Maybe, just maybe, if you don’t have any idea how any of this shit works you shouldn’t run off half cocked sounding alarm bells?

Each Lemmy site (instance) is a separate thing with its own admins. Underneath each instance, there are multiple communities, each with their own moderators.

Admins decide instance wide rules, and decide which other Lemmy instances they wish to federate with (host content from). Moderators decide on any additional rules within their own communities.

So… go to that post you linked to, use the report button. It will send a report to the community moderators, the admins of the instance it was posted on, and the admins of your own instance.

So, that’s a community on sopuli.xyz

Report it to their moderation instead of making three threads about it on lemmy.world using an 18 minute old account.

If you have reported it and gotten no response, post receipts.

Like games on the playground: My sword is super strong! Well mine is stronger! My sword gets twice as strong as the strongest sword near it! Mine gets three times as strong as the strongest sword near it! Well since my sword keeps getting stronger than yours, its power becomes infinite! Well mine becomes infinite first!

But with tragedies.

I broke my toe while my life partner passed away! Well I broke my toe and my arm while mine died, and they never healed right! Losers, I dealt with all of that and tapeworms all at once! Well, my loved one had dementia, lost all memories of their loved ones, and I got a paper cut!

Feel like there’s some ripe ground there for a comedy sketch, or a Cyanide and Happiness Depression Week strip.

I suspect that in the near future, DNA tests will be done as a matter of course to test the baby for genetic diseases

This is pretty much the standard for IVF. You might be able to waive it, but it’s standard process to test for chromosomal abnormalities before implantation. You can extend that to test for other markers if you have money to burn.

Hopefully it becomes affordable and standard across the board.

I’ve entertained this concept before, but it presents issues. What if a piece of evidence needs to be edited? To protect someone’s identity (say an SA victim) or even just to cut an originally 1 hour stretch of security camera footage to the relevant 5 minutes.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for editing photos or videos, even when being used as evidence. And I’m sure there’s ways around this using trusted chain of custody methods.

But I’ve seen this “just hash it and store the hash in an immutable, publicly verifiable manner (the actual use case for blockchain)” brought up before for this and stuff like governments signing recordings of their officials, and every time I have to point out that it ignores relevant key use cases.

I’m sure there’s ways to make this concept work, it isn’t a bad idea, but it’s never going to be quite so simple.

It’s the fact that US police regularly break up properly registered and approved peaceful protests by “less than lethal” force when they get to be incovenient for [insert power here]. Not live rounds, but “less than lethal” munitions. Rubber bullets, which often cause injury and sometimes death anyway. Tasers. Pepper spray. Tear gas smoke grenades.

You can find a decent amount of pictures and video of police pepper spraying protestors calmly sitting cross legged on the ground.

There are also psychological tactics they use to try and break up protests that often have the fun side benefit of fomenting response from otherwise peaceful protestors that is easily labeled as violent/threatening/resisting. At protests that camp in an area overnight, they will use flashing lights and loudspeakers playing audio specially designed to tap into anxiety centers of the brain to keep the protesters from resting. Literally borrowing some of the tactics our intelligence agencies used against the vietcong. They will “bottle” or “kettle” protestors, surrounding groups with riot shield equipped cops and squishing them into smaller and smaller space until the protester have to push back so people won’t get literally crushed, then out come the batons.

The threat of police brutality is always there. With significant chance that there will be no legal recourse. Judges play softball (sometimes literally) with police here. Manslaughter in the line of duty? 3 months paid vacation, then we transfer you to another local police force somewhere they won’t recognize your name. And decades of news media jumping at the chance to stir people up has cemented these fears in the public mind.

But here’s the thing: the amount this happens is just barely rare enough that it’s not international rights org level shit. And when it does happen, usually the police can justify it with some imagery or video of violent protesters.

So it’s rare, just always possible it could escalate. If it does there’s no rel recourse, and the news makes people feel that it’s a more likely outcome than it is. Peaceful protests that go fine don’t make the news.

What also isn’t covered by the media is how to plan and take effective action despite these risks, or effective action from the past, so many Americans just see the pipeline as being directly from public peaceful protest to some sort of freedom fighter in active combat.

That’s why all of us Americans can quickly tell when someone is just trying to start shit when they get angry online…

There are ways to fight back. But they require patience, communication, planning, subterfuge, and more importantly OPSEC. Otherwise the regime just slaughters everyone like they want to.

Louder for the motherfuckers in the back!

