and seemed to be able to anticipate and navigate around all pedestrians and cars in front of him like they weren’t even there

…spoken two seconds after almost hitting two pedestrians

deleted by creator

Well that’s just it; it’s not boring, but watching it usually is. Professional sports was a mistake.

I’ve only heard of bridges that are set up to enable, say, IRC and Discord channels to replicate to a Matrix channel, and vice versa. So we can have a conversation with you using Discord and me using Matrix, which appears to you as a Discord channel and appears to me as a Matrix room.

Well, now that you mention them, the PRC have a far better track record on international relations than the USA. How many continents have they invaded and bombed into dystopia? The international incidents and overreach of the PRC is almost nothing when compared to the American Empire’s constant atrocities and wars around the globe.

They’re anti-oligarch and anti-billionaire. Ask them about the fall of the USSR and its consequences if you don’t believe it. They’ll tell you how the Russian billionaires looted the place and sold the children into literal prostitution. All the gains of the USSR went to waste.

Any support some of them have for the capitalist RF is ‘critical support’ based on their theory of multi-polarity, not support for their capitalism nor their billionaire garbage running the show.

A lot of people on Lemmy believe that a wealthy elite controls the whole system. I think it’s far more likely that no one controls the system. Sure, some people are able to get rich off the system and carve out a little niche for themselves but the whole state apparatus is just a big tug of war that’s long since pulled everyone into the mud pit.

The closest I’ve seen to that is people explaining that the upper owning class has influence and control over many aspects of society, like politicians and mass media, but this does imply a conspiracy, that any one group has a cohesive agenda or control. It’s more about acknowledging a mutual class interest among the owning class which trends towards certain outcomes despite that tug of war among them.

Good question. It’s especially a tough one in the real world, where the people who have the power to censor are typically the ones who shouldn’t have it.

I personally don’t think there are any hard-and-fast definitions of what should be censored and what shouldn’t. It depends heavily on content and context. There’s a big difference between, hypothetically, a historian discussing Nazi ideology in a research paper, and between a politician discussing it in the presidential debate. One of those has legitimate value to society, the other is anti-social, politically delusional and harmful to citizens. Same with some forms of climate denialism - there is a valid point in permitting counterviews to consensus in the scientific method, but there is also a point where mass media is outright lying for the sake of self-enrichment at the expense of the entire planet’s population.

who should be the one deciding

One aspect of this is that communities often decide, to some degree, what is acceptable to say through social mores. This obviously isn’t foolproof and can be manipulated, but tends to be better than having just one person at the head of a network deciding.

It is a tough question, because everyone has biases. You shouldn’t have any one person or group in control of this.

That all said, my comment was meant more meant as a critique of the environment, where the owning class (that is, the ruling class) own and control the vast majority of the mass media and social media platforms. The worldview I’ve seen around which suggests their speech is comparable to the speech of you and me is naive. That’s a big part of why nonsense is now common sense, because the ruling class and their propaganda can pervade society despite so much of it being either illogical misinformation or outright bullshit.

who’s the real bad guy when both are celebrating debately equally as terrible acts?

It’s a good question. An issue I see with with this premise, is that one must consider more than an act itself, but also its context, to decide if it’s terrible.

To explain what I mean by that, consider this thought experiment:

• A person with a gun walks into a church and tries to shoot everyone they see. One of the people in the church (person A) violently tackles the gunman to try and stop them killing people. Tackling someone is violent battery.
• A person (person B) walking along a footpath sees their co-worker who they are jealous of, and out of hatred, tackles them. Tackling someone is violent battery.

Evidently, despite committing the exact same violent act, person A is heroic and praiseworthy and prevents large amounts of harm overall, while person B is anti-social and harmful overall. Would you agree that person B is ‘the real bad guy’ of those two, despite them committing the same violent act?

That also applies to more extreme acts such as murder - that’s why we distinguish it from manslaughter and self-defense based on intent rather than the act itself. For example, let’s modify that first scenario: if person A was further away and their only way to prevent mass murder was to shoot the gunman, would they be just as bad as the gunman? They’re both attempting to shoot a person, but surely person A would not be ‘the real bad guy’? In fact, most people would find it appropriate to celebrate person A for saving innocent lives, and find it extremely inappropriate to celebrate the gunman who threatened innocent lives.

