Explaining the sudden access for some users on Wednesday, X said a change of network providers had “resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”.

The company’s explanation had caught some observers by surprise.

“Everything that happened during the day led us to believe that it was on purpose,” said Basílio Rodriguez Pérez, advisor to ABRINT, the country’s leading trade group for Internet Service Providers (ISP).

Um… yeah. See… there’s this thing that people do called “lying.” It’s when they deliberately claim something other than what’s actually true.

There was likely a time when “incel” just meant “involuntarily celibate,” without all of the baggage, but then two things happened together.

First, a significant number of “incels,” most notably on 4chan, fell into a specific set of essentially misogynistic coping behaviors - primarily blaming the supposed hypocrisy and shallowness of women for their own problems.

And second, a significant number of smugly self-righteous bigots saw an opportunity to hurl self-affirming hatred at an undifferentiated mass of people without suffering the backlash they’d get if it was directed at a group that essentially enjoys protected status, and leaped at the opportunity.

So now the popular conception is that all involuntarily celibate men are “incels,” with all that that implies - that they’re not just involuntarily celibate, but shallow, hateful, misogynistic losers and assholes.

It could potentially help if involuntarily celibate men who don’t share the misogyny of the “incels” had their own label, but honestly I don’t think it would make much of a difference in the long run, because there are now enough asshole bigots reveling in their hatred of “incels” that they’d refuse to let anyone get away. Just like all other more traditional bigots, they’d cling to their self-affirming conception that the mere fact that an individual is of a specific race gender sexual orientation relationship status means that they’re necessarily foul and loathsome, so their hatred of them is justified.

True, and I indeed should have said “reflex” instead.

Seriously, WHAT is THE DEAL with conservative disinformationists scattering ALL-CAPS WORDS throughout EVERYTHING they WRITE?

My THEORY is that it’s MEANT as a SUBSTITUTE for LOGIC and REASON - that in LIEU of saying things that are ACTUALLY logical, reasonable or true, they JUST say things really LOUDLY.

It MUST be TRUE because it’s so EMPHATIC, right?

And it PROBABLY triggers a PAVLOVIAN response in the DUNDERHEADS who READ it. “LOOK at all the CAPS! This is MY kind of TRUTHINESS!”

It’s just… WEIRD. And sort of PATHETIC.

Lied. The word you want is lied. They lied.

Good to see this - this is a story that needs to be repeated often, so that more and more westerners will come to see where and how things went wrong, and most notably, who bears the responsibilty for it.

It’s also what first led me to the theory that the underlying goal of American Middle East policy is simply destabilization - that the American authorities, and the interests they represent, broadly seek to avoid the threat to western hegemony that would be posed by Middle East oil wealth administered by stable and progressive governments, and to provide recurring enemies to empower the military/industrial complex, so have deliberately pursued policies designed to keep religious fundamentalists and paranoid authoritarians in power.

I have no more right to interfere in someone else’s life than they have to interfere in mine.

Avoid people who don’t share that view.

Of course he is.

It’s really a very simple calculus - any deal is going to include a timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and if Netanyahu signs off on a deal that includes a withdrawal from Gaza, the hard right assholes are going to turn on him. And if the hard right assholes turn on him, he’s not going to be able to hold onto the office. And if he doesn’t hold onto the office, he’s likely going to jail, because he’s not just a psychopathic piece of shit, but a grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit.

And that’s really the whole deal right there - tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of people are dying and millions of people are displaced all so that one grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit can evade justice.

People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff

Ironically enough, that’s because they’re stupid.

He’s not just a manipulative psychopath, but a craven coward.

The entire Republican worship of him is weird, but that to me is the weirdest part. They seem to like him so much because he’s a conservative strongman, so he represents their ideal. But that means they have to be oblivious to the painfully obvious fact that his shows of political strength are really all about the fact that he’s a frightened little poseur.

He blames everyone else for everything he does, he constantly cries about how supposedly persecuted he is, and every time that someone challenges him, he has them killed. So he doesn’t have the courage to take responsibility for his own actions, much less to face their consequences or to stand up to anyone who disagrees with him.

Or in other words, he’s a coward.

And you know… that opens up a whole line of thought I haven’t followed before. Is the fundamental driver of conservatism fear? It appears to be anger - that’s the broad impression - that conservatives are angry and hateful. But is it really, underneath that, that they’re frightened and insecure?

I think that just might be the case. That explains a lot of things that didn’t make sense to me before…

Hierarchism never puts the working class on top.

The class on top, no matter its origins, is always and without exception and literally by definition the ruling class, and it inevitably and not coincidentally ends up broadly indistinguishable from any other ruling class throughout history.

“Their authoritarianism is bad but our authoritarianism is good.”

Said every hierarchist ever.

It amuses the hell out of me every time the conservatives whine about their brazen disinformation getting censored, since whenenver and wherever they get an opportunity (including, especially ironically, Facebook), they reveal themselves to be the most cowardly censorious people on the planet.

Everywhere, without exception, where conservatives have control, anything that even hints at undermining their comforting delusions is instantly censored.

But if anybody dares to censor anything they might want to say, including overt and deliberate lies, they wail and cry like the spoiled children they are.

What’s with this mealy-mouthed “extremists” stuff?

The Israeli government overtly supports the illegal settlers, and the IDF and the police actually distribute the weapons with which they then terrorize and murder Palestinians.

It’s not just “extremists” - it’s Israeli government policy in action.

Israel is a rogue state. It’s just that simple.

I guarantee that the explanation for this would become very obvious if one were to simply, as the cliche has it, “follow the money.”

I understand the desire for unmuted mikes, but I think pushing for them was a poor strategy.

All the way through, while the Trump campaign was trying to weasel out of this debate, the Harris campaign had the ethical upper hand, since their position was simply that this is the scheduled debate, with this host and these terms, and the Trump campaign already agreed to it, so put up or shut up.

Now, by themselves trying to change the rules, they’ve lost that ethical upper hand. They’ve gone from looking like the party with integrity simply expecting the Trump campaign to keep its word to just another set of schemers trying at the eleventh hour to go back on their word.

So the unspoken bit about RFK Jr. is that he’s a tweaker, right?

I mean, the details are all in the context of politically entitled progeny, but the underlying vibe I get from the stories about him is very reminiscent of the tweakers I’ve known over the years.

Israel is a rogue state.

Who said anything about striving to be different?

That’s at least as cringey as striving to be the same, and generally even more so.

Strongly agreed.

I’m reminded of the scene in Groundhog Day in which they have that one day that just unfolds naturally and is so wonderful, and then the next time through, the Bill Murray character tries to duplicate it, and it’s just awful and cringey.

Lemmy, given the chance, will (continue to) develop its own norms and memes and traditions, and be that much better for it. Just trying to duplicate Reddit here is not only doomed to failure, but cringey.