ChunkMcHorkle

Last year I started maintaining a MAC address whitelist on the router: if I haven’t added it, it doesn’t get in or go out. No way in hell I’m putting any household appliance on the allowed list. While an appliance could technically still try to access via an allowed device, they’re all phones and tablets and computers with slightly more robust security than the trust me bro levels of an IoT appliance.

Yeah, that’s why I worded it the way I did. For myself, I don’t know what to believe; I just figured if I didn’t at least nod to the allegations someone would assume a position for me anyway.

And whenever the subject comes up, I can’t help but reflect that there is an absolute fuckton of cash involved no matter which direction the truth travels, and the legal burden of proof for historic child abuse claims varies wildly from state to state.

In MJ’s case, there are a small number of potential litigants, a massive amount of cash, people who stand to benefit no matter which way the wind blows, not a lot of objective proof for or against, and all of that in a situation already made murky just by the way survivor memory works. In a situation where an offender is very rich, the legal situation can get insane. And I think we’ve all seen some of that with MJ, with accusations and retractions and family members and settlements.

So I just don’t know, but if I had to give a verdict I’d say not guilty. Not just for that but also for what @Art3mis said as well.

There’s another reason too. IMO, the one characteristic that never changes in sexual abusers, especially pedos, is the extreme arrogance of entitlement. If you’ve ever had to deal with one, underneath all the tears and excuses and manufactured outrage they literally believe they have the right to that kid’s body.

But Jackson didn’t seem self-aggrandizing or entitled at all, especially not about children. Rather, as Art3mis pointed out, MJ was legitimately protective of the children around him.

And given everything he had to say about his own upbringing, he knew for himself what abuse was, and lived the hell of a survivor himself in a number of ways. It just seems more unlikely than not to me that he’d visit any kind of that same survivor hell on the children around him. As you said, MJ locked up his porn: a predator is far more likely to leave it laying around in the open deliberately, to passively normalize the idea of sexuality through the environment for any passing child. That doesn’t mean MJ couldn’t have done it in other ways, but it’s definitely not the typical “I need to find a way to coax this kid into this unwanted activity” predatory behavior.

But either way, for better or worse, I grew up with him. In the first half of the 70s in the US, you literally couldn’t turn on a tv and not see him. This is not an exaggeration. He was on every variety show, every performance show, even talk shows, and specials. Oh god so many tv specials, lol. But he had an incredibly sad life in so many ways, they all did.

I see it too. It is impossible to describe how popular he was in this period: he and his brothers were on tv constantly, plus making records and doing Vegas and international tours and promos and whatever else anyone wanted them to do. In the US in the early to mid 70s you literally could not go a week without hearing or seeing a reference to the Jackson 5 and especially Michael.

But what we didn’t see at the time is that he and his brothers were effectively slaves, with their dad signing them up wherever he could make a dime out of it while the kids just worked and worked and worked, plus they had to be nice to everyone, could never let their guard down, could never just be kids, could never really personally enjoy any of the money everyone else was making off them at the time. They weren’t even allowed any creative say in their earlier records: it was a shut up and sing situation.

So in this picture, Michael was exhausted and his father was still running his life, a relationship he always called physically and emotionally abusive in later years, as did his sister LaToya.

It doesn’t excuse whatever he did later in life, but he looks a bit sad and tired probably because he was.

Yep. When the mark turns the tables and becomes the one with the “broken wing” it changes everything.

It’s a great way to smoke out people in your life who take up a great deal of your own time and resources, like this scammer, but do not actually give a shit about you: when you are unable to do for them as usual because now it’s your own wing that’s broken, and could they step up and carry their own weight right now, they clear out entirely and wait to come back when they think you’re ready to give again.

Yeah, OP’s dad has probably already gotten instructions to hide anything problematic.

“You know I wouldn’t ask you to hide anything from your kids, but don’t tell them about this one thing. It’ll just upset them and they won’t understand how it is for us”

The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)

Just one more reason why Bill Pulte has been pushed into this position as “acting” DNI by Trump past unusually strong bipartisan opposition, to the point of canceling the nomination hearing for the real candidate.

This office is really what people should be paying attention to in the coming months, because it’s all about the midterms.

For those who are unaware, Bill Pulte is a MAGA loyalist that goes after Trump opponents, and has ZERO knowledge of or experience in national security. As the head of Federal Housing Finance Agency, he is the guy who has been accusing those legitimately investigating Trump (Letitia James, Adam Schiff, etc) of unsubstantiated mortgage fraud.

Expect him to do the same with the ODNI.

When Tulsi Gabbard resigned (or was fired, who knows) another candidate to replace her as DNI was put forward, the Rs and the Ds agreed on him for the most part, and that confirmation hearing was supposed to have happened on Wednesday. It did not. It was canceled at the last second by Trump, allowing Pulte to become “acting” DNI.

While an “acting” DNI has time limits on how long they can “act” without confirmation, that legal end to the “acting” role of DNI comes after the midterms, so this essentially puts Trump’s personal bully in the office for the duration of the election season.

