[dropkicks a man through a fourth-story window]

“I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”

I have adblocker solely set up to block Youtube ads.

They broke the implicit contract of “Don’t make ads too intrusive and I won’t go out of my way to block your revenue”. THEY DREW FIRST BLOOD

I think my main quibble with this is that cops in the US aren’t really beholden to anything or anyone except themselves. That description could be applicable to the legal system as a whole, but US cops have a weirdly loose relationship with the entire legal system despite, theoretically, being its enforcers.

US police departments are more like gangs that receive public funding in exchange for literally nothing, rather than state enforcers.

“Not all cops, but so many and in such incredible proportions that it may as well be, especially considering the choice to be a bastard is one that must be made every moment of every working day”

There are cops out there who want to do good in bad departments. They are either pushed out of the force, or pushed under the extant culture of callousness and brutality.

There are cops out there who want to do good in good departments. They’re rare, and the way that policing is (not) regulated in this fucking country makes all good departments inherently unstable, as power tends to corrupt, and unchecked power doubly so - but they do exist.

But the vast, vast majority of cops out there are complicit with their departments - and the vast, vast majority of departments in this country are rotten. And until we, as a society, reckon with that - ACAB remains a valid criticism.

What if I already have the power of being attractive 😎

Do I have to waste a choice to keep it?

And does immortality come with eternal youth?

I always smuggled a book in to auditorium bullshit, even though the lights were usually dim and it was hard to read. Fuck that noise.

Women were not specifically barred from voting in the United Kingdom until the Great Reform Act of 1832. This doesn’t mean that they voted often - and would have been practically barred in most circumstances, but it was possible in some. There were no bars on suffrage for black men in the United Kingdom at any point.

Before the reform act of 1832, something like 1% of the population of the UK could vote due to property requirements, stricter than any of the US states in the 1790s.

Late 18th century, yes. And if I hear pop history myths about the Iroquois, I will be irritated.

The majority of the population could not vote, either due to their skin color, sex, or degree of property ownership (colony by colony/state by state as I recall).

Yeah, you should look into other governments of the period.

The paper referenced gives an overview of its methodology and its data.

The three ‘hit songs’ you cite appear to actually be:

1. Foreign funding decreases democracy and increases antisemitism in universities

2. Some DEI programs are instituted in a counterproductive way

and

3. Glorification of Luigi Mangione could result in a feedback loop of violence like 4chan did with the alt-right (I agree, but I don’t see it as necessarily a bad thing)

Use https://12ft.io/ to bypass the paywall if you’re interested in past discourse on the matter.

I think this is from one of the early seasons of House.

Lord.

There’s a difference in not knowing and denying.

As I said elsewhere, knowing it but still denying it, is considerably worse than being ignorant or confused.

Yeah, when you ignored the context of the OP.

… what context in the OP did I ignore?

Are you always this nitpicky?

This is what you said:

The current context of the tiktok ban is that it’s hard for the US to control the political message with that big of a platform not under US control.

I didn’t realize that it was nitpicky to dispute a point.

No. I prefer a wide range of different news sources where I can judge the biases. I can still get good information from Tiktok if I know that I should be critical concerning anything about China’s policy.

You shouldn’t be getting any of your information directly from social media. Furthermore, propaganda is like advertising - you are not immune to it. The “I’m too smart to be fooled” approach just makes you a mark.

So you’d prefer it if Facebook/Twitter/Google/Microsoft/Amazon are the only ones in control of mass online discourse? (That’s the type of strawman you’re constructing of me)

I would prefer it if none of them did, and if Facebook or Twitter or Google catches a ban, I won’t be defending them as news sources which don’t spread propaganda, “and if they did, so what?”

Denying is different than not knowing. 🙄

… then you admit you were knowingly and outright lying?

That’s… that’s worse than what I was accusing you of.

Late 18th century. The chaos of the French Revolution arguably diluted its viability as an example to other countries, despite the structure of democratic government being objectively better, so you can argue that we were still on the cutting-edge through the 19th century, even, when most countries were still autocracies or constitutional monarchies with extremely questionable de jure voting systems.

I would argue as late as the 1950s, our democratic structure was closer to average than below-average, but by the 1970s, what gave the US more in-common with other developed democracies was that we had extensive practice with our democratic system; by then our structure was not just hopelessly outdated, but a structure that no one in their right mind would take seriously as a foundation for a new government. Come the fall of most of the single-party Soviet-backed regimes of the 1990s, and the only countries we actually beat out for being a ‘good democracy’ are ones that… well, are only questionably democracies to begin with. And even then, most of them have structures that are superior to our’s; only a tradition of civic participation has led us to hobble on as long as we have without becoming an outright authoritarian state.

Though this might be the last month I can say that, which says a lot about the failures of our shitshow of an attempt at implementing democracy.

But this entire conversation sprouted from you explicitly denying propaganda being pushed. Saying “My point isn’t that it’s not propaganda” when every previous comment was about you denying it’s propaganda rings very hollow.

I happen to like that tiktok spreads information about the genocide in Gaza,

So in the interest of that, you chose to deny that Tiktok is used to push CCP propaganda.

which is being shadowbanned on the western platforms.

Some of the Western platforms run by billionaires, yes, whom I explicitly compared to the CCP in the original comment.

Context is important. The current context of the tiktok ban is that it’s hard for the US to control the political message with that big of a platform not under US control.

You think it’s the US government which is pushing Facebook and Twitter to censor Palestinian voices?

I happen to dislike censorship, even if it is done by the west.

But you’ll tolerate it, if it pushes one view you do like? Or just if it’s not done by the West?

This comment summarized my point.

The comment I quoted and responded to, yes.

What is the point I supposedly missed?

In that case, “in this house” we like Tiktok?

Please. Show me where this summary is wrong. Show me the point I missed.