Ambassador Husam Zomlot: Well, what we know so far, this isn't about Trump or Biden. This is about the US, and so far the US has failed miserably.
TropicalDingDong: And that is why it is VERY IMPORTANT for me to keep talking about Biden, and connecting him and only him to this issue. It's the only way
Yeah. They "encroached" on 77% of Palestinian land in 1947.
Since then, they've steadily encroached on 56% of what was left.
Now they're encroaching on 32% of Gaza, which is 4% of the 56% of the 77%. The Palestinians are going from owning the least usable 10.1% of all the land they used to own, to now a 9.7% share. So what's the big deal? Doesn't sound like that much.
😢
Futurologist
But I was assured that this guy was our only chance to resist Biden because Biden was the guy doin a fascist takeover, and we had to nominate someone else instead, who wouldn’t be a fascist. Like Phillips.
Now I’m all perplexed about it. Surely the people saying that wouldn’t have been lying for some duplicitous reason
In Living Color, Liquid Television, The Simpsons when it first came on. For some reason these little separate groupings of people with no connection at all to one another just all decided it was okay to show genius weird shit on TV, all of a sudden, when before that it was all just "Cheers" and bullshit and whatever.
Lmao, so on the same day that I said this, this comment of mine got 7 downvotes in a space of 2 minutes, 5 hours after I posted it, from a variety of accounts each with one- or two-word nonsense names with the first letters capitalized, perfectly evenly spread out among exactly 7 instances.
I'm honestly a little bit surprised that the actual real lemmy.ml users can't manage to muster up enough natural downvotes to overcome me coming in and disagreeing with them, but somebody got salty enough about my comment to feel like it needed a bunch of fake downvotes. Hello @Alsephina@lemmy.ml -- were those you? You posted your comment 3 minutes before the 7 fake downvotes came in. I think you need to be more subtle with your fake voting if you want people not to notice. Federated votes are not private.
(I actually don't think that's any kind of propaganda-bot operation; I don't think the propaganda bots are that un-subtle, if they are actually doing any kind of fake voting. But who knows.)
(Oh, also he seems to have replied to himself from one of the fake-voting accounts, agreeing with himself about how wrong I was 😃)
And more about him being in prison for speaking out against the war.
“I know of no reason why the workers should fight for what the capitalists own,” Debs wrote to novelist Upton Sinclair, “or slaughter one another for countries that belong to their masters.”
Illness slowed Debs for several months after war was declared; he mostly stayed home in Terre Haute, resting under doctor’s orders, sick with back pain, digestion problems, and a weak heart. But in December, his friend Kate O’Hare, the nation’s most prominent female socialist, was convicted under the Espionage Act for a July 1917 anti-war speech and sentenced to five years in prison. “I shall feel guilty to be at large,” Debs wrote her in solidarity. In May 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act, further tightening restrictions on dissent.
Enraged, Debs set out in June on a new speaking tour of the Midwest. He knew he was courting prosecution, and maybe even welcomed it. “I’ll take about two jumps and they’ll nail me, but that’s all right,” he told a friend.
Two weeks later, Debs was walking into a Socialist picnic in Cleveland when U.S. marshals arrested him.
“I have been accused of having obstructed the war,” Debs told the jury. “I admit it. I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone.” He defended socialism as a moral movement, like the abolition of slavery decades before. “I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace,” Debs declared. “If the Espionage Law stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead.”
The jury found Debs guilty on three counts, and the judge sentenced him to ten years in prison.
The Wilson administration, unmoved, rejected a recommendation to commute Debs’ sentence in February 1921. “While the flower of American youth was pouring out its blood to vindicate the cause of civilization, this man, Debs, stood behind the lines, sniping, attacking, and denouncing them,” Wilson complained to his secretary. “This man was a traitor to his country."
In December 1921, Harding commuted Debs’ sentence, set his release for Christmas Day, and invited Debs to the White House. “I have heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now very glad to meet you personally,” Harding greeted him on Dec. 26. Leaving the meeting, Debs called Harding “a kind gentleman” with “humane impulses,” but declared that he’d told the president he would continue the fight for his “principles, conviction, and ideals.” He took the train to home to Terre Haute and his wife, Kate, the next day.
Debs died in 1926 at age 70.
Pretty much the same thing as raw-dogging a porn star just after your wife gave birth and then committing felony business fraud and campaign finance violations to cover it up, I guess.
I used Usenet and anonymous FTP, archie and gopher, in the days just before the creation of the web. I actually thought the web was weird when my ISP started trying to push it, and couldn't really understand why they were making such a big deal about it and taking so much trouble to explain to me all the things I'd have to do to get hooked up with it (which were significant). It seemed like just a bunch of weird-looking pages and not all that useful. Weird bomb-making recipes in text files from anonymous FTP seemed a lot better.
CompuServe had a very different feel as opposed to the community-run places like FidoNet and Usenet. It always sort of felt like a Dollar General version of the internet, where all the shelves are a little disordered and no one's really paying that much attention to what's going on. Usenet and FTP were very cool. There was wild stuff on there.
Getting access to email was very cool. Before that it was sending letters, or talking on the phone with family members or random strangers walking around hearing you. Getting a physical letter from someone you were distantly-connected to was very cool in a way that's not replicated on any electronic network, and email seemed initially like it was better, although I think now that in letters we lost something important.
Probably the most massive difference between now and those days is something I don't see people talk about very much: Before the internet, there really was only 1 viewpoint and 1 viewpoint only on the news. US soldiers were the good guys. Neoliberals in government are looking out for you. Criminals are bad. It's just... it's hard to explain, because now there's such a wealth of different opinions and ways of looking at things that it seems normal, but back then it was very rare to get your hands on even one little piece of "subversive" viewpoint. When the Rodney King beating made the news, it was really electrifyingly shocking; at least to the white world, the idea that the cops would ever do something wrong or could even be charged with a crime was aberrant and confusing. They found the cops not guilty in the first trial. It was just too much to take on, to change the jury's world view around to that they might have done something illegal, even with the whole thing on video.
I got an issue of Adbusters and it was like this wild precious thing, an artifact from some other world. I was visiting somewhere when I found it; it wasn't available in my hometown. On the early internet, I was reading a message board where some people were talking about tactics fighting against NATO troops, and it was fucking mind blowing. Like... they're the enemy. How can they be allowed on the internet? Like people? And then I started downloading episodes of "Off the Hook" and issues of 2600, and it sort of was this gateway into this whole other way of looking at the world. I read some Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and around that time this whole other type of media came along, and in about 5-10 years it became, silently but inexorably, an acceptable thing. But when I was growing up, it wasn't.
It's not gonna be possible, I think, for someone from today to really understand how blinkered the view was of the world for 99% of people, before the internet came along. I don't know how well it will translate to today, but I remember Spin as another big watershed at the time, in showing me how much fakeness was in a lot of what I thought was real.
The janky network penetrates the enshittification
Yeah, there's a whole different thing of whatever codes are embedded in the movie and a fairly successful effort, I guess, to read into that whole side of it and determine whatever is the mystery at the bottom of all the different codes. I have no opinion on all that stuff; I was just trying to read into what was going on with the plot and the events of the movie.
Although I think it would be hilarious if my "both of the characters who are into codes and finding secrets are out of their goddamned minds wasting their time because there's nothing there" theory translated also into "there's nothing at the bottom of all the different ciphers embedded in the movie and any fans who are digging into it are wasting their time because there's nothing there" 🙂.