There are so many fucking people online upset about this shit that amount to not much more than hot air. Chasing the perfect to the detriment of the good. Purity tests. Arguing for blatantly impossible courses of action, or at least ones that will nevet get enough buy in from the greater population to work. Sitting on their asses getting angry while worshipping some half-cocked idea of open revolution, full overthow of the government, and dissolution of the capitalist economic framework… without ever evaluating how the fuck the world could even get to that state except “magic unspecific mass violent revolution”, “complete apocalypse scenario then rebuild”, or “if we all wish upon a star really hard, all the bad people will have simultaneous fatal anuerysms”. Not to mention how the fuck could that state ever be maintained afterwards.

If it’s not outright impossible, it will require an astronomical amount of prep and planning. None of this is shit that just “happens” through sheer desire or will without slow supportive action to build what is neccessary.

People getting their emotional catharsis ranting, venting, and shit stirring without taking any true action. Stirring other people up into the same state.

Get offline, get involved locally, become an expert on the spaces and people around you. Form local connections. Accept that you aren’t an action hero, and if the US military is turned on you, as a civilian you cannot win through force. Build relevant skills for a crisis. Build relevant skills for ongoing resistance. Build skills for organizing locally and securely.

Most importantly: Shut the absolute fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. As far as it’s within your power, don’t make yourself a target and blend in.

I’m already not a good example, as my OPSEC on this account is abysmal. I take solace in that none of my plans or actions involve abject resistance, and are all local good type shit.

I had a decent stretch where I was just making comments and expected them to get bad replies, or I didn’t really have the space to care about any replies I got, so I stopped checking obsessively and they built up. I’m in my 30s with a wife, a toddler, and a job that alternates between “oh god you need to lock the fuck in for 8 hours straight” and “you’re being paid to be here if something happens”. I also have had some big life shit happen in the time since I started using lemmy that would pull me away from checking/responding.

Then I had some replies mentioning things I wanted to look into later, so those I made sure to keep as unread.

More recently, I find that I use my own profile’s comment page and the upvotes and downvotes on any of my comments in there to get an idea of what I’m about to walk into. Also helps remind me what the fuck I posted in the first place. So any replies I interact with that way don’t get marked as read either.

Kind of like email, once it passes something like 20 or 30 unread the count just kind of becomes visual noise.

Nope!

I’m running into this at work lately. Suits are forcing everyone to move from one email sending service to another to save a few $, and I got stuck tracking the progress of everything that needed to be moved.

Entire departments that openly told me all they do for the company is manage software to generate reports that get sent out via email automatically. One of their guys is using python. One is using some SQL server plugin that mixes “no code” shit with straight C#. Another is using an entire suite of outdated software that has its own proprietary email generation logic, and the only part they’re using is the email generation. The fucking lead? A god damn vbscript, used to dynamically construct a string that is sent to the command prompt to be executed. That string? Launch an existing PowerShell script that sends an email. I’ve seen the whole thing, that’s all it fucking does front to back. Just fucking use PowerShell straight for the love of all that is holy instead of this awful rube goldberg mess.

In other departments, people whose entire job description is “I admin and support these three systems” being unable to do literally anything in their systems without relying on the vendor’s help desk for the software. Shit that I was able to find out in 30 seconds with a search that got me the system documentation, they open a support case and are fucking helpless.

I just want to close the door and get back to working on my stuff, so I can stop taking mental damage from exposure to all the cognitive hazard messes these other supposedly technical teams have shit into existence.

One of the fun things about modern Windows is that ~1 shit still appears every once in a rare while. Gotta love just stacking more and more shit on top of ancient systems in the name of backwards compatibility!

I already deal far too much with trying to handle dumb fucking typos in employee data, and trying to turn human names into valid email addresses.

The first time I encounter something like this there will be a body. It will not be found.

Here, I made it a meme! I think you accidentally posted a reading assignment for a history course.

Pretty sure it doesn’t do that on lemmy. I definitely have comments with blocked responses (they show up a specific way in Jerboa) from people I blocked ages ago. If I open the thread in a browser where I’m not signed in I can see their response clearly.

So they can still see and reply to my comments, I just don’t have to see more than an error message that the comment couldn’t be loaded on my end.

Arguably if the speed was increased it might get results, but I think it’d just be more likely that they’d burn some of their stupid amounts of money on more security and stuff like popemobile booths.

At the end of the day the US populace can’t provide meaningful resistance to the full might of our military industrial complex, if things were to ever get that far. And I don’t think that our currenr administration would have any issues misusing our military for protection of these assholes.

