Ramin Honary

She had a history of horrible policies.

The idea that voters vote based on policy rather than loyalty is totally incomprehensible to the Democratic party.

If you get the government to simply declare everyone else “terrorists” then there is no need for rule of law anymore, you can do whatever you want! Because they are by definition worse than anything we do to them. How convenient for those states with plans for committing genocide, it doesn’t count as genocide if you are mass-murdering terrorists.

This strategy of the government calling every troublesome minority ethnic group anywhere “terrorists” got kicked into high gear when the US government started using 9/11 as an excuse to commit war crimes and remove restrictions from police forces (like the right of habeas corpus), and it has been a constant slippery slope since then. Nowadays the Biden administration officially considers the “Anti Fascist” movement in the US “terrorism,” although no one in government refers to fascist mass shooters as “terrorists.” Gee, I wonder why they would do that?

According to the story told by Schwarzenneger’s character in part 2, Skynet started out controlling only in US Air Force drones (hence the name), and was soon after connected to everything else. Eventually human decision making was removed from the control of the system.

It was also the plot of the Terminator series of films. Well, except for the detail that the AI controlling the aircraft (called “Skynet”) became “self aware” and that is what caused it to launch all the nukes to kill all the humans.

So how it differ from Terminator’s “Skynet” is that these real life AI are being controlled by genocidal maniacs (the largest concentration of whom seem to live in the US and Israel at present) and they are setting these things to “auto-kill” mode, like what happened in Gaza recently. And the genocidal maniacs gleefully ignore international law, saying “you want to stop me, you and what army?” So who is to keep them from turning the robots against you and me?

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Why are you trying to distract from that?

I am not trying to distract from that, I thought I made myself clear:

this particular report seems to be more concerned with anti-Trans and neo-Nazi propaganda which is indeed a real problem, and their research here would otherwise probably be very useful

But if Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL is defending the genocide of Palestinians, that is some pretty important context. If there happens anything in the report about pro-Palestine protests being equated with neo-Nazis, you need to take those parts with an extra few grains of salt.

I am upvoting this thread for being relevant to the discussion, but man, this article makes me sick. They are completely ruining Star Trek.

they’re not really illegal at all, are they?

If a police officer commits murder but the D.A. covers it up and the officer is never charged with a crime, does this make murder by the police legal?

Yes, it is illegal, and the government does not enforce laws consistently. The point is, this is a moral failing of Starfleet/the US government. This is an injustice.

“Illegal?” DS9’s S31 was protected by Starfleet Command. They were completely untouchable.

They can be both protected and illegal. Sisko noted that the organization was completely antithetical to the laws of Starfleet, e.g. committing genocide against the Changlings of the Dominion (they used the actual word “genocide” to describe what Section 31 did in the show). But their existence was neither denied nor acknowledged by Starfleet. This is part of the reason why he asked Bashir to act as a double-agent.

It was clearly analogous to the CIA, which for decades has been collecting money from the illegal drug trade and supporting terrorist organizations around the world, all in the name of “national security.” It was a critique of the US government, like most of the Star Trek episodes that deal with the moral shades of gray within the laws of Starfleet. It is clear from their political commentary that the shows morality was staunchly anti-fascist.

And this new film on Section 31 completely reversing their former politics and joining with and celebrating the fascists is more than I can stomach.

Poisoning the well

Yeah, that seems to be the M.O. of the Anti-Defamation League with regard to anti-zionism: poison the well against anyone who might feel empathy with the Palestinian people before they have a chance to speak, by equating them with antisemitism and Nazis.

Ironically, the Palestinian people are technically Semitic people also, but their wells are being literally poisoned by white Phosphorus bombs “made with [white] pride in the USA,” and dropped by different Semitic people who have the privilege to do that.

This is why white supremacy is so evil, it is so arbitrary. Who gets counted as “white” and that dividing line between enjoying privilege and being a victim of mass murder changes from day to day, and place to place. Zionism just happens to include Jews in that definition of white (while also excluding Palestinians), where as antisimitism excludes Jews, but both are white supremacy.

Deep Space Nine made it absolutely clear that Section 31 is an illegal black-ops org with garb somewhat reminiscient of Nazi storm troopers, they were the bad guys.

Yeoh has described it as “Mission: Impossible in space,” and likened the tone to the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

Mission: Impossible, the longest-running, pro-CIA anti-socialist propaganda series in US history. OK… so now Star Trek is about making illegal black-ops Nazis look cool?

