[-] Schadrach 5 points 15 hours ago

Maybe there's a greater purpose for what we call "evil" that results in more good.

A work of fiction I very much enjoy called UNSONG uses a variant of this as the answer to the question of evil. The basic notion being that at the level of abstraction that God operates at two identical things are essentially one thing and so in order to maximize the total net good he creates universe upon universe, all slightly different but each ultimately resulting in more good than bad in net. The universe the story takes place in is recognizably similar to ours until the Nixon administration, and it is explicitly said to be "far from the center of the garden". IOW in a region of possibility space in which few potential universes are good on net.

The story is also an absolute master class in foreshadowing to the point that if you just listen as the story repeatedly tells you how one should interpret text, you can derive the ending from like the first paragraph of chapter 1 by just digging deep enough. And it goes a lot deeper than that. It's not just an aesthetic choice that every chapter name is a Blake reference, or that the story is arranged into groupings of four, ten, twenty two and seventy two. It also manages to analogize itself to both the works of William Blake and the song American Pie because why not?

[-] Schadrach 1 points 18 hours ago

I'll fully admit it's a problem I don't know the solution to. I feel like NPOV as a policy was intended to reduce that, but I also feel like it doesn't do that job as well as it should, specifically with any kind of controversial topic. And I don't know what would fix that.

I'll just say this, I kinda pity the people in charge of trying to maintain NPOV and BLP for the page on Trump. That's got to be a nightmare.

[-] Schadrach 6 points 20 hours ago

Yeah pornhub seems pretty legitimate and safe these days.

Yeah, they got threatened a few years ago with essentially banking cutting them off if they didn't make a concerted effort to purge anything shady, which they achieved by purging basically all end-user uploads that weren't verified models or studios.

[-] Schadrach 11 points 20 hours ago

Too bad there aren’t other porn sites with massive libraries of content that apparently no one in power has noticed.

The states aren't banning PornHub from being accessed there, PornHub are blocking themselves from being accessed from those states so as to not need to comply with new state laws requiring ID proof of age to access because they don't want to handle personally identifying information of end users. So basically you're just waiting for law enforcement to notice and charge them, and then find out if they're run out of somewhere the state can reasonably do anything about it.

[-] Schadrach -5 points 22 hours ago

Wikipedia is one of the last, best sources of information on the Internet that isn’t biased, corporate-sponsored bullsh*t.

Instead it's bullshit built upon elaborate bureaucracy which has it's own layers of issues depending on exactly what topic/field we're talking about.

The biggest and most obvious flaw being that it's more or less explicitly designed to fail spectacularly as regards any topic that the media doesn't want to talk about (for example, anything that might make the media look bad) because there's going to be an intentional lack of "reliable sources" on those topics.

The definition of a "reliable source" is another - there's a fair bit of jockeying on that which functionally biases WP. Especially when you start looking at what disqualified a given source from being "reliable" and start to notice that the bar seems to be set very unevenly depending on the particular source and how well liked it is by certain power-editors.

It's good enough for anything that's not politically contentious to anyone, but I would never use it for anything other than a vague overview and starting point for other sources to dig into.

[-] Schadrach 9 points 1 day ago

Being serious, it seems like he picked his people from a couple of pools.

  1. Republicans with a lot of social media clout.
  2. People plausibly accused of being Russian agents.
[-] Schadrach 6 points 6 days ago

Every couple of years Chinese make a new Sun Wukong move, TV show, or videogame.

Let's not forget that in the same way you can trace a huge amount of things you see in Western stories to the Greek epics and Gilgamesh you can trace a huge amount of things you see in anime/manga to the Journey to the West.

[-] Schadrach 58 points 1 month ago

It's the US, we put presidents and Founding Fathers on our bills. Harriet Tubman is neither, so of course we're not putting her on the twenty.

Instead we should compromise with historical precedent and put Obama on the twenty - he's both a president and a black historical figure and he'll piss off the people pissed off by the idea of Tubman on the twenty even more. It's a win all around!

[-] Schadrach 49 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Advertising company makes it harder to block ads on their browser, news at 11.

Or did anyone forget that they made an explicit effort to block another ad blocking extension a while back, including blocking it from the Chrome store, blocking you from installing it manually and even blocking at least some versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode?

Ad nauseam, because it also simulated ad clicks and thus ruined their metrics.

EDIT: Fucking phone autocorrect. "as clocks" -> "ad clicks".

[-] Schadrach 65 points 6 months ago

The best part of that line is that everyone left of fascism reads it as a direct threat - bow to our will or there will be blood, while the right can claim it's just them worrying about the left turning violent.

[-] Schadrach 71 points 9 months ago

Nah, your lifetime license will be fine. They'll just slightly rename the products, release them as "entirely new, unrelated products" and cease updating it under the old name. You can still use the old, never updated product in perpetuity, if you want...

The first time this happened to me was a MUD client of all things. zMUD discontinued, check out the new cMUD! Also available with a lifetime license just like zMUD was!

[-] Schadrach 39 points 1 year ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so come on Mazzoni, provide said extraordinary evidence!

Odds are that at the most she can manage is evidence of 1-2 pedos being caught doing something vaguely adjacent to it and also claiming to be some flavor of LGBTQ, like how the GOP notion of drag queen story time is shaped entirely by that one library event in the UK (which is probably still the entire top page of Google results for "rainbow dildo butt monkey") and trans people by Jessica Yaniv.

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Schadrach

joined 2 years ago