They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
> "They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:"
Err, BlueSky is enthusiastically complying with that one (as you read by clicking through to their corporate statement),
> "We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features... Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
It's bold of them to attempt to shift the Overton Window in this way ("OSA is actually moderate and we should hold it up as an example of reasonableness to criticize other censorship laws against"). That happened fast.
Bluesky has never opposed or criticized OSA. Am I over-indexing on that?
Their July 10 blogpost even frames OSA as a collaboration—it's written plain in the title, "Working with [sic] the UK Government to Protect Children Online",
The meta point here is that both parties are basically the dregs of the last generation of politicians to not be "native" to the interner and are now having one last go at ramming it into a box (e.g. all the bad stuff is shoved into X dot com) which they can ban.
The thing is there's a decent chance it'll work. We have beaten out any liberal or even conservative sentiment in mass consciousness
> all the bad stuff is shoved into X dot com) which they can ban.
I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing.
We need outlets for free speech, but who those outlets are controlled by matters. Look at the impact Murdoch has had over the past many decades. That's what we want to stop.
>We need outlets for free speech, but who those outlets are controlled by matters.
What kind of nonsense is this? Have you considered the logic of your comment? Free speech is good, but let's reserve the legal right to control who builds platforms for it so that its the "correct" Kind of free speech. Of course there's no risk at all of that being grossly misused to crush real free speech.
For all the Murdoch fear mongering, there's no shortage at all of progressive, left-leaning media publications, news channels and organizations, globally or in any developed, more or less democratic country you care to look at. Would you support a conservative government shaklling them because of claims about their impact?
>The meta point here is that both parties are basically the dregs of the last generation of politicians
No it’s not. That is a completely different point than what you initially made. You specifically called out leftists for causing the OSA and then tried to pivot to saying “by leftists I actually meant everyone” after someone pointed out that your point was invalid because you were factually wrong
The meta- part of that sentence would imply it's a different scale.
And I obviously don't mean "everyone" or I wouldn't have made the distinction.
There is almost zero distinction on social policy between most of the current labour front bench and a Tory wet. Other than the latter being more pro-trans
You mean the Tories. Given that they massively increased what was already record-high immigration (while promising the opposite) [1,2], calling them "conservative" is laughable.
They absolutely took control of Luigi. Rather than becoming a revolutionary icon who inspired people to water the tree of liberty with the blood of capitalists, he got turned to a meme, co-opted, defanged and reduced to nothing, like a Che Guevara t-shirt.
> because it allowed criticism of Israel, at least according to the people that reintroduced it and got it passed
This is nonsense. I worked on that bill. The Israel lobby was, like, there. But to my knowledge is delivered zero votes. At the end of the day, if you want a bill passed, you are very careful about saying no to support.
From a broader social-media advertising perspective, the war in Gaza has been a financial bonanza.
This proves that Bluesky isn't decentralized. Children shouldn't view pornography, but I am worried about state abuse of the controls necessary to prevent it. Every scheme that isn't full-Orwell creates black markets. They all seem to be an excuse to eventually blanket ban VPNs.
I don't think a lot of businesses could operate without VPNs. It's essential for secure remote work. I'd have to imagine the amount of lobbying against it would be quite strong
It is essential, but never underestimate government's ability to completely screw everything up with regulation. Source: "do you accept these cookies?" when device fingerprinting exists.
Wasn't Bluesky meant to be an inclusive decentralized network that does not exclude any people? How come it's able to exclude a whole state of people?
This really shows that Bluesky is yet another us based social network company. This is where I think nostr is something completely different. Yes, it can be rough and if you use it naively you may see some annoying content, but oh-boy, it is actually fairly decentralized and resistant to state level attack like this.
And so if you try installing the Bluesky app, how many relays does it have? And in Mississippi you now won't be install the app or you won't able to use the bluesky relay either?
I'm coming from understanding nostr - each app usually starts with ~10 relays and as you start interacting with other people it collects more paths/routes/relays (the new "outbox model"). So as soon as you install any nostr app, it's usually not affected by any single relay issue.
This does not require the bluesky app. I'm not in Mississippi, but people on bluesky are reporting that these alternative AT Proto apps work fine there and grant full access to the same content.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China. They can stop all but the most persistent users. It is just a question of how much they care to; they have the means. And most users are closer to Homer Simpson than Edward Snowden.
If you get 75% coverage (or let's say the 5 biggest ISPs here, comcast and so on) you don't need to really chase the long tail of small providers that hard. It would effectively be unavailable to non technical people at that point.
Universities? The primary revenue source for basically 100% of US universities is the federal government. The concept of a private university in the US is little more than a legal technicality.
> They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They can learn from Russia. Censorship in Russia now surpassed China. TSPU are now in every ISP facility. They pass all traffic through them and allow arbitrary bans of specific resources/protocols/etc in specific cities or whole regions.
They don't need to. If only 1% of the people are able to access censored content and therefore hold censored ideas, the majority will treat them as crazy pariahs.
It's the same mechanism that makes us consider the 1% of flat earthers crazy. Sadly the mechanism works based on how many people believe a thing, not whether it's true, so it can also block true things if only 1% of people believe them.
We think flat earthers are crazy because it is a fairly trivial thing to prove them wrong. If you believe something that is that easily disproved AND widely understood to be so, there is clearly something wrong with you.
We don't think that people who think there's a bearded man in heaven are crazy, even if that's crazier than thinking earth is flat.
We don't think they are crazy because they are not 1%, they are majority.
Most people think flat earthers are crazy not because they proved them wrong. Just most people around them think flat earthers are crazy and that's enough.
No we think flat earthers are crazy because it's trivial to prove wrong, whereas religious belief is a matter of faith that can't really be proven one way or the other, regardless of how silly the belief is.
There is no way to prove that the earth isn't actually flat but every observation conspires to make it look round. For instance some flat earthers say that the atmosphere reflects light in the exact way that makes it look round.
Take any phenomena on a globe earth, describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered.
> describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered
…which have other consequences that are easily disproven.
Flat earthers are empirical cosplayers. It mostly seems they just want something to argue about and couldn’t come
up with anything original.
If every observation conspires to make it look round, it's round because observation is all we have. Refusing to accept observational evidence that forms a coherent explanation is either anti-science or anti-definition-of-words. This justification for flat earth exits the realm of scientific inquiry and enters the realm of Cartesian evil demons, a hypothesis even Descartes rejected.
Well yes, nobody who truly believes in scientific inquiry believes the earth is flat. But that just pushes the problem one meta-level deeper: people who don't believe in scientific inquiry are shunned only because 99% of people do, not because it's better even though it is better, and if 99% of people opposed scientific inquiry the situation would reverse. (it is reversing in the USA)
> Take any phenomena on a globe earth, describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered.
You can't actually do that in an internally consistent way. (Or atleast I've never seen it.) It isn't only interally incosistent but those theories also break down if you look at them too closely. That's why so much of flat earthism relies on conspiracy theories that are used to justify ignoring phenomena rather than actually investigating it.
> No we think flat earthers are crazy because it's trivial to prove wrong, whereas religious belief is a matter of faith that can't really be proven one way or the other, regardless of how silly the belief is.
that you even say this may show how you learned to live with it because majority around you believes it and your human brain considers it suicide to go against the tribe. (Or maybe you believe it yourself)
it's trivial to prove there's no heaven or hell. Maybe as trivial as disprove flat earth.
Flat earth is very similar to religion. It's a belief. It perpetuates because people around you believe in flat earth and if you tell them how they are crazy then you will be outcast and lose friends and family. And hey spoiler alert this is the same reason you don't call religion crazy, because anywhere in the world 99% you have religious friends or family (except maybe north korea or china, then replace religion with dictator cult). Flat earthers are just unlucky because they are very small minority
I have no issue saying I think religion is BS. I don't care if I lose friends over that tbh.
I just don't normally do so because a) it won't change their mind and b) I don't care what they believe. I still think it's crazy but that's fine. Everyone is a bit crazy anyway. And c) I prefer focusing on common ground than contradictions.
But tribes are overrated in this day and age. If you don't fit in you can just find another one that you do gel with. This changes over time too.
Well what I mean is it doesn't matter if you piss off your tribe these days because you can just find another one that aligns better with you instead. No need to fake it to fit in. This is what's so great about today's globalised society and internet. There's always people like you somewhere within reach.
I could totally not live in a small country town where I'd be forced to pretend to be religious and care about sports. And I'm into other stuff like polyamory that small communities tend to hate.
So yeah that would be hell for me. I probably would end up excluded.
I also tend to change pretty radically every few years or so. Including finding a new country to live, new hobbies etc. So I have few long term ties anyway. I like it like that. I tend to feel trapped in too stable situations.
You are a sociopath. This tends to reduce with age. Trust me for normies it's an insane scenario.
You seem to be specifically trying to show how you're not like most people, so in a way you support my point!
> So yeah that would be hell for me. I probably would end up excluded.
Why hell, if you don't have ties anyway and you are fine? You are contradicting yourself
> I also tend to change pretty radically every few years or so. Including finding a new country to live, new hobbies etc. So I have few long term ties anyway. I like it like that. I tend to feel trapped in too stable situations.
Yeah so if your long term ties were religious or flat earth you would likely be that too. Because people don't usually fuck with long term ties. Re my point
Hmm maybe I am a sociopath then. One thing though is that I do respect other people a lot. I just won't bend my identity to fit in. If we don't gel I don't fight them but I'll just leave. But yeah if that makes me a sociopath that's fine, I am what I am :3 I'm not young by the way.
I would mind being excluded, like I said I do have communities, I just find them to fit me not change me to fit them. Most communities I'm in are also super open and accepting of that anyway.
In a small town this would be difficult obviously, and things like poly and lgbt are more hated there.
> Yeah so if your long term ties were religious or flat earth you would likely be that too.
My parents were religious when I was young. They had me baptised. But by the time more stuff had to happen (communion I think?) I had already decided I hated religion and wanted nothing to do with it. My parents were ok with that. My grandparents were pretty pissed because they were really catholic but I always hated that side of the family anyway.
> it's trivial to prove there's no heaven or hell.
You're conflating physics and metaphysics.
> Flat earth is very similar to religion
You seem to have a beef to pick with religion. There are religious groups that do function similar to flat earthers, but that isn't true of all religious groups and many of the smartest and open minded people in history have been religious.
If anything, by making this comparison you are legitimizing idiocy.
There's a big difference between taking a position on unknowable metaphysical topics and refusing to recognize or even look at evidence when presented to you.
If you think I am legitimizing flat earthers you really don't get the point. I am just saying that for 90% of people belief in this or that mostly dictated by people around them.
> unknowable metaphysical topics
religious people often conveniently shift goalposts to make sure what they say is always beyond knowable. We launched satellites and found no heaven above? fine, it exists in some other way. No soul detected? our technology is not good enough. Flat earthers do almost the same thing just they use conspiracy theories instead.
If you want to find a difference between religion and flat earther theory, Christianity for example (not sure this applies to all religions) is supposedly helping humans live together better, like: be kind, do to others what you want be done to you, don't steal/kill/rape etc. But that's not really related to how it's proven or factual.
> religious people often conveniently shift goalposts
It isn't "shifting goal posts"...It's called updating your beliefs when the evidence proves them wrong. Many religions have a strong history of doing this and it is something that flat earthers don't do.
> Flat earthers do almost the same thing just they use conspiracy theories instead.
If you don't understand the epistemological difference, you should try educating yourself. There is quite a bit of scholarly work on this...
Equating flat earthism with religion is just ignorant. They are not epistemologically equivalent. Normalizing flat earth beliefs like this is actively harmful.
China isn't an example of the impact of poltics vs technology because chinese people generally don't use de-centralized or private tech in the first place
yeah my source confirmed it's one of the final tweaking on the backbone "intranet". Some software are getting uninstalled and downgraded to rudimentary hardcoded rules.
Mississippi can’t unless they can establish personal jurisdiction over a specific Mastodon operator. Which if that instance’s owner/operators don’t live in Mississippi, probably requires a novel application of the Zippo test [1] that’s a bit questionable for how noncommercial Mastodon tries to be.
I'm near Mississippi but not in it and I'm blocked on my home network. To open the app on my phone I have to turn off with and open it while on mobile data. Once the app is open I can get back on Wi-Fi and everything works fine, so they're only checking that first time the app opens.
They don't actually care about the block or ban, they just want to put in enough token effort that a judge in the area will feel that it was reasonably done. It's performative for the legal system.
I disagree that "performative" and "token" are the opposite of "best effort".
The opposite of "best effort" is clearly "worst effort".
You seem to take offense with the idea that the company is doing "the minimum viable legal requirement" and you insist that "no, by doing what the judge says, it's actually an earnest and good attempt!"
If you actually think a company puts in even 0.1% more effort than a court requires of them, then I think you are very naive. Clearly the company could prevent VPNs from working if they wanted to invest the effort, like Netflix and China do, but they literally can't be bothered if the court doesn't require it.
I consider "minimum viable legal requirement to get past the judge" to be "performative and token" because they do NOT actually care if users access it, they want them too, they are only checking a liability box forced on them by the court and their legal department, doing the literal minimum.
I'm not taking offense at any mythical company, and am being very specific as to what I am discussing.
As I've said, several times, the court will barely tolerate the minimum, and any form of token or performative, hand-wavy attempts to act as if complying, but not, will be taken poorly by the court.
Performative by its very root, is to put on a show, an act of story telling. This in not even remotely inline with compliance, but instead, pretending to do so, whilst not.
"something that you do, or a thing that you give someone, that expresses your feelings or intentions, although it might have little practical effect"
The 'little practical effect' is the key point here. A display without actual effect is not complying, even minimally. Courts care not for performances, displays, but instead actual fact.
You seem to have different definitions for these terms, perhaps even less used ones or colloquially derived. However, when one dives into the legal, terms take on a more rigid definition.
I don't see the value of this back and forth beyond my reply here, for there isn't much I can do, or that we can agree upon, if you use terms in ways that really aren't inline with how they will be taken.
And really, if you're simply going to argue that performance and token displays are somehow doing something meaningful, that's just plain incorrect.
> something that you do, or a thing that you give someone, that expresses your feelings or intentions, although it might have little practical effect
Perfect definition for the geo block, since it's trivial to bypass and billions worldwide use the technology to bypass such a check.
Thank you for providing a dictionary definition that perfectly captures how the businesses efforts are "token", since literally billions of humans can bypass it with minimal effort.
And I could keep going. But point being there are a thousand alternative frontends and every other bit or piece to interface with the same bluesky without censorship.
And the only user facing components are the frontend and the PDS. The appview can't even see the user's IP, only the PDS it proxies through. So if you move to an independent PDS and use any third party frontend, even if you use the bluesky PBC appview, there is no direct contact/exposure to the company that could be exploited.
The client/frontend calls out to a set of XRPC endpoints on the user's PDS. The user can use any PDS they want but yes most users are on the bluesky "mushroom" PDSes. There are plenty of open enrollment PDS nowadays if you care to look around and want to switch away.
The appview have no ability to interact with the user directly so if you use any non bluesky PDS and non-bluesky client/frontend (both relatively trivial to do), then the appview is basically a (near) stateless view of the network which you can substitute with any appview you want (the client can choose the appview to proxy to with an http header) without ever touching bluesky the company.
And of course there are multiple appview hosts. As well as relay hosts (which the appviews depend on but not the user/client).
There are plenty of ways to go about using bluesky without yourself or the services you use ever touching bluesky the company's infrastructure.
Edit: I mistook the bsky.sh domain, my bad. Can't get strike through to work for the life of me. I give up.
~~Bluesky blocked in Mississippi, try to work around it, only for the resource that tells you how to do this to be hosted on Bluesky, which is blocked. That's... suboptimal~~.
I can't help but feel like Bluesky is just three corporations in a trenchcoat pretending to be an open federated ecosystem.
Bluesky is not decentralized. The AT protocol is - albeit with few large integrators besides Bluesky, but it isn't susceptible to like 51% attacks or anything so that's mostly okay.
Does it actually? (Genuine question.) The article doesn't get into specifics about how the block is implemented, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some non-trivial way around it.
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
The client checks https://bsky.app/ipcc locally on startup, and if the json object it gets contains "isAgeBlockedGeo : true" it displays the block message.
ublock origin filters can replace the contents of any page using regex.
TLDR it's a single geoloc RPC call clientside. you can just tag it with an adblock filter to kill it. Or use any third party client (my comment to OP has a bunch of them listed).
Interesting though: I wonder how long til site host lists and ad filters start shipping anti-censorship lists and features. We know some DNS provider is already doing it. (I forgot which one)
Yes, it is the case today. Its not a huge proportion, but there are thousands on external servers, and we recently had a nice sized migration to blacksky
... but any replacement you build will, in practice, have to include a single centralized "relay" that aggregates all content. Since that's a lot of content, it has to be run by a big, easily found, easily pressured organization. And everybody "porting their accounts across" means a flag day that's going to be almost impossible to organize in practice. It'd effectively be just as much work as switching to an entirely new protocol.
Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.
The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.
Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.
What is your example of an effective open network then? ATProto is specifically designed for effective discovery which means scale. The fact that you can sync the entire network - not a requirement but you can - is a positive. The trade then is, yeah, you have to actually sync the data.
Nostr actually does much better with content discovery recently. Partially because of the new "outbox model" of connecting to relays and partially because there are couple "nostr client" companies that do good job in people & top notes discovery (e.g. Primal - it's a centralized company providing quite good service to the open network).
> What is your example of an effective open network then?
I'm not sure there is one. But that's because I don't accept the idea that "likes" and "follows" are the best way to find content, or even a good way. If you do accept the idea that those should be your primary way of discovering content, which Bluesky does seem to accept, then decentralization becomes a more important criterion, and Nostr or even Mastodon is more effective that AT. Unfortunate about the culture on Nostr, though...
You could maybe build a system that I would think was better by, say, indexing Nostr using some kind of DHT. But you'd have to do some things to traditional DHTs to make them more attack-resistant. And maybe more things so they could scale to that size. Having "topics" like newsgroups or subreddits would be another approach, and could probably be grafted into pretty much any protocol.
Cool take. Shitting on the south is an age old American tradition. I have a hard time understanding why people gleefully have these attitudes towards fellow human beings. Does someone from Mississippi not deserve factual actual push back against these laws? If we can't fight it there, it'll be in Connecticut soon enough.
By any number of metrics, Mississippi is the least developed, most backwater state.
My own personal metrics: Everyone's got that once racist uncle. Mine moved gleefully to Alabama. I have never known anyone who moved to Mississippi. Or from there!
I bet MS has some amazing old homes out in the swamp with great fishing.
you're probably from a place that is just as racist and backward as mississippi. maybe new england, the most racist region in the united states? if you feel this way about the south, just say you hate black people and be done with it.
Blue as they come (Illinois). And on the contrary, I reckon Ohio is far more racist than just about any place I've been. Black folks are just fine by me. Maybe you are trying to read between the lines instead of what I wrote?
When you consistently shoot yourself in the face despite all evidence because you believe it'll make you wiser, at some point rational people just need to point out that maybe you've blown your own head off too many times to make intelligent decisions and accept your agency for your actions. Mississippi is governed by fear, full stop. Specifically, a fear that their individual mediocrity will trickle down to their children and so they will vote to make life as difficult as possible just to make it harder for people in even lower social strata to compete with them. I've lived through decades of this stuff and watched it up close and personal.
They're SO racist that when you give them statistics about their state and their communities, the first thing they'll do is handwave them away because to them, statistics are irrelevant if they contain data regarding minorities UNLESS said statistics are there to condemn minorities. Same thing with people in different economic classes. Generalizations are there for them to make about other people, not the other way around.