Even the Republicans don’t want Pulte, and with the Dems they also refused to renew a part of FISA in objection, because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has access to all the surveillance tools and output this country ever got its hands on.

The consensus is that Bill Pulte is being chosen as DNI for the sole reason of being able to leverage that surveillance against non-favored candidates in the midterms.

Think about that for a hot second. All the surveillance powers of the Five Eyes leveraged against US political candidates that the orange administration doesn’t like.

And now we see there’s actually a second reason for Pulte’s installation: to suppress facts gathered about our voting machines.

EDITED for clarity

That’s possible, but does not seem likely. First, it wasn’t just the two towns, and hits came back from Buncombe County as well.

Also, the results exclude Madison County altogether, though there are cameras in the county, and presumably queries were made in regard to Madison County residents and plates, which is the supposed reason Madison County has Flock to begin with.

The way I read the HaveIbeenFlocked site was that the query itself was answered from that specific town or group of towns linked to the response, which would not be possible if the query itself had NO response from the HaveIbeenFlocked database.

Also, those two towns were just the most frequently listed, but others across the country have come up as I noted, as well as Buncombe County, which is where you’d think the vast majority of responses should be coming from, but they’re not.

Buncombe County (Asheville) is the source for multiple queries, but not anywhere near a majority. And someone involved in the HaveIbeenFlocked flow of information is very aware of the Buncombe County responses, because on all the Buncombe County hits I saw, the reason for the query was redacted: that didn’t just happen, someone chose to do that.

But if all this is legit, you know what source I never saw linked to a query? Madison County itself.

Now how is it possible, when cameras are in Madison County – iow, Madison County is itself a valid source on HaveIbeenFlocked – and the law enforcement requests are coming from Madison County, presumably pursuant to a valid Madison County law enforcement need for information, but the cameras in the county are not the source of any information requested? (Or very little, and I just missed them time after time.)

But don’t take my word for it: the links are in my post. Look for yourself. Click on anything you find, as randomly as you like, and see what you see.

The article quotes a Madison County privacy org directly:

“The Sheriff Office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes, yet published audit logs tell a different story,” a website called Madison for Privacy says. “Madison County has searched the nationwide database over 1,200 times over just a 60 day period. In a county over only 20,000 residents, its hard to understand what could warrant this many searches.”

Holy shit, they’re not wrong. Follow that haveibeenflocked.com link to the Madison County sheriff’s office Flock searches, and the accompanying note:

These are some of the searches performed by Madison County NC SO. We have seen a total of 1,216 searches for this agency, performed by 1 person over 62 days between 3/11/2026 and 5/11/2026 (1 user was active in the most recent six months) The most recent import of records for this agency happened on 5/17/2026.

Madison County is southwest of Asheville on the state line between NC and TN, comprised mostly of unincorporated communities, which is a polite way of saying most residents live in the hills, not in the towns. The entire county has a population of roughly 21,000, and the largest town, Mars Hill, has only 2,000 residents. It doesn’t get much more rural than this on the East Coast.

So given the population and its distribution, and the fact that the sheriff’s office only serves the unincorporated communities because the three towns have their own municipal police, where the fuck does the sheriff’s office get cause or even time for what averages out to 600 Flock searches in a month?

But it gets even stranger. I clicked on a few searches, just to see what I could see, and every single one I clicked on with an unredacted reason* was associated with the same two or three other non-local police departments as the source of the information retrieved, two of which were the exact same ones every time: Forest Park Ohio PD, Tifton Georgia PD, and occasionally the Douglas County Nevada SO. There were a couple others, but always at least one of those three. (If you go to the little i next to the other PDs, it tells you, “This audit record appears in [n] different public record files.”)

This is true whether I clicked on a homicide, a non-DUI alcohol inquiry, a burglary, a car theft, or a sex offense. No matter what reason I chose, no matter how disparate the crime or the date, one if not all of those three law enforcement agencies came up as the source of the Flock information that inquiry pulled from. And this is the same of every search I clicked on, over and over and over again.

(*The sole exceptions to all this were where the crime itself was redacted, and then the associated source of information was Buncombe County, NC, which neighbors Madison County and could potentially be a valid law enforcement reason to search Flock data.)

And when I selected the Repeat Searches checkbox at the top, defined as “Display filter that hides likely duplicate searches (identical searches within 5 minutes). Does not affect server-side counts or downloads,” an even 800 of those 1,216 searches get loaded. So fully two thirds of those searches across two months qualify as duplicates executed within five minutes of each other, to Flock parameters at least. (Or maybe one third, if I’m understanding it wrong; I’m sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.) But that’s still a fuckton of duplicates executed within five minutes of each other.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand how it all works on the Flock side, but it almost seems like someone in the Madison County, NC sheriff’s office is just sitting on their ass keeping serious tabs on a short list of people living in other places.

Trust Lemmy to answer the question I very specifically did not ask and to provide an answer that is essentially a regurge of the OP, lol.

EDITED TO ADD: but I found the answer I was looking for anyway, so there is that.

Are there any instances where votes are public? In other words, where it shows on the post or comment who up/down voted? I know there are some, or were, but I don’t know the current status.