If anything, evil at scale tends to come from an absence of feeling for others instead of an impulse. A desire to validate that we’re better than others married to a missing regard for others.

• If you have a choice between bettering something you care for (yourself) and something you’re apathetic toward, what wins?
• Ethnic cleansing is everyday people being coached to apply this mindset selectively to a neighbor.
• Sociopaths don’t need the coaching and everyone else is a candidate for the cleansing. The people who they keep around are there to enrich their wallet or their ego.

True “evil” tends to occur when such people gather together and seek attention and distinction amongst themselves. The irrational pursuit of decadence leads to the decadence itself becoming enshrined as a system of measurement. Even serial killers aren’t likely to kill for killing’s sake. It’s not the moment of the kill that keeps them coming back; it’s the sense of superiority that comes from repeating the deed and not being caught.

Outliers exist, naturally. Sadism is a thing, much like masochism. Crimes of passion are self-describing, and some are more prone to volatile emotions than others. But when I view the problem at scale, I see people who 1) consider themselves the main character, 2) break things around them to ensure the main character wins, and 3) don’t feel anything particularly strong in the process unless they’re losing or “failing”.

And here I thought f-strings were something that happen when others are forced to read my code.

The boring nuclear option is unfortunately the correct one then.

For many people it’s the notification that is the biggest problem. That sound immediately sends the mind back to the anticipated argument and the physiological responses to conflict are already kicking in before you’ve even tilted the screen to read the notification.

If that describes you, here’s my advice:

• Type your comment, put your best rebuttal forward, click send. That’s your mic drop moment. Now never come back to it.
• Turn off notifications. If the thread has a link for turning them off, click that. If it doesn’t, turn off notifications for the entire app.
• That entire comment thread is now off limits, and it’s easier to police yourself now that the mind controlling powers of the notification have been dealt with.

While you’re at it, turn off notifications for a few more apps. Pretty much everyone needs to turn off a few more than they have and that shit disrupts your best thinking throughout the day. And if you still can’t exercise the discipline to say your piece and move on? That means you’re running out of excuses for telling yourself it isn’t an addiction, and you really should delete the account and the app.

This is why you should always say “and then he defended it publicly” in the same breath.

Will you win the argument? No. Will you increase the amount of mental gymnastics they perform for your own personal entertainment? Yes.

Hijacking comment to point out that both posters of negative scored comments are 12-13 days old and one of them has a gibberish username. Downvote and move on.

Edit: Cry more, payroll shills.

IMO: A lot of this is groundwork for a parallel construction narrative. “Of course our numbers are better than theirs, we would have won every election ever if it weren’t for rigged votes.”

The primary goal isn’t to win by driving the actual vote count down, though it certainly helps. The actual goal is to create the widest smoke screen possible, so that any time the numbers look strangely in their favor it’s because there are fewer illegal immigrants “voting”. Deportations! Better ID verification! Blue vote numbers are down, and it’s because the Trump administration fixed the system. Just ignore all the fact based studies that showed how few votes were tallied in error.

Their demographic doesn’t need proof for what they want to believe, just a plausible narrative that they are already groomed to accept.

Department of War Crimes

Laws like this only work if they are uniformly enforced.

The shell game is when the enforcement agency or parent company takes initiative during an election cycle versus when they choose not to. (top down enforcement) You can certainly complain from the bottom up and take it to court, but by the time it gets litigated the election is already over.

You did not address the core issue, which is that you engage with many comment threads negatively and on an individual basis, providing a cyclical viewpoint. This is creating engagement for each “toxic” thread individually instead of confidently asserting a PoV and letting it rest. I understand that from your perspective that it’s fair to lower yourself to their perceived level, but it’s still bloating the toxic side of the discourse instead of helping it move on.

Drop a wall of well reasoned text and let it stand on its own. Or provide the type of comment that you want to see at the top level and be the change you want.

Case in point, I’ve said what I wanted to say, have found myself restating it once, and this comment is my peace out. A good day to you!

Then make a top level comment that kicks off the type of discussion you want.

For all your comments, not a single one was a reply to the post itself. Lots of comments presenting your POV (totally fair), others that call the contributions of others noise because you think their POV is low value and over represented.

Your posting style may come from a good place, but it’s very adjacent to sealioning. Be the change that you want to see, not a comment warrior creating engagement in every comment thread where someone on the internet is wrong.

Why not both moment:

Micro$lop

deleted by creator

If you have any way to check the key validity offline (for example, you subpoena the encrypted data) then it’s trivial to check and automate.

Trivial to automate, yes. The rest is a question of how long it takes to compute, that’s the basic rules of cryptography:

• good algorithms are computationally more expensive to solve in one direction than the other
• the hardware of tomorrow will more easily solve the cryptography of today, making it important to rotate your bits into new algorithms as old ones become more solvable
• big business and big government have more power to throw at the problem, but not infinitely so; where will you fall on their wait list?

Lack of physical access to your files protects you against casual inquiries by businesses and local governments. If you’re a person of interest, they are breaking down your door and getting your bits unless they self destruct or are in a country they can’t bully.

In summary:

• Don’t be a person of interest if you can avoid it.
• If you live somewhere that hurting a politician’s feelings (or having the wrong demographic) will make you a person of interest, assume they will get physical access to your bits unless those bits are in an unfriendly country. What country do you want them in?
• Assume they will get their hands on your bits anyway. How easy are they to decrypt, and will the juice be worth the squeeze?

I’m pretty okay with Tucker running for office. It can end the same way Crossfire did: with Jon Stewart sitting across from him.

Their Black Friday discounts launched this week.

Trump is a narcissist who learned to play social media. At his core he’s a grifting and attention seeking slimeball. Everything else is sausage thumbs posting to social media and gauging what gets the best reactions.

There’s no cynical intelligence to this, but something worse: chasing the worst of mankind who revel in his boorishness. The very act of remaking himself every second to seek that attention is what makes him who he is, and it’s why he’s so hard to replicate.

Don’t believe it? Pay attention to his speeches when he’s talking about others. You can see him testing nicknames for opponents, watching the crowd to see how strong the reaction is. Watch for the satisfaction on his face when he finds the one that gets the reaction he’s looking for.

From Smoot-Hawley to Bueller-Trumpy.

Ignoring the practicality of achieving it for a moment, acquiring Greenland and Canada gives an allied Russia and US near full control of the Arctic Ocean corridors. Most of us spend our time staring at 2D Mercator-esque maps, so I highly recommend taking a look at things from the top down to appreciate this:

Also see: https://geology.com/world/arctic-ocean-map.shtml

I think it’s best to consider that this is a long term play for control of the Arctic. Sea ice very much remains a factor, but the amount is shrinking every year due to global warming. Over time this opens up new seasonal routes, both for drilling and transport.

Sure, it could just be Trump’s narcissism wanting him to add another state during his presidency. The thing to remember is that someone else is always the one giving him these ideas. (see: Project 2025) These imperialistic ambitions on Greenland and Canada of all places did not emerge from nowhere. It’s the motives of people who are giving him these ideas that you need to be concerned with.

Svalbard is next.

Your reasons for being unhappy aren’t completely unfounded. We get that. It just doesn’t change the fact that you’re wallowing in a Canadian brand of conservatism in response to our even stupider conservatism. It isn’t going to stop folks from rolling their eyes at the tone deafness or finding amusement at your microcosm of our own bullshit.

It’s clutching poo to your chest while complaining that we’re exporting our stinkier poo on your doorstep. Is ours stinkier? Sure, I’ll be the first to admit it and include our right leaning “liberal” party in that statement. It’s still poo.