sapient_cogbag

sapient_cogbag , 19 days ago

Technically, genderfluid is more a descriptor of the rate of change of gender than of gender when you think about it :p

So really, the answer to that is an ever changing subset of people ^.^

sapient_cogbag , 5 months ago

Abolish borders lol

sapient_cogbag , 5 months ago

Breitbart? Really?

sapient_cogbag , 5 months ago

The cruelty is the point.

sapient_cogbag , 5 months ago

The war on drugs is just shit urgh. Fucking over people's lives, both directly ("you put something in your body that the government didnt approve of so suffer"), and indirectly ("other people put this stuff in their body in ways we don't approve of, so even though with doctor's suggestion we have decided you're allowed to have a little bit for medical reasons and hence know it is probably vital you have it, we're just going to make it difficult, frustrating, or impossible to get and ruin big parts of your life in case you're secretly using it in ways we dont approve of") nya

It's wrecking people's lives by presumption of guilt - or at least, not presumption of innocence - for a stupid "crime" (where at least some of the committers are also likely to be self medicating ADHD lmao).

I have ADHD (and have medication for it, though i dont use it 100% of the time every day, but do have it most times). I have methylphenidate, which is a bit different to adderal though its still a stimulant.

Honestly the side effects are not great (really don't understand why someone would have this recreationally at any higher dose), but I don't actually give a shit if soneone does consume it either recreationally or for uni work (though stimulants in non adhd people worsen problem solving skills while on it, but the fact people use it for studying and still benefit really to me illustrates a problem with the way things are taught and assessed as well as the high sociopolitical pressure for grades) >.<.

I actually get a bit irritated sometimes, cause a lot of adhd folks see these shortages and blame "illegal users" rather than bullshit war on drugs policy that violates bodily autonomy.

At least as far as I am concerned I dont think people using these things illegally is "wrong" - I don't see why it's any of my business even if I don't think it's the greatest idea or get why given the side effects (might be a bit different for adderal since it has some slightly different effects to what I have nya) - especially when some of them may be self-medicating, as per this article.

sapient_cogbag , 5 months ago

Most anti copyright people I see (including me) hate those kinds of laws lol

sapient_cogbag , 5 months ago

Honestly I'd just read South Africa's court filing with the International Criminal Court (yes I know they're hypocrites due to lukewarm attitudes to Putin's actions but it doesnt change the facts in the specific case): https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240112-pre-01-00-en.pdf

You dont have to read all of it. Even scrolling and just stopping randomly comes up with sone of the most horrific shit the government of Israel is doing and the stuff high level administrators have advocated for and said.

If you think the "human animals" comments and policies are bad, it gets so much fucking worse :/

sapient_cogbag , 5 months ago

The link is to a court filing with the UN.

And its not just the actions, its the statements by Israeli figures, which aren't related to the PA/are easily externally verifiable.

They clearly demonstrate intent and action for genocide, and the most significant aspects like razing half of Gaza to the ground, bombing """safe zones""" (which are already essentially force mass migration, and what about people who cant evacuate), preventing even the most basic access to food, water, electricity, healthcare, etc. are easy to see.

If you want more named sources, perhaps consider that Israel apparently loves to prevent journalistic entry and also bomb journalists in Gaza <.<

And we all know what Israel's statements are. "Everything is a Hamas base, so lets use masses of high yield bombs in highly urbanised areas while deliberately bombing the zones we pretended were safe, and our officials cheer on mass slaughter of civilians while claiming no person in Gaza can be considered a civilian and comparing them to animals or filth to be removed"

sapient_cogbag , 10 months ago

What the hell are people supposed to do?

Eat the rich :)

More concretely, there are a number of smaller and larger sociopolitical changes that can be fought for. On the smaller side, there's rethinking the way our society values people and pushing for some kind of UBI, on the larger side there's shifting to postcapitalist economics and organisation to various degrees ^.^)

sapient_cogbag OP , 11 months ago

Meta in particular has a specific record of social manipulation, which is why I think defederating them specifically is so important. Even if we collectively have mixed feelings on corporate instances in general, social media companies, especially those like Facebook, have a specific and direct record of manipulating people and the population nya. Facebook/Meta in particular, is probably the worst of any of them.

sapient_cogbag OP , 11 months ago

The post is too big for my next edit, so here is the next edit in a comment:

Edit 2 - Clarification, Expanding on Facebook's Behaviour, Discussion of Admin-FB Meetups

I want to clarify the specific dangers of Meta/FB, as well as some terminology.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and Embrace, Extend, Consume

The link I posted approximately explains EEE, but in this thread I've used the phrase "Embrace, Extend, Consume", to illustrate a slightly modified form of this behaviour.

