That’s pretty much what it seems to amount to.
All of the focus has been astroturfed onto the fact that the leaks came from Russian sources, and away from the content of the leaks. The clear (though of course unstated) implication is that the wrong isn’t the DNC’s corruption, but Russia’s self-serving exposure of that corruption.
I’ve never bought this spin.
Certainly Russia had a hand in getting the leaks to Wikileaks, and certainly because they had an obvious vested interest in the US electing Putin’s sycophant Trump.
But I’ve never seen or heard of any specific evidence that any of it was “disinformation” - just the repeated unsubstantiated claim that it was. It appears to be exactly what it looks like - a detailed record of the DNC’s overtly fraudulent maneuvering to torpedo the Sanders campaign in order to ensure the nomination of Clinton, or more precisely, to torpedo the campaign of a sincere progressive who would likely threaten the ongoing flow of big donor soft money in order to ensure the nomination of a transparently corrupt neo-lib who could be counted upon to serve establishment interests and keep the soft money flowing. And notably, early on that was how the DNC treated it themselves, even going so far as to issue a public apology to the Sanders campaign “for the inexcusable remarks made over email” that did not reflect the DNC’s “steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.”
So what it actually all boils down to was that the DNC really was acting in a manner contrary to the public good, driven by their own greed and corruption, and the fact that Russia had a hand in exposing that in order to serve their own interests doesn’t alter that fact.
No matter how one slices it, the bulk of the blame for the whole thing rests squarely on the DNC. Yes - it served Russian interests to reveal the information, but had the DNC simply been operating in a legitimate, honest and neutral way, instead of self-servingly and dishonestly, there would’ve been nothing to reveal.
No - it’s actually not like that at all.
Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.
Mm… no. It’s really not.
The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.
So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.
So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.
So basically the US government is a gigantic Trump - rising up in self-righteous fury at the very idea that anyone might dare to charge them for the crimes they’ve brazenly committed.
Best of luck to them.
It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”
Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.
How deliciously ironic that this is paywalled.
I think the significant part there though is that it’s what the US government did almost 200 years ago. Not that that excuses it, but it was a much more primitive and ignorant world then, and at least some of it can be ascribed to that primitiveness and ignorance.
Doing the same thing in the modern world though - that’s just pure, unmitigated evil.
As intended.
Israel’s strategy with the West Bank is masterful. Wholly and completely evil, but masterful.
Either the Palestinians just accept their lot, in which case Israel incrementally takes their land through their “settler” proxies, or the Palestinians (entirely justifiably) try to fight back, in which case the IDF goes in and kills a bunch of them, and Israel takes their land anyway.
It’s fucking despicable, but it works, and if one is devoid of morality, empathy or simple human decency, that’s all that matters.
Ah. And all the pieces fall into place.
Motherfuckers.
What the fuck business does Israel have “allowing” anything at all to do with Palestine?
And how the fuck does the US government negotiate with fucking Israel regarding Palestine and still continue to pretend that Israel isn’t violating Palestinian rights?
And I stand by everything I said there.
And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.
And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.
And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”
If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.
The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.
I haven’t seen a single anarchist on Lemmy. Not even one.
The most obvious group, and the one this thread is about, is about as far as it’s possible to get from being anarchists.
Why on Earth would we want to make it more popular?
I want more people to leave. Things have noticeably gotten better over the last few weeks, but there’s still a ways to go.
The people who are leaving are presumably mostly people who are frustrated by the relative complexity of decentralized forums and people who can’t find enough “content” to scroll through here, and good riddance to the lot of them.
“Authoritarian” is fairly meaningless in this context. All societies and political structures rely on authority to maintain social control to greater or lesser extents.
“Authoritarian” doesn’t refer merely to the existence of authority. It refers to a system under which, on balance, individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority - a system under which there is more likelihood that an individual will be constrained by authority than that theybwill be free to act as they choose.
And note, before you even go there, that that doesn’t mean or imply no individual liberty. Again, the issue is the balance between individual liberty and governmental authority.
Where does liberal “democracy” derive its authority from?
