, or find additional controversies with which to divide republicans, or even encourage factions to splinter and submit their own rival candidates to elect instead of Trump / DeSantis, we are doing good work to give US democracy (lower case) time to sort itself out.

The US Libertarian Party is really rather removed from libertarian parties of other natures or typical libertarian ideology. As far as I can tell the major difference between being US Libertarian or Republican is that Libertarians actively do not care if they're hated. Notoriously, Penn Gillette divorced himself from libertarianism because the Libertarian Party got too obnoxious for him.

Typically, Republicans trying to distance themselves from Republicanism pretend to be conservative independents. Bill O'Reilly has asserted such as has others on the FOX News cast. (Tucker Carlson, maybe? I wonder if it's a FOX News editorial guidelines to assert party neutrality, even as they were giving Trump softball interviews or letting him rant on the phone for 60+ minutes at a time.)

To Republicans it's about loyalty over principle. Everyone who is part of the movement gets the benefit of doubt while anyone else is an enemy.

Of course this hasn't stopped infighting within the Republican party, so they're now factioning and fighting among themselves as well, each sect claiming to be the true base of the Republican party.

McDonald's is notorious for suing any food-related company with a name starting with Mc or Mac, for trademark infringement. McDonald's lost to McNally's, a steakhouse in California, but I have to assume they've won enough to persist the policy.

Although in the 2010s it was observed that copyright lawyers on retainer to movie studios and record companies were over-eager to report infringement to media platforms even when it was obviously unintentional and not useful for piracy (e.g. dancing baby videos.) And Disney has a long wretched tradition of suing daycare places for wall murals long before the internet.

So this might be a matter of retained legal teams keeping themselves busy with overvigilence, since overenforcement makes such companies look like abusive dicks who deserve to be pirated (or worse, deserve to be not pirated).

Looking at Iran right now, I imagine there may come a point when violent revolution is appropriate. The Masha Amini protests (and the escalation to assassination, arson and sabotage) are the result of years of infrastructure failure and brutal retaliation by law enforcement and religious authorities. Pro-tip: If your side is the one bombing girls' schools with poison gas, you might be the baddies.

I doubt the left in the US is going to start civil war, but the militant right is eager enough that I'm worried about lethal attacks on pride parades. But for now we still have alternatives to burning down police precincts.

I liken the right wing attacks on civil liberties akin to containing the dinosaurs on Isla Nublar. There's enough integral complexity in the systems that pass and enforce execrable bills (and elect officials inclined to submit them) that they are prone to sabotage through malicious compliance with policy.

Still, according to retired CIA analysts interviewed on PBS, civil war in the US is inevitable (though they didn't specify it was imminent) and the kind of election reforms and diffusion of political power back to the public that might prevent war is unpopular among state or federal officials. We'll need to pressure them to pass such measures, probably with a level of extortion that equates to the threat of violence. Specifically what is well above my pay grade.

As heinous as their child predation and corruption of office have been, war profiteering, bonded labor exploitation, global pollution, suppression of harm assessment science and pushing deadly addictive pharmaceuticals all put their immorality at an exponentially higher scale.

Anyone who is a Republican at this point is actively supporting the white power / Christian nationalist movement and the fascist takeover. That is to say, they're in support of the purification movement and genocide whether or not they personally believe in the culture war or are a fiscal conservative loyalist.

43 years of failed fiscal conservative policy only served to accelerate the Republican party toward fascism and the Trump takeover of the GOP during the 2015-2016 primary. So it essentially was fascism all along.

Well Musk absolutely was this stupid. We has content moderation experts lay out in specific detail how not to fuck Twitter up. And he totally fucked Twitter up in the way we were warned would happen.

I think these guys are just so far removed from us normies as to have no context how or why their companies