Embrace, Extend, Consume is like Embrace, Extend, Extinguish except the end goal isn’t complete annihilation of the target. Instead of defederating at the endpoint, Meta/FB just dominates the entire standard, and anyone who steps out of line is forced into a miniscule network of others.

They can then use this dominant position to buy out or consume large instances, or for example, force data collection features into the standard and aggressively defederate anyone else who doesn’t comply >.< - because they're so big, most instances will comply in the service of "content".

Such a dominant position can even be obtained simply by sheer user mass, which Threads already has to some degree, as long as the relevant instance has large amounts of financial resources to buy out instances.

In this way, they consume the network entirely, which doesn’t necessarily destroy the communities but essentially Borg-ifies them and renders people unable to leave their grasp.

Facebook/Meta-Specific Threats: Information Warfare & Manipulation

One of the major specific threats of Meta/FB in particular is their long and continued history of engaging in what essentially amounts to large-scale psychological manipulation and information warfare towards it's various goals (money, total domination of human communication, subsuming the internet in countries where the infrastructure is still too small to resist a single corporation restricting it's content, political manipulation, collection of ever more data, etc.), against both it's users and non-users.

They have well over a decade of experience in this, hundreds of times more users than us (providing good cloaking for astroturfers), and untold amounts of labour, research and other resources have been poured specifically into figuring out the most effective ways to manipulate social groups via techniques like astroturfing, algorithmic prioritization, and more sophisticated strategies I am not aware of. All backed by data from literally billions of human beings >.<

This means that exposing the Fediverse to Facebook/Meta is essentially exposing us all to one of the most organised and sophisticated information warfare machines that has ever been created. Cutting off the connections immediately (as in the other analogy by @BreakingBad) not only protects from direct EEE/EEC, but also makes it harder for Meta/Facebook to influence, dominate, and consume the conversation here, either by sheer user-mass, or by malicious information warfare (or even unintentional consequences of their algorithms), or by a combination of all of these.

We know they are extremely malicious and willing to use these methods towards real-life, ultra-harmful ends. Examples are at the start of this post :)

For hypothetical examples on how this might work - in reality it might be different in the specifics (these are just illustrative):

• Meta/FB could start a campaign (maybe astroturfed) for "user safety", where they encourage people to distrust users from smaller instances or any user with their instance address marker not on @threads.<whatever their url>
• Meta/FB could add "secure messaging" (lol, it's facebook), but only between threads users. Then they could push the idea that ActivityPub is bad for privacy (the DMs are, but just use Matrix ;p - if you post stuff publicly, it makes sense that it's public).
• Meta/FB could by simple user mass result in most communities being on Threads. People tend to drift towards more populous communities about the same topic, in general, and Threads unbalances the user ratios so much that everyone would just go to those >.< (as opposed to right now, where we have similar sized communities on several large instances, where most people subscribe to most of them)
• Meta/FB could use social engineering to push for changes to the ActivityPub protocol that are harder for other ActivityPub servers to implement ^.^, or even ones that are hard for non-proprietary clients to implement. For example, embedding DRM in the protocol or something like that.
• Meta's algorithms could over time shift towards deprioritising non-"paid"/"verified" Threads users.
• It's already been explained how the app as we know it essentially makes it hard for people to leave due to the fact only they have access to their server software and they also ensure that the app is only a specific client for this service.

Instance Admins, and the "Friendliness" of Meta

Some instance admins have been in contact with Meta/FB. It does make sense for at least some of them to do "due dilligence", but I've seen in at least one post a comment on the friendliness and cooperativeness of the engineers and the fact they mostly discussed architectural concerns and stuff like moderation and technical stuff.

I want to remind instance admins that no matter how nice the engineers are - and how much they share your interests - they are still working for what is essentially a mass information warfare machine. This doesn't make them malicious at all, but it does mean that what they are doing is not a solid perspective on the actual goals and attitude of Meta/Facebook, The Corporate Assimilator Organism.

Regardless of what they have discussed, they are obligated as employees to act on Meta's orders, not the things they actually want to work on or the things both them and you find important ^.^ - or even act towards the goals they want to act towards when Meta inevitably goes for the throat.

I encourage instance admins to keep this in mind, and further keep in mind that Meta is pretty much royalty when it comes to social stuff and how to appeal to people. If they were trying to appeal to a more corporate social media service, they'd probably have gone with sending in the C-suite, but they know this community is technically inclined and less likely to buy into corpo speak and corpo bullcrap, so they probably hooked you up with all the chill engineers instead :).

Reiterating my view: Resist Corpo-Assimilation!

Note on This Post

I've realised this post would probably be most useful if the primary targets of Threads could see it (Mastodon). But I don't have Mastodon cus I really am not into microblogging myself, so RIP ;p