For that same reason, people are celebrating the assassination of Thompson, as Thompson’s acts as CEO are knowingly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Luigi only killed one person, in an attempt to prevent many many more people being killed by UHC. They are not equal or equivalent. Nor is that equal or equivalent to the acts of Trump as a politician and the mass suffering caused by their policies and the torture caused by their sexual assault of women.

‘The real bad guy’ out of Trump and Luigi is clearly Trump. Luigi, in fact, is not a ‘bad guy’. What Luigi did was defending innocent people from a mass social murderer, which is generally what a ‘good guy’ does in the overly simplistic worldview of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

Why does this argument assume violence is always evil?

There are plenty of situations where non-violence is not effective, where an attacker does not want or need co-operation, making non-cooperation merely non-resistance to evil. Sometimes the only realistic way to disobey violence is with targeted counter-violence or the threat of counter-violence, we don’t always have the luxury of non-violent tactics available to us.

Even groups like antifascist orgs emphasize that non-violent tactics are generally preferred, and I agree completely, but ultimately, there are many real-world situations where non-violent methods just aren’t applicable. This is important to realize if we want to stop evil.

Dethroning the ones in charge by the same means they use (hate, division, etc.)

The insurance industry does not hate the people they kill. It’s cold and passionless; it’s simply business. And it was hardly divisive, just look at the surprising approval in polls. It really only divides the upper class abusing the masses from the masses themselves, a division which already existed.

This is not cyclic. Doing nothing was cyclic. This is the way out of the cycle of mass social murder. This isn’t some symmetrical dispute of vengeance between neighbors or factions, this is oppression by a minority ruling class of sociopaths. You don’t need to hate them to know they’re passionless mass murderers with legal approval.

I’ve been doing nothing but try and shed light on the fact that murder, regardless of how its seen, never should be championed,

That is not a fact. It’s an opinion, and an unhelpful one too. What other practical solution was there to the mass social murder of thousands by Thompson and their associates?

But that remains to be seen, and I think ordinary people are already forgetting about this story.

I’m not even in the USA and that’s not the case here.

Again, without sustained organization this leads nowhere.

Yes, but this is very different from saying it didn’t change anything. It evidently has. We’re not pretending this is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the flashpoint of a new era. No, this is one of the small little steps where organizing becomes more viable, when the “”“public debate”“” shifts from ‘is it ok to punch nazis?’ to ‘is it ok to assassinate the worst capitalists?’. For many, it’s provided a real window into the corporate mass media’s alienation from the people on the ground.

India’s independence

There was plenty of violence there, even in the Quit India Movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi.

Worldwide, people envy you. The poorest inhabitant of the USA has rights, possibilities and duties that only the richest in any other country can only dream of.

It’s one thing to exaggerate or to fall for propaganda, but this is a ridiculous statement.

• The richest of many, many countries have more rights and possibilities than 90+% of the USA.
• A whole percent of the USA is incarcerated, and according to their constitution, legal slaves, many performing labor in for-profit prisons.
• According to the UN HRC 2018 report, “5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty”. In two of the visited states, “a high proportion of the population is not served by public sewerage and water supply services”.

This is not a country which has had mainland wars in the last century. This is the country creating those asylum seekers on rafts through their imperial wars.

“Muslims rape kids” is wrong, bigoted, and a gross generalisation.

Yes. That’s why it’s an example being used. It’s not how you inform the general public of real atrocities, and the important kernels of truth behind that wrong, bigoted and gross generalisation don’t justify making it. So I don’t understand why you felt compelled to detail them.

We allow generalized hate speech because we believe that the appropriate counter to speech is speech.

In the world of corporate mass media where money is a microphone, unfortunately this belief is just idealist faith. Overall, good ideas and speech alone hasn’t prevailed, and harmful speech has done more than counter-speech could hope to fix.

USA McDonalds is one of the worst in the world AFAIK. Actually, that goes for many of their products, from the butyric acid in Hershey’s to the HFCS in their world-famous drinks (which I assume is why ‘mexican cola’ is such a meme in the US due to their cane sugar). The Fanta in Italy actually tastes like good oranges, because they just wouldn’t be able to compete with the garbage they sell in many other countries.

Is it true German McDonald’s sells beer?

It’s also a walled garden that excludes many peoples.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html

This article is about collaborative projects but many of the points apply universally.

The UN General Assembly Human Rights Council 2018 report on USA’s poverty and human rights is a pretty quick and clear overview which makes it clear that parts of the USA are just undeveloped:

http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1

“5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty”

“69. In Alabama and West Virginia, a high proportion of the population is not served by public sewerage and water supply services”