Amezarak

50 ms·

721.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Credit cards have a crucial benefit over debit cards: they add a layer of indirection to my bank account. Steal (or mischarge) my credit card, run up 10k in charges, no problem. No money ever comes out of my bank account and I dispute the c
722.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Call it what you will: I mean people in a free and fair healthy society cannot be radicalized by information. It can only happen when bad government and other organic social forces (which government could regulate with better policy) cause
723.
by Amezarak 3y ago
What constitutes damning? I guess that’s in the eye in the beholder; as far as I can tell, the Overton window on this subject shifted hugely in the past 20 years. There’s certainly been much bigger outrage in the past over smaller instances
724.
by Amezarak 3y ago
I personally believe misinformation is a symptom rather than a cause of radicalization, but granting the premise, I don’t see how SV and USGOV can be trusted to fairly censor and run their own propaganda campaigns without transparency. We a
725.
by Amezarak 3y ago
This particular article goes deeper into the same subject and among other things, details government employees working for government agencies actively participating a way people attacking the Twitter files reporting claimed did not happen.
726.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Taibbi is in the byline. He’s a well-known award-winning investigative reporter. He certainly has biases, puts his spin on things, and this is one of his hobby horses lately, but he is a reliable source.
727.
US and UK Military Contractors Created Plan for Global Censorship in 2018(public.substack.com)
47 points by Amezarak 3y ago|40 comments
728.
by Amezarak 3y ago
It's worth mentioning that individuals could legally (and some did) own cannons and warships back then as well - it wasn't limited to muskets. The reference in the Constitution to "letters of marque and reprisal" refer t
729.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Well, I watched HD video on my 1999 PC, and it worked fine. I had to resize it to fit 1600x1200; I don't know what all is going on behind the scenes to play a 1080p-encoded video in that situation. But it worked great. You don't n
730.
by Amezarak 3y ago
I ran a 1999-era machine well into the 2000s (I think 2007?) with Windows 98SE on 1600x1200 and it worked great, and faster than the XP computer I had.
731.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Why on earth would this bother her??? It also saves tons of money. I downloaded a delivery app, saw how much more it would cost, and have never used one again.
732.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Yes, in other words, AI is only safe when it repeats only the ideology of AI safetyists as gospel and can be used only to reinforce the power of the status quo.
733.
by Amezarak 3y ago
The US foreign policy establishment mostly bypasses the treaty ratification process nowadays because of the embarrassments that occur when they are not ratified. The number of signed, ratified, in-force treaties is probably much smaller tha
734.
by Amezarak 3y ago
One thing I forgot to add is some concrete examples of the “defenders of democracy.” John Brennan, former CIA director who authorized and ordered CIA torture program, the assassination of American citizens, who said the CIA was above the la
735.
by Amezarak 3y ago
I have a much longer response in mind to this but I would say in short this: having talked to many such people, they perceive an increasing bifurcation between the political/chattering class “consensus” and the popular consensus. Those
736.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Perhaps, as a non-USian, you do not have the same sense for American interests or the same context in which to place current events, whereas these voters would have it directly in their lived experience. No doubt you find it absurd anyone c
737.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Perhaps they believe "the other guy" will ultimately do more to advance everyone's true interests than "their" guy.
738.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Everything you're saying is true to some degree, but I don't think most people would be willing to spend 12k just to be more comfortable, if they understood that's really all they're paying for and understood clearly upf
739.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Sites are actively being deindexed. My entire website, probably 20 years old now, used to be indexed. Now only a few pages are.
740.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Out of curiosity, what sort of parasite? I did not know there were parasitic infections that could be treated with antibiotics as opposed to an anti-parasitic drug like mebendazole.
741.
by Amezarak 3y ago
That’s not true at all; you can’t generally distinguish viral infections from bacterial infections by the length of illness. [charitably, this is somewhat a useful rule of thumb for many cold like illnesses, but the GP knew how long they we
742.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Nietzsche looked with total disdain on academic philosophers. He calls them names like “dwarves” (as opposed to the true philosophers calling to each other across centuries), and “scholarly oxen”, calls the field the “harmless chatter of ch
743.
by Amezarak 3y ago
> A bit weird to use Nietzsche as an example here, considering that he had zero formal education in the discipline called "philosophy" and spent most of his life as a hermit writer with nearly-zero readers. Virtually no philoso
744.
by Amezarak 3y ago
“Well-established” may be too strong wording, but Greek sailors and traders were certainly familiar, and people generally were familiar with Gades and other settlements. I am not sure if there really was a Greek colony as well at the time o
745.
by Amezarak 3y ago
This is one theory, but it is certainly not established or the consensus view.
746.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Interestingly, Plato claims that the waters beyond the Pillars of Heracles are very shallow and full of mud shoals because of the sinking of Atlantis. I’ve always thought this a puzzling detail, since a) it certainly isn’t shallow now and b
747.
by Amezarak 3y ago
I read other reporting while trying to find biographical information about the judge, and the reporting is rather one-sided. The judge was certainly overstepped and was doing something wrong and illegal but it wasn’t quite as egregious as t
748.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Do you have a source for that? I took the totally unscientific method of sampling every southern border-ish state I could think of: California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Of th
749.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Oh sure, it definitely devolved into a riot, and I can’t say anything about this guy in particular because I don’t know the details. My point is that just showing up to a protest in or at the Capitol is not really an unusual thing, and most
750.
by Amezarak 3y ago
Entering the Capitol in a protest by itself is not unusual. Protests occur in the Capitol regularly. Without the retrospective view and full knowledge of January 6, “storming the Capitol” appears in a different light, if you concerned about

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