Honestly, the billionaire media wasn’t doing us any favors anyway. It’s a problem if they are setting the precedent that the president is in charge of what the media can say, which can then be applied to more honest and courageous media, but it’s not like losing their particular point of view is really costing us anything. And if they’d like now to make it known that they have no desire to challenge power or do their jobs, there’s a good argument to be made that it’s better for that to finally be fully in the open.

Sounds about right, for someone who has an actual ideology and values that they’ve lived and acted on for years. Presumably, like Bernie, “no one wants to work with him.”

What’s more, the order is unbelievably stupid and illegal.

So stop obeying them. People are taking this random bullshit that Trump says, way too seriously. Just explain that you’ll be happy to follow orders that come in from the US government, that is your employer, and that if someone has delusions that they’re able to tell you what to do outside the established governmental system, that’s not your problem.

I know it’s not that simple. But it’s definitely not as simple as “everyone do whatever crazy illegal shit Trump is telling you, and hope for the best,” either, and way too many people seem okay with taking that approach.

Trump would have a stronger grip on the military

I wouldn’t be so sure. He might, but then again, the high-level leadership of the US military is extremely constitutionally minded. All their training and a lot of their pride in what they do is rooted in it. He might decide, as the real horrors are starting to begin and no one really knows what to do about it, to fire anyone in the military who isn’t loyal to him, and he might get quite a severe shock when they took the loyalty of most of their troops with them when they left.

Firing the military because they won’t do what you want, so that then they’re kicking around loose in civilian society ready to be slotted into the rebellion and increase its power tenfold, is a pretty traditional rookie coup mistake.

I wouldn’t be so sure. China is at the world’s forefront of automated techniques to be able to spy on and manipulate people through their own devices at massive scale. If they had some semi-workable technology to fingerprint individuals through their typing patterns, in conjunction with fingerprinting the devices they were using through other means, that would make perfect sense to me.

I don’t think it is especially a concern for Deepseek specifically, for reasons discussed elsewhere in the comments. That one particular aspect of the privacy issue is probably being overblown, when there are other adjacent privacy and security concerns that are a lot more pressing. Honestly, that one particular detail isn’t really proven simply because it’s in the privacy policy, and even if they are doing something like that, its inclusion or not in this particular privacy policy or this app isn’t the particularly notable part about it.

No, but they can manipulate the public’s perception of political reality to the point that someone gets elected who will bust your door down and kill you, because a bunch of people who don’t have time to make figuring out the news into a part-time job decided that that person would be able to make eggs cheaper and the other guy’s son was really into hookers or something, and also he was old and wasn’t “fixing the border.”

Just as a random example.

(To be clear, I don’t have any reason to think specifically that TikTok or China was involved in getting Trump elected. I’m just saying that allowing any adversary, whether that’s China or that’s the GOP’s social media psyop department, to have control over American’s social media landscape, will absolutely have an impact on you personally, and already has.)

Got it. Yeah, fair enough. What I was aiming to do, more or less, was ask for clarification, but I definitely see how it could come across as me trying to continue the argument when he was saying that he already agreed with me. I think you hopping into it with a big italic and bold wall of text on the thing that apparently all three of us already agree on only confused the issue further.

Anyway, sounds like we’re all on the same page. Cool.

I’m talking to someone in a privacy forum hosted outside of corporate social media who described reports about privacy violations committed by a privacy-invasive social media app as pearl-clutching and fearmongering.

I’m not sure what your deal is, here, but I’m not into it. I feel like what I said was pretty straightforward and you’re determined to gin up some kind of disagreement, where I’m supposed to say that corporate media’s reporting on privacy isn’t bad, or something.

Privacy good, corporate privacy invasion bad. Corporate media underreporting of privacy violations bad. Hopefully that makes sense, and we can agree on it. I’m not into whatever argument you’re attempting to create about it.

Well, you did say it was “pearl clutching” and “fearmongering.” My point is, they should be clutching pearls, and fear should be mongered. Arguably, at all the social media companies including TikTok.

I actually do agree that TikTok is worse, but it’s hardly the point. We can be alarmed about all of them, especially since the US ones are now in the hands of an overtly evil tyrannical government instead of merely the sociopathic profit-minded corporatocracy they were in before.

Yes. I also like how the alarming take on it is not “People are typing their passwords / medical histories / employer’s source code into ChatGPT and from there it goes straight into the training data not only to be stored forever in the corpus, but also sometimes, to be extracted at a later date by any yahoo who knows the way to tease it back out from ChatGPT via the right carefully crafted prompting!”

But instead it is “When you type things, they can see what you type! The keystrokes!”

Dude, why is this guy getting so upset about the suggestion that people should be alarmed both by TikTok and also by the malicious behavior of all the other social media companies? And that the media should report more on it? Why is he yelling so much at me for making what I thought was that fairly reasonable suggestion?

Folks like me have been voting Blue for 25 fucking years

Oh. Um… what? What does that… okay.

Edit: Oh, also, you were unnecessarily doing a bunch of obedience to the establishment if you’ve been voting blue for 25 years. Back in the Bill Clinton era, the parties really were practically indistinguishable, and there were other realistic options like Ralph Nader and Ron Paul on the table who were genuinely pretty good. They got creamed by FPTP, but right around the year 2000 was a time when almost anyone could see that the good options were not within either major party. Al Gore being a pretty obvious and rare exception. The calculus changed a lot with the last few elections, where the Republicans became such an objectively terrifying option that voting for the Democrat just so they wouldn’t get into office became a necessary strategy if you care about the country. In my opinion.

(they provided no evidence: who were they quoting?)

https://platform.deepseek.com/downloads/DeepSeek Privacy Policy.html

Ctrl-F “rhythm”

I’ve noticed that this “there is no proof!” or “where’s the evidence?” all of a sudden has become popular. You have people saying it even when they’re talking about a very specific statement of a fact that’s very specifically and easily verifiable.

that is unfortunately not uncommon

Completely true. A lot of web sites monitor everything you do on them, and can play it back for anyone who’s curious about optimizing the UX or for any other less innocent reason. Generally I think there’s not much specific in their privacy policy about it when they do. It’s not surprising that this one is also doing that, accompanied by really a pretty minor line in their privacy policy to go along with it, I completely agree with you here.

As shown by their TikTok pearl clutching, corporate media regularly goes for maximalist cold war fearmongering.

Personally, I wish the corporate media would pearl-clutch a little bit more about how explicitly malicious to our interests our computing devices have become. “Everyone does it, so it’s not a big deal after all” is a common take to have, but it’s the exact opposite of the one that I personally have on it.

Not directly your question, but:

• Propane for heating, off an underground tank separated from the house
• Generator
• Two sump pumps
• Solar panels
• Vegetable garden

Security doesn’t just mean security against surveillance and physical violence.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I feel like that was the original idea of each state doing its own thing, and the federal government basically only being around for refereeing and standardizing stuff between the states, or organizing things when we had to fight a war. And other than that it was just your state.

I feel like a national divorce between two sides, which is what it would be, would mean war, and also we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of being one massive unified economic and military force instead of a little Europe-style bunch of little ones. But also that kind of ruined us, spiritually and karmically, so maybe you’re right. During Covid it somewhat collapsed back down to state governors in charge of a lot of things, and I feel like maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world. And it might happen, like it or not, or it might be the only alternative to a unified fascism.

As Trump likes to say, we’ll see what happens.

Yeah, agreed. To me the key factor is this: Nobody’s got all the answers. Whatever ideology it is, it can be gangbusters in some situations, but then there are going to be places and times and situations where it isn’t true or doesn’t work. As soon as people get themselves wrapped up into this thing where such-and-such is always the answer, and it’s universal, for all police departments in and outside the US for example, and in all cities, and across all modern time periods, as long as the situation is “police” then the answer and judgement of the situation is: (blank)… as soon as people start thinking that way I feel like they start making basic mistakes because nothing in the world works like that.

There are principles that hold true pretty widely, and some models are better than others, but as soon as it’s like “this is my way, and it is ALWAYS right, shut up so I can tell you about it,” I feel like the productive conversation and thinking just stops. And unfortunately that’s how a whole lot of people tend to look at issues in the world, like they just have to pick the right ideology and then go HAM with it applying it to all situations, and then it’ll all be simple and clear.

Oh, I wasn’t saying they’re going to. Just that it’s one possibility and there are definitely some police in leadership positions who are itching for it to happen so they can start banging up Hispanics and protestors whenever they want to. I mean… more so than now. You get what I mean hopefully.

And yeah, I feel like we may not see eye to eye vis-a-vis police completely, but civilian police who are abusive to whatever degree are a totally different animal than deputized Proud Boys stomping people in the street because they looked funny, and then taking them away to a farm-labor camp because they weren’t loyal to the leader.

There is a very specific point, in the collapse of a democracy into an autocracy, where the “irregular police” that are loyal to the leader, and the civilian police who have to obey rules and restrictions and are answerable to a more-or-less-democratic system, merge and intermingle, and they both become in practice subject to the leader.

We’re right on the inflection point right now, on a knife edge. A lot of cops are Trump “supporters,” in a general kind of way. Then there are a handful of sheriffs and other leadership people who clearly think they should be obedient to Trump instead of to the law. There are also a whole lot, though, who aren’t. The people who are downvoting you are apparently ignorant of this whole distinction, and how vital and lucky we are that Trump and his people have decided to gratuitously pick a fight with the civilian police. That’s a gift. It doesn’t mean that the brownshirts won’t overmaster and combine with the police in the end. But it’s a rare gift in times like these for any obstacles come to the table that might make it less likely to happen. Let’s not take it lightly just because of the fun and emotional satisfaction of screaming ‘ACAB shut the fuck up’ in the face of anyone who tries to have this type of conversation.

I mean, he’s not wrong I don’t think. He didn’t attempt to say that he felt bad that it happened. He was just saying that he understands and respects that the family of the dead guy will probably feel sad.

If the last and the worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked. If, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next.

One day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you lived in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

-Milton Mayer

+10,000 as to YPTB becoming a critical part of the infrastructure. It brings transparency and community consensus to the whole endeavor of moderation, which I think was exactly what was needed to bring it out of the reddit weirdness and into being a balanced endeavor.