Why are we suddenly talking about democracy?
Why then do studies repeatedly show that there is no correlation between popular opinion and policy? Why do the majority of Americans want public health care and yet it never passes?
Why are we now suddenly talking about representative “democracy” instead?
Yes - of course there’s a gap between actual public sentiment and the machinations of representatuve "democracy - that’s most of the point. It’s a system that’s been sold to the unwary to give them an illusion of self-determination behind which the oligarchs can hide.
How is that relevant to anything? (Other than a broad argument against institutionalized authority in general, which I’d agree with).
There is no such thing as a distinction between “democracy” and “authoritarian”
Not necessarily, but as a general rule, there is, simply because it’s more difficult for oligarchs in a representative democracy to enact their will. There’s a number of hoops that they have to jump through in order to maintain at least some semblance of serving the will of the people, and that specifically because the people still retain some significant freedoms (remember - it’s about the balance between freedom and authority).
In effect, oligarchs in a representative democracy have to trick or coerce people into not exercising their freedoms or exercising them poorly.
In an authoritarian system, the balance favors the government in the first place, so they’re far more likely to be able to simply issue decrees and then enforce them, without having to muck about with all of the pretending to be serving the will of the people stuff.
Granted that it’s not as significant a difference as gung-ho Americans might wish to believe it to be, there is still a difference.
Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing
Actually, I would say that it is inherently a bad thing.
That’s an awful lot of why I’m an anarchist - I believe that institutionalized authority cannot be justified and is inevitably destructive.
But that’s sort of beside the point.
People always justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn’t “authoritarian”.
This reads like classic projection.
And in fact, I just wrote another post in which I pointed to what I believe to be the fundamental flaw at the heart of the tankie position, and it was pretty much exactly what you wrote here.
My position is that if you’re going to hold that authority is legitimate, then that means that you are legitimately subject to it. You don’t get to pick and choose, just as you wouldn’t allow those who would be subject to your authority pick and choose. Just as you hold that they’re rightly subjugated if those with whom you agree are in power, you’re rightly subjugated if those with whom they agree are in power.
It’s either that or you carry your aversion to being made subject to someone else’s authority to its logical conclusion and cede to others the exact same freedom you wish to have yourself.
You can’t have it both ways. You’re not some sort of demi-god, deserving of special treatment. If you can rightly oppress others they can rightly oppress you. If they can’t rightly oppress you, you can’t rightly oppress them.
That last is the main reason I’m an anarchist.
Oh and, more broadly I’d note that virtually all authoritarians believe that authority should be directed in a specific way. That’s exactly how their irrationality manifests - they don’t advocate for authority broadly, because that carries with it the risk that they might end up subject to someone else’s authority. They advocate only for their own authority, or for that of their ideological fellows.
So what that boils down to is that they explicitly advocate for visiting on other people that which they explicitly oppose being visited on themselves.
Or in simpler terms, they’re self-centered assholes.
I’m not an anarchist by accident.
That’s exactly why it’s cynically amusing - because they “believe it should be directed in a certain way.”
Specifically, they’re entirely on-board when someone who happens to wear the same ideological label they do uses it to, for instance, massacre “dissidents,” but the instant anyone else uses it in any way that causes some minor inconvenience for themselves, they start mewling about how oppressed they are.
I’m fully aware that the DNC is under no legal mandate to operate legitimately or honestly.
And that’s rather obviously entirely irrelevant.
In point of fact, if the legal standing of their actions is the only thing that matters, as you imply, then the entire notion that Russia willfully acted to harm them collapses. How could Russia harm them by leaking details of things that are not illegal and therefore (purportedly) entirely acceptable?
If, on the other hand, we stick with the way that things have been presented by the DNC itself - that Russia willfully acted to bring them harm - then rather obviously even they are taking the position that the legal status of their actions is irrelevant.
Go ahead and pick either one - I don’t care. Either there was nothing wrong with their actions, in which case they could not be harmed by having the details of their actions leaked, or they were harmed by the the leak of the details of their actions, in which case their actions were self-evidently judged to be wrong, and the legal standing of them is irrelevant.