Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis

The whole point of that to which you are responding to is that that needs to change.

This is true, but I think you underestimate Miller. He's the actual Hitler in the White House. He is literally the person doing Trump's thinking for him, and is an actual Nazi bent on world domination by a white "master race". He's the one behind the concentration camps.

That feels like a cop out to me. It's a religion. We're being ruled by a huge, dangerous, well-organized religion bent not just on world domination, but world annihilation.

No.

Like, preventing PayPal from accepting prepaid cards does not seem to have anything to do with preventing blackmail scams, except insofar as they wreck prepaid cards so cc companies give up selling them all together and they no longer exist.

Completely agreed. But from where I'm sitting, I don't see any efforts on the part of the feds to work on the latter, just preventing the former.

What does? Are you imagining the present US gov't takes an interest in preventing that?

The American people don't understand why anonymous financial transactions are a bedrock necessity for a society not succumbing to fascism.

Unfortunately they're about to learn in the worst possible way.

Different war.

I confess I'm surprised to hear you say that. That's like saying the govm't war on encryption is partially justified bc criminals use encryption.

Hey, @proton.me, serious suggestion: when prompting the user to pay by credit card, have an alert for this fact. "ACCOUNTS PAID BY CREDIT CARD ARE NOT ANONYMOUS. Paying by credit card links the name on the cc to this account in a way that we CANNOT keep confidential from a valid subpoena."

I don't know this for certain, but it smells like the US feds strong-arming cc processors (again/more).

The US DHS has been waging a secret back-end war against anonymous digital transactions for a couple of decades now, hence my suspicion that's what this is.

In addition to what @rahaeli.bsky.social said: this is a space I monitor, and it's getting harder and harder to buy things online *at all* w gift cards. PayPal has stopped allowing them, for ex; any vendor using PayPal for cc processing them will reject a prepaid card.

Note: I assume this is also all true of making donations to Signal.

Signal allows users to set up monthly donations, and maps them to specific Signal accounts. Presumably this means Signal is subpoenaable for that information.

Should Proton have been more forthright and clear about this? Absolutely.

At the same time, they're not wrong in insisting they provide the highest level of security it is legal for them to provide: actual email contents and metadata remain inviolate.

This is essential to the nature of credit cards in the present legal moment thanks to something called "Know Your Customer" (KYC) laws.

There is a technical term for engaging in cc transactions that evade the KYC laws and that term is "money laundering".

Eh, even this comment is unclear in its representation of what Proton can and can't do for its users. It's really simple. A Proton account cannot be anonymous if it's paid for by a credit card. Proton cannot keep confidential which credit card paid for an account.

A fair cop. My apologies.

Heh

They are equally unconcerned with national security and hurting bad guys. This is about securing their own personal interests as they see them.

Like terrorists who learn to take off in an airplane but not how to land it, they are wholly unconcerned with how any of this works out. Merely that they get it started.

I think there is a very important third option. The Trumpistani Right believes, both rightly and wrongly, that it is an oppressed underdog with one last desperate chance to impose its will on the US and world. They don't expect to be in power past the midterms. So they're speedrunning their agenda.

this should scare anyone who works for a hyperscaler, because your data centres, nay, your offices, could be viewed as legitimate targets of war.

This is why the left lost the unions. Tell someone enough that they're not one of you, they'll eventually believe you and look for other friends.

It's also classist af for a reason entirely aside from economic access. The liberal white-collar assumption that "has a degree=one of us" and "doesn't have a degree=one of them" is just straight up stereotyping. It's just bigotry.

Markwayne Mullin is awful and corrupt for many reasons.

Not having a college degree is not one of them.

I know plenty of people W/O degrees who have more moral backbone, smarts, common sense, and compassion than at least half of Congress. Mullin isn't one, but not bc he did not graduate college.

"Is it "unfair" to have to dedicate social resources toward persuading them to do something they should?" No, that is literally the fucking job of primary care, the one they are expected to do but not trained to.

Hiring people actually trained to have conversations with patients about their health behavior in the hopes of changing it is not some extra service on top of what everyone gets. It's actually delivering to patients what they should have been getting all along, but generally don't.

From my perspective as a psychotherapist – a medical professional whose specialty is behavior change and who went through an entire graduate course of study on the topic of eliciting behavior change – PCPs are untrained lay people presuming to do our jobs unaware of how incompetent they are.

Alternative take: a vast amount of the job of a primary care physician is convincing their patients to change their behavior – not just vaccines, but diet change, exercise, specialist referrals, medication regimens – and they receive no actual training on how to elicit behavior change in a patient.

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military

EXCLUSIVE: At more than 30 installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been “inundated” with more than 110 complaints.

One NCO said they were told the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus…