QuietCupcake

Yeah, unfortunately 12ft.io didn't keep up with the paywall arms race. It's too bad because it was one of those things that a lot of people knew about, many of whom may now just give up when it doesn't work even though there are other options out there.

As one example, there's now also the 13ft ladder: https://github.com/wasi-master/13ft It's like 12ft but self hosted. Sounds really good but I can't vouch for it yet.

I mostly would just archive a paywallrd page with archive.is (aka archive.today, archive.ph, etc.) and that worked great and also helped take traffic away from asshole sites that paywall content. Unfortunately, archive started requiring a cloud flare captcha when archiving a page. This is a deal breaker for me since captcha totally deanonymizes you and is used for tracking purposes and even to train AI. So it defeats a good chunk of the purpose of using an archive site.

Still, there's a good chance that someone else already archived the page you want to see, so putting the url in archive.is search can be enough to bypass the paywall.

Those are copy cat sites. Fuck the Guardian but no, they're not "lying." Fmovies has been shut down for weeks now.

To be clear, where I was using the word "them" I meant the ruling class, not people in general. I see how some of my sentences weren't worded well.

Bringing the ruling class into it... I don't get it.

The idea that humans and human progress are inherently destructive is a lie told by the ruling class because getting people to believe it benefits them. Among other things it absolves them of their own crimes of destruction while simultaneously blaming the rest of us and our positive traits for those crimes. Somewhat ironically it's a lie that helps lead to more destruction. See my other response to u/Sagittari.

Maybe could've done without the "The fuck are you on?" though I guess

To me it's honestly a disgusting thing to claim that human progress and creativity is all based on destruction when in reality it's the exact opposite. I don't think my response was at all over the top given how harmful of a sentiment I think that is.

This stuff matters. Our biosphere is facing destruction at human hands but not because of our desire to create and build things, not because of our ability to express ourselves through our ingenuity to shape stone and wood. Those are not "destructive traits" but profoundly constructuve attributes. The destruction on the scale that it's happening now to both the environment and much of human culture is because of, like I said, a social pathology that's rooted in a system that rewards greed instead of trying to prevent it. It is a pathology that tries to equate greed and destruction with the creative aspects of human nature... just like the comment I responded to was doing. It's a lie. Even if someone who has fallen for it may be well-meaning, they're still perpetuating a very harmful (and destrctive!) misconception. So I think it deserves a strong, even emotionally-charged critical response.

The fuck are you on? "Destroy" stone? There is a vast gulf of difference between altering something, including in creative and constructive ways, and "destruction." Most of us know the difference today and our ancestors certainly knew the difference. Human labor is in general a constructive force even if it can be used to destructive ends. Saying that "our willingness to destroy is the trait that powered our rise" is ahistorical nonsense and anti-human drivel. But it sounds an awful lot like the lying justifications the small subset of the current ruling class likes to use as an excuse and justification to exploit us and actually destroy our environment for the sake of their own narrow profit and greed. But that's no more of a universal human trait than any other disgusting pathology that a select few are afflicted with.

What you're doing isn't realism, dipshit, it's denialism.

I really hate to admit it, but I do use amazon quite a bit. It's not "like me" to use a company or service I despise, despite the truth of "no ethical consumption under capitalism," some businesses are just so evil that I feel it is wrong to support them in any way, even at the cost of convenience.

Here's the situation though. I rely on foodstamp benefits to be able to afford food. Amazon allows me to buy food in bulk online with my ebt card. I also have a disability that makes it prohibitively difficult to go to the grocery store as often as I would need to, and bulk buying online also stretches the benefits I get much further than regular grocery visits. Walmart and Target also now allow ebt cards for online food shopping, but they didn't used to, and they are evil as well!

I rationalize using amazon by telling myself that since mostly the only thing I get from them is food via ebt card, then it's really just money going straight from my state government to amazon, and my state government (just like most others) gives amazon free money anyway, so I may as well get something out of their capitalist sweetheart deal too.

It was not a "massacre."

Then post articles that say that and not articles that refute your own point.

Even the title of the first article I posted is "There Was No 'Tiananmen Square Massacre'" It's in the url for chrissakes. This is beyond a failure of reading comprehension, it's a failure to even look at words.

It was not. a. massacre. It is not at all pedantic to point this fact out. Especially when people, following a blatantly propagandist narrative line, incorrectly call it that.

My choosing those two sources specifically among the thousands of others that was to point out how ridiculous it is to ban someone for "denying a massacre" when even mainstream western news sources (in addition to the BBC as was mentioned in the comment that caught that user the ban lol), including one of the most famous mouthpieces for the U.S. government's foreign policy, likewise "deny" that it was a massacre and likewise would have been banned according to the silly mod's standards. Those articles did not at all refute my point, they clearly made it, as should be obvious to anyone able to follow this thread.

Well said.

Another very illustrative example of this kind of deferral and obfuscation played by liberal democracies with their use of authoritarianism is the continued use of literal slave labor specifically in the US, which is even enshrined in the constitution. The sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?) comes from shifting the term slavery into euphemisms for prison labor. A slave population of "prisoners," the vast majority of whom are People of Color, mostly black people, as is the slavery tradition, who are actually pipelined from their schools to prison, and criminalized for engaging in the only means they have of economic independence. The authoritarian slave drivers will tell the general populace they are "bad people, felons" and deserve to be sequestered away from society to live solitary lives doing hard labor for no pay (2 cents an hour doesn't count as pay.)

There is nothing more "authoritarian" than having actual slaves, which is the major reason the prison-industrial complex exists in the US and has more prisoners (read: slaves) than any other country in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita by a ridiculously large margin. That is capitalist-style authoritarianism.

And there were many soldiers who were also killed as well, the first of which were not even armed but were lynched. There was absolutely fighting in the streets in the surrounding area, and no one denies that people did die. But it was a mutually armed struggle, not a massacre. Calling it a massacre distorts the reality and paints a distorted picture that is beneficial to the west and especially the current anti-China narrative.

The fighting I mentioned above was also heavily instigated and pushed to happen by westerners with a vested interest in harming China who were there to rile up protesters and encourage them to do violence, but then left in helicopters when fighting did start. Some of these instigators have openly admitted this and now live happily in the US. It was not a "massacre."

Come on.