Appreciate how good you have it. In America, child sex abuse material is only illegal when children were abused in making it, or if it’s considered obscene by a community. If someone edits adult actors to look like children as they perform sex acts, it’s not illegal under federal law. If someone generates child nudity using ai models trained on nude adults and only clothed kids, it’s not illegal at the national level.

Fake porn of real people could be banned for being obscene, usually at a local level, but almost any porn could be banned by lawmakers this way. Harmless stuff like gay or trans porn could be banned by bigoted lawmakers, because obscenity is a fairly subjective mechanism. However, because of our near absolute freedom of speech, obscenity is basically all we have to regulate malicious porn.

Both those jobs require PHDs, something only 2% of Americans ever get. It would be inaccurate to claim that there’s only a 1% chance of both your parents being doctors, but it is more exclusive than 1 doctor. They were definitely millionaires by the time he was an adult, and could probably afford excellent education for him since birth. The key thing is that closer you start to the bottom, the harder it is to become ultra wealthy.

It’s honestly amusing to see what batshit strategy Musk will use next to fuck up Twitter. It’s like he’s trying to force every smart employee to leave, drive away every advertiser possible, and get users to find other homes.

That’s just how the internet do. Not unique to lemmy.

LGBTQ rights activists were complaining about this already, and people didn’t listen. Using a more highly motivating issue like abortion is sadly necessary to get people to care. It could censor so many important issues, it’s a travesty it’s gotten this far.

To be fair, they aren’t exactly profiting from the current strategy.

That’s still not ok. It’s just normalized.

I don’t know what “willing cooperation” has to do with anything. The US government has the willing cooperation of millions and had the willing cooperation of a majority of Americans in the past. That doesn’t mean the US government didn’t do some of the worst shit ever during the peak of their popularity. It’s also not like consent isn’t manufactured in China.

If anything, it’s my belief in the similarities of the Chinese and US governments that makes me think they would do hateful things with their power. People in China are the same as people here. I don’t have a rose tinted view of people here either.

Except the Chinese government has way more control over their companies than the US government does. In fact, there has been an explicit push recently by the government to increase their control and ownership of companies. It’s also consistent with how most large states operate, especially ones with a history of trying to control ethnically Chinese people outside of their borders.

That isn’t to say that a ton of anti China sentiment isn’t racist; it’s just that one doesn’t need to be racist make such a prediction. It’s true that many people who hate China hate it for the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to take issue with.

I don’t know what it was called, but the purchasable blue check marks thing built off of an already existing service. It might have had a different name, I don’t remember.

I heard of several people paying for blue to be able to edit tweets and such before Musk bought it.

That’s because you’re well off in the international context. If you lived in an exploited country where life has been getting worse by many metrics for generations, you probably wouldn’t feel like we’re “moving in the right direction.” Most of Europe and America has benefited from the imperialism of global capitalism.

Climate change will kill billions, and there’s a decent chance that each one of us might be in those billions. Even if it won’t kill 100% of humanity, it will probably kill a number of governments, our current way of life, and there’s no guarantee it won’t kill me. It’s an existential threat in the same way that Russian roulette is.

I suspect the argument is that capitalism is fueled by desire, which is psychologically insatiable. Some would probably say that any system allowing capitalism will eventually be corrupted by it and lead back to the infinite growth capitalism we currently live in. It’s the belief that we have to totally extinguish it or it will come back stronger.