I guess they’re trying to insinuate that there’s a conflict of interest because he worked for a government agency and Wikileaks leaked documents pertaining to that government agency.

But, like… That would be like saying no judge could oversee the case of someone who attacked a courthouse because they work for the same legal system. That would be a real loophole in the law if by breaking the right ones, you just couldn’t be tried anymore.

I can almost understand the Personal Liberties Libertarian, which I think is what the philosophy was originally supposed to be about. But we often see Corpo-National Libertarians or Totally-Not-An-Anarchist-I-Swear Libertarians, and both of those are baffling to me.

Yeah. If this hadn’t been banned already in Canada, it makes me wonder what other laws I just assumed were common in Western republics and democracies actually aren’t.

THAT HITS HARD, RIGHT HERE, IN MY EMOTIONAL PROCESSING UNIT.

Well, time to fill my life with meaningless debauchery, because it’s not like there’s a future to plan for.

Wait, wait, wait… The average middle-class voter who is struggling to get by is starting to turn away from the Tories and their leader’s suggestion is to reduce taxes on the wealthiest people? Not to improve services or perhaps address the issues that drove former conservative party voters to Labour. No. Cutting the taxes of the elite, further reducing funding for services that the majority of voters use or rely on is the obvious answer.

I also noticed that both here on Lemmy and over on Reddit that there’s been a push of pro-Russian talking points and a huge push towards Islamaphobia for the past few days, starting just before the attacks this weekend.

I understand there’s going to be some natural anger over the attack, but the amount of accounts I’ve seen, especially noticeable here on Lemmy because we just don’t have as many users, who are saying things like, “This is just what Muslims are like,” and, “Western countries accept these kinds of people, so expect them to do the same there,” and other racist bullshit talking points. They’ve also been painting the ongoing conflict as unquestionably one-sided in Israel’s favor.

It’s depressing but kind of to be expected that there’s a psyops campaign going on trying to get people outraged at not just Hamas, not just Palestine, but all of Islam right now while simultaneously trying to paint Ukrainian surrender and pro-Russian propaganda. This horrible act of terror was either in part planned by Russia or at the very least is seen as an easy opportunity to try and weaken Western support of repelling their invasion of Ukraine. Just spending a little time in the wrong circles on social media should make that obvious.

Is it actually reducing harm to fight to the last Ukrainian though?

When Russia is trying to commit genocide against Ukraine? Yes.

One of the things that made me really like Sanders when he was first campaigning for president was when I looked up his record on American war and he had a voting record that tended to follow a quote from him that amounted to something like (paraphrasing), “War should be the last resort, but if a war is started, we need to see it fully see it through.”

It’s not like siding with Ukraine and getting into that conflict is supporting warfare. It’s seeking to prevent warmongers from profiting off a senseless war. The idea that abandoning Ukraine to just be invaded and allowing Russia to get whatever they want by force is an, “Anti-war,” stance is fucking absurd.

Honestly, this edit of the comic comes off as the cat being annoyed about not being fed after the owner either died or had an emergency they never returned from.

I thought Lemmy was supposed to be the best free speech alternative

I don’t think there’s any useful definition of a “good” free speech website. Because everyone’s going to disagree on the criteria of what makes one good. Myself, I like more moderation, but I like that moderation to be held accountable in an attempt to keep the moderation higher quality and honest. Some people see free speech as no moderation, total anarchy, and I hate that, I’ve seen some websites that tried that, it turned into hate speech and revenge porn and other terrible things very quickly.

I don’t really know how you can threaten someone when you need them more than they need you.

If you leave town, where are you going to go? The city doesn’t need you. If you’re not making what you want/need here, go ahead, leave, the city won’t be hurt by it. You will, though. Because you’ll have to pack up your business, set it up somewhere else, and hope that they do the things you want them to. It’ll be expensive for you, won’t mean a thing to the city.

So how is it a threat?

You joke, but I’ve seen those kinds of arguments, especially online.

Some time back, someone argued that global warming was a self-solving problem because the oceans reflect light and heat energy back out into space, so as the earth warms and the oceans rise, the ability to reflect that heat will increase and we could even go back into an ice age because of it.

That is, of course, not really how it’s going to go. Massive ecological collapse and possible human extinction would occur due to the initial warming, first off, even before you get to the arguments about… Everything else at the crux of that.

For a long time, one of the talking points of climate change denial wasn’t that it wasn’t happening but that it was normal for us to go through heating and cooling cycles, so just deal with it and wait it out, we survived the last ice age so we can survive this heat wave, right? But again, that’s mostly bullshit.

If Chicken can be a language, that can be a language!

And I don’t mean the actually useful programming language. I mean the esolang one where the only valid character is Chicken.

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To some extent, I agree. But while you’ll never craft a perfect response and some people will always call your response, “Not enough,” or, “Disengenous,” there are better and worse ways to do it. Dan Harmon sexually harassed a coworker, created a toxic work environment, and harmed one of his writer’s careers. When that started to come out, he talked to her first, then he laid all the cards on the table, took full responsibility, and talked about how he’s trying, not always succeeding, but trying to improve and not do the same things again. It’s impossible to ever say that a simple apology is enough, but even the person he hurt said that his was the kind of apology that people should strive for. It was brutal, honest, and it didn’t shy away from anything. He admitted fault and talked about the very real and non-idealized path forward.

