The iDumb Pro Max flip phone with next gen T9, starting at $1399
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How about this for evidence? Taken from M1ch431 elsewhere in this thread
The original source is a verified, leaked email (dated April 23, 2015) from her 2016 campaign. The DNC plan was attached in the email and can be found here. The specific quote is from Salon.
No form, just whisper ‘sudo apt-get install femboy-starter-kit’ into the void and they will arrive within 24 hours
lmfamao@lemm.eeto Technology@lemmy.world•Apple adds red exclamation mark warnings on EU App Store listings for apps using third-party payment systems, not Apple's “private and secure payment system”English163·24 天前Oh, bless Apple’s heart, always looking out for us! It’s purely coincidental that their “concern” aligns perfectly with protecting their profit margins and crushing any semblance of competition. I’m sure the irony of a company that has faced numerous privacy concerns itself is completely lost on you. And I’m sure that little red exclamation mark isn’t designed to scare anyone into using Apple Pay exclusively. No, absolutely not. It’s just good, old-fashioned corporate altruism! 😊
lmfamao@lemm.eeto Technology@lemmy.world•I tried another Iron Man-style exoskeleton and now I'm stronger than ever | TechRadarEnglish9·1 个月前This is how every single IoT company works. This is the standard. You can even tell from the app that they used a shitty templating app that makes this app look the same compared to every other shitty IoT app.
lmfamao@lemm.eeto Technology@lemmy.world•I tried another Iron Man-style exoskeleton and now I'm stronger than ever | TechRadarEnglish81·1 个月前You literally have to establish cloud access first by registering an account or SSO then signing in before even using the app. Then you grant Bluetooth access. You can download the app and see right now.
At ANY point this company can collect your data or do any combination of things from the list I mentioned.
lmfamao@lemm.eeto Technology@lemmy.world•I tried another Iron Man-style exoskeleton and now I'm stronger than ever | TechRadarEnglish183·1 个月前The app doesn’t have to exist. Calibration can happen via other means.
You’re zeroing in on this one app’s supposed utility, missing the broader, well-documented pattern of issues with app-dependent, cloud-connected devices. The fundamental problem isn’t this specific app, but the systemic risks: data harvesting, planned obsolescence when servers shut down, and companies shifting terms post-purchase. Dismissing valid comparisons because the product category differs is a smokescreen. The concern isn’t an assumption based on nothing; it’s based on a consistent history of consumer-unfriendly practices across the IoT landscape.
- Google Nest Secure: Bricked by server shutdown (announced for April 2024).
- Revolv Smart Home Hub: Bricked by server shutdown after Nest acquisition (2016).
- Vizio Smart TVs: Caught collecting and selling viewing data (settlement in 2017).
- Sonos Older Speakers: Attempted forced obsolescence through a “recycle mode” (faced backlash around 2020).
- iRobot (Roomba): Privacy concerns over mapping user homes and data sharing (surfaced significantly around 2017-2022, especially with Amazon acquisition talks).
- Anki (Cozmo/Vector Robots): Company folded, impacting cloud server access for full functionality (2019).
- Cloud-Based Pet Feeders: Multiple brands have had server outages causing failures (ongoing issue, specific examples like Petnet in 2016 & 2020).
- Wink Smart Home Hubs: Imposed sudden mandatory subscription fees (2020).
- Philips Hue Smart Lights: Increased account requirements and phased out older bridge support (various changes, e.g., original bridge support ended 2020).
- My Cloud Home Drives (Western Digital):Local file access blocked during server outages (notable widespread outages in 2021 and 2023).
- “Smart” Padlocks: Prone to software/hardware failures and security vulnerabilities discovered (ongoing, e.g., Tapplock issues reported around 2018-2019).
- Chamberlain MyQ Garage Doors: Blocked third-party integrations (significant moves around 2023).
Skepticism isn’t an “assumption based on nothing”; it’s pattern recognition.
Exactly. They passed the CR and Schumer blew what leverage Dems had at that moment.
