well when the major conservative media “news” outlet sells CONSTANT FEAR and FEAR THE BLACK AND BROWN AND GAY AND EVERYONE NOT CONSERVATIVE IS ANTIFA 25/8 and the other legitimate news outlets are deathly afraid for some reason of losing ratings to that propaganda outlet that they parrot the exact same thing but with tamer language (which also kinda de-legitimatizes them to be honest), you get that kind of thing.

also what doesn’t help, is the constant blowout coverage of mass shootings that the neworks do (which also strangely are committed by white male conservatives) which also fuels the narrative of rampant violent crime.

my view on it lies in two seperate buckets:

1. if the thing being pirated is vastly overpriced for its function i don’t see it as immoral
2. if the thing being pirated is no longer available or was never made available for private ownership, ie only able to be streamed and only available on said service so long as the host streamer still has rights to do so, it isn’t immoral.

and just to be clear, i don’t see piracy as inherently evil or anticapitalistic. there have been several books and apps that i pirated that i liked and converted to an actual buyer to get more books in the series or get updates to the program.

Saturday’s People’s March in Washington DC drew smaller numbers than its predecessors.

Organisers had expected 50,000 people. About 5,000 turned up.

and here’s the entire problem right here expressed in 2 sentences with the entire liberal political movement.

the organizers are much more interested in optics than DOING THE FUCKING WORK TO GET LIBERALS IN OFFICE. these assholes right here are the ones that think just showing up is what matters. they think that not being objectively cruel just to be cruel is the only reason to vote for democrats.

you can take this protest and $2 and maybe you can get a drink at a fast food place for all the good it’s going to do the country the next 4 years. instead of marching, chanting, and holding signs the protest organizers would have been a whole lot fucking better off taking the time to organize a toothless white guilt relieving performance act and used it to organize and coordinate local aid societies that will be directly affected by the trump administration.

typical white liberal guilt performative bullshit.

stop protesting to bring awareness of an issue as if it was going to do something and try, I dunno, ACTUALLY FUCKING DOING SOMETHING. like well before election day for example.

didn’t see a bunch of black people in pictures taken. I wonder why he said rhetorically.

I don’t drink coffee, so this doesn’t affect me any.

I’m okay with this policy. commercial places should be for people who want to conduct commerce. from what I can tell this doesn’t affect anyone who needs to run to the bathrooms, this is for the people who take their macbook airs and just sit down occupying space working on their manuscripts taking advantage of the free wifi and not buying anything, or for an extreme example that old pictures of a guy who set up his entire desktop at a mcdonald’s monitor and all just for the free wifi.

if there are people who are really upset about that, the wifi signal extends outside the walls. no one says you can’t sit in the car and use the starbucks wifi.

“How is it that there are so many Americans who own so many guns who are so indiscriminate about using them when someone makes them upset, and yet you’ve got four in 10 American adults carrying medical debt?” (Doctrow) said. He’d heard of people who wouldn’t approach someone who was texting at a movie theater or swerving across traffic because they might have a weapon. “How is it that people who fly off the handle under such trivial circumstances are so sober and responsible and even-keeled when it comes to these things that when I imagine them, all I can think is I would lose my mind?”

I can tell you why in less than 25 words: the gun lobby wants people to buy guns and be afraid of everyone, and you never see the person who approves medical procedures.

vulture capitalism at it’s best. and when I say best I mean the absolute worst.

the party would rather have members who play nice with money and power and make public pointless grandstanding actions in public rather than members who connect with the actual people, listen to the people, and fight for the people.

with 3 exceptions, I have always voted for the democratic candidate in the 22 years that I have been eligible to vote. and I refuse to register with the party because the national party does stupid shit like this. it’s as though they are intentionally trying to never join the party. and yet I get bombarded with fundraising emails and snail mail. MEIN GOTT the begging.

i vote for democrats because they are closer to where I am and they are viable. how many nonpartisan voters like me aren’t that tactical and stay home and cost themselves elections?

before this election I was not in favor of an electoral age cap for office. now I’m strongly in favor of one. it’s clear as day that these gerontologic electeds who have been in office since clinton and bush, the first bush, that they are so out of touch that mercury has a better chance of touching pluto than they are with the base of the party. vote out all of the olds. I don’t just want them not in power but still in office because then they could still have influence behind the scenes. get them away from the controls of power.

