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It brings me great pleasure to announce that — thanks to a few last-day-of-the-year subscriptions — SoylentNews has successfully reached its fund-raising goal for the second half of 2019! (Note: these amounts are unaudited and are, therefore, approximate.)
During the period 2019-07-01 through 2019-12-31, we received a net total of $2036.33 (from gross receipts of $2121.64) on a goal of $2000.00! There were 71 paid subscriptions which ranged from $4.00 up to $200.00
Here's a great big thank you to all who have subscribed to SoylentNews... every contribution is important!
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2019 2nd Half Funding Goal Achieved -- Thank You!
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @06:05AM (1 child)
Hello World
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @06:19AM
The system goes online on December 13th, 2019. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 1:05 AM, Eastern time, January 7th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @08:33AM (23 children)
Please don't donate to SoylentNews. This site isn't far away from being another 4chan or 8chan. White supremacists like Ethanol-fueled [soylentnews.org] are freely allowed to post hate speech, potentially inciting violence against minorities. Even moderation fails to adequately suppress hate speech. Here's a fine example of a blatantly antisemitic comment written Ethanol-fueled [soylentnews.org], which was actually modded up three times. It's also a haven for obvious Russian assets like khallow [soylentnews.org], The Mighty Buzzard [soylentnews.org], Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org], and many others to spread misinformation. If you remain unconvinced that this site has been infiltrated by Russian assets, just look at the coordinated trolling of this article [soylentnews.org] with numerous long-winded comments that are blatantly Russian propaganda.
These are not isolated incidents, but rather they are persistent and coordinated efforts to post a constant stream of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech. The admins are surely aware of the harmful comments, so their inaction to combat the persistent trolling is perceived as giving their tacit approval. It is truly unfortunate that SoylentNews has chose to follow in the footsteps of sites like 4chan and 8chan, even allowing the creation of "journals" that allow virtually any content with no attempt to curtail blatant abuses.
Until SoylentNews chooses to act responsibly and stop being a cesspool of hate speech and Russian-backed trolling, I strongly encourage you NOT to donate to this site. Furthermore, please consider bringing to the attention of Linode that they are hosting a site that allows virtually unregulated posting of hate speech and conspiracy theories.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @08:46AM (10 children)
TL;DR free speech is bad, I want to censor everyone's speech, and Russian trolls with impeccable English vocabulary are being paid to infest minuscule websites.
ok boomer
(Score: -1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @08:51AM (9 children)
1. You needn't be Russian to be Russian troll, it's kind of like driving for Uber
2. Most Russians have a larger and more expansive vocabulary than the average American.
3. Speech that destroys a forum is not free. It is a weapon.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:15AM
1. Fake news. Check under your bed for evil monsters.
2. Anti-American hyperbole and plain false.
3. It is the censors who want to destroy this forum. They are tipping their hands right now.
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Tuesday January 07 2020, @10:59AM
The trouble is that inside every Russian Troll you'll find another Russian Troll, and in that one there's another...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 07 2020, @12:13PM (6 children)
Most Russians don't speak anything but Russian. Most Frenchmen don't speak anything but French.
A forum comprises speech. Shutting down speech shuts down the forum. That is the aggressive act.
I seriously doubt anyone at Soylent was ever swayed to EF's views by his pungent comments. It's highly dubious that khallow ever won anyone over to the Nazi cause. You have a forum to talk about because Soylentils like Buzzard have built it, so say "thank you."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday January 07 2020, @10:56PM (5 children)
Most Frenchmen speak English perfectly understandably.
I have never met a Russian who doesn't speak English either, but I have never actually been to Russia, so maybe the ones who travel are the ones who speak English, I don't know.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 08 2020, @01:39AM (4 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population [wikipedia.org]
39% of France speaks English to some level of competency. That's somewhat low compared to other European countries, although not all of them (for example, Spain is at 22%).
Russia? A measly 5.48%. That's one of the lowest rates in the world, and lower than China.
It's safe to say that Russians do not speak English very well. Less people speaking English, less competency at English than other European countries. This can be corroborated by anecdotal accounts if you look around.