Or you know, maybe putting up a bit more of a fight by not actively voting for trump’s picks like Bessent or Duffy. Not exactly Ws, but 🤷
Your latest missive pivots rather dramatically from the pretense of philosophical debate to a flurry of ad hominem attacks and mischaracterizations. It seems when the foundations of your argument grew shaky, you opted to critique the architect rather than the architecture. Let us dismantle this new edifice of deflection, brick by rhetorical brick.
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The Mirage of Inconsistency: You accuse me of shifting sands, yet it is you who seems unable to grasp nuance. To state that agency exists within profound systemic constraints is not a contradiction; it is the very definition of navigating oppressive structures. Resistance being difficult or rare due to these constraints does not magically erase the possibility or the moral weight of choice – it merely highlights the cost, a cost whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden demonstrably paid. To hold both truths – constraint and agency – is complexity, not inconsistency. Similarly, acknowledging proportionality in guilt (Nuremberg) while insisting responsibility extends beyond the absolute apex is not contradictory; it’s precisely how sophisticated legal and ethical systems function, something you conveniently ignore by focusing solely on the very top tier of defendants. Your demand for simplistic binaries forces you to see contradiction where there is only layered reality.
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The Phantom Quote & The Ad Hominem Shuffle: You attribute phrases to me – “enjoying murdering civilians,” “joining up to shoot people” – enclosed in quotation marks, implying direct citation. Let the record show: this is a fabrication, a straw man sculpted from bad faith. My critique targets the function and outcomes of military institutions and the roles within them – the deployment of lethal force, the upholding of imperial interests, the predictable generation of civilian casualties. To conflate this structural critique with accusations of individual bloodlust is a deliberate, and frankly desperate, misrepresentation. Your subsequent pivot to my supposed motivations (“judging from a safe distance,” lacking “courage” to speak to veterans) is a textbook ad hominem fallacy. The validity of a critique of systemic violence does not hinge on the speaker’s personal proximity to its agents. One need not personally interview every CEO profiting from exploitation to critique capitalism, nor every soldier to critique militarism. The system, its logic, and its effects are the subject, not the individual psyche of every participant – though the system certainly shapes that psyche.
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The Patronizing Plea for “Humanity”: You position yourself as the champion of the working-class enlistee, painting them as purely reactive victims navigating “impossible choices.” While acknowledging the brutal reality of economic conscription is crucial (a point I’ve consistently integrated), your framework uses this reality as a shield against any ethical scrutiny. You offer a vision of “dignity” that amounts to infantilization – treating individuals as incapable of moral reasoning under pressure. True dignity lies in recognizing their capacity for choice, however constrained, and demanding systems that don’t weaponize poverty against them and others. Your call to “see their humanity” rings hollow when it serves primarily to silence critique of the violent systems they are compelled (or choose) to serve. Empathy should not require ethical blindness.
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The Illusion of “No Path Forward”: You lament that my position offers only “judgment.” This willfully ignores the tangible effects of cultural shifts driven by critique and stigma. Reducing the social license of militarism, questioning the automatic valorization of service, challenging the normalization of state violence – these are paths forward. They erode the foundations upon which recruitment, funding, and political support for perpetual war are built. Policy change rarely happens in a vacuum; it often follows a profound shift in public consciousness, a shift fueled by the very “moral gatekeeping” you disdain. To demand neat policy proposals while dismissing the cultural work that makes them possible is, again, a strategic evasion. Accountability itself is a constructive step.
In conclusion, your argument has devolved from debating principles to impugning motives and constructing straw men. You oscillate between portraying soldiers as helpless pawns and moral agents depending on which framing best deflects criticism. You demand empathy as a substitute for accountability and mistake pragmatic analysis of constraints for a denial of all agency. This isn’t a robust defense; it’s a tactical retreat into sentimentalism and misdirection.
