EZ Lynk is the name of the app for anyone too lazy/busy to read the article and want to know which app to uninstall.

I mean I kind of see what you’re saying but it doesn’t really pass the smell test.

Yelling in someone’s face is assault. Spreading harmful lies about specific individuals or businesses is lible. Speech that incites violence is not protected by the first amendment. And the rest: January 6th and the misinformation machine aren’t something that can really be legislated. Lies unfortunately are protected speech unless they incite imminent violence. As much as I would like to hang the raid on the capital on Trump I watched his speech (and Bannon’s) and he only ever implies violence. The crowd whipped themselves up into the violence frenzy we saw that day.

Words absolutely can cause harm in the right conditions, but the ones that do the most damage would definitely not be hate speech. Fox News ran a segment last year where one of the hosts said homeless people should be killed and within a few days there were three separate incidents where armed men walked into homeless encampments and opened fire. I think the death toll was 9 people across the three events. But fox news spreading lies about ivermectin and masking during covid killed potentially tens of thousands. In the case of the homeless what the host did was already illegal, but the lies can’t be legislated.

The more I think about it the less I’m concerned about hate speech. The things that need to be illegal, inciting violence, already are, and the things that aren’t are murky at best and a slippery slope at worst. Especially when you consider who would be determining what is or isn’t hate speech. Right now the powers that be would label your comment as hate speech because it’s critical of the gop.

Forgive my ignorance, but how can words infringe on the rights of others? As a member of a minority class with several hateful and hurtful slurs (that were on their way to becoming hate speech prior to the second Trump administration) I understand that some folks can get very upset but I don’t think anyone has the right to not be upset. I could be misunderstanding something though.

The Expanse

Absolutely not. No one wins an argument and it’s the least likely form of communication to result in any part changing their mind. Even formal debate with rules and timers doesn’t lead to changed minds often.

I personally strive to be factually and logically correct about anything I might discuss (that can be validated by facts or logic). Despite spending large portions of my time reading and researching so that I understand the world I live in better, I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve been able to change someone’s mind.

The truth is it’s very hard, bordering on impossible to change someone’s mind who isn’t open to it and most people are not. It’s easier to make a snap judgement and never reconsider it or let someone else form one’s opinion of something than to do the work to understand a topic enough to warrant having an opinion at all.

The extreme polarization of opinion and the politicization of basically everything makes it so that it’s rapidly becoming functionally impossible to interact with people of different ideologies as they now encompass most of one’s life.

Not books, but there have been a few creepypastas that had me on edge for weeks after reading them. There was one about a murderous doppelganger that disguised itself as a household pet that had me nervous around one of my cats.

I saw her napping in my living room and then a few seconds later sitting patiently by the bathroom. She must have slipped by me without me noticing, but I was a bit afraid of her for a while after.

Nope. All it really does is make the fight against perfectionism easier.

Good. I enjoy network security as a hobby and at one time a profession but even still I don’t envy your threat model. A state level actor as your adversary is next to impossible to foil. Tech-wise if it exists, they can crack it or recover it. Even a (software) shredded drive can be restored, it would just be very costly and time consuming for them. Heck it’s even possible to recover a physically smashed drive. On physical security, no amount of guns or prep can evade them. You’d basically need to hit the road in a car made before 2010 registered to someone else and use only cash to pay for things for the rest of your life. And even that’s not a sure thing thanks to the growing surveillance state.

Honestly there is little that could be done to protect one’s self in your situation. If going to prison isn’t an option for you, Hunter S Thompson always carried a revolver on his person in case he needed a way out, which he eventually felt he did.

If you’re tech savvy, use an anonymous crypto wallet to setup a server outside the 5 eyes countries and their allies and put all of your info there. Then destroy (with fire) any hard copies of the data you have. Be sure to ‘shred’ the local files with at least 50 passes once they’re uploaded, or better yet shred the entire drive and reinstall your OS. Then configure a dead man’s switch so that if you don’t log into the server as root every seven days the server will automatically send a full copy of the data to the press (the more places the better).

But you’d need to use tor plus a VPN from a car parked outside the range of any security cameras that has access to a public wifi network. A burner laptop with a hardened linux distro would be advised, and your server should be hardened as well.

Even with hyper paranoid levels of security that still doesn’t guarantee anonymity.

