Is everything critical of Saudi Arabia Hasbara propaganda?

I hate Saudi Arabia’s leadership and brutal oppression of their people. Obviously, Kashoggi. Obviously, funding terrorism worldwide. Personally, a friend of mine witnessed a state beheading simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time while he was working in SA (he was an Indian immigrant worker) - scarred him for life.

Hasbara are in the walls so I presume they saw me type that out and I’ll just patiently await my cheque.

Hey so I just wanna make one point about this that a lot of people aren’t going to like

Whenever I said that Substack should be willing to host Nazi blogs, <blah> “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THE FIRST AMENDMENT IT’S A PRIVATE BUSINESS THEY CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT IT’S NOT THE GOVERNMENT”

The point I’m trying to make though is “it’s a private business so they can censor whoever they want” isn’t really the rhetorical slam-dunk that some people seem to feel like it should be, and this is a good situation to point to for why that’s sometimes an important principle.

You’re wrong in the above statements. It is a slam dunk. The situation with Kimmel and the FCC and Sinclair is a counterpoint to your argument, not backing. You don’t wanna see if that way. Thats fine 🤷🏻

You probably got shouted at in the past because you were wrong then, just as you are now.

Free speech applies only to the government not interfering with your speech for good reason: the government should not stifle speech (with limits regarding shouting fire, or compelling violence ‘kill that guy!’). If a person hosting a forum or (via owning a business) talk show or tiny Lemmy instance decides they don’t want statements against their beliefs on the platform, its their free speech being exercised by removing it or placing rules stating “no nazi talk” on their service.

If free speech applies to private businesses and they are forced by the government to host all opinions then it becomes compelled speech. “You must host Nazis rhetoric on your message board, by order of the government, you cannot infringe on an individual’s free speech”. It becomes a paradox, free speech of the individual overrules free speech of the hosting individual or group.

The example you’re using here is particularly backwards - because the FCC (the government) is pushing to have pro-Alt-right (pro Charlie Kirk) messaging pushed on all privately owned platforms, and punishing any platforms or individuals who disagree. They are compelling speech. That is the antithesis of free speech, yet you somehow see it as, “look, Sinclair banning Kimmel is the same as Nazis being banned from Substack,” and they are actually not the same at all when you look at context.

In addition, if your platform hosts hate speech (Nazis, alt-right fascists, etc) then congrats - your platform is not a ‘free speech haven’, it’s just a fascist platform. Look at 4chan, 8chan, 8kun, even Twitter - once the site runners decide it’s ok to keep fascist content up, they become fascist / white supremacist platforms. If site owners don’t want that to happen to their site, they moderate and ban and post rules - their free speech but your argument is that this is a bad thing and they should instead host all opinions?

Where are you? I bet there’s at least a few local ISPs that would allow you to use a user-supplied router.

Don’t forget to have the SSL certificate supplied and managed by Cloudflare, of course 🤫

Get a router that has flood protection? This is like… Extremely basic network protection.

OpenWRT has had configurable syn-flood protection (enabled by default) since like 2010.

• corporate theft from artists, claiming ‘its just learning data bro’, only to have the output often be 99% identical to the original ‘learning data’
• making fake videos much easier for swift political disinformation campaigns
• LLM voice agents that make scams much easier to perpetuate on the elderly

Yes I think it’s intimacy shows they were very close friends, confidants even, accomplices who both knew what they were doing was wrong and illegal but that they were getting away with it and felt untouchable.

Tweet from Dems & full size original image.

I just use the Fairphone 2 Launcher and it’s fine 🤷🏻

I used Nova on my last phone and it worked great, I paid for pro. So I know what I’m missing, not worth it to get back in the Google Play Store system though. I like being anon with no Google account, especially considering Nova sold to a company that data mines user data?

Yeah and it only took evolution (checks notes) 4 billion years to go from nothing to a brain valuable to humans.

I’m not so sure there will be a fast return in any economic timescale on the money investors are currently shovelling into AI.

We have maybe 500 years (tops) to see if we’re smart enough to avoid causing our own extinction by climate change and biodiversity collapse - so I don’t think it’s anywhere near as clear cut.

The consumer has spoken and they don’t care, not even for 4K. Same as happened with 3D and curved TVs, 8K is a solution looking for a problem so that more TVs get sold.

In terms of physical media - at stores in Australia the 4K section for Blurays takes up a single rack of shelves. Standard Blurays and DVDs take up about 20.

Even DVDs still sell well because many consumers don’t see a big difference in quality, and certainly not enough to justify the added cost of Bluray, let alone 4K editions. A current example, Superman is $20 on DVD, $30 on Bluray (50% cost increase) or $40 on 4K (100%) cost increase. Streaming services have similar pricing curves for increased fidelity.

It sucks for fans of high res, but it’s the reality of the market. 4K will be more popular in the future if and when it becomes cheaper, and until then nobody (figuratively) will give a hoot about 8K.

Yep that’s absolutely not what people are talking about when they say ‘climate change’ in this context, they mean anthropogenic climate change, and you know it. Your bad faith response shows you have no interest in an honest discussion.

They gotta deep throat the fascist regime so that they keep getting invited to the press events and thus keep making those shiny dollars.

Yes, it is pathetic.

Right here, this is fine with me.

The US was incredibly stupid to not demand shares in the US banks when they had them over a barrel and crapping themselves in 2008 - and instead gave them tens of billions of interest-free loans and literal handouts. Capitalism, right up until the companies that are ‘too big to fail’ go belly-up and fuck the entire world economy with their stupid decisions, then its, “oh can we please have some socialism? No, we will not agree to any public ownership or shares lol … And no there can be no strings attached - wtf we deserve those executive bonuses this year - just give us the money. Thx plebs! Thoughts and prayers for your mortgage”.

*Few more billion.

I sometimes wonder if silicon valley tech businesses in general will take a reputation hit with investors when this bubble bursts, it’s gonna be a doozy.

But then I remember how many greedy idiots there are out there pumping money into grifts in the hope of The Big Win, and my expectations of consequences are tempered.

He’s that Ghostbusters ghost. This sounds pretty cool tbh… I gotta attend more corporate BBQs.

Less science (pasteurization? Disgusting, sounds foreign) = more nature (*god made everything perfect, like childhood leukaemia *) = more better.

These people are not complicated.

This particular woman blames the company, because the milk being labeled “for animal consumption only” wasn’t a big enough clue for her that she shouldn’t feed it to her toddler. She’s not taking any responsibility whatsoever and will continue to do dumb shit.

Sorry, corporations are only legally ‘people’ when it suits them - like when paying bribes contributing to SuperPACs and lobbying. If it doesn’t suit them, like with crimes, then suddenly… nobody is responsible.

Considering how people love to delay things until the last minute, I expect it’ll sharply rise in October.

I know this because I’m one of those people. Linux on several PCs and servers for years, but I’ve been too lazy to format & rebuild my gaming PC to get it off win10 and onto Linux.