Fuck these fucking producers. I want my gay space communism back.

Until the ADL gets rid of their pro-genocide leadership and spokespeople, I can’t take any of their reports seriously. Its a shame, since this particular report seems to be more concerned with anti-Trans and neo-Nazi propaganda which is indeed a real problem, and their research here would otherwise probably be very useful. They have really damaged their own reputation this past half year by equating support of Palestinian victims of genocide with antisemitism.

I am genuinely surprised that the US only abstained, not vetoed, this resolution. Something like the past 40 or 50 similar resolutions to help the Palestinian victims of war and occupation were all vetoed by the US over the past 30 or so years. I wonder if this might actually be the first such resolution not vetoed by the US in… I don’t even know how long.

It is just so typical of a fascist state like the US what they do at the UN, where they talk big about upholding and enforcing international law, but then at every opportunity the US simply excepts itself (and Israel) from the law. They take exception by vetoing every single UN resolution ever passed toward the peaceful coexistence of ethnic Jews and Palestinians, and so the US keeps this White Supremacist project that is Israel to commit crimes against humanity continuously for decades, to such a severe degree that it spirals into a full-on genocide.

Now, finally, the US does something to NOT overtly support White Supremacist genocide. That amazes me.

The Voyager theme song is by far my most favorite, probably of any TV series. I haven’t seen the whole series yet, but I like it a lot so far. Still, I think DS9 is my favorite.

And once they control the media, no one will ever again have to worry about learning the truth when military and/or police commit war crimes like genocide, or murder protesters at demonstrations, or when the cops murder people for not having the correct skin color, and so on.

Wow, I am impressed. I am just finishing up the entire Deep Space 9 series, this really adds to the ambiance for me.

I am so curious where they got all the 3D assets for the Defiant, Deep Space 9, even one of the Orb of the Prophets… did they actually do all that by hand? These aren’t just available on Thingverse or the Unreal Engine Marketplace, right?

And no, they don’t speak to one another / find one another or are able to follow / like / reply to one another as one is told the Fediverse works.

This is true, it is a problem, but maybe not as big a problem as you think.

Kbin combines the data model of both Lemmy and Mastodon so Kbin can interact with both of them perfectly. Mastodon can interact in a limited way with Lemmy. Frendica and Pixelfed also work fairly well with Mastodon, so Kbin should be able to interact with both of those as well, although I have never tried. PeerTube is probably the least compatible, although I can upvote and post comments on PeerTube videos using my Mastodon account, and follow PeerTube accounts on Mastodon. But I can’t create new PeerTube posts on Mastodon. I hope in time all of these different app services will be able to interact with each other more.

The most difficult thing right now is moderation tools. Right now, banning instances is very coarse, and it also deletes the entire social graph between instances, so people who were following each other lose their connections with each other, even after the ban is removed.

There are people working on solving that problem right now, but it might be a little while before the changes are spread throughout the network.

What I would like most is if I can create one ActivityPub account and use it on every ActivityPub service. This for me would be a perfect solution, because then I could use any app using a single account. I would also like to see it possible to ban instances temporarily without losing social connectivity, and I would like to see better moderation tools for individual user accounts being banned by an instance.

There are 500 million posts on Twitter every day. Do you read them all? There are 2.8 million subreddits. Have you browsed them all? The internet is big. You’re not going to be able to follow everything everywhere all at once.

That is not really the point though. Suppose there are 2.8 million forums on Kbin or Lemmy. If you join an instance of any ActivityPub app, can you talk to any of those 2.8 million? Can you interact with all of the precise subset of forums that interest you? You can choose an instance to join, but you have to know ahead of time all the instances you want to interact with, and your interests might change over time. Or you have to create and maintain multiple accounts.

This isn’t exactly sustainable for individual users.

I have no expertise in how ActivityPub works, but my guess is it works something like this:

You make a post on instance A, you can view it on instance B. People all over the fediverse, instances C through Z are voting on your post.

The venn diagram of other instances with which instance A and instance B federate overlap but are not exactly the same. There are instances federated with instance A not visible to instance B, there are instances federated with instance B not visible to instance A.

The vote count for a post is counted by instance A and B based on which instances with which they federate. That means instance A is counting votes from instances that B cannot see, and instance B is counting votes from instances that A cannot see.

Where the Venn diagrams overlap, both instances will agree on the vote count. But the vote counts coming from instances that they don’t both federate with will cause a difference in vote count.