glimmung (u/glimmung)

glimmung commented on I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0% cmarmitage.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/rbanffy

readthenotes1 · a day ago

The author even says "Finland 1932 is the only clean win I can find".

So not 0.

Maybe 0 when the future dictator is invited to power as a deep state move, not by the people but by the government?

glimmung · 20 hours ago

Nope, the author's point is about what happens after fascists are elected, and he proposed no exceptions to that.

Finland was not cited as an exception. His point about Finland was that the fascists messed up - they tried to use violence before that point.

glimmung commented on Websites and web developers mostly don't care about client-side problems utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/zdw

glimmung · 6 days ago

This is hilarious - I have yet to get to the article, because (on a fresh Ubuntu Mate LTS install with the stock Firefox) I am redirected to: -

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/cspace-generic-ua.html

...which complains about an "HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this.", and I'm left thinking that the person behind this site does not care about client-side problems...

glimmung commented on X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links disruptionist.com/p/elon-... · Posted by u/confusing3478

goodpoint · 6 months ago

No, he did not misunderstand. This is 100% malice.

glimmung · 6 months ago

Username checks out!

glimmung commented on Meta Censoring '#Democrat' on Instagram mstdn.chrisalemany.ca/@ch... · Posted by u/vool

Wickedflickr · 7 months ago

I truly believe the Fediverse is a viable solution. I've found Lemmy to be an extremely viable alternative to Reddit. The fediverse, more than any other centralized solution, seems equipped to avoid the hellish pitfalls that profit-motive behemoths seemingly must sink into.

There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech?

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.

glimmung · 7 months ago

I agree. As well as the technical merits, it seems to me to be a better match for natural human interaction. Your point about citizen-owned media is well made - in the US we seem to be seeing the near-total collapse of integrity in commercial media - on the one hand it is dismaying to watch, on the other it is as clear a call to arms as we could wish for.

It's been good to see Bluesky up its video game in response to the TikTok nonsense. I'd like to think that the Fediverse could evolve to meet the expectations of people fleeing Facebook, Twitter & co, but it's not there yet. Those of us who are highly motivated (and I am, after recent events!) will make do, but I think it needs to be easier in order to get the critical mass required.

glimmung commented on Meta Censoring '#Democrat' on Instagram mstdn.chrisalemany.ca/@ch... · Posted by u/vool

baq · 7 months ago

In a way they did. Europe outsourced their defense to the US, energy to Russia and manufacturing to China, now getting <censored> by all three, rather predictably.

glimmung · 7 months ago

We also outsourced our social media. That has to change - it's literally not safe.

There is a lot of witless verbiage about the "town square", but precious little acknowledgement of the obvious fact that every town has its OWN square, and that's the point.

For the last decade my feeds have been polluted by "content" about Brexit and Trump, almost all of which has been noise/distraction/propaganda. I'm sick to the back teeth of it, and it's time to make it stop.

glimmung commented on White British students not allowed to apply for security services internship telegraph.co.uk/news/2024... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

immibis · 9 months ago

So are they barred from working at these places, or are they just not eligible to get there by means of programs that seek to increase diversity of hires and they have to get there the normal way instead?

glimmung · 9 months ago

No, they don't just work at these places, they run these places.

There may be some problems in UK society caused by upper class Harrow school boys (!), but the batch of those very same upper class Harrow school boys currently running the security services are obviously smart enough to recognise that getting the job done requires more diversity.

glimmung commented on A kid made $50k dumping crypto he'd created – then came the backlash wired.com/story/memecoin-... · Posted by u/kevinsync

ggm · 9 months ago

A kid made other people give them money for a specious investment based pretty much on the south sea bubble.

They then took the money and cashed out. Some of the other people who had bought in, then made the investment temporarily worth many times more than the original, which the kid who took the money had to watch because they had cashed out. Then it went silly.

Probably a few people made a lot of profit and most people didn't.

Everything about this was vaguely off, criminal and bad, but one person actually made that a feature and was committing other crimes on camera until the website got worried about their liability and shut it down.

Also just words. Some of them are terms of art back to the 18th century and before, rigging investment markets.

glimmung · 9 months ago

I don't think he _made_ anyone do anything, unless that's somehow a term of art?

glimmung commented on Ask HN: What happens to ".io" TLD after UK gives back the Chagos Islands? · Posted by u/MrsPeaches

vidarh · a year ago

Pet hate: Regularly running into dropdowns that list countries by name, but sort them by country code.

glimmung · a year ago

Thanks for explaining where that apparently random ordering comes from - drives me nuts too!

glimmung commented on Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later independent.co.uk/news/uk... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

jdietrich · a year ago

HM Inspectorate of Probation's review on IPP prisoners released on license paints a very different picture - of people with complex problems, chaotic lives and a high and ongoing risk of reoffending.

IPP prisoners can't be arbitrarily detained forever. There has to be a reason for the refusal of parole or for a recall to prison. There are clearly significant shortcomings in how IPP prisoners are supported, but it's also clear that a cohort of people who are living with drug addiction, severe mental illness and behavioural problems are going to struggle to stay on the straight and narrow even in ideal circumstances.

https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmiprobation/wp-cont...

glimmung · a year ago

Thanks for the link - will take some time for me to digest.

> people with complex problems, chaotic lives and a high and ongoing risk of reoffending.

Surely that applies to almost all prisoners?

I don't think that you have addressed my point though, which is that the people who have been given these sentences are not those supposedly targeted by the law.

I couldn't disagree with any of the points that you make, but I think we're talking past each other. There is a threshold at which these sentences might make sense, and we risk conflating discussion about those cases with the much larger number of problematic cases where the logic is - at least quantitatively - different.

glimmung commented on Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later independent.co.uk/news/uk... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

jdietrich · a year ago

The problem with IPP sentences is more complex than just "the government arbitrarily locking people up indefinitely". The IPP prisoners who are still behind bars are there for a reason - in every case I'm aware of, because they keep committing violent offences while in prison.

The psychological burden of an indefinite sentence is undoubtedly an obstacle to rehabilitation, as are the wider issues of understaffing and overcrowding in the prison estate, but let's not kid ourselves. IPP sentences were created specifically to deal with prisoners who habitually reoffend on release. These are people who were on a revolving door of offending and imprisonment before their IPP sentence, and who would almost certainly be stuck in that cycle again if their IPP sentence was quashed.

IPPs are unjust and the current government will almost certainly retroactively resentence most or all IPP prisoners within this parliament, but the underlying problem is still there. We could definitely do a better job of rehabilitating this cohort, but even the best-funded and most liberal systems have had fairly meagre success in actually breaking the cycle of reoffending; the much-heralded low recidivism rates in Scandinavia are substantially a reporting artifact rather than a meaningful difference in outcomes.

glimmung · a year ago

> IPP sentences were created specifically to deal with prisoners who habitually reoffend on release.

The whole point about this situation is that the sentences were applied to people who do NOT fit that description (not my just view, also the view of the architect of this atrocity, David Blunkett), so in the majority of cases in question your reasoning does not apply.