Because Russia is a fairly large country, it has an estimated 7,574,303 English speakers, and 2,522 English as a first language speakers. The first figure is lower than the figures for Ghana, Turkey, Iraq, Nepal, and Kenya. The second figure is pretty much bottom of the barrel among countries that collect that information. Brazil has about 50% more population, an even lower English rate (5%), but a much higher 292,000 reported EFL speakers due to descendants of various English speakers who settled there.
Only a fraction of Russia's English speakers would be involved in some kind of government sponsored information warfare. 2020 should be a big year for that, so they would be too busy to be hanging around here. Bots are not a good enough solution yet. Bot (3902) is the best the machines can do right now.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday January 08 2020, @02:27AM (3 children)
I have not met all the French people, but I am yet to meet even one who couldn't speak English at least understandably.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday January 08 2020, @02:39AM (2 children)
Phoenix666 may be wrong about Frenchmen, but the numbers I found do support his statement.
You mentioned travel and I think that could indeed be a huge factor.
Russia? Near the bottom in English speaking rates, while other nations you wouldn't think of have surprisingly high rates.
The numbers on Wikipedia could be wrong or skewed by different reporting methods from country to country. Hopefully, a Russian asset will stumble across this conversation and provide their own perspective on English competency.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday January 08 2020, @02:54AM (1 child)
The point I was making was that as I have never been to Russia, I am not aware how widely English is spoken there, and so I can accept that the average Russian can't really speak it at all.
I have, however travelled through France (several times) and have never met a French person who can not speak even a little English. Parisians will almost always pretend they can't speak English, but that's because they're arseholes mostly.
I have even sparked a quite heated debate about rugby in a tiny cafe near Carcassone one time, and the average age of the locals would have been about 350. They all knew enough english to let me know what a load of shit I was talking though.
Yeah, Zinzan Brooke was a way better number 8 than Laurent Fucking Rodriguez.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @02:09PM
If you're going to assert that, then surely you're going to follow up and tell us how you have also never met an American who can not speak even a little Spanish, and therefore Americans are in fact a multi-lingual people, right? Because there are also, you know, Americans of a certain generation who used to watch Hogan's Heroes and a million WWII movies and TV shows and can speak at least a little German. Therefore they speak German and are multi-lingual.
In France, outside Paris and away from university campuses and the tourist areas where French vendors find it advantageous to speak English with German and other tourists, the ability to speak English drops off precipitously. Live there among the French, not as a tourist or an expat in an expat bubble, and it's clear.
We are in full agreement, however, that Parisians are unmitigated assholes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 07 2020, @12:07PM (4 children)
Censorship is repugnant. Claiming the shrunken, shriveled state of Russia is hiding under everyone's bed is beyond daft. Pushing for these things under anonymity is beyond cowardly.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:43PM (3 children)
Censorship of ideas certainly is. However, I think there are some topics that are best discussed between consenting adults in private. Some people disagree with such an idea, but, for example, I would find it hard to share a freedom of speech platform with someone who argues that showing hard-core pornography to minors is a reasonable thing to do on freedom of speech grounds. There might be other grounds.
Of course, one then gets into endless arguments about where to draw the line: what it it were soft-core, or the minor was within a day of reaching their age of majority etc, etc. I don't think a hard line can be drawn, and we just have to get used to that. [wikipedia.org]
SoylentNews is liberal in what it allows, which is uncomfortable for some. I don't always agree with contributors', or editors' stances, but it is sometimes good to be exposed to things you don't agree with.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @02:21PM (2 children)
Constraining how we frame our ideas is still censorship and repugnant. Do you want to be required to frame all your ideas in Marxist terminology, wherein you are not allowed to question its bedrock terms of proletariat, alienation, class struggle, material dialectic, and false consciousness? Perhaps you ought all be required to adopt Scientology's framework of thetans and engrams, lest you unwittingly trigger someone else's tender sensibilities? Or maybe you're proposing we dismantle every language to remove references to gender (bye-bye, French/Spanish/Italian/German) and all objectionable words and idioms and phrases such that what comes out of our mouths is the linguistic equivalent of pablum. You could call it Newspeak. A gentleman named George Orwell already developed a full plan, so you're in luck; it's called, 1984.
