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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • For the U.N. and international prosecution of genocide, intent is important—there has to be evidence that a government set out deliberately to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. …

    there is some evidence to suggest that the Trump administration did in fact intend to use COVID-19 to target certain political and racial groups. According to reporting from Vanity Fair, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner shelved a federal COVID-19 testing plan because he believed that the virus would mostly affect Democratic states, and the administration could then blame Democratic governors for deaths. Blue Democratic cities are disproportionately home to Black people and other minority populations. A federal plan to allow deaths in blue states inevitably and predictably disproportionately facilitated the deaths of Black people and other people of color.

    Black death rates and Hispanic death rates from COVID-19 were 2.3-2.5 times those of white people, according to the CDC. Indigenous death rates were 2.2 times those of white people.

    Wow, that is pretty damning. The only reason it might technically not be genocide is that he targeted a political group, (which just happens to have the most minority members,) as a proxy for specifically targeting minorities themselves.

    Ironically, their denial of pandemic reality seems to have ultimately led to more Republican deaths than Democratic:

    Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats from March 2020 to December 2021







  • I’m getting used to the slight UI differences but it has a similar vibe. The biggest difference to me is the server/global federated dynamic. I like that it’s owned by individuals running communities rather than a megacorp mining data and engagement for profit. I’m also on mastodon, but I never used twitter so I feel like there’s fewer expectations to unlearn.



  • Digg was a site that was a lot like reddit, it was incredibly popular until they did a site redesign that many users hated and they were unable to roll back, engagement went way down, users looked for alternatives, and reddit got most of the refugees. I haven’t been back on digg for many years.

    I thought reddit learned its lesson from digg given they kept legacy old.reddit.com running even after their own redesign, but they failed to remember that 3rd party interfaces to their API is almost the same thing; users like interfacing with their social media using the UI/UX design they chose and grew accustomed to. If they take that away, it risks alienating users and driving them to alternatives.

    If reddit was smart they’d make it so that people with reddit gold can keep using API access instead of locking them out entirely.