The path beyond the horrors of imperialism and state violence isn’t paved with comforting evasions or the blanket absolution of all who participate under duress. It requires rigorous critique of the systems and a clear-eyed understanding of the choices made within them – scaled by power, yes, but never entirely erased. It demands we hold faith in the capacity of all people, even the oppressed, to engage in moral reasoning and, sometimes, courageous resistance. Your framework, which offers paternalistic pity instead of demanding accountability and radical change, ultimately serves only the systems we both claim to oppose.–
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Let’s take a different tack, because it seems like you’re not fully comprehending how much your arguments have not only shifted drastically since the beginning of this exchange, but are crumbling under their own contradictions.
Let’s hold your words side by side, while maintaining context:
You initially claimed: “Acknowledging how systems limit choice isn’t denying moral agency—it’s recognizing its realistic boundaries.” Yet later, you dismissed whistleblowers as exceptions: “Manning and Snowden don’t simply represent ‘rare courage’—they had specific access… that made their actions possible.”
So which is it? If systemic constraints merely ‘bound’ agency, why frame resistance as requiring “extraordinary circumstances”? You can’t simultaneously argue that choice exists within constraints and that dissent is so exceptional it proves nothing.
You insisted: “Responsibility must scale realistically with power, knowledge, and genuine choice.” But when pressed, you narrowed this to: “Nuremberg focused primarily on leadership… distinguishing between architects and participants.”
Except Nuremberg did prosecute mid-tier actors—a fact you ignore to protect your hierarchy of guilt. You demand “proportionality” but define it to absolve all but elites.
You accused me of “mistaking moral absolutism for moral clarity” while arguing: “Effective movements… focus on policies, not individuals.” Yet earlier, you praised the civil rights movement for “strategic targeting”—which included boycotts that shamed individual businesses and exposed specific perpetrators.
You vacillate between “systems matter, not people” and “sometimes people matter” to dodge scrutiny.
You framed enlistment as survival: “The teenager… isn’t making the same ‘choice’ as your philosophical thought experiment assumes.” But when I noted enlistment often involves cultural factors (glory, legacy), you pivoted: “The working class deserves… recognition as moral actors.”
So which is it? Are enlistees helpless victims of circumstance or moral agents capable of questioning systems? You toggle between these to avoid conceding that poverty limits—but doesn’t obliterate—choice.
You cited Nuremberg to argue “accountability requires focus”—yet ignored that the trials explicitly rejected “just following orders” even for low-ranking SS. You cherry-pick history to sanitize complicity.
You claimed: “Real change comes through political organization… not moral gatekeeping.” But later admitted: “The anti-war movement… normalized draft-card burning.” So suddenly, cultural stigma is part of “pragmatism”? Your definition of “practical” shifts to exclude critique when inconvenient.
Conclusion: Your argument isn’t a coherent stance—it’s a series of tactical retreats. When pressed on agency, you cite constraints. When shown resistance, you dismiss it as exceptional. When confronted with history, you cherry-pick. This isn’t systemic analysis—it’s intellectual arbitrage, exploiting ambiguity to evade hard truths. It seems that consistency is the first casualty of your philosophy.
Your rebuttal rests on a series of selective interpretations that obscure the interdependence of systemic and individual accountability. Let’s clarify:
You argue for “proportional accountability” but define it so narrowly that it functionally absolves anyone outside leadership roles. Nuremberg, however, explicitly rejected this hierarchy of guilt. While prioritizing architects, the trials also prosecuted industrialists, bureaucrats, and doctors—not because they held equal power, but because systems of oppression require collaboration at multiple levels. Proportionality isn’t about exempting participants—it’s about calibrating scrutiny to their role. Your framework risks reducing accountability to a binary: architects bear guilt, while participants bear circumstance. This isn’t nuance—it’s evasion.
Resistance is costly, yes—but so is complacency. The Underground Railroad conductor risked death, but we don’t retroactively excuse those who didn’t resist; we honor those who did. Their courage doesn’t demand heroism from everyone—it exposes the moral stakes of participation. To say “most couldn’t” doesn’t negate the imperative to act; it indicts the system that made resistance lethal. Dismissing dissent as “exceptional” rationalizes passivity.