Mississippi has one of the higher murder rates? Irrelevant to them because they have a higher number of black folks. Murder rates among whites in the state are high? Irrelevant because it's the poor whites who are murdering each other. At some point, you just have to accept that the conditions they're living in are the conditions they're choosing to live in and treat them accordingly.
> get them to stop actively voting against their own interests
Such a tired trope that I wish would stop. The whole point of a plural democracy is that people will have different interests, and there are few things that rub me the wrong way more than the idea that people are too stupid to recognize what their own interests are and vote accordingly.
What do call it when they repeatedly vote to slash the health care programs that almost half the state relies on for coverage? For candidates that defund education and basic infrastructure investment? It is objectively against rational self-interest.
what do they call it when a lot of the people in the state don't vote because of a history of disenfranchisement? or when power is taken away from groups of people due to redistricting? when many people can't get to the polls because it's far away or they have work? and when the absentee ballot process is hard? or when they purge the voter registration, requiring people to re-register, if they realize it before it's too late? this last one happened to me.
While I share your frustration can I also share with you that I think your original take is entirely dim-witted and ignorant that populations are not singular voting blocs? That's to say, I lived in Texas for a long time as a leftist and people like you would come in to dunk on our suffering. Nearly half the state votes Democrat but that didn't matter to folks like you. It's unproductive and isolates more people than it gratifies.
There is a huge difference between accepting someone’s opinion about supply side economics or US foreign policy or heck even abortion rights than “understanding” someone who doesn’t believe that people shouldn’t be treated equally and with respect because of the color of their skin, their sexuality, etc.
I’m from South GA and spent all of my adult life until 3 years ago in Atlanta. I live in another red state now - Florida. I’ve spent enough time in the bigger cities in Texas to have a feel for it. Alabama and Mississippi are just…different.
What I was speaking to was the ignorance of referring to the entire state as a singular voting bloc. A lot of liberals and leftists will happily cut each other down over something as simple as geography by wishing ill on an entire state with some kind of "you earned it" smugness. Not super productive.
> “understanding” someone who doesn’t believe that people shouldn’t be treated equally and with respect because of the color of their skin, their sexuality, etc.
Can you steelman the culturally conservative viewpoint? I find this to be a big blind spot in today's progressive thinkers; i.e. it's hard for someone in that camp to explain why anyone would have voted for Trump, without dipping into the "they know not what they're voting for" or "they're just ignorant, racist, and hateful" buckets.
> Alabama and Mississippi are just…different.
I'm a visibly nonwhite immigrant who moved to one of those "different" states from a large coastal metro. I'm not treated any worse or differently in society.
Perhaps the biggest disparity I've noticed is that the Old South still believes that it's good for society for people of various backgrounds to assimilate to one central culture, whereas the more cosmopolitan metros seem to have declared assimilation as an imposition on minority groups.
I believe the former to be the correct position, and closer to the original "liberal" belief that anybody, no matter what they look like, will be treated equally as long as they are willing to play by the same rules. The latter viewpoint to me is very much like "separate but equal"; no one cultural group has any say over another, and there is not one standard set of behaviors that everyone is expected to conform to, because differences are valued over unity.
It has been fascinating to see, as someone with an outsider's background, the realignment of political thought over the past decade or two.
> Can you steelman the culturally conservative viewpoint? I find this to be a big blind spot in today's progressive thinkers; i.e. it's hard for someone in that camp to explain why anyone would have voted for Trump, without dipping into the "they know not what they're voting for" or "they're just ignorant, racist, and hateful" buckets.
I can’t possibly steel man why someone thinks it’s their right to tell another adult why they shouldn’t be able to date or marry who they choose whether it be someone of the same sex or someome of a different color. Liberty University just recently lifted the ban on interracial dating.
I am not saying everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. I hear some of the things that come from Democrats and I can perfectly understand why some traditional Republicans hold their nose and vote for Trump because the alternative is worse.
> I'm not treated any worse or differently in society.
And being an immigrant in the US (along as you aren’t Hispanic) is a completely different experience than being Black. I’ve moved to Florida now.
Have you spent time in “their spaces”? Have you gone to a White Evangelical church? Have your kids tried dating their kids?
Again I’m not saying “all white people are racist” far from it. I’ve tried to even distinguish between “George Bush”/“Mitt Romney”/“John McCain” conservatives and whatever the hell is going on now.
I lived in what was a famous “Sundown town” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town) until the early 90s. I didn’t move there until 2016 when I had a house built in the burbs. My six foot two 230 pound+ stepson who has lived in the burbs all of his life often got questioned walking down the street of our own neighborhood and when he went to the community pool.
> Perhaps the biggest disparity I've noticed is that the Old South still believes that it's good for society for people of various backgrounds to assimilate to one central culture, whereas the more cosmopolitan metros seem to have declared assimilation as an imposition on minority groups.
To be blunt, I don’t have to assimilate shit and neither does a gay person who wants to walk around with their partner just to make other people comfortable or any other non white/non straight person.
If you have an accent, of course they are going to be respectful to your face. But they are going to complain just like they complain when people are speaking Spanish to each other.
Another anecdote, now I live in a resort area in Florida upstairs from a bar that is all tourist besides us (long story). Every Friday and Saturday night, they have karaoke and a live DJ. It’s mostly your standard non offensive top 40 music from the last 20-25 years.
Around 10 o clock, a large Latin American group came. I was already talking to a guy from Puerto Rico. The DJ started playing a Latin playlist and they all started dancing, there was another group there from Alabama and you could just see the looks on their faces.
I appreciate your viewpoint, though I disagree with some of it. I am not black, and I understand that this is a differentiating factor for some people. I personally know someone who has a troubled relationship with her family for, among other things, marrying a black man, so I know that old-school racism is still alive[0][1].
> They also didn’t owe it to anyone to “assimilate”
People around the world have wildly different expectations of what is considered normal behavior in public. In some parts of the world, defecating in public is acceptable. But I would not find it tolerable if someone were to originate from a place like that, come to this country, and engage in the same behavior. I would highly encourage such a person to assimilate to the norm in this country of not defecating in public, and were they not able to do so, I would be antagonistic against more of such people immigrating to this country.
I don't know whether in your anecdote the large Latin American group were tourists or people who live here. My expectations would be very different depending on it. Neither I nor anyone else expects tourists to be fluent in the local language and cultural customs. But conversely, I would not like to live in a country where I do not even speak the same language as my fellow countrymen; the very meaning seems to lose itself.
So, respectfully, I disagree fundamentally: those who choose to put down new roots in a different country absolutely do owe it to the existing inhabitants to assimilate. I, as an immigrant, owe it to existing Americans to assimilate to the American way of life. When in Rome, do as the Romans.
I believe there should always be open dialogue on what the culture exactly is to assimilate to, and such things should change slowly over time, but to suggest that nobody new owes anything to those who were there before seems neither true nor good immigration policy.
> To be blunt, I don’t have to assimilate shit and neither does a gay person who wants to walk around with their partner just to make other people comfortable
> I can’t possibly steel man why someone thinks it’s their right to tell another adult why they shouldn’t be able to date or marry who they choose whether it be someone of the same sex or someome of a different color.
Would you draw the line anywhere? Does any adult have the right to tell another anything, especially if they are of different groups (however you may slice and dice it)? Does anyone owe anything to the society around them? Are there norms that everyone is expected to adhere to, despite the fact that some people are naturally further away from those norms than others? Because it seems like the West has tried saying no to all of these questions for 50 years, and it has resulted in atomized and fractious societies where people, despite material wealth unimaginable to previous generations, are so, so unhappy.
I would like to live someplace where people treat each other fairly and as individuals, without regard for stereotypes of whatever cultural, ethnic, religious, sexual, or other background such individuals may belong to. I do not believe that this is at all possible without everyone playing by the same set of rules.
Let me extend your anecdote about your stepson, to illustrate my point: it is a failing if a white youth of the same size who was dressed exactly the same and behaved the same way did not get stopped and asked questions the same way your stepson did, only by virtue of the color of his skin. But it is equally a failing if white adult were to find a black youth's behavior to out of the ordinary in a negative way[2], but was not able to voice any concerns solely out of racial sensibilities. Both mean that one is putting immutable group characteristics over the individual.
My thesis is thus: we can either have a multiethnic society where we all debate what "the ordinary" is and agree to follow it (notwithstanding the likelihood that the debate, by virtue of numbers, ends up near the dominant group's preferences), or we can have monoethnic societies, either in parallel ("separate but equal" where each group plays by their own rules with minimal crossover) or as the eventual result of a vicious struggle between the factions that leaves only one standing. There is no alternative that is sustainable over the long term. My clear preference is the first.
[0]: But perhaps on life support, to quote Sowell.
[1]: As you have alluded to, one might reasonably believe that the current progressive viewpoint on race is making race relations worse.
[2]: Only a hypothetical example; I am not saying that your stepson was engaging in any behavior out of the ordinary. The same applies for any two different groups.
> I would highly encourage such a person to assimilate to the norm in this country of not defecating in public, and were they not able to do so, I would be antagonistic against more of such people immigrating to this country.
Do you also believe that Muslim women should be forced to take off their hijab or that it should be illegal for them to wear burkinis in public pools like the laws they passed in France?
Should gay people not hold hands in public because it may make straight people uncomfortable?
When a Spanish family is speaking to each other in public, should they speak English? This really offends some people.
I go to a barber shop where everyone speaks Spanish and they play Spanish music. Most of them speak English also. But when they speak to each other, they speak Spanish. If I happen to go to the barber who doesn’t speak English, I switch to my limited Spanish and keep it moving.
The “norms” the culturally conservative want is perfect English without a foreign accent, straight, Christian.
> So, respectfully, I disagree fundamentally: those who choose to put down new roots in a different country absolutely do owe it to the existing inhabitants to assimilate. I, as an immigrant, owe it to existing Americans to assimilate to the American way of life. When in Rome, do as the Romans.
If someone can manage in this country catering to people who speak their language, why should it be anyone’s business if they speak English?
