The scary part of this is that it can be used to target "those people" like atheists or LGBTQ or POC.
Want to go paint swastikas on someone's house? Check the app for where the Jews are!
Need to know who is behind the petition circulating around school to bring back banned books, or supporting LGBTQ kids? Check the app, see if anyone made a note about rainbow flags!
Want to SWAT someone? There it is, right on the APP!
They're more like the extinct Andrewsarchus, a huge, prehistoric, carnivorous mammal related to sheep, than actual sheep. (google it, yikes!)
May they follow its example and fade into extinction. This is not acceptable; it's intrusive and can easily be used abusively. I'm about at the end of my Rope of Tolerance with this sort of thing. It's dangerous in the hands of a fanatic. It has a lot of negative potential.
Maybe it's time to invest in door signs informing such unwanted visitors that their presence is not welcome at your house. Ignore the signs at your peril, you nosy-ass pieces of evangelistic stool!
Just because this is legal (to me this is worse than the threat from Tik Tok, because you can choose not to be a part of TT.) doesn’t make this ethical. But ethics are not a concern for evangelicals. Maybe it’s because their morals are based on abject obedience, or because they’re more concerned with money and influence, or all of the above.
" One missionary told TNR that he used information about which homes have children to send them invitations to Vacation Bible School. Harmless enough—just more junk mail—but it’s not hard to imagine how that information could be used for more direct forms of contact later on. "
The United States enjoys as much religious freedom as can be found on planet earth, and I will never understand why that isn't enough for some Christians. Anyone who wants to hear about the many flavors of Jesus has no trouble doing so. Churches abound, religious broadcasters are everywhere, and Christian bookstores aren't hard to find. Never the less, these people are so driven to force their views on others they're now using computers to target possible marks. There isn't much of anything that cannot be justified in the name of religion.
My immediate thought: Download the app and write a note about myself! "If you show up at my door, I'm going to thrust a copy of the book I wrote about your religion in your face and challenge you to read it! Is your faith really strong? I've read your Bible, so fair is fair. Come back after you've read my book and I promise I'll talk with you."
Beware! Satanists live here, and they will rip your soul from your body and send it screaming to hell if you knock on this door. Also, ringing this doorbell summons Cenobites.
I am not as fat as I was in my 20's but the rest is not a bad idea and between theater club when I was younger and having Aria for 14 years I can scream quite loudly. If a JW lost their way into my building again 😁
I would be tempted to put up a sign that says, "Door to door Jesus salespeople will be shot on sight." Which would probably would get me a visit from the local constabulary.
Years ago, they were geo-fencing women ar abortion clinics. So, this is an obvious, distopian upgrade. It bring a whole new meanibg to Big Brother is watching.
Not only can christians target your, pedophiles and sexual predators can easily locate homes where a parent might be in the hospita. While they arel being "prayed" for, their children are being preyed for.
Given the volume of shootings in religious centers, this will certainly make hate crimes easier. What's a little antisemitism between neighbors?
"Mother is in hospital" isn't publically available information, it's privately shared, privileged information. Imagine having an ambulance rush your spouse to the hospital only to return home hours later to discover you have been burgled. How? This app flagged you for prayer with private medical details, and criminals used that to target your home.
What's to stop a nosy, spiteful neighbor from broadcasting your every move?
The government watching you is one thing, they don't care about you until you cross certain lines. Your neighbors, they're watching for you to cross any lines
And when you're an atheist whose neighbors are broadcasting your every move to christian nationalists targeting you, harm is just a notification away.
That is very similar to the problems with that 'Next-Door' App. Thieves use it to find out who is on vacation, and who has just bought some expensive toy. Our community advised us never to use it, because it is easily hacked, and the security is poor. Also, I keep getting invitations to join from supposed 'neighbors' that live at non-existent addresses. This all screams SCAM to me.
Well, big surprise. Turns out, evangelicals are all about the money ... YOUR money. And they'll dun you any way they can to get it. This kind of shameless moneygrubbing is disturbing if utterly unsurprising. What they are trying to do is build the influence of their church, of course, buy their way into power and position, much in the same way as Dimwit Donald does with his rallies.
They just do it with the tithing plate rather than with MAGA hats.
Remember, these are the same people who vehemently oppose China's credit score system. Now, they have created an identical christian credit score system.
What's the difference between Chinese communism and christianity? The spelling.
True. Certainly not Marxist Communism, which has never been practiced as a form of government. So, we've got various bastardized versions of it floating about.
But, that cardboard caricature that republicans/christian/conservatives/libertarians rely on when they use the term "communism" is definitely what they (the conservatives) are working toward practicing.
I even once had a republican consplain* to me that childless couples should be fined and heavily taxed for flouting the law.
Flouting the law, you ask. I did too. He consplained to me that the tax laws were written to encourage people to have children (write offs) and by not having children, they were breaking the law.
Yes. He said that.
Do you know who else thought, and did, fine and tax women and couples for not having, or producing enough children? Nicolae Ceaușescu, former communist president of Romania.
From the Wikipedia page on China, "China is a unitary one-party socialist republic led by the CCP, and the party de jure still considers itself committed to Marxism–Leninism."
Russia was an oligarchy even when they were still the USSR. The USA is also an oligarchy, just look how our so-called justice system works based on how much money you have.
They're committed, that's true. Wikipedia is only repeating what the Chinese government is saying. Communism is a goal. In theory. It'll happen. In two weeks. For sure. Any Day now. On February 30. La semaine des quatre jeudi. No country has established communism. No.matter what they said.
You didn't find a way to opt out either, right? That's what makes me so crazy. If downloading the app and adding notes saying that I kill and eat all proselytizers who come to my door would make that information visible to every user of the app then THAT would be a useful feature. But I don't think the notes are for anything other than the gamification (sp?) of their own personal brand of evangelical weirdness. And the dangers of the app are so obvious. I do wonder if TCOS could purchase access to this app, for helpful information on future converts. Turnabout is fair play and all.
Not selling the idea of gaudy butt ugly gold tennis shoes, they haven’t actually made them yet, what you’ve seen are a prototype. He pulled a Tesla on his fans, and no one actually expects him to follow through with producing them.
The orange fraud has made a career of manipulating the legal system (delays, frivolous motions, projection). Now the financial system which he has tried to game over the years, has shot him in his fat ass.
Unclear as to why it's come to a halt? Seems pretty clear to me. Trump's MAGAts, the poor-as-dirt slobs who are his demented base, are clearly tapped out. They can't afford to support an alleged millionaire anymore.
"And that’s before you consider what they could do if Christian Nationalists take over the government after the 2024 elections."
Yeah, that's the part that worries me more than being mildly annoyed by junk mail: giving the would-be American inquisition a tool to track your fervency for white, supply-side Jesus so they can decide who needs a round of disappearing and torture this week.
The "compiling notes" section is a pedophile, kidnapper, mugger, or rapist's dream. Yes by all means, tell me exactly when and where your neighbor's 10-year-old daughter is. Or that your neighbor likes to jog alone every morning at exactly 6:43am.
It also easily allows neighbors to share non-public medical information on their neighbors. