Arms but only in the hands of the state. Specifically the American state, the heart of the dystopian global empire. What could possibly go wrong.

Problem is that well-intentioned rules with discretionary boundaries end up with unethical enforcement. See: the bill a few months ago that federally defines “anti-semitism” as including “criticism of the state of Israel”. Actually that’s not even a discretionary boundary, that’s statutory. The reasoning behind the First Amendment in the first place was to avoid authoritarian censorship, including these kinds of games where “reasonable regulation” of speech is used to shoehorn in authoritarian censorship.

I didn’t vote for Harris because she’s one of them. I also don’t use food delivery. Enjoying your feeling of superiority from pointing out the hypocrisy of random group intersections?

There are political cartoons from over a century ago where they’re talking about how much of an oligarchy it is. Look at this one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/The_Bosses_of_the_Senate_by_Joseph_Keppler.jpg/1920px-The_Bosses_of_the_Senate_by_Joseph_Keppler.jpg

This is the straw man:

Way I see it, you have two competing overarching theories, “spontaneous order” and “orchestrated order”.

I mean “order” in the sense of “enforced form”. The shape of things, namely, a broader, shared agenda of government and major corps. And I’m not assuming it, I’m describing the content of theories.

You didn’t explain how that was inaccurate. You just said they were using a “mental model”. Why are they using that mental model, though? It’s because they need somebody to be in control.

I did explain it, actually.

This has actually been studied. Sociologists have studied conspiracy theorists, and they are often people with control issues.

Correlation and causation issue? Point to the studies, show their methods and conclusions (although IMHO don’t bother).

That should have come across as critical of the commodification.

People still love cult movies and other classics from 100 to 50 years ago, with handcrafted or minimal budget special effects, no CGI. It’s because it’s an entire art form and it can’t just be reduced solely to aesthetic appeal. That kind of approach is just a result of the commodification of art. You want to reduce a successful work of art to some quantifiable metric besides popularity/sales, so that you can create repeatable processes around producing it and selling it, and optimize them for cost, but art defies quantification. Even just basic “enjoyable gameplay” defies that.

Not attacking a strawman, I asked him to clarify and then talked about the context.

“Conspiracy theorists” often look at an event that’s heavily covered by the media, that serves a perceived state interest, and investigate it further. Particularly if it receives disproportionate emphasis, like the various mass casualty events that were referenced so often they’re just referred to by dates (“9/11”, “7/7”, “Oct. 7”, etc.). Sandy Hook served a perceived state interest (popular disarmament), and people perceived “weird things about it”, so to speak, so interpretations of the event differed. Sometimes people try to explain the formation of these theories in terms of fulfillment of an emotional need (“they can’t accept this would just happen so they need to pretend someone is in control”), which is just inaccurate. They have a mental model, whether accurate in a given case or not, where there’s an antagonistic power structure of some kind orchestrating events or narratives for its own benefit, and are simply applying that lens to understand new events and narratives.

At the end of the day, it is a fact that the U.S. government does things like this in general. You look at declassified CIA documents from the past, they are very open about overthrowing governments, manipulating public perception, and all sorts of other shady behavior. But they’re not open about them as they’re doing them. So we’re left with the difficulty of figuring it out for ourselves.

Which facts. How does the world work, in your estimation.

Way I see it, you have two competing overarching theories, “spontaneous order” and “orchestrated order”. You look at the U.S./Western empire, with its totally hierarchical command structure, and a big “?” at the top above SCOTUS, Congress and the Presidency, who all inexplicably follow the same agendas opposed to the will and benefit of the people, it seems to me a perfectly reasonable conclusion that somebody is in control. I don’t think it’s the Freemasons - this was kind of an old trope throughout American history (see the early 1800s Anti-Masonic Party), but knocking out individual dumb theories for who’s in charge doesn’t disprove all of them.

IMO, “conspiracy theories” are a natural attempt to explain observed reality (inequality, mass conditioning/brainwashing, global militarism and empire, etc.). They can be informed by falsehoods and/or manipulated into harmful movements (MAGA for example), but again, doesn’t disprove the entire idea of society being controlled. The only way you get to such a disproof is by an exhaustive analysis of every social institution demonstrating it’s not being controlled. Going, “these things just happen on their own” without any further detail is hand-wavey.

Have you considered you can really accuse anyone you disagree with of “being idiots who can’t or won’t face the facts of reality”? Maybe reality is as hideous and our society as controlled as they say, and you’re the one can’t or won’t face the facts of it. That kind of discourse doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

In contexts where mistakes don’t cost people’s lives.

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If you wanted a privacy angle.

Turns out “move fast and break things” doesn’t work that well in the auto industry

I meant something a little more peer-to-peer than lemmy/mastodon actually. Each person self-hosting their own.

So in other words this is a tech issue.

As someone who’s written in-browser player and transcoding/server code…the lemmy/mastodon etc. version of this can work, especially if flexible bitrate handling is baked into it (i.e., bitrate offer/acceptance matching over a protocol). You can get this down to YouTube interface + install some software + open a port on your firewall.