> But it is equally a failing if white adult were to find a black youth's behavior to out of the ordinary in a negative way[2]
This kind of thing happens all of the time to Black people living in White neighborhoods. Ving Rhames was in his own house minding his business and got SWAT called on him.
How many times has a White person been harassed outside of their own home and having to prove they live there.
> or we can have monoethnic societies, either in parallel ("separate but equal" where each group plays by their own rules with minimal crossover) or as the eventual result of a vicious struggle between the factions that leaves only one standing.
Or we can do like I’m suggesting and treat people like people, celebrate the gay couple, mixed race couple, etc who decide to get married. Dance salsa when the Latin music comes on. Be willing to sing along with the country music, hip hop, rock, music when the DJ plays it.
When me or my step son is walking in the neighborhood where I was making twice the median household income of the most affluent area in Atlanta (working remotely for BigTech), mind your business instead of putting a message on NextDoor about a strange Black man suspiciously walking into his own house with a key.
The current administration which benefits only billionaires which make up a tiny fraction of the population proves that yes people aren't capable of voting for their interests.
Well it’s true. The cuts to healthcare and other budget cuts are going to hurt people in Mississippi more than California.
If you ask them why they vote the way they do, it’s because their “interest” or some combination of Trump was sent by God, we must save Isreal so Jesus will have a place to come back to (I don’t have an opinion about Isreal, I just think that’s a crazy reason), evil immigrants and something something “fighting woke idealogy”.
Can you name a single modern Republican policy that would help people in Mississippi?
And I emphasize modern because nothing about today’s national Republican Party resembles the one I’ve known from 1980-2016 or even between 2016-2020 when many held the line against some of the craziness.
And if your response is Democrats have also gone too far in the other direction and out of touch, you won’t get any argument out of me.
Your right that interests are varied but to be more specific, what's being pointed out is that people are manipulated into focusing on an emotional interest (hating woke or whatever the current thing is) so that they'll vote against their practical (economic) interests. It's a perennial marshmallow test failure.
They aren’t being “manipulated”. This is no different than the old “Segregation Now. Segregation Tomorrow. Segregation Forever.” George Wallace inauguration in the 1960s.
The south has always cared more about culture wars than their own self interest.
FWIW: I have lived in the south all 51 years of my life - GA until 3 years ago and now Florida.
> I think everyone has an interest in supporting their addiction to food and shelter.
Maybe if one's income is so low that all they can afford is food and shelter. But this is a rich country, and even Mississippi is very rich by global standards[0]. So there are surplus dollars beyond what goes into food and shelter, and people disagree politically on how much of it should be taxed and what it should be spent on.
I am merely one voter, but I am an example of someone who does not vote solely to enhance my own economic interests, whether spent on food and shelter or not. I will happily take the hit to my wallet for other causes I find worthy. Indeed, I would be extremely skeptical of someone whose highest political imperative was to funnel as much tax dollars as possible to their own wallet, even though by some definition this might be the most "rational" voter behavior.
> the most Republican leading states are the poorest and already have the largest imbalance of tax and flows versus tax outflows
> You don’t think California and New York contribute less to the government than they receive?
This is a point that gets raised often, but there are many confounding factors here, besides "Democrat rich, Republican poor" (and the implication that there is a causal relationship).
At its core, "California" and "New York" don't contribute anything; the people residing in those states who pay taxes do. And, conversely, the people residing in those states receive transfer payments. So you really want to look at the individuals who are net payers of taxes vs. net recipients of taxes and see how they vote and why they live where they live, to get a better idea on what policies may favor contribution.
At a national level, both higher incomes and higher accumulated wealth predict voters favoring Republicans over Democrats[1]. In fact, even among registered Democrats, those with higher incomes or wealth are roughly twice as more likely to vote for the Republican candidate in an election than those with low incomes or wealth. If Democratic policies were truly better for wealth creation, then why would wealth-focused individuals cast their votes the opposite way?
[0]: It has a higher median household income than Germany, which is not a country anyone thinks is poor.
Now compare the life expectancy, education levels, infant mortality rates, etc of Mississippi and Germany?
How many people in Germany don’t have access to health care compared to Mississippi? If you were out of work for a year, would you rather be in Germany or MS?
If California didn’t receive anything from the federal government and didn’t have to pay taxes to the Federal government and the same happen to MS, whose states citizens would be better off?
Let’s go a step further, if all the Blue states were a country and all of the red states were a country, which hypothetical country would be better off?
I vote for policies to help other people. The people in MS voted for a President who promised to hurt the evil brown people, the pet eating Hatians and to “own the libs”
What about the people that didn't vote for this? Every election is 49/51 so when someone says "they're getting what they voted for", half the people are getting the opposite of what they voted for.
It wasn't close to 51/49. The south doesn't work like that. I've lived here my whole life.
In 2024 Mississippi went 61/38 for Trump. They haven't sent a Democrat senator to DC since 1982. In their most recent state house/senate cycle, 2023, overall voting was 62R vs 34D.
OPs point wasn’t about the exact stats, it’s just that there is a significant percentage of people in a state that don’t agree or support their government.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan took 44 of 50 states, Jimmy Carter took 41% of the vote. In electoral terms a party taking 38% of the vote is almost a non-entity. You don't come close to succeeding in a first past the post system with those numbers.
They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
> "They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:"
Err, BlueSky is enthusiastically complying with that one (as you read by clicking through to their corporate statement),
> "We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features... Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
It's bold of them to attempt to shift the Overton Window in this way ("OSA is actually moderate and we should hold it up as an example of reasonableness to criticize other censorship laws against"). That happened fast.
I think this is weirdly cynical. BlueSky isn't in favor of OSA, they're saying that the Mississippi law is radically worse.
Bluesky has never opposed or criticized OSA. Am I over-indexing on that?
Their July 10 blogpost even frames OSA as a collaboration—it's written plain in the title, "Working with [sic] the UK Government to Protect Children Online",
https://bsky.social/about/blog/07-10-2025-age-assurance
Bluesky is the nesting place for basically every neurotic middle aged leftist who left twitter. It's sort of their team doing the OSA
The porn and gaming fans are on Reddit
Young versions of the above on Instagram.
The Conservatives passed the OSA.
1) they also brought about net zero, do you think they're so different?
2) labour are absolutely balls deep on this. "If you use a VPN you are either Jimmy saville or worse Nigel farage" says Peter Kyle.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/29/peter-kyle-...
The meta point here is that both parties are basically the dregs of the last generation of politicians to not be "native" to the interner and are now having one last go at ramming it into a box (e.g. all the bad stuff is shoved into X dot com) which they can ban.
The thing is there's a decent chance it'll work. We have beaten out any liberal or even conservative sentiment in mass consciousness
> all the bad stuff is shoved into X dot com) which they can ban.
I'm not entirely convinced that's a bad thing.
We need outlets for free speech, but who those outlets are controlled by matters. Look at the impact Murdoch has had over the past many decades. That's what we want to stop.
>We need outlets for free speech, but who those outlets are controlled by matters.
What kind of nonsense is this? Have you considered the logic of your comment? Free speech is good, but let's reserve the legal right to control who builds platforms for it so that its the "correct" Kind of free speech. Of course there's no risk at all of that being grossly misused to crush real free speech.
For all the Murdoch fear mongering, there's no shortage at all of progressive, left-leaning media publications, news channels and organizations, globally or in any developed, more or less democratic country you care to look at. Would you support a conservative government shaklling them because of claims about their impact?
Governments actively enable people like Murdoch and Musk and their businesses. That's not a requirement to have robust free speech.
>The meta point here is that both parties are basically the dregs of the last generation of politicians
No it’s not. That is a completely different point than what you initially made. You specifically called out leftists for causing the OSA and then tried to pivot to saying “by leftists I actually meant everyone” after someone pointed out that your point was invalid because you were factually wrong
The meta- part of that sentence would imply it's a different scale.
And I obviously don't mean "everyone" or I wouldn't have made the distinction.
There is almost zero distinction on social policy between most of the current labour front bench and a Tory wet. Other than the latter being more pro-trans
You mean the Tories. Given that they massively increased what was already record-high immigration (while promising the opposite) [1,2], calling them "conservative" is laughable.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67506641
[2] https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/05/23/irony-labour-mea...
Conservative is more about their outlook on society right? They appear to be trying to get back to the Victorian age of morality especially sexually.
Better put those hands above the blanket!
Ps: ok those Victorian chastity belts are pretty kinky though, I have to give them that
And surprise surprise, it's in the name of "protecting children", the same thing red blooded Americans have been falling for for decades.
Some people would say "this is exactly why we can't have good things".
Who is failing to protect them from what?
> Who is failing to protect them from what?
Social media from itself. The frank answer is apps like Bluesky and Twitter should be age gated like cigarettes.
How do you age gate a website like a you would a physical item thats sold at a store?
This is what they want, no more free journalism/reporting means bringing back child labor
“services that have a significant influence over public discourse”
This may show paranoia but all these things that are happening recently kinda add up to preparation for war.
In the tiktok ban case we know its reintroduction and passong was because it allowed criticism of Israel, at least according to the people that reintroduced it and got it passed https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/tiktok-ban-fueled-by-israe...
Israel and Luigi have them spooked. Two incidents where they've completely lost control of the narrative.
Israel, maybe, but Luigi, definitely not.
They absolutely took control of Luigi. Rather than becoming a revolutionary icon who inspired people to water the tree of liberty with the blood of capitalists, he got turned to a meme, co-opted, defanged and reduced to nothing, like a Che Guevara t-shirt.
> because it allowed criticism of Israel, at least according to the people that reintroduced it and got it passed
This is nonsense. I worked on that bill. The Israel lobby was, like, there. But to my knowledge is delivered zero votes. At the end of the day, if you want a bill passed, you are very careful about saying no to support.