Your claim that whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden had “extraordinary access” distorts reality. Manning was a low-ranking analyst; Snowden, a contractor. Their roles weren’t unique—their choices were. The My Lai massacre was halted not by a general but by Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who intervened. Moral courage isn’t about hierarchy—it’s about recognizing ethical breaches and acting, however imperfectly. To frame their actions as outliers is to ignore that systems crumble when enough cogs refuse to turn.
The civil rights movement did target institutions, but it also stigmatized individuals—Bull Connor, George Wallace, and the white citizens who upheld segregation. Rosa Parks wasn’t a passive victim of buses; she was a trained activist making deliberate choices. The movement understood that systemic change requires both policy shifts and cultural condemnation of those who enforce oppression. Boycotts didn’t just bankrupt businesses—they made racism socially untenable.
You frame systemic reform and cultural critique as opposing strategies, but they’re symbiotic. The draft wasn’t abolished through congressional debate alone—it collapsed under the weight of draft-card burnings, desertions, and a generation rejecting militarism. Stigma isn’t a substitute for policy—it’s the cultural groundwork that makes policy possible.
Your “realistic expectations” argument conflates constraints with absolution. The teenager enlisting to escape poverty still chooses to join an institution they know causes harm. To say they have “no choice” denies their moral agency. Solidarity isn’t excusing participation—it’s fighting for a world where survival doesn’t require complicity in empire.
Finally, your “pragmatism” mistakes resignation for strategy. True change requires uncomfortable truths: systems and individuals must both be challenged, complicity persists even under constraint, and moral clarity isn’t about purity—it’s about refusing to normalize oppression.
Your rebuttal rests on several conflations that demand clarification.
You claim systemic analysis and individual accountability are incompatible, but this is a false divide. To recognize how poverty funnels people into militarism does not require absolving their participation in it. Acknowledging coercion is not exoneration—it’s contextualization. The working-class recruit and the defense contractor both perpetuate the machine, but through differing degrees of agency. Moral scrutiny need not be all-or-nothing; it can—and must—scale with power and choice.
The dismissal of historical resistors as “exceptions” misunderstands their purpose. Exceptions disprove inevitability. They reveal cracks in the system, not its invincibility. To say we shouldn’t celebrate Underground Railroad conductors because most enslaved people couldn’t escape would be absurd. Their rarity doesn’t negate their moral significance—it underscores the brutality of the structures that made rebellion so perilous.
Your Nuremberg analogy falters upon closer inspection. While leadership was prioritized, the trials explicitly rejected the “just following orders” defense, convicting bureaucrats, doctors, and industrialists who enabled atrocities. The lesson was clear: systems of oppression require collusion at multiple levels. To focus solely on policymakers is to ignore the ecosystem of complicity that sustains them.
Regarding whistleblowers: Manning and Snowden were not elites. They were low-level operatives whose choices, while exceptional, disprove the notion that dissent requires privilege. Most service members encounter ethical red flags; few act. This isn’t to condemn all who stay silent, but to reject the claim that silence is inevitable. Moral courage is always a choice, however costly.
You argue that effective movements focus on institutions, not individuals, yet history contradicts this. The civil rights movement didn’t just target Jim Crow laws—it shamed segregationists, boycotted businesses, and made racism socially toxic. Cultural stigma and policy change are symbiotic. To exempt individuals is to sanitize activism into a bloodless abstraction.
Your “pragmatism” conflates strategy with fatalism. Yes, we must dismantle systems that weaponize poverty. But refusing to critique those systems’ participants isn’t pragmatism—it’s resignation. The anti-war movement didn’t end the draft by politely petitioning Congress. It normalized resistance: burning draft cards, sheltering deserters, stigmatizing recruitment centers. Cultural shifts are strategy.
Finally, your concern for “alienating allies” presumes veterans cannot handle nuanced critique. Many already do. Organizations like Veterans for Peace or About Face openly reckon with their past roles while condemning militarism. True solidarity trusts people to grapple with complexity—it doesn’t condescend by shielding them from tough questions.
