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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • In the US, cops are legally allowed to just ignore you.

    There was a case in Colorado I believe where an estranged husband kidnapped his kids from their mom. The mom went to the police but they kept brushing her off. After while the dad showed up to the station with a gun, promptly got killed, and then the kids were discovered dead in his car.

    It went to the courts, and courts came back with “yeah they don’t HAVE to help you.” Of course this is overly simplified, but there’s case law in at least part of the country now that allows cops to ignore anyone at their discretion because they’re on dinner break or just not feeling it.

    Also in the US, cops can tear your car up on a minor traffic stop because they “smelled” something. If they search your vehicle for whatever reason, they can decide they want to throw all you stuff out on the road, cut open your upholstery, take door panels off, etc. And if they don’t find anything? “Have a good day sir, get your shit off the road it’s a public safety hazard.” Then drive off leaving you to pick up their mess. And yes it has happened, and no not just once.

    There was a case in New York where a guy was going around stabbing people. Cops posted up looking for him of course. Guy on the subway got stabbed nearly to death, a bystander tried to help the victim and took the criminal off-guard. Cops came in from the operators cab and subdued the criminal. They were watching the whole thing from the operators window and didn’t help the victim until they saw an opening created by the bystander. Literally watching a guy on his way to getting stabbed to death and only decided to intervene when they felt like it.

    Also the Uvalde school shooting. Just hanging out in hallways while kids get shot, waiting for the danger to clear.

    Also George Floyd but at least some amount of justice has been served there. But I’m highly skeptical it would have came to that if the case wasn’t as well-known as it was. Shit happens all the time. They have a term they love to bust out for minorities who are acting out of line. “Excited Delirium”: look it up.

    I could go on, but I think you get the idea. They “can” help, but totally not a requirement.
















  • Perhaps the whitewashed, watered down MLK would beg to differ. He’s been reduced to like three quotes for people to slap on their Facebook profiles; for companies to paste on their messaging in February; to be trotted out once a year like Weekend at Bernie’s so people can feel the warm fuzzies inside and ignore actual, real-world racism and violence that is happening right now.

    It’s like anytime someone mentions anything above a megaphone and a cardboard sign there’s always one of you that comes out of the woodwork and is like “MLK… Checkmate 😎”. As another commenter said, MLK was not the civil rights movement of his time. The reason he is the poster child for that movement in that era is specifically because his personal convictions about non-violent protest are safe for the system as it is.

    Slavery can still exist, albeit in a different form. (Not chattel slavery) Racism can still exist, albeit in different forms. People who are victims of these systems are dismissed out-of-pocket because that’s the goal: the system never wanted to change, and by making MLK the summation of “the civil rights movement” in the eye of the public, they infused passivity into the discourse. They tell you to make your signs, and get your megaphones, and write your blog posts because that’s what is safe for the system to continue on as it has always been.



  • The pitfalls of our current systems preclude us getting to the point of utilizing space to any meaningful extent. Better to forgo the hypothetical Star Trek romanticized fiction and just fix what we have here; then maybe we can think about that stuff.

    At this stage, the mere mention of any such possibility is a distraction from the gravity of the situations we face. It’s a mere tool to keep the apple cart going, while people are literally dying from our own collective hubris.


  • Show me where activitypub actively tracks how much time you’ve spent looking at content, what content makes you stop scrolling, factors that contribute to you interacting in content, or any demographic information about you, etc.

    Privacy is given up on the fediverse when you choose to post such information, (e.g. “I live in Ohio”) not actively harvested as a means to craft ads for your eyeballs and sell to whoever has money.

    Your comment is akin to “oh you don’t like eating spoiled yogurt? And yet, you eat bananas… Curious.”