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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • His friends started responding to his emails for a span covering years? That’s a bit strange, I don’t understand why or how they’d do that unless asked to and given the credentials.

    If those friends are included in the people who haven’t heard from him in years, I’d consider that behaviour a little suspicious.

    If you can’t find any evidence of activity, or anybody to vouch for him - I’d consider filing a report.


  • They know that suppressing disability benefits will cause excess death, they just don’t care.

    It doesn’t matter to them if their decisions drive vulnerable people to destitution or even suicide, so long as they can feed a few extra bodies into the gears to pump their numbers.

    People with mental health conditions and other disabilities need support that the health and social care services can’t provide because the government have spent over a decade cutting them.

    Instead we get thinly veiled eugenics, a cynical revival of social Darwinism.


  • It’s not as though the existence and mechanisms of piracy are a coveted secret. There’s a decent chance that they’ll learn about and attempt it independently, and the method they learn about online might expose them to greater risk than if they did it with more consideration.

    On that basis, I think that knowledge transfer is at worst harm reduction. If it’s immoral, which I don’t believe it is, then at the very least your intervention could prevent them from being preyed upon by some copyright troll company when they do it despite your silence or protestations.




  • Not particularly surprised.

    By most accounts they’re very capable pieces of hardware, but the prices are way too high for current conditions.

    Think there’s also a case of incremental performance improvements in the form factor becoming less perceptible, and also more people favouring phones and tablets over laptops for everyday use.






  • I don’t think it’s especially likely that you’ll find consistently interesting, well-reasoned discussion through any platform bringing together anonymous strangers in an ephemeral manner.

    I think consistently interesting discussion has shared stakeholding as a foundational aspect - participants need to actually care, either because the discussion is a product of some commitment they’ve each made (e.g. reading something for a book club), or because the participants are familiar with each other and the outcome tangibly matters (e.g. a physical town hall meeting).

    Otherwise, I think you’re more likely to get what you’re looking for from adopting some tangential hobby and having those discussions with the friends you get through that.




  • Good.

    I’m far from a social media fanatic, but make no mistake that the primary purpose of legislation like this is to increase the degree of control that parents can exert over their children - not to improve the wellbeing of young people.

    For teenagers from marginalised groups living in oppressive households: social media can become an outlet for self-expression amongst trusted peers which might otherwise put them at risk of retaliation from abusive parents, or a venue for them to discover like-minded people and organisations who might be able to help them cope or increase their available options by offering sanctuary should they ever need it.

    It also can’t be overstated that social media is one of the main venues for political expression nowadays, particularly beyond the orthodoxy. There remain issues with misinformation and the far-right, but nonetheless the breadth of opinions can help people to develop a degree of political consciousness which they might not otherwise. Consider how infrequently sympathetic portrayals of protests, strikes, and unionisation drives make the mainstream media in comparison to social media.

    It’s unsurprising that the politicians most aggressively pursuing legislation like this are also the ones who are trying to prevent, for example, queer people and especially queer youth from being able to express themselves without fear of reprisal - and who are actively trying to prevent access to information and depictions which might contradict their political ideology through mechanisms like internet censorship and book bannings.





  • I don’t care about sharp words from a brutish authoritarian.

    You’re free to continue endorsing an institution and approach which generates further undesirable behaviour as recidivism whilst preventing little wherever it’s implemented. You can continue to pretend that criminality is a phenomenon completely local to the actor and not a reflection of broader social and structural issues which we need to address. You can proceed with turning out more victims by proxy of the traumatised ex-incarcerated continuing to deal harm if it’ll satisfy the sadistic streak inside of you demanding that infractions incur the infliction of suffering and trauma in turn.

    Regions which engage with mass incarceration and operate more sadistic prison regimes overlap with those regions with the highest rates of repeat offending. That’s not a coincidence, but a product of thinking like yours.

    Prisons which exist with actual commitments to rehabilitation, and which respect the dignity of the incarcerated, while imperfect, turn out far fewer repeat offenders than those who don’t.

    If you care about victims of abuse, as I do, then you’ll turn instead to approaches which result in fewer of them to be counted: alternatives to incarceration, and the pursuit of relative normalcy within the institution for the incarcerated where it still exists.

    I hope for a future without coercion, abuse, violence, or pain. I would hope that we all do.