It's really sort of amazing how few years it took to go from "Do no evil" to "Don't even bother pretending not to."

This shouldn't be an exception - it should be the rule.

At the very least, companies should be fined every single cent that they made off of something criminal, and really, they should be fined much more than they made.

If they're fined less than they made off of it, it's not even really a fine. It's just the government taking a cut of the action.

The "why" is certainly that someone in the state beef industry gave him a pile of money.

Ah... the venerable old "make a 'loan' then forgive it" strategy for paying bribes.

At this point Thomas might as well have a tattoo across his forehead that says "I am corrupt."

If he had even a speck of integrity, he'd resign.

This is such a deeply disturbing viewpoint.

When someone says that a lack of religion leads to a lack of morality, what they're necessarily really saying is that they're so deeply sociopathic that they not only can't reason morally, but can't even envision the possibility of doing so. They're effectively stating outright that they can't even imagine arriving at sound moral judgments through the application of reason, empathy and concern for others, and that the only way they can even conceive of morality is as a set of rules laid down and enforced by some enormous daddy figure who's going to punish them if they break them.

It's astonishing really. And sobering.

It's never been about the money.

The Republicans and their grifters want Putin to win. It's just that simple.

Even without any details concerning the cases, I can entirely confidently predict that they're going to fuck us over at every turn.

Neither Gosar nor Trump have served in the military.

That pretty much goes without saying, but bears repeating anyway.

Makes sense.

Elon undoubtedly has folders full of cool images he's saved, so while he was still focused on the "X" idea, he rummaged around and found that one and thought, "Yeah! This is gonna be sick dude!"

Thus are decisions made by the world's richest teenage edgelord.

See... this is the point at which the whole conservative covid reaction, to me, goes from just weird and unsettling to full-on bug-eyed insane. AND hypocritical.

Their whole deal with masks and vaccines is that they should have the right to decide for themselves. I think they make dumbass decisions that cause entirely avoidable harm, but okay - I can grant at least some bare semblace of legitimacy to self-determination. I don't vagree, but at least I can see their underlying logic.

But banning masks? What the actual fuck? What possible difference can it make in their lives that somebody else is wearing a mask? And what happened to their whole self-determination thing? Do they sincerely believe that nobody should be able to tell them whether or not they have to wear a madk and that they should be able to tell other people whether or not they can? How does that even work inside their brains? What possible logic leads to "I don't have to do what you say but you DO have to do what I say"?

Seriously, are they literally insane? I sincerely can't think of any other explanation. It's not just people acting in some way other than my preference, but people acting in a way that's blitheringly irrational, even by their own principles.

I suspect that when future historians write about this era, they're going to call it something like The Idiot Age, because to them it will be marked by people inexplicably doing obviously and painfully stupid and irrational things.

I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, "Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds."

It just doesn't even begin to make sense to me.

And I'm with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that's exactly what they should do.

"Lemmy" can't handle anything. That's by design.

"Lemmy" is really just a piece of software that people can use to run forums that will federate with other forums and so forth and so on. There is no central "Lemmy" authority that could do anything, and that's by design, and a lot of the point. It means that there can never be a Lemmy spez or Musk or Zuckerberg, fucking things up for everyone.

The highest authorities are the individual instance owners, so it will fall on them to deal with illegal content as they see fit. Presumably they'll generally work to keep it off of their own instances through active moderation, and they'll block other instances that they have reason to believe do not maintain acceptable standards.

And like it or not, some share of responsibility will fall on individual users to manage their own activities in order to avoid problematic instances.

The trade-off for having no central authority that can fuck things up for everyone is that there's no big mommy/daddy to watch over you and protect you. The fediverse is better suited for people who are okay with that.