From a broader social-media advertising perspective, the war in Gaza has been a financial bonanza.
https://archive.is/3pave
This proves that Bluesky isn't decentralized. Children shouldn't view pornography, but I am worried about state abuse of the controls necessary to prevent it. Every scheme that isn't full-Orwell creates black markets. They all seem to be an excuse to eventually blanket ban VPNs.
I don't think a lot of businesses could operate without VPNs. It's essential for secure remote work. I'd have to imagine the amount of lobbying against it would be quite strong
It is essential, but never underestimate government's ability to completely screw everything up with regulation. Source: "do you accept these cookies?" when device fingerprinting exists.
Wasn't Bluesky meant to be an inclusive decentralized network that does not exclude any people? How come it's able to exclude a whole state of people?
This really shows that Bluesky is yet another us based social network company. This is where I think nostr is something completely different. Yes, it can be rough and if you use it naively you may see some annoying content, but oh-boy, it is actually fairly decentralized and resistant to state level attack like this.
The reverse is true. There are other relays that are still functional as you'd expect in a decentralized network: https://zeppelin.social/
And so if you try installing the Bluesky app, how many relays does it have? And in Mississippi you now won't be install the app or you won't able to use the bluesky relay either?
I'm coming from understanding nostr - each app usually starts with ~10 relays and as you start interacting with other people it collects more paths/routes/relays (the new "outbox model"). So as soon as you install any nostr app, it's usually not affected by any single relay issue.
This does not require the bluesky app. I'm not in Mississippi, but people on bluesky are reporting that these alternative AT Proto apps work fine there and grant full access to the same content.
It's not decentralised. They also blocked a bunch of trans people criticising JK Rowling. They couldn't do that if it were truly decentralised.
IMO it's got all the bad things about centralisation and the bad things about decentralisation. The worst of both worlds. I don't bother with it.
Mastodon/fediverse and nostr (the latter despite being from the same founder) are much better.
Meanwhile, nothing has changed on Mastodon.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China. They can stop all but the most persistent users. It is just a question of how much they care to; they have the means. And most users are closer to Homer Simpson than Edward Snowden.
Mississippi would have a hell of a time convincing every ISP in the US to put up a firewall too.
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They don't have to go after all of them, they just have to make an example of one. See: qwest's Joseph Nacchio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
God, Nacchio's story is infuriating.
"Sorry, you can't use this evidence that exonerates you - it would be bad for the government."
If you get 75% coverage (or let's say the 5 biggest ISPs here, comcast and so on) you don't need to really chase the long tail of small providers that hard. It would effectively be unavailable to non technical people at that point.
AT&T, Comcast, C-Spire. I don't know anyone who is on anything else here unless it's through a university.
six months ago I would have said the same thing about US universities.
Universities? The primary revenue source for basically 100% of US universities is the federal government. The concept of a private university in the US is little more than a legal technicality.
I heard from a friend that went to China and the hotel staff right away asks if they want to VPN their room.
Using a staff provided VPN sounds iffy.
> They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They can learn from Russia. Censorship in Russia now surpassed China. TSPU are now in every ISP facility. They pass all traffic through them and allow arbitrary bans of specific resources/protocols/etc in specific cities or whole regions.
They don't need to. If only 1% of the people are able to access censored content and therefore hold censored ideas, the majority will treat them as crazy pariahs.
It's the same mechanism that makes us consider the 1% of flat earthers crazy. Sadly the mechanism works based on how many people believe a thing, not whether it's true, so it can also block true things if only 1% of people believe them.
We think flat earthers are crazy because it is a fairly trivial thing to prove them wrong. If you believe something that is that easily disproved AND widely understood to be so, there is clearly something wrong with you.
We don't think that people who think there's a bearded man in heaven are crazy, even if that's crazier than thinking earth is flat.
We don't think they are crazy because they are not 1%, they are majority.
Most people think flat earthers are crazy not because they proved them wrong. Just most people around them think flat earthers are crazy and that's enough.
No we think flat earthers are crazy because it's trivial to prove wrong, whereas religious belief is a matter of faith that can't really be proven one way or the other, regardless of how silly the belief is.
They're just different.
There is no way to prove that the earth isn't actually flat but every observation conspires to make it look round. For instance some flat earthers say that the atmosphere reflects light in the exact way that makes it look round.
Take any phenomena on a globe earth, describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered.
> describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered
…which have other consequences that are easily disproven.
Flat earthers are empirical cosplayers. It mostly seems they just want something to argue about and couldn’t come up with anything original.
I don't believe I've seen a flat earther explanation of foucalt's pendulum yet, but perhaps they have one
"Pendulums just do that."
Until you travel around the world? Try that on a flat disc.
That's a void argument.
If every observation conspires to make it look round, it's round because observation is all we have. Refusing to accept observational evidence that forms a coherent explanation is either anti-science or anti-definition-of-words. This justification for flat earth exits the realm of scientific inquiry and enters the realm of Cartesian evil demons, a hypothesis even Descartes rejected.
Well yes, nobody who truly believes in scientific inquiry believes the earth is flat. But that just pushes the problem one meta-level deeper: people who don't believe in scientific inquiry are shunned only because 99% of people do, not because it's better even though it is better, and if 99% of people opposed scientific inquiry the situation would reverse. (it is reversing in the USA)
> Take any phenomena on a globe earth, describe the exact same thing in flat earth coordinates and then say that everything weird in the equations is a new physical effect you just discovered.
You can't actually do that in an internally consistent way. (Or atleast I've never seen it.) It isn't only interally incosistent but those theories also break down if you look at them too closely. That's why so much of flat earthism relies on conspiracy theories that are used to justify ignoring phenomena rather than actually investigating it.
> No we think flat earthers are crazy because it's trivial to prove wrong, whereas religious belief is a matter of faith that can't really be proven one way or the other, regardless of how silly the belief is.
that you even say this may show how you learned to live with it because majority around you believes it and your human brain considers it suicide to go against the tribe. (Or maybe you believe it yourself)
it's trivial to prove there's no heaven or hell. Maybe as trivial as disprove flat earth.
Flat earth is very similar to religion. It's a belief. It perpetuates because people around you believe in flat earth and if you tell them how they are crazy then you will be outcast and lose friends and family. And hey spoiler alert this is the same reason you don't call religion crazy, because anywhere in the world 99% you have religious friends or family (except maybe north korea or china, then replace religion with dictator cult). Flat earthers are just unlucky because they are very small minority
Who cares about the tribe?
I have no issue saying I think religion is BS. I don't care if I lose friends over that tbh.
I just don't normally do so because a) it won't change their mind and b) I don't care what they believe. I still think it's crazy but that's fine. Everyone is a bit crazy anyway. And c) I prefer focusing on common ground than contradictions.
But tribes are overrated in this day and age. If you don't fit in you can just find another one that you do gel with. This changes over time too.
You and everyone except psychopaths cares about tribes even if you don't think you do. Tribe = society. Social exclusion = death.
You can find new friends thanks to internet. Flat earthers and religious communities have more strong relations IRL than us here
Well what I mean is it doesn't matter if you piss off your tribe these days because you can just find another one that aligns better with you instead. No need to fake it to fit in. This is what's so great about today's globalised society and internet. There's always people like you somewhere within reach.
I could totally not live in a small country town where I'd be forced to pretend to be religious and care about sports. And I'm into other stuff like polyamory that small communities tend to hate.
So yeah that would be hell for me. I probably would end up excluded.
I also tend to change pretty radically every few years or so. Including finding a new country to live, new hobbies etc. So I have few long term ties anyway. I like it like that. I tend to feel trapped in too stable situations.
You are a sociopath. This tends to reduce with age. Trust me for normies it's an insane scenario.
You seem to be specifically trying to show how you're not like most people, so in a way you support my point!
> So yeah that would be hell for me. I probably would end up excluded.
Why hell, if you don't have ties anyway and you are fine? You are contradicting yourself
> I also tend to change pretty radically every few years or so. Including finding a new country to live, new hobbies etc. So I have few long term ties anyway. I like it like that. I tend to feel trapped in too stable situations.
Yeah so if your long term ties were religious or flat earth you would likely be that too. Because people don't usually fuck with long term ties. Re my point
Hmm maybe I am a sociopath then. One thing though is that I do respect other people a lot. I just won't bend my identity to fit in. If we don't gel I don't fight them but I'll just leave. But yeah if that makes me a sociopath that's fine, I am what I am :3 I'm not young by the way.
I would mind being excluded, like I said I do have communities, I just find them to fit me not change me to fit them. Most communities I'm in are also super open and accepting of that anyway.
In a small town this would be difficult obviously, and things like poly and lgbt are more hated there.
> Yeah so if your long term ties were religious or flat earth you would likely be that too.
My parents were religious when I was young. They had me baptised. But by the time more stuff had to happen (communion I think?) I had already decided I hated religion and wanted nothing to do with it. My parents were ok with that. My grandparents were pretty pissed because they were really catholic but I always hated that side of the family anyway.
> it's trivial to prove there's no heaven or hell.
You're conflating physics and metaphysics.
> Flat earth is very similar to religion
You seem to have a beef to pick with religion. There are religious groups that do function similar to flat earthers, but that isn't true of all religious groups and many of the smartest and open minded people in history have been religious.
If anything, by making this comparison you are legitimizing idiocy.
There's a big difference between taking a position on unknowable metaphysical topics and refusing to recognize or even look at evidence when presented to you.
If you think I am legitimizing flat earthers you really don't get the point. I am just saying that for 90% of people belief in this or that mostly dictated by people around them.
> unknowable metaphysical topics
religious people often conveniently shift goalposts to make sure what they say is always beyond knowable. We launched satellites and found no heaven above? fine, it exists in some other way. No soul detected? our technology is not good enough. Flat earthers do almost the same thing just they use conspiracy theories instead.
If you want to find a difference between religion and flat earther theory, Christianity for example (not sure this applies to all religions) is supposedly helping humans live together better, like: be kind, do to others what you want be done to you, don't steal/kill/rape etc. But that's not really related to how it's proven or factual.
