Thank you for your payment.
@admitsWrongIfProven @laprice it is a scandal how horrible US prisons are, and how strong a retributive impulse is in our culture that excuses awful conditions. "they deserve to be punished. they should suffer."
sex positive assisted living.
@DetroitDan yes! the best thing to do is to agree as broadly as possible on a system of well-defined rights and obligations and avoid any kind of violence in the first place!
@DetroitDan Russia is a sovereign state only to its borders.
To extend the analogy, it may well be unwise of someone to stroll along “my sidewalk”. Maybe I’m pretty strong, and have the capacity to beat the crap out of interlopers, even kill them. Maybe I’m so strong they can’t arrest me. Maybe it’d be better for all concerned if everyone just pretended the public sidewalk was mine. 1/
@DetroitDan That’s a judgment call! After all, the sidewalk is, in an ethical sense, not mine. I have no right to it. But maybe actually enforcing others’ rights would be costly to all concerned, and many people agree it would be sound judgment to leave well enough alone. 2/
@DetroitDan Nevertheless, if some motherfucker disagrees and strolls along the side walk, we might regret it ever happened, but we still have to bear the high cost of trying to arrest and lock you up. Because fundamentally that motherfucker had a right to do what he did, even if it was poor judgment on his part, and I had no right to beat and kill him, and tolerating extralegal beatings and killings is something we collectively wish not to do. Even if, hypocrites we are, other times we have./fin
@DetroitDan the sidewalk in front of my house may be a red line for me. i really don’t like people there. i may make it clear i’ll beat the shit out of anybody who walks there. it makes me uncomfortable.
maybe people indulge me on this, maybe they don’t. maybe it’s “provocative” when somebody takes a stroll there.
but it’s no excuse. if i beat the shit out of him, to jail with me. just because i declare a red line, even if i am willing to act upon it, doesn’t render it legitimate.
@DetroitDan the US government I hope commissions studies considering conflict with every country on earth and how to prosecute it. that’s the job of the security sector, to study contingencies, including very ugly ones. since 2014, the US has certainly treated Russia with more skepticism and less generosity than it did previously. no doubt in various ways we sought to apply pressure and create discomfort, in response to the dismemberment of a neighboring state. but only Russia invaded.
@DetroitDan I guess I think it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that led to war, mass death, and destruction. So we probably will disagree about this. But in general, states sometime prosecute unjust wars, and that’s a legit serious problem with states! But tearing down the state is no solution to that either, it just means domestic gang violence and being subject to foreign conquest, as we see with weak states everywhere.
a movement of unrepentant bullies and thieves resentful of sometimes having been held to account, gaining power by persuading a wider public that the state — whose main sin is to do too little to protect — is solely to blame for their unhappiness and should be dismantled, leaving no protector at all.
so what X is saying is that combatting disinformation, including using cancelish mechanisms like suing speakers that are putatively speaking in bad faith, is supportive of rather than a hindrance to free speech. seems pretty woke! https://mastodon.social/@MattBinder/110812452420739905
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @FrankPasquale the whole list is… amusing!
“Competition waned as the defence market consolidated.” https://www.ft.com/content/2ed278cc-6c3f-4569-b73c-64ad378f3ea8 ht @FrankPasquale
// gotta love the passivity of every clause as the Financial Times acknowledges the market concentration catastrophe
i mean it kind of is my ex so ok.
iphone icon for former twitter, now x.
@maria In all aspects of commercial affairs (and let's not pretend #ActBlue isn't commercial), purely transactional "best practices" have displaced any notion of a collaborative relationship, with each individual customer and the customer base broadly. As you say, it's just a "science" of raising numbers. Let's A/B test it.
I've been working since last fall to cancel recurring #ActBlue contributions my father got onto but can't get off of. They don't centralize all the recurring charges, everything looks long canceled under his login. When you find receipts (only by e-mail), they don't make recurrences easy to cancel. Each time I've thought I've gotten them all, I find a few charges keep reappearing. They hold themselves out as the good guys, but they are so sketch. To think I even used to tip them.
("not easy to cancel" means they expire the links in the receipts — pretty quickly, so you have to request a fresh receipt copy by e-mail then cancel through that link then fill a form with a reason for the cancelation. it's not end-of-the-world arduous, but plenty of speedbumps for the older people outraged by MSNBC into signing up for these.)
when you put it that way, i’m not sure i’m comfortable with you boosting my toots.
@cshentrup that’s probably right. widely known on social media and widely known on the streets of portland are two different things.
@cshentrup (it’s become a pretty well-known symbol, and pretty shocking to find it in the rfk jr post. though, as you experienced, certainly lots of people have yet to have the, um, pleasure of discovering it. it could always be a coincidence, but rfk jr and his minions are very, very online. i think the likelihood this wasn’t intentional, whether by him or his social media staffer, is small.)