I’ll have you know that this is famous sci-fi author Charles David George Stross posting an excerpt from his seminal novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus. The warning is right in the title, I’m sure nobody will be dumb enough to ignore it!

2. […] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?

I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.

Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.

And don’t get me started on internet infrastructure… In an international comparison we certainly aren’t leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.

Depends on the kind of colour blindness you have I guess. I think I have the congenital red-green blindness common among men, and saturate Just Works™ for me. Plus I don’t have to fiddle with setting a rotation degree there.

PSA for my fellow colour blind people, you can use inspect element option of your browser to add a filter: saturate(100); rule to the element for this kind of image:

I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.

That’s not right, at least not for the fascist regimes in Europe that emerged prior to WW2. The countries where it happened (specifically Germany/Italy/Spain) had all seen civil unrest or even civil war in the recent past, they were hit hard by the global financial crisis in the twenties and had high unemployment and widespread poverty. This was the very thing the fascists used to ingratiate themselves to the public at large, by creating jobs through massive public building and rearmament projects.

By the way “first world countries” is post-WW2 terminology and didn’t originally have a connotation of superior economic status, but was referring strictly to ideological alignment. Whether a country belonged to the capitalist/communist/unaligned block in international politics during the cold war.

Hence my disclaimers in said post, and my efforts at explaining following your accusations.

Learn to read.

I said Sulla gave up his dictatorship in response to a rhetorical question I took the liberty of answering.

In an effort of tying that aside back to the topic of the thread I then tried to state that it remains to be seen if Trump will be the one to kill the republic (Caesar), or the one setting the precedent to make it possible (Sulla).

I have no delusions that Trump would willingly give up power. He has already shown that he will not. But what he hasn’t done (yet) is kill the republic. And as the assassination attempt happening a few days after my post should have made clear, he might yet fail to. What I’m worried about is whoever is going to fill the power vacuum that comes after his departure. This shit won’t stop even if death rids us of him.

But fair enough, I can see how that might have been misinterpreted. Hence my disclaimers in said post, and my efforts at explaining following your accusations. Which you have so far only answered with more insults. So I really have to wonder who is the one saying stupid fucking things here.

Yeah I’m probably giving more benefit of the doubt than I should here, but I prefer to err on the side of caution in matters like this. I’m still not entirely convinced that this user is a troll, because if I were facing the prospect of an openly fascist dictatorship I would be in emotional distress as well. So I’m still doubting, however I have to say my patience is beginning to wear rather thin.

Again, not what I said. To be frank, the amount of misinterpretation you show is starting to seem utterly deliberate.

If Trump is elected to a second term it will be a disaster and there is no ambiguity as to the nature of Trump for he has already declared civil war against the will of the American people.

And please show me where the fuck I ever doubted that. Do you not know who Sulla was? Did you not read me saying he fought a civil war and was the first general to march on Rome? Like right above the section you quoted out of context?

What I said is Trump might not turn out to be the one to kill the republic but the one to irreparably damage it instead. Think for example him getting elected to a second term and then dying a month into it without achieving much of his dictatorial agenda.

You are an idiot.

That I am, given that I am still arguing with you.

I’m not quite sure what exactly you are taking offence from in that statement but feel free to enlighten me. In my defence I tried to indicate that it is a rough metaphor.

P.S. to rephrase, it seems you did not in fact catch my drift.

Wow, ok. User name does not check out.

Jokes aside though I feel attacked and my defence mechanism is to braindump, so consider what is to follow to be on you.

you should shut the fuck up with your ‘well actually’ de facto dictator apologia

As I was trying to make clear with the implicit disclaimer at the beginning of my comment and the explicit disclaimer at the end of my comment, that was not my intention. What I was trying to do was expand on the historical context as @Soulg@sh.itjust.works already pointed out (thanks btw). I am well aware that the term dictator has lost its connotation of “temporary office” long ago, and it is today used pretty much in the sense of absolute monarchy.

Rome didn’t have that many ‘dictators’ give up power

The GP asked “how many do you know”, and essentially I replied “at least two but pretty sure it’s more” to that.

But ok, you posit I test. Here is my counterargument. With knowing Wikipedias love for lists and a search you land here: List of Roman dictators.

List starts 501 BCE, ends 44 BCE, with Julius Caesar by the way. I would eyeball its length at ~80-100 entries. That would amount to a dictatorship once every five years roughly.

The article helpfully explains a few Latin terms it uses, among them “abdicavit – abdicated, or resigned”. Ctrl+F says 7 occurrences, minus the one explaining it that are 6 mentions of the term, so my new guesstimate would be there are at least 6 dictators (in ancient Rome) who relinquished their office willingly. And I would bet you could get that number higher if you dig into the details, and start looking at term limits and stuff.