> religious people often conveniently shift goalposts
It isn't "shifting goal posts"...It's called updating your beliefs when the evidence proves them wrong. Many religions have a strong history of doing this and it is something that flat earthers don't do.
> Flat earthers do almost the same thing just they use conspiracy theories instead.
If you don't understand the epistemological difference, you should try educating yourself. There is quite a bit of scholarly work on this...
> We don't think that people who think there's a bearded man in heaven are crazy, even if that's crazier than thinking earth is flat.
Um speak for yourself.
I think most of us atheists do think that but we're too polite to not say it. Besides, it won't change anything so there's no point.
Equating flat earthism with religion is just ignorant. They are not epistemologically equivalent. Normalizing flat earth beliefs like this is actively harmful.
Then we need to make every user the most persistent user. How many governments have given up because Tor Browser ships anti-censorship defaults?
technology does not work unless you use it
What does that mean?
China isn't an example of the impact of poltics vs technology because chinese people generally don't use de-centralized or private tech in the first place
On a side note I have very credible source telling that China might want open up the Internet "in a matter of days"
idk how "open" would this mean but drastic changes are coming.
That would be a big change considering things appear to be getting worse not better: https://securityboulevard.com/2025/08/great-firewall-china-w...
Would be great for the Chinese if true though.
yeah my source confirmed it's one of the final tweaking on the backbone "intranet". Some software are getting uninstalled and downgraded to rudimentary hardcoded rules.
Mississippi can’t unless they can establish personal jurisdiction over a specific Mastodon operator. Which if that instance’s owner/operators don’t live in Mississippi, probably requires a novel application of the Zippo test [1] that’s a bit questionable for how noncommercial Mastodon tries to be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
Or they pick a few and make an example out of them.
I believe the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany."
That would be mastodon.social, yes, but there's lots of instances that are not.
Like I run one and I'm in Louisiana and I sure do not have the funds to mount a legal defense.
Sounds like a failure to properly build a threat model. Consider relocating your instance and begin using privacy mitigations like VPN.
Much cheaper than an attorney.
> the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany”
Mississippi is a red state. Bluesky is liberal. I could see the White House turning the dispute into a tariff or defence spat.
Other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
How exactly can a website restrict itself in a single state?
They're blocking IPs that look Mississippi-ish. I assume just using Maxmind or some other IP geolocation database.
I'm near Mississippi but not in it and I'm blocked on my home network. To open the app on my phone I have to turn off with and open it while on mobile data. Once the app is open I can get back on Wi-Fi and everything works fine, so they're only checking that first time the app opens.
Badly. Anyone whose IP has recently been geolocated in that state will be swept up in the ban (and anyone with a VPN can evade it)
They don't actually care about the block or ban, they just want to put in enough token effort that a judge in the area will feel that it was reasonably done. It's performative for the legal system.
No, not performative or token.
Blocking via geoip is a reasonable, best effort method in this case. It's doing a best effort to comply.
So not merely for performance without true compliance, or tokenism, which courts really frown upon.
>> judge in the area will feel that it was reasonably done
> No ... It's doing a best effort to comply
Generally when you repeat my statement back to me, you do so in agreement.
Except that your statement contains the words 'performative' and 'token', which are the opposite of 'best effort' in a court.
And this is my point.
I disagree that "performative" and "token" are the opposite of "best effort".
The opposite of "best effort" is clearly "worst effort".
You seem to take offense with the idea that the company is doing "the minimum viable legal requirement" and you insist that "no, by doing what the judge says, it's actually an earnest and good attempt!"
If you actually think a company puts in even 0.1% more effort than a court requires of them, then I think you are very naive. Clearly the company could prevent VPNs from working if they wanted to invest the effort, like Netflix and China do, but they literally can't be bothered if the court doesn't require it.
I consider "minimum viable legal requirement to get past the judge" to be "performative and token" because they do NOT actually care if users access it, they want them too, they are only checking a liability box forced on them by the court and their legal department, doing the literal minimum.
I'm not taking offense at any mythical company, and am being very specific as to what I am discussing.
As I've said, several times, the court will barely tolerate the minimum, and any form of token or performative, hand-wavy attempts to act as if complying, but not, will be taken poorly by the court.
Performative by its very root, is to put on a show, an act of story telling. This in not even remotely inline with compliance, but instead, pretending to do so, whilst not.
A good example of what I refer to:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/token
"something that you do, or a thing that you give someone, that expresses your feelings or intentions, although it might have little practical effect"
The 'little practical effect' is the key point here. A display without actual effect is not complying, even minimally. Courts care not for performances, displays, but instead actual fact.
You seem to have different definitions for these terms, perhaps even less used ones or colloquially derived. However, when one dives into the legal, terms take on a more rigid definition.
I don't see the value of this back and forth beyond my reply here, for there isn't much I can do, or that we can agree upon, if you use terms in ways that really aren't inline with how they will be taken.
And really, if you're simply going to argue that performance and token displays are somehow doing something meaningful, that's just plain incorrect.
> something that you do, or a thing that you give someone, that expresses your feelings or intentions, although it might have little practical effect
Perfect definition for the geo block, since it's trivial to bypass and billions worldwide use the technology to bypass such a check.
Thank you for providing a dictionary definition that perfectly captures how the businesses efforts are "token", since literally billions of humans can bypass it with minimal effort.
IP geolocation
Its actually really simple but its not perfect.
This proves that Bluesky is not decentralised, btw.
FWIW the only "site that goes dark" is the https://bsky.app website frontend/mobile app.
And the "block" is a single clientside geo-location call that can be intercepted/blocked by adblock, etc.
And the "block" doesn't apply to any third party clients. So that includes:
- https://deer.social (forked client)
- https://zeppelin.social (forked client + independent appview)
- https://blacksky.community (forked client + independent appview + custom rust impl of PDS + custom rust impl of relay)
And a bunch of others like:
- https://anisota.net/
- https://pinksky.app/
- https://graysky.app/
And I could keep going. But point being there are a thousand alternative frontends and every other bit or piece to interface with the same bluesky without censorship.
And the only user facing components are the frontend and the PDS. The appview can't even see the user's IP, only the PDS it proxies through. So if you move to an independent PDS and use any third party frontend, even if you use the bluesky PBC appview, there is no direct contact/exposure to the company that could be exploited.
but Bluesky runs the API that all of these tools rely on
No it does not. That is the trick.
The client/frontend calls out to a set of XRPC endpoints on the user's PDS. The user can use any PDS they want but yes most users are on the bluesky "mushroom" PDSes. There are plenty of open enrollment PDS nowadays if you care to look around and want to switch away.
The appview have no ability to interact with the user directly so if you use any non bluesky PDS and non-bluesky client/frontend (both relatively trivial to do), then the appview is basically a (near) stateless view of the network which you can substitute with any appview you want (the client can choose the appview to proxy to with an http header) without ever touching bluesky the company.
And of course there are multiple appview hosts. As well as relay hosts (which the appviews depend on but not the user/client).
There are plenty of ways to go about using bluesky without yourself or the services you use ever touching bluesky the company's infrastructure.
so basically you can run a cache for them and they have the final say on all accounts/ids because nobody will see any federated content anyway.
you progress the grand parent comment point, with a lot more words.
No? I'm not sure how you got that out of anything I said.
Where does the firehose stream originate? From individual PDSes, or from the Bluesky relay that aggregates their repo events?
How do I do this then?
Everything but the relay (but you'd realistically only need the PDS): https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q
The relay: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
Edit: I mistook the bsky.sh domain, my bad. Can't get strike through to work for the life of me. I give up.
~~Bluesky blocked in Mississippi, try to work around it, only for the resource that tells you how to do this to be hosted on Bluesky, which is blocked. That's... suboptimal~~.
I can't help but feel like Bluesky is just three corporations in a trenchcoat pretending to be an open federated ecosystem.
Bluesky is just one corporation in a trenchcoat.
Bluesky is not decentralized. The AT protocol is - albeit with few large integrators besides Bluesky, but it isn't susceptible to like 51% attacks or anything so that's mostly okay.
Does it actually? (Genuine question.) The article doesn't get into specifics about how the block is implemented, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some non-trivial way around it.
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
The client checks https://bsky.app/ipcc locally on startup, and if the json object it gets contains "isAgeBlockedGeo : true" it displays the block message.
ublock origin filters can replace the contents of any page using regex.
TLDR it's a single geoloc RPC call clientside. you can just tag it with an adblock filter to kill it. Or use any third party client (my comment to OP has a bunch of them listed).
Interesting though: I wonder how long til site host lists and ad filters start shipping anti-censorship lists and features. We know some DNS provider is already doing it. (I forgot which one)
Reminder that Bluesky is not decentralized, and can be censored or bought out just like Twitter.
Can you elaborate on that? I thought you could run your own instance and your identity was in the EDID.
In theory, but is that actually the case today? I couldn't find any information about the current state of federation for Bluesky.
Contrast this with Mastodon which already has a vibrant federated ecosystem.
Yes, it is the case today. Its not a huge proportion, but there are thousands on external servers, and we recently had a nice sized migration to blacksky
If it is decentralized then a ban in a US state would have no impact. Did not know about blacksky though. That is at least -some- progress.
There are other instances running: https://zeppelin.social/
AT protocol is open source.
Bluesky is private but the underlying mechanism is OSS and accounts are portable.
Go build the replacement and people can port their accounts across.
... but any replacement you build will, in practice, have to include a single centralized "relay" that aggregates all content. Since that's a lot of content, it has to be run by a big, easily found, easily pressured organization. And everybody "porting their accounts across" means a flag day that's going to be almost impossible to organize in practice. It'd effectively be just as much work as switching to an entirely new protocol.
Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.
The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.
Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.
What is your example of an effective open network then? ATProto is specifically designed for effective discovery which means scale. The fact that you can sync the entire network - not a requirement but you can - is a positive. The trade then is, yeah, you have to actually sync the data.
Nostr actually does much better with content discovery recently. Partially because of the new "outbox model" of connecting to relays and partially because there are couple "nostr client" companies that do good job in people & top notes discovery (e.g. Primal - it's a centralized company providing quite good service to the open network).
