• 6 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Good for you, and thanks for doing all that! I won’t prescribe a specific strategy, but for what it’s worth: as soon as I read the news about this today, I went and donated $10.

    I already liked him, but I don’t just throw $10 at everyone I like. But I saw this and immediately wanted his campaign to see strong fundraising this week and get the message that they don’t need to worry about this kind of thing.


  • Well maybe I’m wrong then. FWIW, you sound confident and credible to me.

    I do agree that it seems obvious that this was sent to CNN by Janet Mills rather than discovered in house. I was just saying that I think this kind of research is easy enough for CNN to do that they could, but I agree that based on the timing of Mills’ entrance into the race and the fact that I just don’t really expect places like CNN to be that proactive that, yeah, this was absolutely sent to them in an email that probably looked like: “Subject: Anonymous bombshell tip! ; From: PR@ millsforsenate. com”

    I’m curious how it works out. Attacking a guy running as an outsider in Maine for being pro-worker, pro-gun, and fed up with the system kind of sounds like they’re misreading the electorate. Like… don’t threaten Mainers with a good time, you know?


  • Really? You think so? I could be wrong, but that doesn’t seem at all the case to me.

    First, I think a lot of this is just skill. You dig around in the stuff that’s publicly known, find usernames and links to old bios, and then start searching for those usernames on every social media site to see if a unique handle appears on OkCupid, PornHub, etc.

    Second, on the resource side, there are tons of data brokers that have a ton of info on all of us. You don’t think CNN has $50 to drop on a file filled with tracking data on a senate candidate? I think even broke local newsrooms have access to license plate reader data and leaked medical records and a ton of super personal info. I don’t think they tend to use it, because a lot of them are understaffed and it’s less cost-effective than just writing up local police blotters and whatever appears on Nextdoor. But I don’t think it’s hard to get this stuff at all.




  • Andy@slrpnk.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlbe honest
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    8 days ago

    It’s kind of depressing to watch so many people just embrace this kind of naked smearing of someone.

    I don’t know Hasan’s work. I know Vaush, and I think he frankly sucks. In either case, I’d rather people just say, ‘Fuck that guy, I don’t like him as a person’ rather than diving into this practice of labeling everyone you don’t like as a pedo or some other flavor of sick abusive pervert. It’s gross.


  • I think it’s remarkable that you and several other folks actually give notice. Now-a-days, I think that’s somewhat unusual.

    A lot of people just bounce. Sometimes they don’t even bother telling anyone, they just don’t show up and stop picking up the phone. I hear about this happening regularly at my husband’s workplace (which to be fair is retail).

    I told my last boss when I began reaching final round interviews so that he could plan accordingly. A lot of people thought that was risky and that I should’ve just quietly lined up my next job and told him I was leaving once I’d accepted, but I liked him and liked the work (it was lab research. I wasn’t a big-time scientist, but I’d been managing the lab for a while and actually gave a shit about what we did).

    Regarding your situation, I think you did what you could and showed a lot more integrity than is common. Could you have stayed until your boss was back from vacation and then given a proper notice? If so, well… then maybe you should’ve. If not… then it’s unfortunate, but there wasn’t much I think you could’ve done.








  • 100%.

    I try to remind myself, though, that it would be a waste of time trying to yell at this tidal wave of rage that’s bearing down on us just as it would to yell at an actual tidal wave. I think we need to be grabbing sand bags and securing our food supplies and looking to get to the other side of this period of history. I think it could easily last a generation. And if we’re really, really effective (and lucky) it could be as short as another decade. But there’s no use rubbernecking or bellyaching. We just need to focus on fixing this broken-ass world.


  • I think you’re right not to spend any energy on this, and I agree that it would be performative to pretend to be sad that he left the world. In some ways, our society is better for normalizing honest reactions to things.

    However: I want to encourage you to think about what it means to define him as vermin. Within the meaning of this word is the belief that he is low enough on a hierarchy of worth that he no longer falls under the protections and values we afford to “human”. And furthermore, he is of a group that can only be effectively dealt with through extermination.

    Personally, I don’t think this is a useful philosophical concept. It’s very central to the philosophies that Charlie Kirk sought to popularize: the idea that some people, through their worldview and lifestyle have forfeited any minimum universal protections we afford to humans, and instead should be eradicated. Obviously, his criteria of human worth was more or less an inverse of yours, but personally I’d reject his overall framework.

    I’m really sure whether I truly disagree with it. But I definitely believe that the framework itself inherently benefits the fascist project far, far more than it could benefit a socialist project.

    I definitely don’t encourage you to mourn him. But I would encourage you to ask whether you really think there’s utility in agreeing with him at all on the principle that humans can be vermin.