So we have to organize. If we truly want to overwhelm the military, we’d need to overwhelm them with literal piles of bodies.

If we want to attempt less bloodshed and lives lost, which I would hope most people would want, than we still need to organize and put up a strong front while turning their “allies on the ground” to our side. That means that yes, we need to start doing more concentrated effort to turn our asshole republican neighbors instead of just shunning them. Start sharing techniques and talking points for slowly turning folks, build up your tolerance so you can spend time in their presence slowly dropping the seeds because changing people’s minds takes time.

On the other end, start pulling normal people currently just voting Democrat into more action like showing up to city council votes, into community service and support organizations, and make sure that we’re broadcasting these public goods well and with good branding. Increase engagement across the board.

Do like the “best” Christian groups do and just do unimpeachable good loudly while quietly wearing the affiliation on your sleeve to draw people in, then turn them when they already see you as a good person doing good things.

None of these techniques are new, especially in the Christian church. We just need to fight the feelings of hopelessness, isolation, and the “well your idea of better isn’t my exact idea of better” purity test bullshit you see from people online who for example won’t be satisfied until the end of capitalism entirely… so that we present a united front as a force for general good.

You think the issues with your health insurance is Obamacare? Whatever brother we’re here to help. Eventually down the line we’ll start steering you right once we’ve built that relationship. You’re homeschooling your kids to avoid the woke, but need assistance in a subject you can’t teach them? We’re here to help. Eventually we’ll start steering you right.

It’s exhausting, time consuming work. But it does work for changing hearts and minds.

Organize. Lone vigilantes carrying out incredibly sporadic assassinations against poor target choices isn’t going to make things better.

The Nepalese didn’t overthrow their government by a couple of folks shooting a couple of folks spread out over months.

He cancelled one event? Holy shit the world is healed!

You aren’t wrong that these people are cowards.

But Luigi didn’t change health insurance. It pushed one bad move from a former United Healthcare exec back but didn’t stop it, and now there’s proposed kickbacks for AI companies whenever their AI denies medicare or medicaid coverage.

There is so damn much broken and I understand the sheer desperation, but lone vigilantes carrying out sporadic and infrequent assassinations with poor target choices are not going to cause long term positive change.

I significantly doubt killing Charlie Kirk of all people is going to effect change. At least, it’s not going to be positive change.

The right is emboldened greatly by every situation like this. Yes, they’ve just been looking for an excuse and would be horrible anyway, but this accelerates things by giving them more definitive cover.

They’re already making shit up about evidence of “trans and leftist stuff” carved into the bullets or casings (tabloids and the WSJ have run with this) when there’s no actual proof.

Turning Point USA will stumble for a bit while they find a new talking head capable of carrying their bullshit platform, but there’s a glut of right wing influencers (and people willing to play one for money) that will fill the gap.

Also, he was shot in front of his kids. They’re already fucked up enough having him as a dad without seeing him catch a bullet in front of them and die.

Look, I’ve got no tears to shed for this balloon headed ass. But this is not a victory. Even if you support the idea of using violence to achieve change, this was a piss poor target.

Look man, I get it. The world is heading to hell in a hand basket, and in a lot of ways accelerating towards it.

But there’s a difference between awareness and… I guess feeling the “doom” of all of it constantly. Existing with that weight constantly pushing down on you. At least part of that is a choice.

Letting the weight of all of this impact you constantly is not a virtue. Do what you can to push back the oncoming waves where you can. Don’t beat yourself up for not being able to hold back everything. And enjoy the joy and beauty where you can find them.

Living your life bent out of shape about things you can’t do anything about is just wasting what little time you have, and wasting time while things are comparatively better than they’re likely to be later.

And I get the need to speak out about all of it. But it doesn’t help. What helps is getting involved with stuff locally, being active in local politics (to a degree, the rot and shitty lying politicians exist on local scales too). Doing what you can. Trying to discard the worry and upset about what you can’t. Try to influence those close to you to do the same.

They can’t leave, they can’t opt-out.

If you’re going to be this pessimistic about simply existing as a human being, it’s worth noting that this is absolutely false. There are plenty of ways to opt-out permanently, and some of them are even peaceful.

Less darkly, there are communes and mutual aid communities and the like. Some even arguably self-sufficient.

Beyond that, if you truly feel existence is that fucking bleak, do you really think it helps to spread this shit to people who might otherwise be happily ignorant to it? Or are you content just making the collective experience of existence worse by putting this out into the world? Explicitly desiring to bring others down with you into the pit because you haven’t grown enough to find life worth living and enjoying anyway.