> What is your example of an effective open network then?
I'm not sure there is one. But that's because I don't accept the idea that "likes" and "follows" are the best way to find content, or even a good way. If you do accept the idea that those should be your primary way of discovering content, which Bluesky does seem to accept, then decentralization becomes a more important criterion, and Nostr or even Mastodon is more effective that AT. Unfortunate about the culture on Nostr, though...
You could maybe build a system that I would think was better by, say, indexing Nostr using some kind of DHT. But you'd have to do some things to traditional DHTs to make them more attack-resistant. And maybe more things so they could scale to that size. Having "topics" like newsgroups or subreddits would be another approach, and could probably be grafted into pretty much any protocol.
Most people will never learn. It's an endless cycle.
https://archive.is/r8cfH
[dupe]
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
You reap what you sow.
[dead]
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Cool take. Shitting on the south is an age old American tradition. I have a hard time understanding why people gleefully have these attitudes towards fellow human beings. Does someone from Mississippi not deserve factual actual push back against these laws? If we can't fight it there, it'll be in Connecticut soon enough.
Hating on Mississippi is an age-old Southern tradition.
Unless you're from Mississippi, then you hate on Alabama.
By any number of metrics, Mississippi is the least developed, most backwater state.
My own personal metrics: Everyone's got that once racist uncle. Mine moved gleefully to Alabama. I have never known anyone who moved to Mississippi. Or from there!
I bet MS has some amazing old homes out in the swamp with great fishing.
you're probably from a place that is just as racist and backward as mississippi. maybe new england, the most racist region in the united states? if you feel this way about the south, just say you hate black people and be done with it.
Blue as they come (Illinois). And on the contrary, I reckon Ohio is far more racist than just about any place I've been. Black folks are just fine by me. Maybe you are trying to read between the lines instead of what I wrote?
When you consistently shoot yourself in the face despite all evidence because you believe it'll make you wiser, at some point rational people just need to point out that maybe you've blown your own head off too many times to make intelligent decisions and accept your agency for your actions. Mississippi is governed by fear, full stop. Specifically, a fear that their individual mediocrity will trickle down to their children and so they will vote to make life as difficult as possible just to make it harder for people in even lower social strata to compete with them. I've lived through decades of this stuff and watched it up close and personal.
They're SO racist that when you give them statistics about their state and their communities, the first thing they'll do is handwave them away because to them, statistics are irrelevant if they contain data regarding minorities UNLESS said statistics are there to condemn minorities. Same thing with people in different economic classes. Generalizations are there for them to make about other people, not the other way around.
Mississippi has one of the higher murder rates? Irrelevant to them because they have a higher number of black folks. Murder rates among whites in the state are high? Irrelevant because it's the poor whites who are murdering each other. At some point, you just have to accept that the conditions they're living in are the conditions they're choosing to live in and treat them accordingly.
I read the comment more as a criticism of Bluesky ("nobody actually uses it [except California liberals?]") than a criticism of Mississippi.
I live in the south bro. That was a dig towards bluesky being a shitty twitter clone.
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> get them to stop actively voting against their own interests
Such a tired trope that I wish would stop. The whole point of a plural democracy is that people will have different interests, and there are few things that rub me the wrong way more than the idea that people are too stupid to recognize what their own interests are and vote accordingly.
What do call it when they repeatedly vote to slash the health care programs that almost half the state relies on for coverage? For candidates that defund education and basic infrastructure investment? It is objectively against rational self-interest.
what do they call it when a lot of the people in the state don't vote because of a history of disenfranchisement? or when power is taken away from groups of people due to redistricting? when many people can't get to the polls because it's far away or they have work? and when the absentee ballot process is hard? or when they purge the voter registration, requiring people to re-register, if they realize it before it's too late? this last one happened to me.
less than 60% of eligible voters in the state cast a vote in the 2024 election. there was lower turnout in 2024 election among black voters. here is more data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
what do you call it when both candidates aren't good enough for those people, so they resign to not vote?
what do you call it when college-educated liberals disparage the poorest, blackest state in the union? definitely not progressive. maybe "racist"
While I share your frustration can I also share with you that I think your original take is entirely dim-witted and ignorant that populations are not singular voting blocs? That's to say, I lived in Texas for a long time as a leftist and people like you would come in to dunk on our suffering. Nearly half the state votes Democrat but that didn't matter to folks like you. It's unproductive and isolates more people than it gratifies.
There is a huge difference between accepting someone’s opinion about supply side economics or US foreign policy or heck even abortion rights than “understanding” someone who doesn’t believe that people shouldn’t be treated equally and with respect because of the color of their skin, their sexuality, etc.
I’m from South GA and spent all of my adult life until 3 years ago in Atlanta. I live in another red state now - Florida. I’ve spent enough time in the bigger cities in Texas to have a feel for it. Alabama and Mississippi are just…different.
Not sure that you and I disagree here friendo. I was replying to this (which was dead by the time I arrived): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44992082
What I was speaking to was the ignorance of referring to the entire state as a singular voting bloc. A lot of liberals and leftists will happily cut each other down over something as simple as geography by wishing ill on an entire state with some kind of "you earned it" smugness. Not super productive.
> “understanding” someone who doesn’t believe that people shouldn’t be treated equally and with respect because of the color of their skin, their sexuality, etc.
Can you steelman the culturally conservative viewpoint? I find this to be a big blind spot in today's progressive thinkers; i.e. it's hard for someone in that camp to explain why anyone would have voted for Trump, without dipping into the "they know not what they're voting for" or "they're just ignorant, racist, and hateful" buckets.
> Alabama and Mississippi are just…different.
I'm a visibly nonwhite immigrant who moved to one of those "different" states from a large coastal metro. I'm not treated any worse or differently in society.
Perhaps the biggest disparity I've noticed is that the Old South still believes that it's good for society for people of various backgrounds to assimilate to one central culture, whereas the more cosmopolitan metros seem to have declared assimilation as an imposition on minority groups.
I believe the former to be the correct position, and closer to the original "liberal" belief that anybody, no matter what they look like, will be treated equally as long as they are willing to play by the same rules. The latter viewpoint to me is very much like "separate but equal"; no one cultural group has any say over another, and there is not one standard set of behaviors that everyone is expected to conform to, because differences are valued over unity.
It has been fascinating to see, as someone with an outsider's background, the realignment of political thought over the past decade or two.
> Can you steelman the culturally conservative viewpoint? I find this to be a big blind spot in today's progressive thinkers; i.e. it's hard for someone in that camp to explain why anyone would have voted for Trump, without dipping into the "they know not what they're voting for" or "they're just ignorant, racist, and hateful" buckets.
I can’t possibly steel man why someone thinks it’s their right to tell another adult why they shouldn’t be able to date or marry who they choose whether it be someone of the same sex or someome of a different color. Liberty University just recently lifted the ban on interracial dating.
I am not saying everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. I hear some of the things that come from Democrats and I can perfectly understand why some traditional Republicans hold their nose and vote for Trump because the alternative is worse.
> I'm not treated any worse or differently in society.
And being an immigrant in the US (along as you aren’t Hispanic) is a completely different experience than being Black. I’ve moved to Florida now.
Have you spent time in “their spaces”? Have you gone to a White Evangelical church? Have your kids tried dating their kids?
Again I’m not saying “all white people are racist” far from it. I’ve tried to even distinguish between “George Bush”/“Mitt Romney”/“John McCain” conservatives and whatever the hell is going on now.
I lived in what was a famous “Sundown town” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town) until the early 90s. I didn’t move there until 2016 when I had a house built in the burbs. My six foot two 230 pound+ stepson who has lived in the burbs all of his life often got questioned walking down the street of our own neighborhood and when he went to the community pool.
> Perhaps the biggest disparity I've noticed is that the Old South still believes that it's good for society for people of various backgrounds to assimilate to one central culture, whereas the more cosmopolitan metros seem to have declared assimilation as an imposition on minority groups.
To be blunt, I don’t have to assimilate shit and neither does a gay person who wants to walk around with their partner just to make other people comfortable or any other non white/non straight person.
If you have an accent, of course they are going to be respectful to your face. But they are going to complain just like they complain when people are speaking Spanish to each other.
Another anecdote, now I live in a resort area in Florida upstairs from a bar that is all tourist besides us (long story). Every Friday and Saturday night, they have karaoke and a live DJ. It’s mostly your standard non offensive top 40 music from the last 20-25 years.
Around 10 o clock, a large Latin American group came. I was already talking to a guy from Puerto Rico. The DJ started playing a Latin playlist and they all started dancing, there was another group there from Alabama and you could just see the looks on their faces.
My wife and I (Black) hung around, my wife started dancing with them, I used my A2 level (https://www.colegioespana.com/en/levels-of-spanish-language/) barely fluent Spanish to talk to some of them who didn’t speak English.
They also didn’t owe it to anyone to “assimilate” and they appreciated the effort that I made.
I appreciate your viewpoint, though I disagree with some of it. I am not black, and I understand that this is a differentiating factor for some people. I personally know someone who has a troubled relationship with her family for, among other things, marrying a black man, so I know that old-school racism is still alive[0][1].
> They also didn’t owe it to anyone to “assimilate”
People around the world have wildly different expectations of what is considered normal behavior in public. In some parts of the world, defecating in public is acceptable. But I would not find it tolerable if someone were to originate from a place like that, come to this country, and engage in the same behavior. I would highly encourage such a person to assimilate to the norm in this country of not defecating in public, and were they not able to do so, I would be antagonistic against more of such people immigrating to this country.
I don't know whether in your anecdote the large Latin American group were tourists or people who live here. My expectations would be very different depending on it. Neither I nor anyone else expects tourists to be fluent in the local language and cultural customs. But conversely, I would not like to live in a country where I do not even speak the same language as my fellow countrymen; the very meaning seems to lose itself.