In the end, your framework mistakes compassion for evasion. Believing in systemic change doesn’t require absolving individuals—it demands we hold both the cage and its keepers to account. Revolutions aren’t built on pity for the exploited, but on faith in their capacity to resist, even within constraints. To lower that bar isn’t kindness. It’s despair.
lmfamao@lemm.eeto Fediverse memes@feddit.uk•They have started federating again, lord help us.English1·2 个月前deleted by creator
Your rebuttal is a masterclass in conflating material constraint with moral exemption, blending pathos with logical slippage. Let’s dissect:
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The Privilege Paradox
You frame my insistence on moral agency as “privileged abstraction” while positioning yourself as the arbiter of working-class reality. This is paternalism disguised as solidarity. To claim poverty negates moral capacity is to reduce the oppressed to instinct-driven animals, not complex humans capable of ethical reflection. Yes, systemic coercion funnels people into the military—but to say they lack all choice is to deny the countless working-class resistors throughout history. The Black Panthers, the GI coffeehouse organizers, the Appalachian draft counselors—these weren’t Ivy elites. They were poor people who chose defiance. Your narrative erases them to sustain your fatalism. -
Fractal Responsibility ≠ Equal Guilt
You misrepresent fractal accountability as “meaningless guilt,” a classic strawman. No one claims the mechanic shares equal blame with the general. We assert they share complicity in differing degrees. Nuremberg’s prosecutors didn’t equate IG Farben chemists with Hitler—they tried both, sentencing accordingly. To dismiss all layered culpability is to endorse the myth that oppression requires only villains, not collaborators. -
The Whistleblower Dodge
You dismiss Manning and Snowden as “exceptions” to absolve the majority. But exceptions disprove your determinism. They prove that even under duress, moral choice persists. Were their actions rare? Yes. Difficult? Profoundly. But their existence refutes your claim that systemic coercion annihilates agency. Your logic suggests we shouldn’t praise any act of courage because most people conform—a surrender to moral mediocrity. -
The False Binary of Stigma
You pit “stigmatizing institutions” against “demonizing individuals,” another strawman. The two are inextricable. To stigmatize the military as an institution requires condemning its function—which necessitates critiquing those who perpetuate it, however reluctantly. This isn’t about “purity”; it’s about refusing to valorize participation in imperialism. Your plea to “embrace veterans as allies” presumes they cannot be both victims and complicit—a nuance my framework allows. Veterans can critique the machine they served while acknowledging their role in it. See Rory Fanning, who left the Army Rangers and became an anti-war activist. -
The Futility Gambit
Your “status quo” accusation inverts reality. By quarantining blame to policymakers, you protect the system’s foundation: the myth of passive foot soldiers. Power doesn’t reside solely in the Oval Office—it’s reproduced daily by millions of acquiescent actions. The Vietnam War ended not just because Nixon faced protests, but because draft resistance, GI mutinies, and desertions crippled the war effort. Change requires pressure at all levels. -
The Myth of “Either/Or” Reform
You present policy change and cultural critique as opposites—a false dilemma. They’re symbiotic. The draft wasn’t abolished by congressional benevolence but by mass resistance that made conscription politically untenable. Similarly, defunding the military-industrial complex requires both legislative action and a culture that rejects militarism. Stigma isn’t the end—it’s the spark. -
The Poverty of “No Alternatives”
You fixate on enlistment as the “only viable path” for the poor, but this fatalism ensures no alternatives emerge. Why not ask why the U.S. offers more funding for bombers than for rural schools? My critique doesn’t attack the enlistee—it attacks the system that makes enlistment a “choice” at all. Demanding better options requires first rejecting the legitimacy of the current ones. -
The Coercion Canard
You conflate coercion with compulsion. Poverty limits choices; it doesn’t erase them. The 18-year-old who enlists to feed their family still chooses to prioritize their survival over others’. This doesn’t make them a monster—it makes them a moral agent whose decision warrants sober scrutiny, not blanket absolution. To say otherwise is to reduce ethics to a vending machine: insert desperation, receive exoneration.
