It’s less a dogwhistle and more just explicit symbolism, just substituting the swastika so that it’s not a swastika.

This was interesting. I know two of the small communist sites I use are hosted on these services so it’s good to know how stable the ground is.

If it has four legs, they’re gonna try and kill it.

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

If someone’s take on 9/11 doesn’t go back to at least the early 1980s, it’s probably not worth taking too seriously. It didn’t start on 9/11, that’s just the date millions of people were forced into hearing about the messy and complex conflicts. A witness on ground zero doesn’t become a 9/11 expert.

The 4th season of the podcast Blowback does an excellent job of covering the background, both within and beyond the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I highly recommend it.

It’s disingenuous to assume the Soviet Union is representative of communism or even the Western communist movement at the time or afterwards. It would be similar to pointing to the unique horrors of the United States history and claiming therefore all those supporting capitalism are disturbing.

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

For me, it was the palmy beach.

And I’ll have you know that I’m still under 30 and do regular back extension exercises!

I am quickly fragged by space-aged weaponry, provided I don’t explode from the strange atmosphere. Best case scenario isn’t good, food seemingly doesn’t exist.

I’ll call for their manager and attack the manager specifically. Is there a term for that yet?

Security is a cat and mouse game. There’s always a way to steal from anyone, especially a convenience-oriented business.

The best deal is always free. So, I’d rather inconvenience the conglomerate haute-booj than the petit-booj, even if it’s only a few dollars.

Huh, I’ll have to look for a mute button, thanks for the hint. Mine keeps yelling at me to finish unloading then churns out a nonsense marketing phrase. Utterly annoying.

That isn’t a useful definition of racism. It’s sounds alright, although it’s ultimately idealistic, it doesn’t hold up when applying to material circumstances.

As for why people think having different rules for different groups is good, I think one of the simplest ways to sum it up is: Equality of treatment will not give equality of outcome until there is already equality of conditions. Treating all people the same isn’t fair in the real world.

As a thought-experiment to demonstrate: If we have two people, one has $200 savings after rent and the other has $10,000,000, you can’t make them more equal or make the money more distributed by treating them the same: if society wants to reduce poverty (which is obviously a good thing for society, to have less people in poverty), it makes some sense to supply the poorer of the two with money, but it makes no sense to supply the richer: they already have more money than 90% of people! There isn’t a moral or ethical benefit in giving them more money, they don’t need the money as much as others do, it’s not how to achieve fairness or equality.

The generalised point of that being, if a group is disadvantaged and the status quo is keeping them disadvantaged, solving that will require special treatment. Treating Indigenous people the same way as always just keeps the systemic racist status quo, and to solve that, the Government will inevitably have to treat Indigenous people differently. That’s a consequence of trying to create a more equal outcome in an unequal environment.

The same goes for other types of disadvantage, of course. I am obviously not trying to imply that all people who aren’t indigenous have all the advantage they need! Ultimately, everyone who is not a mega-multi-millionaire is disadvantaged, but we can’t fix that all in one change. We have to start somewhere.

No, it is not just racism. There would have been an element of that, but it’s certainly far from the main reason. That idea is contradicted by the facts that a very significant portion of Indigenous people and Indigenous activists voted against it.

Linking to this useful post, explaining why various progressive groups were against it.

You’ve actually explained one of the reasons many Indigenous people rejected this: it is just feedback that could simply be ignored by the Senate. That’s powerless, and we’ve seen from royal commissions into Aboriginal deaths in custody that the feedback does get ignored. Why accept such a bad deal, pretending it’s a victory or progress?

The Black Peoples Union interview with ABC explains why they took the ‘no’ position.

Relevant: the Black Peoples Union position on the referendum (interview on ABC).

An aggregation of written statements collected from socialist, anarchist and radical Indigenous groups, showing the diversity of thought on the matter: http://old.reddit.com/r/AustralianSocialism/comments/161r8r1/megathread_of_leftist_statements_on_the_voice/

(PS: don’t just take all the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ summaries in that list at face value, a couple of them are misinterpretations or oversimplications)

If I browsed these types of joke-sharing communities more often, I’d petition community mods to create a rule against it. I don’t think that’s too harsh.