So, respectfully, I disagree fundamentally: those who choose to put down new roots in a different country absolutely do owe it to the existing inhabitants to assimilate. I, as an immigrant, owe it to existing Americans to assimilate to the American way of life. When in Rome, do as the Romans.
I believe there should always be open dialogue on what the culture exactly is to assimilate to, and such things should change slowly over time, but to suggest that nobody new owes anything to those who were there before seems neither true nor good immigration policy.
> To be blunt, I don’t have to assimilate shit and neither does a gay person who wants to walk around with their partner just to make other people comfortable
> I can’t possibly steel man why someone thinks it’s their right to tell another adult why they shouldn’t be able to date or marry who they choose whether it be someone of the same sex or someome of a different color.
Would you draw the line anywhere? Does any adult have the right to tell another anything, especially if they are of different groups (however you may slice and dice it)? Does anyone owe anything to the society around them? Are there norms that everyone is expected to adhere to, despite the fact that some people are naturally further away from those norms than others? Because it seems like the West has tried saying no to all of these questions for 50 years, and it has resulted in atomized and fractious societies where people, despite material wealth unimaginable to previous generations, are so, so unhappy.
I would like to live someplace where people treat each other fairly and as individuals, without regard for stereotypes of whatever cultural, ethnic, religious, sexual, or other background such individuals may belong to. I do not believe that this is at all possible without everyone playing by the same set of rules.
Let me extend your anecdote about your stepson, to illustrate my point: it is a failing if a white youth of the same size who was dressed exactly the same and behaved the same way did not get stopped and asked questions the same way your stepson did, only by virtue of the color of his skin. But it is equally a failing if white adult were to find a black youth's behavior to out of the ordinary in a negative way[2], but was not able to voice any concerns solely out of racial sensibilities. Both mean that one is putting immutable group characteristics over the individual.
My thesis is thus: we can either have a multiethnic society where we all debate what "the ordinary" is and agree to follow it (notwithstanding the likelihood that the debate, by virtue of numbers, ends up near the dominant group's preferences), or we can have monoethnic societies, either in parallel ("separate but equal" where each group plays by their own rules with minimal crossover) or as the eventual result of a vicious struggle between the factions that leaves only one standing. There is no alternative that is sustainable over the long term. My clear preference is the first.
[0]: But perhaps on life support, to quote Sowell.
[1]: As you have alluded to, one might reasonably believe that the current progressive viewpoint on race is making race relations worse.
[2]: Only a hypothetical example; I am not saying that your stepson was engaging in any behavior out of the ordinary. The same applies for any two different groups.
> I would highly encourage such a person to assimilate to the norm in this country of not defecating in public, and were they not able to do so, I would be antagonistic against more of such people immigrating to this country.
Do you also believe that Muslim women should be forced to take off their hijab or that it should be illegal for them to wear burkinis in public pools like the laws they passed in France?
Should gay people not hold hands in public because it may make straight people uncomfortable?
When a Spanish family is speaking to each other in public, should they speak English? This really offends some people.
I go to a barber shop where everyone speaks Spanish and they play Spanish music. Most of them speak English also. But when they speak to each other, they speak Spanish. If I happen to go to the barber who doesn’t speak English, I switch to my limited Spanish and keep it moving.
The “norms” the culturally conservative want is perfect English without a foreign accent, straight, Christian.
> So, respectfully, I disagree fundamentally: those who choose to put down new roots in a different country absolutely do owe it to the existing inhabitants to assimilate. I, as an immigrant, owe it to existing Americans to assimilate to the American way of life. When in Rome, do as the Romans.
If someone can manage in this country catering to people who speak their language, why should it be anyone’s business if they speak English?
> But it is equally a failing if white adult were to find a black youth's behavior to out of the ordinary in a negative way[2]
This kind of thing happens all of the time to Black people living in White neighborhoods. Ving Rhames was in his own house minding his business and got SWAT called on him.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/actor-ving-rhames-said-...
How many times has a White person been harassed outside of their own home and having to prove they live there.
> or we can have monoethnic societies, either in parallel ("separate but equal" where each group plays by their own rules with minimal crossover) or as the eventual result of a vicious struggle between the factions that leaves only one standing.
Or we can do like I’m suggesting and treat people like people, celebrate the gay couple, mixed race couple, etc who decide to get married. Dance salsa when the Latin music comes on. Be willing to sing along with the country music, hip hop, rock, music when the DJ plays it.
When me or my step son is walking in the neighborhood where I was making twice the median household income of the most affluent area in Atlanta (working remotely for BigTech), mind your business instead of putting a message on NextDoor about a strange Black man suspiciously walking into his own house with a key.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-chief-orders-probe-handcuff...
The current administration which benefits only billionaires which make up a tiny fraction of the population proves that yes people aren't capable of voting for their interests.
It may rub you the wrong way, but it's happened many times throughout history. Paradox of tolerance and all.
Well it’s true. The cuts to healthcare and other budget cuts are going to hurt people in Mississippi more than California.
If you ask them why they vote the way they do, it’s because their “interest” or some combination of Trump was sent by God, we must save Isreal so Jesus will have a place to come back to (I don’t have an opinion about Isreal, I just think that’s a crazy reason), evil immigrants and something something “fighting woke idealogy”.
Can you name a single modern Republican policy that would help people in Mississippi?
And I emphasize modern because nothing about today’s national Republican Party resembles the one I’ve known from 1980-2016 or even between 2016-2020 when many held the line against some of the craziness.
And if your response is Democrats have also gone too far in the other direction and out of touch, you won’t get any argument out of me.
Your right that interests are varied but to be more specific, what's being pointed out is that people are manipulated into focusing on an emotional interest (hating woke or whatever the current thing is) so that they'll vote against their practical (economic) interests. It's a perennial marshmallow test failure.
They aren’t being “manipulated”. This is no different than the old “Segregation Now. Segregation Tomorrow. Segregation Forever.” George Wallace inauguration in the 1960s.
The south has always cared more about culture wars than their own self interest.
FWIW: I have lived in the south all 51 years of my life - GA until 3 years ago and now Florida.
> The south has always cared more about culture wars than their own self interest.
Another way of saying that they[0] value preserving their culture more than economic or financial concerns, is it not?
[0]: Insofar as any group of people can be generalized, of course.
> they'll vote against their practical (economic) interests
Not everyone's top policy priority is what will get them the most taxpayer dollars redistributed in their favor.
I think everyone has an interest in supporting their addiction to food and shelter.
Yet for the most part, the most Republican leading states are the poorest and already have the largest imbalance of tax and flows versus tax outflows…
You don’t think California and New York contribute less to the government than they receive?
> I think everyone has an interest in supporting their addiction to food and shelter.
Maybe if one's income is so low that all they can afford is food and shelter. But this is a rich country, and even Mississippi is very rich by global standards[0]. So there are surplus dollars beyond what goes into food and shelter, and people disagree politically on how much of it should be taxed and what it should be spent on.
I am merely one voter, but I am an example of someone who does not vote solely to enhance my own economic interests, whether spent on food and shelter or not. I will happily take the hit to my wallet for other causes I find worthy. Indeed, I would be extremely skeptical of someone whose highest political imperative was to funnel as much tax dollars as possible to their own wallet, even though by some definition this might be the most "rational" voter behavior.
> the most Republican leading states are the poorest and already have the largest imbalance of tax and flows versus tax outflows
> You don’t think California and New York contribute less to the government than they receive?
This is a point that gets raised often, but there are many confounding factors here, besides "Democrat rich, Republican poor" (and the implication that there is a causal relationship).
At its core, "California" and "New York" don't contribute anything; the people residing in those states who pay taxes do. And, conversely, the people residing in those states receive transfer payments. So you really want to look at the individuals who are net payers of taxes vs. net recipients of taxes and see how they vote and why they live where they live, to get a better idea on what policies may favor contribution.
At a national level, both higher incomes and higher accumulated wealth predict voters favoring Republicans over Democrats[1]. In fact, even among registered Democrats, those with higher incomes or wealth are roughly twice as more likely to vote for the Republican candidate in an election than those with low incomes or wealth. If Democratic policies were truly better for wealth creation, then why would wealth-focused individuals cast their votes the opposite way?
[0]: It has a higher median household income than Germany, which is not a country anyone thinks is poor.
[1]: http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/lwswps/19.pdf
Now compare the life expectancy, education levels, infant mortality rates, etc of Mississippi and Germany?
How many people in Germany don’t have access to health care compared to Mississippi? If you were out of work for a year, would you rather be in Germany or MS?
If California didn’t receive anything from the federal government and didn’t have to pay taxes to the Federal government and the same happen to MS, whose states citizens would be better off?
Let’s go a step further, if all the Blue states were a country and all of the red states were a country, which hypothetical country would be better off?
I vote for policies to help other people. The people in MS voted for a President who promised to hurt the evil brown people, the pet eating Hatians and to “own the libs”
What about the people that didn't vote for this? Every election is 49/51 so when someone says "they're getting what they voted for", half the people are getting the opposite of what they voted for.
It wasn't close to 51/49. The south doesn't work like that. I've lived here my whole life.
In 2024 Mississippi went 61/38 for Trump. They haven't sent a Democrat senator to DC since 1982. In their most recent state house/senate cycle, 2023, overall voting was 62R vs 34D.
They voted for this.
OPs point wasn’t about the exact stats, it’s just that there is a significant percentage of people in a state that don’t agree or support their government.
I’d consider 38% significant.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan took 44 of 50 states, Jimmy Carter took 41% of the vote. In electoral terms a party taking 38% of the vote is almost a non-entity. You don't come close to succeeding in a first past the post system with those numbers.
"here", yet you say "they"... What's that about?
I live in the south, but not in Mississippi.
"The Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act" ("HB 1126") was passed essentially unanimously by the Mississippi state legislature.
And 100% of voters in Mississippi voted for the representatives currently in the legislature?
Elected legislature. You haven't proven anything against their point that a minority is unrepresented.
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Your writing is confusing and your use of slurs is disgusting. Stop it.
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You could very well read that as praise for Mississippi