Conclusion: The Luxury of Low Expectations
Your entire argument rests on a patronizing premise: that the working class is too besieged to bear ethical consideration. This isn’t solidarity—it’s condescension. True allyship means holding people capable of moral courage, even (especially) when systems seek to crush it. To lower the bar for the oppressed is to deny them full humanity. Revolutions aren’t won by those who see only constraints—they’re won by those who, even in chains, find ways to rattle them.
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The insistence that systemic opacity erases moral awareness is itself a weapon of that system—a seductive lie that confuses compartmentalization for innocence. The drone pilot may not see the toddler incinerated by their Hellfire, but they know the missile’s purpose isn’t philanthropy. Institutional fog does not absolve; it presupposes complicity, relying on participants to accept fragmentation as exoneration. To claim soldiers “lack exposure to consequences” is to ignore the voluminous after-action reports, the veteran testimonies, the very public debates about civilian casualties. Ignorance in the information age is a cultivated posture, not an inevitability.
You romanticize enlistment as purely economic desperation, reducing complex moral agents to survival automatons. But this infantilizes the working class you claim to defend. Yes, poverty funnels people into uniform—but so do recruitment ads selling glory, family legacies of service, even the thrill of weaponized masculinity. To flatten enlistment into mere survival is to deny the interplay of coercion and choice. The 19-year-old joining for college funds makes a different calculation than the contractor re-upping for a reenlistment bonus. Both perpetuate the machine, but only one faces true precarity. Moral scrutiny isn’t cruelty—it’s respect, a demand that we recognize their capacity to question the system that exploits them.
Fractal responsibility doesn’t “atomize” blame—it calibrates it. The mechanic servicing a bomber isn’t as guilty as the general who orders its deployment, but neither is they innocent. Nuremberg condemned industrialists alongside officers because systems require collusion at multiple tiers. Your framework, which quarantines guilt to the top, is a gift to power: it tells the CEO, “Only your underlings will face scrutiny,” and whispers to the soldier, “You’re a pawn, unworthy of moral consideration.” True justice scales accountability to agency—it does not vanish it.
You demand “concrete change” while dismissing stigma’s catalytic role. Cultural condemnation isn’t an end—it’s a means. When society stops valorizing military service, recruitment stalls. When engineers face scorn for optimizing kill-chains, talent fleeds the sector. When the VA nurse is asked, “How many insurgents did you stabilize today?” the mythology of heroism crumbles. Your fetish for “practical” policy ignores that laws follow cultural shifts, not precede them. The Civil Rights Act didn’t spring from legislative goodwill but from decades of stigmatizing segregationists.
Vietnam proves nothing but your own misreading. The error wasn’t critiquing service—it was directing that critique at conscripts instead of the war machine itself. Stigmatizing the uniform, not the wearer, is the goal. When we shame the institution, not its conscripts, we drain its moral capital.
Your “false binary” charge is projection. You—not I—insist we must choose between condemning architects or laborers. I reject this. The drone pilot’s choices matter because the senator’s do. Guilt isn’t zero-sum; it accretes. The ICC prosecutes warlords and child soldiers because both sustain conflict. To absolve one is to empower the other.
Finally, your concern for the “working class” is paternalism masquerading as solidarity. True allyship isn’t absolving the poor of moral reckoning—it’s refusing to let them be cannon fodder. To say they “lack agency” is to doom them to perpetual serfdom. The GI who leaks war crimes, the Snowden who exposes surveillance—these aren’t philosophers. They’re proof that even the desperate retain shards of choice. Your worldview—that only the privileged can afford ethics—is the true elitism.
You call my stance impractical. I call yours complicit. Revolutions begin when the exploited stop rationalizing their exploitation—when stigma becomes the spark, not the suffocation.
Your fixation on “practical realities” is itself a surrender to those realities—a capitulation to the notion that systems are too vast, too opaque, to demand individual accountability. Let us dissect this. You claim soldiers lack awareness of consequences due to institutional compartmentalization, but this assumes moral negligence is excusable if engineered efficiently. The drone operator who never sees their victims still knows their joystick commands a Reaper, not a toy. The technician troubleshooting missile guidance systems understands their work enables precision strikes, not crop dusting. Obfuscation is a feature of the machine, yes, but complicity requires active participation in maintaining that machine. To confuse structural opacity with individual innocence is to confuse fog for absolution.