If you’re not already fluent with security tech, it would be highly advised that you don’t attempt the above. My advice would be to ditch tech entirely and get the data out of your possession. Put it all in a freezer bag and bury it somewhere. Give the coordinates to at least three people you would trust with your life with instructions to retrieve and distribute it if you get arrested, go missing, or die. That way if the feds do raid you there is nothing for them to find. Also don’t write anything down, memorize it and burn anything physical.

I have been trying to pick back up watercolor. I did a daily series last year and posted them on bluesky for a couple months before a depressive episode sapped my will to paint. I’m not very good, but when I can adequately muzzle my perfectionism and just have fun with it, I really enjoy it. Maybe one day I might even be good at it.

I did about 10 years ago. I was working as the entire marketing department for an Oil & Gas services company and I could not stand the owner’s son. At first we were friendly. He and I both struggled with mental illness and sort of bonded over being a little weird (I much more than him).

The problems didn’t start until he came back from a voluntary stay at a mental health facility determined to prove himself to his father. He took over my department (which was just me) and started making big sweeping changes to how I was supposed to work. He had a degree in business management and his only experience in marketing was that he was the CEO’s son.

We started clashing and arguing over every little thing and the more we quarreled the more involved he got. One day I was gchatting on my work computer with my SO at the time and expressed my frustration about the situation. Later that day he came by my desk to watch me work on a piece of collateral and saw that chat which I had forgotten about and left on one of my monitors.

From that moment on he was aggressively an asshole. His sister, the head of hr, put me on a performance improvement plan which is just HR code for looking for a reason to fire me. A few weeks later I was working on a major redesign of the website to reflect the new direction the President (my former boss) wanted to take the company, which Owner’s Son hated. He thought it was a waste of time so he set a bunch of really short deadlines he thought I would fail. When I came in on time and under budget for the second phase of the redesign he couldn’t keep the thin veneer of professionalism that kept our beef low key. He laid into the prototype as if it was final delivery and told me that if it were up to him he’d cancel the project (it wasn’t because I had gone over his head and got the entire C-Suite to approve the project). I was so angry I was shaking and all I could manage to say was that I was glad it wasn’t up to him.

I walked from his office to his sister’s and asked her to fire me (I gravely misunderstood the unemployment laws in Texas). After an hour of conversation she agreed and told me she would in a few days. Unfortunately for me my grandmother died the next day so I ended up taking a few days of bereavement leave. When I got back, while I was at lunch I got a notice from facebook that I had been removed as the admin for the company’s page so I knew before I finished my sandwich it was over.

I carried a grudge for many years after that and many times considered getting revenge. I even concocted a very vile plan to frame him for a crime by hacking his wifi and planting illegal content on his personal computer. Fortunately for everyone, I never did and eventually I realized the best revenge was to forget about him and live my life.

I wouldn’t say we’re past the point of reform, we lack the political will in our elected representatives and the numbers to force the issue. It is possible, but very unlikely, that we could flip the house and senate with enough progressive politicians that reform would be possible. However the establishment democratic party is unwilling to take the necessary steps or support the needed candidates. Their aim seems to be to become more centrist than they already were and maintain the status quo.

Unfortunately though the reality of the situation is very complex, ambiguous, and inundated with misinformation. Most reforms in the federal government won’t change the policies in red states, which are by far more egregious than what’s happening in Washington. While it’s likely true that there are no true red states, just gerrymandered purple states, there are still a sizable portion of the US population that want some or all of what’s going on in red states and the federal government.

There doesn’t seem to be enough political will among the left to carry out a revolution. Even if there was, there are almost as many right wingers (who are better armed, equipped, and trained) who would stand in opposition and turn the revolution into the second civil war.

Realistically while there are things that could be done to mitigate or stop the far right, not enough people seem to have the bravery, resources, and will to do what needs to be done.

Currently I’m listening to Tom Waits’ 1983 album Swordfishtrombones. The specific song playing is Frank’s Wild Years although it switched to the title track while I was writing this comment.

Waits for sure has some great songs, but he’s an excellent album artist and I would recommend Swordfishtrombones. It’s one of his best albums and I would whole heartedly recommend it. Mule Variations, Bone Machine, and Rain Dogs are also fantastic albums. Fair warning though, Tom Waits is very polarizing, you either love him or absolutely hate him.