uriel238

Sans paywall

It is illegal in California as of 2026-01-01

I do use them, yes. Sometimes I'll use them similar to parenthesis to insert an aside comment -- a use case noted in Wikipedia. -- though I add spaces before and after each one.

I was recently accused on Lemmy of using AI to write up a post (laced with links to appropriate Wikipedia articles).

I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

In your society you can openly protest against people calling the shots, or be rude to cops, and not expect legal (and physical) retribution

You are obviously not watching the dozens of phone videos displaying counterexamples to this statement.

Granted, it's true for a shrinking privileged set, and the US saw for the first time in the 2014 Ferguson Unrest, just how brutal and militant the police will get if protests or rudeness to officers occur in a minority neighborhood. It's not that police brutality wasn't common before, but this time there were press on the ground streaming live video to the internet, and it wasn't being filtered through news agencies.

Conservative protests get the light touch, such as the 2017 Unite the Right rally. In contrast, the George Floyd protests in 2020 were saturated with CS gas just like Ferguson in 2014.

Granted, protestors taken to court by the current regime are usually acquitted (if a grand jury succeeds in indicting them; they're failing a lot), but then we're now seeing protestors accused of being part of an Antifa terrorist conspiracy, and getting sentenced disproportionately for minor crimes.

Americans presume they have civil rights, as per those enumerated in the Constitution of the United States, but they're legally being stripped away by federal courts, and law enforcement (and regime-loyal paramilitaries like ICE) are disregarding those rights more and more without accountability.

Even birthright citizenship is being challenged, and that face-eating leopard is going to take a lot of Americans by surprise.

The US is failing as a liberal society.

Capital agglomerates until it is concentrated within a few massive, monopolistic corporations, controlled by a few powerful men.

Karl Marx takes a toke.

Capitalism as a public serving economy doesn't work when it can be zerodayed by an entity with a resource advantage.

Before capitalism, when we were just doing markets and feudalism, the concentration of wealth at the top was even then a terminal illness for civilizations.

This time, the plutocrats at the top are richer (and proportionately richer) than they've ever been in history. They can literally buy the world out from under the rest of us. They can buy all the elections, bribe all the officials, and take over all the governments.

Watch what is happening in the United States: This leopard is totally coming to eat your face.

This is not a paywall, but it can be bypassed if it were a paywall.

A friend of mine got Paralives for her birthday, and says it has its charm.

I assumed that they're buying things that some people like in the hopes that they'll glean some of that like for themselves.

The Saudi family has long been a font of cruelty, ruthlessness and abuse of power, long before Mr. Bone Saw.

When EA Origin (the EA client) became mandated for EA games, I quit purchasing EA games entirely.

No regrets. I avoided the entire lootbox thing.

Now EA is under private equity, which means, I suspect, it'll soon go the way of Toys 'R Us and Radio Shack.

Appropriate, given EA's long standing policy of buying up development companies and gutting them.

No paywall or anti-adblocker bullshit

I live in the United States. Crime is not about behavior or adherence to law, but who we are. Those of us who cannot afford lawyers will be framed by law enforcement or coerced into confession, or extorted into a plea deal.

And laws are not passed that better serve the public, but are based on ideology or corporate interest.

So we're not a liberal, democratic society with rule of law.