So all I’m saying is essentially the dictatorship was an office that was regularly employed for nearly 500 years by an ancient state, and was then abused to bring about the destruction of its system of government. Remind you of anything? Like the presidency? Trump?

the vast majority of societies with authoritarian dictators are dysfunctional

Like those that exist right now? Not only the vast majority, all of them are dysfunctional and I never doubted that. Seriously you are preaching to the choir here. I was literally at court today because a number on a piece of paper was too low, and I couldn’t pay to get a newer piece of paper. Luckily the case was dismissed, so I’m pretty fond of the rule of law and separation of powers at the moment, but also equally aware of the monopoly on violence the state claims for itself and how fragile that makes it.

I sense that you are angry, and most likely afraid, and I empathise with that. And due to that level of distress I would assume you are from the US. I’m not sure what to tell you except trying to resist the slide into dictatorship the best you can. Caesar was assassinated, and Hitler only narrowly escaped assassination several times is all I’m saying.

again: shut the fuck up.

Yeah, no, you little dictator. :P

Cincinnatus.

Yes, thank you!

Yeah I guess it is quite possible, likely even, that his story was embellished in history, and it was certainly abused later as you say. But to my layperson’s knowledge at least, every instance of historically recorded dictatorship before Caesar was relinquished willingly. I also think it quite possible that for a long time there was enough social pressure around such an office to keep it temporary, especially if it was indeed mainly directed against external threats like invasions.

My interpretation is that Sulla set a bad precedent for abuse of the office in domestic politics, Caesar used that precedent to try and kill the (senatorial) republic, and Augustus dealt the finishing blow.

But all of this is an etymological tangent in answer to a rhetorical question anyway. With the drift in meaning Trump basically said he wants to be king, and he might still get his second opportunity to be become Caesar.

How many dictators have you ever heard of that gave up power?

I get what you are saying and agree, but it is kind of noteworthy that basically every dictator before Caesar did that. Famously there was some retired consul or something in the early republic who was granted the dictatorship, saved Rome from seemingly assured destruction in combat, and then immediately retired back to his farm. Always forget the name… But even people like Sulla, who used his dictatorship to wage a civil war and is to my knowledge the first Roman general to march troops into Rome, eventually resigned their dictatorship. It was originally never intended to be a permanent position, which is why Caesar claiming it for life was such a turn of an era.

I guess what I’m saying overall is Trump might, even if elected to a second term, still turn out to be the American Sulla instead of the American Caesar if you catch my drift.

Disclaimer: Non-American here. Dictatorship bad. All of this is bad.

Well I’m no expert on Christianity, but apparently this theology graduate here agrees with you:

https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

So, I think it’s pretty stupid to argue whether “convicted felon” should be in his opening lede line for Wikipedia.

True though that may be, I don’t think it’s surprising that this would happen, and since making the post I have been falling down a rabbit hole of finding out how Wikipedia is handling situations like this, partly through taking more than a glancing look at the talk pages for the first time ever, and it’s fascinating.

Currently my deepest point of descent is this sub-thread on the Admin board about the “consensus” boxes on top of talk pages being an undocumented and unapproved feature.

Not yet, but you probably will be able to in the future.

Right so WhatsApp and messenger are gatekeepers and they must allow interoperation with who anyone who wants to ie me running my own signal instance?

There are several stipulations on interoperability in the new regulation (Ctrl+F “interop”). To my understanding it is stipulated that they have to make interoperability possible for certain third parties, but how to go about this is not exactly specified on a technical level - meaning the specific way to implement this is left to the gatekeeper. So your Signal server may or may not be able to depending on how exactly they go about this.

They also need to interoperate with signal hence if a works with b and c works with a why wouldn’t b work with c?

No they need to enable interoperability period. Says nothing about Signal (the software) per se. Meta has announced they plan on implementing it based on the Signal protocol (not Signal messenger software, not Signal server software).

Cos if thats hoe it works or if im not allowed to interoperate with WhatsApp or messenger in the first place then this juat seems like its handing the monopoly away from the companies to the government and giving the people fuck all.

To my knowledge the aim of the regulation is exactly that, to allow anybody interoperability with these “core platform services”. The status quo is that the regulations has been announced by the EU, it has gone into effect, and Meta has announced how they will implement interoperability to comply. Once the implementation is available and then found lacking in regard to the regulation it would be up to the affected third party to sue Meta over it.

Not with Signal messenger, the company running it hasn’t been designated as a gatekeeper under the DMA rules. You can see which services will be affected on the Wiki page (only WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger currently).