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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • That’s the stupid part, it doesn’t matter what it will look like at the beginning. It might be the best written documentation now, they can even implement the app correctly. The thing is, the jump from “people can use the internet” to “in order to access the internet you need to provide your government ID to your smartphone” is a big jump, one that can cost a politician career. The jump from “you need to use version 1.4.412 of the govenment id checker” to “you need to use version 2.0 of the Government Id Checker Plus” is minuscule. That’s where you introduce a persistent database of the tokens, somewhere on page 5 of the changelog. And only nerds care about that and nobody listens to them.
    It’s so fucking easy, Russia did this exact gambit in 2017, Kazakhstan couple of years before.


  • No, that’s an app on your phone. That accumulates a ton of data in a way that didn’t exist before. The government knows I exist. Now it knows every website I’m visiting, and my identity on those sites. Now the new politician in my country decides to be a little bit more corrupt, and asks the app maintainer “hey, can you gather IDs and home addresses of all the people who criticized genocide online last couple of years, I would like to execute them publicly”, and they can do it with basically one sql equerry. The only defense against that will be “but that’s illegal, there are laws against that!”, which is shit defense nowadays.


  • however “bigoted” seems to mean a wide variety of different things now

    No, no it’s not, there is a very clear definition of that. However, bigots like to muddy that in order to make their bigotry more social acceptable, but it’s important to not fall for that. It has the same “the left just calling everyone nazi this days therefore nobody is a nazi” ring to it, that nazis used to normalise nazism.




  • Victor Orban is also very much not Polish, but what does it matter, right?
    Anyway, sure, you’re technically correct, the most insane Polish Catholic is insane. Serves me right for trying to insert some literary flér of hyperbole in this serious scientific conversation.
    We were talking about popluational trends and statistics though, in which case I will explicitly say that I’m talking about “median” population, not literaly the extreme 0.1%




  • All what you’re saying and more are big problems by European standards. And yet, the most insane Polish catholic will be seen as moderate woke by the most enlightened American public. Polland’s remarkably high religious observance is actually 30% of Catholics attended a mass at least once a year, according to 2024 numbers that I could find. Which actually down from 50% over last three decades with continuing downwards trend.
    So yeah, if you look for very specific things like Pentecostsls in Romania, you can find some anomalies that you can then spin as a catastrophe, but the fact that you needed to do this anomaly hunt in the first place says enough.



  • That’s not exactly what believe means. In a way we can’t be sure of anything, including our own existence, so everything we do is believing something based on what evidence we have. The difference between that and a religious conviction is that religion requires you to stop basing your believe on any evidence at all, and believe in their stuff regardless.
    If I tell you I ate a piece of bread this morning, you’ll believe me. If I tell you I ate a piece of Uranium, you wouldn’t. Even though, you have the same amount of evidence for both claims. That’s normal believe. Religious believe requires you to believe everything religious higher ups tell you, but because humans aren’t wired to do that, they only tell you shit you can’t actually check, so your believes are “justified”.



  • There are people who’re scientists and also religious people. People are amazing at compartmentalizing. My physics teacher in school was young earth creationists. She had no problems spending the whole academic hour correctly explaining how lead is formed over millenia in a heart of a dying start, and then spending an hour after school explaining to all who could listen, with the same conviction, that the earth is 6 thousands years old everything was made in 6 literal human 24 hours days.
    People contain multitudes. Science and religion, however, are mutually exclusive. Scientific method is the opposite of religious conviction, and anyone who don’t see that doesn’t know what either of those words mean.


  • You can’t call them out either, they’re prepared for that probably even more. You debating them, you calling them names, you doing anything with them gives them what they want - attention and footage for their stupid youtube channels.
    The only thing they’re afraid of is if you ignore them. The only footage that makes them look actually bad and which they can’t cut to make themselves look good is them sitting in the corner with their silly little bait bullshit, being ignored by society.