LMG’s response… Was horrible. Even if the apology was only for the bad data stuff, it felt like one of his joke videos like the April Fool’s Day slave farm video, in tone. Sponsor segues, jokes, merch promotions, things like that. I admit that maybe a little humor could be justified because some people make jokes when they’re stressed out, I do that! My mom was damn near on her deathbed a few years back, barely made it out of that alive, and between the sobs, I cracked jokes because that’s how I handle things, so I fucking get that! But that was a scripted video that was supposed to be their apology to the fans, and it felt like an insult. They didn’t feel like they were taking the accusations seriously, it didn’t feel like they were taking responsibility for the problems, and it didn’t feel like they were serious about making changes going forward. It felt like a hollow, “This will help us ride out the storm,” response.

So, I agree with you that even if they’d done the best apology video they possibly could have, people would have still criticized them for it. You’re right. There’s no way around that. But it doesn’t change that that’s not what they did. They put out that apology video instead. And that was just an insult.

So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.

I don’t think it’s that unusual, really. LTT and Linus specifically have had people accuse him before of being unprofessional or creating a toxic work environment or bolstering a toxic fanbase or putting out bad content or all those things. Things I didn’t know about because I just started getting into his stuff a couple of months ago. But all those things are being reexamined now because he lost favor for a second. The Gamer’s Nexus video opened him up to be criticized where normally he’d have a loyal fanbase that would rush to his defense. But even then, it wasn’t until he made that first bad response and Gamer’s Nexus responded to the response and called out his gaslighting on the topic that a lot of the controversy blew open.

People who had long been ignored or felt like they weren’t safe to speak out against the harm they felt LMG or Sebastion had done to them saw an opportunity to let their voice be heard. And people who had been ignored in the past are being looked at again in new context and by more people. This is a common thing. People often feel frightened to speak out about something because they feel they’ll be dismissed or punished for it. Everything from people simply telling them to suck it up because that’s just life to people threatening violence to people getting you blacklisted. This is why after just a couple of sexual abuse allegations started coming out, an entire flood of them suddenly were made public and #MeToo happened. That was a case where speaking out against producers, writers, directors, actors, or anyone else big in the motion picture industry would usually be an end to your career, so most people weren’t willing to do it. And most of the ones who had spoken out in the past were made fun of, actually laughed at, before being blacklisted and relatively forgotten by the wider audience. An individual victim had no power to do anything, but once a few did, some of the others joined, and then it became a movement.

The LTT scandal won’t be anywhere near the same size as that, of course. It’s one relatively small company. But my point is that it’s the same phenomenon at a different scale. The group and specifically Linus have a fan base that has been absolutely brutal to dissenters before. Sebastion on the WAN show and in previous replies to criticism always dismisses it as invalid and that emboldens his fanbase to hit back at people who are, “Just hating,” or, “Don’t understand what they’re talking about!” The Gamer’s Nexus videos started to form a little wedge between Sebastion and his fans as they showed how he wasn’t being fair to them either. That created an opening.

Not actually what I meant. I would have no idea if he mixed personal money and business money directly, but as the co-owner of the business with his wife, and last I knew they were the only owners but I’m not actually certain about that, they could have allowed for the company to keep a better safety net and reduced their own take-home as owners even while keeping their compensation as CEO and CFO. Instead, they made a lot of large purchases, I’m not sure which allocation they took this stuff from because a lot of it was their own but a lot of it also became content for the channel so I have no idea if it was personal or company money they spent, while claiming that the company was in a debt that would take years to see any return on much less profit. It seemed a little tone-deaf to be moving from a small mansion to a “real” mansion while also complaining that the company they owned and at the time were CEO and CFO of was taking on dangerous levels of debt.

Now, I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have a salary or that he shouldn’t be able to spend his own money. But he’s talked before about how his finances and the company’s profits are closely linked as the owner of LMG. He has said, “Any extra profit that we have as a company goes in my pocket,” when trying to explain how he thought stepping down as CEO and hiring someone else would create less incentive to run the company for maximum profitability. That has… It’s own problems that tie in with his wanting to keep employees hourly and not salary and a bunch of other things, but none of that was my point or the point of this comment. The truth is that we don’t know how he runs his business in great detail or how the financials are handled. But at the very least, it was not a good look even at the time before this most recent controversy.

Well, then it’s a good thing that he didn’t also blow a bunch of money on a mansion, a “true” mansion, and then a badminton court. That would have been a real waste of money that could have gone to a safety net for the company instead, so, you know, it’s great that he didn’t do anything like that.

I like what Linus states

I’ve only watched LMG content for a few months, but this out-of-context snippet sums up my feelings on the company.

Sebastian says that it’s a consumer-first, employee-second, profit-third company. But his actions don’t always support that.

Sebastian says that he doesn’t believe anyone should ever be a “fan” of anything because it’s irrational. But then he turns around and dismisses anyone who doesn’t show his brand absolute loyalty.

Sebastian says a lot of shit which sounds absolutely amazing if you can assume it’s true. And the problem is that you can’t assume that the company line is true coming from any company. You can just watch their business practices and make the best judgment on if the company seems honest. And Linus Sebastian, who effectively is the company as the owner and face of it, has increasingly come off as dishonest. It makes it damn near impossible to trust any of the good things he says that he does.