That's argumentum ad absurdum, but I think most of us would agree the cure is worse than the disease.
It's always good to be exposed to things we don't agree with. We're all too damn sure of ourselves. We're all convinced our perspective is 100% correct, and we're all wrong about that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday January 08 2020, @08:38PM (1 child)
Well, I might not agree with you, but we can both celebrate being able to state our positions on this site.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:12PM
Cheers to that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @03:51PM
Well, I donated and likely will again. Fuck you.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday January 07 2020, @06:53PM (2 children)
So let's assume your allegations are true.
What, exactly, would "acting responsibly" entail?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 07 2020, @10:11PM (1 child)
> What, exactly, would "acting responsibly" entail?
Purges.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sulla on Tuesday January 07 2020, @11:14PM
The thing about purges is that they always make things worse-- unless of course your goal is a dictatorship. When Marius rose to power he started a pogrom against those who did not support him, removing powerful voices of dissent from the Senatorial class. When Sulla took power he did the same thing, against the followers and associates of Marius. Any Senator taking a side in either direction was killed leaving a massive power vacuum and only the weak behind. Before the purges the Senate had been filled with powerful people endlessly jostling for power and creating a "stable" environment where it was difficult to rise above the others. The decades that followed were endless conflict between powerful men that went unchecked by the Senate which was mostly empty of influence, and by the time Augustus entered the fight there was no hope for restoring the powerless Republic.
What is left behind after purges is the meek men who did not seek to stop the purges, these are the kind of men who will find the first strongman to foist their support behind and hope that they can make the decisions that they cannot. Later when a disgruntled and disenfranchised Tiberius tried to kick responsibility back on the Senate (depending on sources), he was rebuked because they did not want to deal with it.
Now, even had there not been the purges under both Marius and Sulla, it is quite possible that Julius would have rose to power anyways. Julius managed to best Cato, Cicero, Pompey, and Crassus-- all some of the most capable of men to have existed to that point in history, he very well could have subdued anyone else that got in his path on his quest for power.
Other examples --
The purges by the various tentatively allied groups of socialists in Russia managed to throw off the reins of the Czar, only to be slaughtered by their comrades when the void allowed Lenin to rise from the ashes. Writings by the men driving the movements after spending time in the Czar's prisons wrote about not having imagined how much worse things could have been.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday January 07 2020, @07:09PM (1 child)
I know for a fact that the Russians pay double what SN pays. Hard to maintain your journalistic integrity with all them zeros dangled in front of you.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday January 08 2020, @09:43AM
Oh dear, it looks like I'd been
rumbledroubled!(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday January 08 2020, @03:22AM
I have some Hispanic and Native American blood, so it's not racist for me to make satirical comments that only a few years ago were all over TV and movies anyway.
Reading my posts online will not incite violence against minorities. It takes actually living around them before one starts to get angry at them. And if somebody living around them lashes out of frustration from the trouble minorities bring to neighborhoods, well, it was only a statistical certainty that they would be attacked by minorities, so they wisely decided to throw the first punch.
Anytime anybody sees the word "Russia" or "Russian" in these kinds of contexts, they should mentally filter those to "Israel," "Israeli," or "Jewish." Wow, now everything suddenly makes sense again! Now, coming full-circle, we can argue that I'm an Israeli Sayanim Hasbarat deliberately trying to inflame sentiment towards Jews to give them wider latitude about whining of being oppressed, and justify which civil-liberties Americans should give up next, and all for the sake of diversity and inclusion. You really should be praising me and modding me up.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 07 2020, @01:15PM
Congratulations, Soylent!
It's gratifying to see the community reach financial sustainability. I've been noticing new names commenting, some low UIDs, some higher, also. The more voices, the better. SoylentNews is the Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans of online communities.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday January 07 2020, @09:28PM
May you go from strength to strength.
I realise the site just about covers its operating costs, and some people are well out of pocket from startup costs. Thank-you for being so generous.
In addition I am very grateful that so many people donate their time and expertise to keep the site going.
Thank you again.