• 19 Posts
  • 274 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: May 5th, 2026

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  • God, what are you, a shill? You really do have no brain.

    Just because you attempt to call something a strawman and downplay its importance doesn’t make it true. We live in objective reality you rightwing numbnut.

    The crux of this entire argument is that the owner’s political ideology and decisions can be interpreted as synonymous with the company, given his control and that a significant portion of Mullvad’s profit will go into his pocket.

    Here, let me translate that for you:

    That’s not a strawman, it’s the main throughline of the entire argument.





  • Without spoilers, The Good Place is a good show.

    In your hypothetical, it would be similar to a person buying a rose from a flower shop for their mother, but the money they earned supported a company that funds another company that bombs children and the flower came from a retailer that orders flowers from a garden in another country that uses child/slave labor to harvest the flower.

    At what point is the person who bought the birthday gift responsible for the bombs dropped and the enslaved children?

    But, essentially, this is the same question posed when looking at a health insurance CEO. He didn’t kill 640,000 people each year directly. Nor did the employees directly. Nor did the hospital or doctors refusing treatment without payment. The illness or injury did. But the health insurance CEO did make the decision to deny coverage as much as possible and to pay as little as possible for procedures and medications that would have saved lives.

    At what point was the CEO responsible for the 640,000 deaths each year due to lack of health insurance coverage?

    The difference, I believe, lies in severity and knowledge of/if a decision is being made. The person buying the rose does not have a severe impact on the outcomes of the choices made by these companies. They have a very high likelihood of not even being aware and that may even be on purpose, as the PR for said companies would do their best to avoid consumers understanding this. Thus in your nurse and bread scenario. The choice is minimally severe and the individual is likely unaware of the greater mechanisms involved, meaning they won’t be making a fully informed choice. Once informed, they likely could make a choice, and that could be the only bread they can afford or maybe they’ll switch to a local baker, etc.

    The healthcare CEO almost certainly is aware of the impact of his decision and he is able to have a large impact on the direction of the company and on the massive amount of harm caused. He is fully informed and makes his choice anyway out of selfishness and greed.

    The nurse and the rose gift buyer shouldn’t be held fully accountable, if at all. The CEO is, in my opinion, most certainly accountable.

    In the end though, there’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism. Does that mean we should forfeit our survival and/or not attempt the best we can through the methods that we can control? (A lot of comments I’ve seen say you have no choice and it’s stupid to think about. Or better yet, even with extra knowledge, they say it’s “based” to “remove those invaders” and “need to support them more, it’s not like lefties support privacy and free speech.” Fuckin wild stuff from the r/SomeOrdinaryGmrs sub.)

    Great video from philosofree on the ethics of vigilante counter-terrorism. YouTube took it down and now it looks like even Patreon did too.








  • Leftists*

    Liberals are NIMBYs or just plain old conservatives in disguise. Just look at how many “democrats” just voted for war with Lebanon and how many want to surveil you with the KIDS act. Even more, they released their Project 2029 and it’s the Project 2025 narrowing of section 230 and de-anonymizing the internet.

    Liberals are just more PR friendly conservatives.


  • And we’re allowed to have our opinions too? The founder can do and say what he wants, but so can we? Right wingers seem to be all about free speech in one direction. No one is entitled to our money. And many of us would rather not have our money, a significant portion of which going to the founder, redirected to a party advocating for ethnic cleansing. Which would make people need a vpn more via persecution. Not to mention a founder with 50%+ ownership would have significant sway on the company itself.

    For those looking for other options:

    https://vpn.techlore.tech/

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ijfqfLrJWLUVBfJZ_YalVpstWsjw-JGzkvMd6u2jqEk/htmlview#gid=231869418

    And before you try to downplay what the party stands for:

    https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

    Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
    “I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.

    One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.

    In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

    He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said


  • That’s why I said physical media done correctly. Because, yes, if the game isn’t on the disc, it won’t work. Or if it forces a day 1 patch to even run because it contains parts of the code. Or the console itself requires the internet for some kind of DRM check. Those aren’t really physical media in my opinion. Or, at best, they’re anti-consumer locks/practices.

    Is it perfect? No, the only innovation capitalism has brought us is continually more ways to provide less for a higher price. We’re always having to fight greed unfortunately.




  • A) what problems are you referring to?

    B) DRM free already solves a lot of it for digital titles. Sony, Microsoft, etc are entirely uninterested in that. They wouldn’t be able to pull them from your library if so.

    C) Removing physical media completely kills a used market. Dead Space is $20 on disc, $70 on the Sony store. Sony doesn’t want you to think about that though. Sharing becomes nearly impossible. Ironic, considering Sony’s stance for the PS4

    The biggest thing is simply this: physical media offers protections from corporate abuse/greed. If digital media wasn’t abused by corporations, we wouldn’t have this issue. Physical media done correctly makes most of those abuses impossible. And, unfortunately, we can’t trust closed source corporations not to abuse us when money can be made. So without a forcing function through legislation, physical media is that forcing function/protection.


  • Look at EVs. We in the US can’t buy cheaper, better performing EVs because of import taxes and tarrifs up to 100%. Instituted by Biden and raised by Trump btw 🙃

    To buy a BYD and import it, if the car costs $30,000 USD, you’ll pay more like $150,000 USD after taxes, tariffs, import duties, licensing, registration fees, and shipping costs. And yes, even ones in Canada will still be subject to those costs trying to cross the border of course 🙃. And no, it’s not a hyperbolic number.

    There’s tons of loopholes for capitalists not to pay taxes. But a plebian consumer saving money? You bet that shit is battened down, no loopholes to be found. If you look at it the wrong way you’ll be fined.