it’s legislative shitposting/meme magic. one of them gets an idea for the meme: adding “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness to troll the libs. it provokes a reaction in us, because it’s 2025 and for all we know the damn thing might pass at the rate the fascists are consuming the state, and the Republicans’ base feeds off of our panic and grief, fueling their schadenfreude. Republican voters are the real trolls; these legislators are just their proxies.

basically, this is the meme magic formula that took 4chan from “ironic” Nazi trolls to an outright fascist resurgence across the West, that took Trump from a meme candidate to the Oval Office, that took the 51st State rhetoric from obvious hyperbole to deadly serious. it’s “just a joke” when you’re defending it, it’s “just trolling” when you’re pushing it through, and it’s “owning the libs” when you’re executing on it.

I’ve heard that some people have difficulty with hypotheticals in general. not just on political issues, like it’s a surprisingly common cognitive issue.

the Ides is a big Tumblr holiday. I wouldn’t be surprised if more people learned about it from Tumblr than from history class.

Timba, his arms wide!

I needed this. I need to manifest this.

wasn’t the Red Guard also a student movement? it didn’t get deleted, but it’s definitely not looked back upon fondly. tbf most of what I know of it comes from Three Body Problem though, so I could be wrong.

there’s also the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhoff gang) in Germany during the '70s which killed some people.

I’m too much of a coward, honestly. I’m trans, so if I get arrested I’ll be made to detransition and sent to a men’s prison and assigned to a violent criminal as his prison wife. I’ll serve Canada though, if it comes to it.

so autism caused Musk to seig heil, and autism caused Teller to build doomsday devices. so basically Dr. Strangelove is autism’s final form. (/s)

so, NATO’s surrender then… as a condition of a cease-fire with Ukraine… which isn’t a NATO member… which Putin invaded ostensibly to prevent it from joining NATO. right…

sure, I think we can do that. no Western troops, no problem! we’ll just give them each a few dozen hydrogen bombs, and call it even.

oof, never thought I’d see the baseline for “normal” set to after covid.

seems reasonable, thanks for your work!

if neither parent is a US citizen or permanent resident, the child wouldn’t have US citizenship by birth. notably, Kamala Harris would have been ineligible for the Presidency under this rule, since her parents were on student visas when she was born. (though the Heritage Foundation maintains they wouldn’t retroactively strip citizenship but still… yikes.)

also, the issue before the Court concerns a TRO blocking implementation of the policy change. they’re asking for the Court to rule that TROs must apply only to named plaintiffs. that’s a separate issue from the legality of the EO itself, but it’s actually scarier, since it would neuter the lower courts’ last meaningful check on the Executive’s power.

I don’t get it. Reddit’s so much more egregious than digg was - why haven’t more users jumped ship? the soul of the platform was broken with the API change, yet most users stayed, and the ones who did leave haven’t shown up here.

was Lemmy just not ready?

I wouldn’t be surprised if Newsom pulls a Tulsi Gabbard and switches sides. He had Charlie Kirk (of TPUSA) on his podcast where he “completely aligned” with him on trans rights (i.e. eradicating us), then had Steve Bannon on. That’s a bit much even for the Liz Cheney flank of the DNC.

I suspect Newsom doesn’t see any future for his party, and is bailing out instead.

interesting. I’m most interested in the Khruschev era, during de-Stalinization and when the USSR was at its peak, and the satellite countries (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.) the collapse just makes me sad.

right, you said it was stupid because:

Just imagine that you’re in a conflict, then the enemy hacks your command and control systems and disables/hijacks all of your aircraft. Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.

I’m saying that scenario wouldn’t be possible. for the enemy to exploit a backdoor like this, they’d have to either:

1. break the encryption (quantum computer, classical sub-exponential discrete log or factoring algorithm.)
2. break the protocol or encryption (unlikely, since it’d be simple, the NSA is full of competent cryptographers, and they’d probably formally verify it to EAL-5.)
3. steal the private key (most likely imo, but the government also safeguards the nuclear codes, and it’s hard for me to imagine F-35 kill switch keys being more dangerous than those.)

I don’t think any of the above are very likely, or at least not likely enough to outweigh the strategic benefit of being able to ground your enemy’s air force in the (hitherto unlikely) scenario one of the US’s customers became its enemy. so I don’t think it’s stupid, and I don’t think I straw-manned you.

crypto ignition keys (CIKs) are just setup tools to load bootstrap keys into a device.

like, for instance, if you’ve just unboxed a secure telephone, there’s no keys in it, so you have to use a CIK to load keys/ciphers into the phone before you can make calls from it.

the private sector doesn’t use them much, but NSA invented them and they’ve been a staple of IC infra for decades.

for someone with two decades of infosec experience, it’s alarming you’d overlook asymmetric cryptography. it’s simple to build an unhackable kill switch using basic cryptographic primitives, unless you think the enemy has a quantum computer.

Every serious defence analyst has laughed at the idea that the F-35 has a secret killswitch. This would be the dumbest thing ever to include in an aircraft, because there is always the possibility that your enemies could find out about it.

just cryptographically sign the kill switch transmission. the fighter would contain the public key to verify, but enemies would need the private key to trigger it, which the NSA would keep buried in cold storage like the DUAL-EC-DRBG trapdoor key.

you’d probably also want to include the fighter’s serial number or IFF transponder code, so the enemy couldn’t capture or replay.

Consider; if an F-35 kill switch did exist, any buyer of the craft could invest the resources required to go over every inch of circuit and line of code and find it, and then deactivate every US F-35.

there’s something like 100M LoC of C++ (not Ada 😥) in an F-35. and Canada doesn’t have the sources, so they’d have to decompile that. maybe they could focus on the radios, radar and other devices direct connection to receivers, but the implant might be downstream, and there’s a lot of ways to hide an antenna.

even dumping the chips isn’t easy. many of them likely have security features, since they contain classified algorithms which the DoD would rather enemies not be able to extract from the downed wreckage of a fighter. certainly the JTAG pins are not going to be enabled. even die shots could be frustrated by metal meshes over the wafer or possibly even microscopic amounts of explosives triggered by de-lidding.

But this “killswitch” nonsense just derails that important discussion into paranoid conspiracy theorist nonsense rooted in the deranged ramblings of a self-aggrandizing madman.

there’s secure ways to build a kill switch, there’s an abundance of places to hide it in a highly complex fighter, and this kind of spooky stuff is well within the NSA’s wheelhouse. it’s the kind of thing NSA is known for, even - the Crypto AG CIA front, the DUAL-EC-DRBG backdoor, TAO’s clandestine program to intercept and backdoor mailed routers and servers. they clearly can do this kind of thing, since they clearly have before.

did they backdoor the F-35? I don’t know, but it’s plausible, and CSIS/CSE should investigate.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/ca-gov-gavin-newsom-completely-aligns

He agreed with all of Charlie Kirk’s (of TPUSA) views on trans people, when he recently hosted him on his podcast.