Ah, but the economic argument—always the last refuge. You frame enlistment as “survival,” reducing moral agency to a calculus of desperation. Yet this ignores that survival itself is a spectrum. The 18-year-old enlisting to escape poverty makes a different calculation than the contractor renewing their clearance for a third deployment bonus. Both choose to perpetuate the system, but only one faces true precarity. To flatten all service members into victims of circumstance is to erase the hierarchy of choice within the very structures you defend. The working class deserves more than your paternalism—they deserve recognition as moral actors, capable of questioning the systems that exploit them.
Your dismissal of fractal responsibility as “atomized blame” again reveals your discomfort with nuance. No one claims the mechanic bears equal guilt to the general—only that both bear some. Proportionality is key. The janitor who sweeps the death camp floor is less culpable than the architect, but still complicit. To deny this is to argue that oppression requires only a single guilty mind to function, rather than a constellation of choices. The Vietnam War did not persist solely through LBJ’s orders but through the collective acquiescence of manufacturers, recruiters, and yes, soldiers. Scrutinizing one layer does not preclude scrutinizing others—it demands it.
You ask, sneering, how stigmatization aids reform. Let me educate you. Stigma is not cruelty—it is the withdrawal of social license. When society stops valorizing military service as noble by default, recruitment declines. When engineers face scorn for designing surveillance tech, talent flees the sector. When the VA hospital nurse is asked, “How many civilians did you ‘save’ by stabilizing bomb-makers?” the mythology of heroism cracks. This is not about shaming individuals but dismantling the cultural infrastructure that makes perpetual war palatable. Your beloved “political solutions” are inert without cultural shift—the Civil Rights Act didn’t spring from legislative goodwill but from decades of stigma levied against segregationists.
Your Vietnam analogy is telling. You claim stigmatizing veterans failed, but you misdiagnose the failure. The error wasn’t critique—it was directing that critique at traumatized conscripts rather than the war machine itself. We must stigmatize the institution, not the broken individuals it discards. The anti-war movement’s flaw was compassion misplaced, not principle misapplied.
As for your “false binary” accusation—projection, as ever. You are the one insisting we must either condemn the architect or the laborer, as if moral gravity cannot hold both. I reject this scarcity mindset. The drone pilot’s choices matter because the general’s do. Guilt is multiplicative, not competitive. The ICC indicts warlords and child soldiers because both, in their measure, fuel conflict. Your worldview—that accountability is a zero-sum game—is what truly protects power. It whispers to the CEO: “Fear not; they’ll only come for the low-level engineers.”
Finally, your concern for the “working class” rings hollow. True solidarity isn’t absolving the poor of moral scrutiny—it’s demanding they not be used as cannon fodder in wars serving oligarchs. To say they “have no choice” is to doom them to perpetual serfdom in the empire’s engine room. I propose something radical: that even the desperate retain shards of agency, and that treating them as moral infants—incapable of resistance, unfit for critique—is the true elitism. The Black GI who fragged his racist commander in Vietnam, the Chelsea Manning who leaked atrocity footage, the Edward Snowden who exposed mass surveillance: these were not Ivy idealists. They were cogs who chose to jam the gears.
Your plea for “practicality” is just fear of friction. All revolution begins as philosophy—as stigma, as refusal, as inconvenient questions. You want tidy solutions? Start here: stop sanctifying killers, and you’ll get fewer of them.
It’s literally propaganda. For some reason I subjected myself to watching the BBC video that the article referenced and screenshotting the Korean text that the BBC video purports is autocorrecting terms in real time. Below are the findings
The only (half) correct claims they make are the “South Korea” and “comrade” translations, but they could just have set the autocorrect in the phone’s settings for each and every word in this video, before making it lmfao
Completely baseless claims and frankly pathetic attempt. Crazy how this shit spreads like wildfire