Dystopian dispatches

Left-pessimist. Probably a bit old for this sort of thing.

[hauntologicalargument]

Remember how in the 2010s if you dared to question the wisdom of austerity you were a "deficit denier" who was going to bring down the wrath of the bond markets on the UK? And you know how, now that public services have gone to shit and poverty's skyrocketing, the same centrist pundits and politicians who fully supported austerity at the time are talking about how the problem is decades of underinvestment without a hint of shame? And how if any politician actually dares to call for more public spending to seriously address any of this then they're immediately attacked as a naive utopian who thinks there's a magic money tree?

This is a deeply unserious country.

[ltwilliammowett]

An old fisherman and a ship's boy on the deck of a sailing ship, by Hans Smidth (1839- 1917)

[utopicwork]

Discord forcing users to upload IDs and then having their service provider for this get hacked and leaking those IDs is incredible, they should be sued into the ground for this

Discord customer service data breach leaks user info and scanned phot…

[rubylang-official]

By the way, because they know they can get sued from stuff like this, they're making it so that you can't sue them. Make sure to opt out of forced arbitration with Discord so that you can sue them:

Reblog by @steamos-official

💬 367  🔁 27277  ❤️ 29662 · discord's new terms of service DO have a mandatory arbitration clause for the United States and Canada, you have

https://www.tumblr.com/steamos-official/796229383707852800

They're giving the option to opt out until Oct 29 of 2025 (2025-10-29).

[rfsnyder]

Marc Chagall A Wheatfield on a Summer's Afternoon, 1942

[philosophybits]

“No conclusions can be more agreeable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limits of human reason and capacity.”

— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

[leonardcohenofficial]

bertolt brecht, "a bed for the night"

[fiore-firelily]

[soracities]

“The majority of torturers are neither sadists — in the clinical sense of the word — nor incarnations of pure evil. They are men and women who have been conditioned to accept and then use a certain practice. There are formal and informal schools for torturers, mostly state-financed. But the first conditioning begins, before the school, with ideological propositions that a certain category of people are fundamentally different and that their difference constitutes a supreme threat. The tearing apart of the third person, them, from us and you. The next lesson, now in the schools for torture, is that their bodies are lies because, as bodies, they claim not to be so different: torture is a punishment for this lie. When and if the torturers begin to question what they have learnt, they still continue, out of fear of what they have already done; they torture now to save their own untortured skins.”

John Berger, “The Hour of Poetry”, Selected Essays

[politedemon]

absolutely incredible post from leo reich

[politijohn]

Source

[buckingfaseball]

here's the story. i know expressvpn has been recommended in some 🏴‍☠️ how-to posts but it is not trustworthy. the parent company, kape technologies, not only used to distribute malate but has ties to multiple state surveillance agencies. and be careful where you look for info about good vpns, because kape technologies owns a bunch of "vpn review" sites too

[hiddensandtrap]

In case anyone can’t read the article for whatever reasons, the VPNs acquired are:

ExpressVPN

Private Internet Access

Zenmate

CyberGhost

And the VPN review sites they purchased are:

vpnMentor

Wizcase

So if you use any of those, time to look for other options.

[the-falling-eagle]

@i-add-sources This post is about four years old — is it still true?

[i-add-sources]

According to Kape's own website, their "top brands" at this time are:

Express VPN

Private internet access

CyberGhostVPN

Intego Antivirus

Webselenese

Zenmate is part of ZenGuard GMBH, Which appears to still be owned by Kape technologies

VPNmentor is still owned by the Kape technologies, as is wizcase

Kape Technologies and it's predecessor Crossrider are owned by Israeli Billionaire Teddy Sagi

Crossrider started off by making a software development kit (SDK) for the deployment of browser extensions to a variety of platforms with support for monetizing extensions. The monetization options were used by major ad injectors which used man-in-the-browser to change or add advertisements to what users saw. Over time, Crossrider's services became increasingly utilized by malware and adware developers.

Aside from crossrider not actually distributing malware directly, this is all true.

[cryptotheism]

would you guys be mad at me if I got raptured

[witchcoil]

ct if i saw you getting raptured i would intervene and stop it

[cryptotheism]

You could stop it. My followers gotta grab my legs.

[hauntologicalargument]

[lastpositivist]

Lmao staff at a Nigerian hospital hung this up after a boss they didn't like was transferred away

[centrally-unplanned]

H/t to Andrew Gelman, the 404 page for the Financial Times:

[stillhereandstillqueer]

How it feels watching the co-founders of Your Party arguing before the party even got a founding conference

[guerrillatech]

[hauntologicalargument]

This is exactly what's going to happen in the UK. The Palestine Action proscription (unless it gets overturned) will be used by a future Reform government as a precedent to ban literally any progressive organisation they don't like.

[cannibalchicken]

[thenightetc]

@argumate

[argumate]

you verb noun?

[redfagdiver]

You verb noun? You verb noun like the comparison? Oh!! Punishment for title! Punishment for amount of time!!!!