my workaround for glucose watch monitoring is an android app called gluroo. if you’re using an app that sends your glucose data to a server gluroo pulls that data from the server and displays it on your watch as a specific watchface so the info that’s displayed is as accurate as the sensor you’re currently using. the downside is that gluroo can’t pull directly from whatever app you happen to be using, so going to an area with no data service at all will show no stats even though your phone is right there.

and kids in their classrooms.

since a lot of functionality at my job that doesn’t require me to physically be in the office can be done on a web browser I use my tablet as a work computer if the office is occupied. before this year I used my smartwatch as a phone monitor because even vibrating I can’t feel my phone ringing in my pocket or vibrate for text messages. and it was literally vitally important that I be available 24/7. these days I no longer need to be constantly available but I now have to monitor my glucose levels so I found a watchface and corresponding phone app to send that information to my phone.

tablets and watches still have a place for a lot of people.

they aren’t doing this to convince us, the proles. they’re doing it for their corporate masters. it’s a sign to them that they will cower and comply in advance to make sure that we, the not wealthy, won’t be given any more ammunition reasons to start going after any more of them.

it’s not going to work, the corporate media not only ripped any credibility they had during the last 16 years, they decided to go for broke and nuked it in the last 3 months. does anyone really believe anything anyone associated with a major media outlet has to say about anything related to people who are at least millionaires?

voting is absolutely worth the squeeze when you do it. however voting also is heavily dependent on a voting base that is both highly engaged in the process and is knowledgeable about the issues.

so when you have elections where:

1. a third or more of all eligible voters do not vote
2. laws have been passed to make it harder to vote for some people
3. a majority of the people who do vote have only paid attention to campaign issues for at the most the two weeks directly before the end of voting and
4. voters are not given the facts about each candidate by a press that is more interested in manufacturing a close race for pure financial gain rather than accuracy in telling the truth about the candidates

voting completely defeats the purpose. because the end result is not one based on actual facts, it’s an outcome manufactured by vested interests with near infinite resources given the petina of legitimacy by playing on the fact that people were freely given a choice. more times than not there’s enough people who are paying attention to overcome that deficit in the ability to message. but the times when it does not it goes really wrong.

voting

there is no statute of limitations for murder

shouldn’t have constantly sanewashed trump.

sholdn’t have given the guy who launched trump 20 hours of television and a “best of” weekend show.

shouldn’t have had a management team that was more interested in ratings than actually reporting on real news since the lewinsky affair (both meanings of the word).

should have brought back keith olbermann despite rachel maddow vetoing his latest comeback attempt.

shouldn’t have fired tiffany cross and constructively fired mehdi hassan.

shouldn’t have let the 20 hours of live tv morning guy dictate guests for all dayparts of the channel.

should have fired 20 hours of live tv morning guy and andrea “mrs. allen greenspan” mitchell 15 years ago at minimum.

msnbc has an uncertain future because they sure as fuck don’t want to be the liberal network they would have a monopoly on and make lots and lots of money and their entire management team are a bunch of self indulgent idiots who failed up into their current positions and have no idea how to run a successful cable tv channel.

i used the android app “reddit is fun”. i had stopped using reddit well before the api and public offering drama so i had absolutely no idea it was going on. i needed to get an answer to a question and the google search led to a reddit link. typically i normally chose web links, but this time i said, what the hell, and opened the link with rif. then i read the changelog of the app. that pointed to a lemmy instance for rif (which does not have a lemmy version btw) and that’s where i caught up on all the bullshit i missed during the intervening 3 years.

ps i also have a .ml account. it was the easiest one to create an account with at the time. if i could transfer all the stats and comments i made with this account and transfer it to one that allowed swearing (for instance you can’t use the word that describes selling one’s self for money or other favors that sounds similar to a garden tool called a hoe) i’d do it.

so the genius free speech absolutist has rigged his platform so that if journos, news orgs, and content creators post links outside of his platform those posts get buried UNLESS that content is posted on his platform.

in other words elon wants to own the work produced by others.

and then he wonders why people are fleeing his nazi echo chamber in droves.

this is another reason why I hate apple. other tech companies would rather follow apple than forge their own design path.

I also hate the tech reviewers who reinforce the belief of apple design superiority that pushes this false belief that encourages those bad design changes.

as an aside I find it a bit disturbing how many affable game show hosts are in their private lives terrible people. sajak is another example.