Someone’s comment that I read elsewhere pointed out to me that this is a similar tactic that was used back in the day with white only bathrooms and non-white bathrooms.

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.

Oooh, I get to share my favorite link to Creepy Chicago Sirens

https://youtu.be/84TSpb6UEwc

Is there a Kim action figure too?

It also makes it harder for people who have lost some of these documents.

I went through foster care and in that transition my original birth certificate was lost–I was a minor and had no idea I should look for it, or where it even was, to take it with me. It was hard to bootstrap myself after. Anyone who’s lived through a domestic violence situation might have had to leave home suddenly with very little.

And that’s not considering natural disasters like floods and fires and tornados that might have destroyed paperwork for people too.

Are a bunch of millennials and gen-x deemed gang members because they followed a trend?

Yes. That’s the point. They decide they don’t like someone because of something they posted on social media, or texted, or whatever, then they look for a tattoo that they can pretend means gang membership, and boom, the person who dared to say something against them is sent to the new gulag.

They’re using tattoos because there’s a segment of America all pearl-clutchy about them, who subconsciously think anyone with a tat must be trash and involved in gang stuff. And because some people assume those with tats are trash, it’s easier to vanish them without as much widespread protest. The presence of tats will be used to victim-blame.

It’s similar to how various drugs were targeted to get rid of white liberal hippies who smoked weed and black people by throwing them in jail. Find some trait that a portion of the population you want to lock up shares, make it illegal or, in this case, a “symbol” of “gang membership”, then whisk away the people you intended to target all along.

I’m not surprised.

The name of the game here is to destroy America, not build it up. (Russia wants a USSR-style fall of America. The Cold War never ended for them.) And Trump wants to stay out of jail. Everything you see Trump or his admin doing can be attributed to those two things. Destroying America, or keeping himself out of Jail.

Chicken thighs or quarters are good for moist, flavorful chicken

Source: fellow rat

They might be tracking the homeless who are living in their vehicles. As well as poor laborers who might be hiring out to do work for cash.

I finally understood the sovcit guys when I realized they’re basically trying to cast magic spells. If you speak the right magic words at the right time, your miracle happens. Or curse or blessing or whatever.

Thanks for the heads up.

Yep, a preview for what’s being done to the US now

Maybe the ghost of Robert A. Heinlein is haunting it.

(I will never not be angry that Musk stole the word from one of the classic sci-fi writer greats.)

I don’t know about orphaned, but my guardians got $300/month in the 90s because my mom was on social security disability. And when I was still with my mom, I think she got $700/month on social security disability. That’s with me included?

Obviously this is different from what orphans would get, and 25+ years ago. But if Musk had stolen it from us then, our situation would’ve been even worse…and it wasn’t great to begin with. Even back then, with my mom having an incurable disability, she had to be careful of how much money extra she made from odd jobs lest they take it all away (people on disability aren’t allowed to save or have above X amount in income or the benefits will be revoked). And apartments in the area were $700/month, and we weren’t in section 8 housing so all of her benefits went to rent–and that was before utilities, food, etc.

From what I’ve heard, similar restrictions are in place now. Nobody’s getting a plush ride on benefits, ever, and it’s a struggle to even get on them to begin with. Even with things that are 100% disabling and incurable.

I’m just curious if spaces such as that even exist, and if they do, what they lead to.

I don’t know about lemmy since I’m old enough to not care to go looking for that, but I can speak in generalities from a few decades back.

So, I ran an old-school forum in the late 1990s/early 2000s. I found that a complete lack of moderation leads to bad actors essentially ruining the vibe. Basically, there are human beings (and bots plied by state actors in this day and age) that will happily exploit a fully-unmoderated forum and fill it full of awful stuff.

Now, bad mods are awful, power-tripping and all, and lots of regular people who have never run a community of any sort have had run-ins with mods that have the HOA Karen mentality and come to the not-entirely-correct conclusion that ALL moderation is bad, but having no mods can ALSO kill a community if it gets big or noticed enough to draw in outsiders, because you end up with the bullies running roughshod over everyone else, and changing the vibe. And if the vibe gets too gross, you lose the decent, cool members because they’ll fuck off elsewhere and do their thing elsewhere because your community is too full of bullshit and crap.

I suspect that’s the point, this admin is being told to do things that will further humiliate the US on the world stage and further erode the respect the US (no longer) gets.

what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?

Losing the Cold War. America wasn’t beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)

Livejournal was one of the earliest “modern” social media sites (for those who didn’t experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr–longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics “on the Russian” side it was getting DDoS’d.

I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn’t it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.

And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it’s valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.

Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as “trending” or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.

Having “trending” algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.

If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that’s easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won’t completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don’t dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.

(all the gums are closed)

I don’t know why, but I find this typo hilarious.

So are you like…16 or 60?

This is the way ^

Furious learning about the subject at hand is how I cope with my losses. Make that anger work for you instead of blowing things up.

So you’re saying there’s a future where a wizard will cast mend buttcrack, and thus nobody will ever stuff things up their bums ever again?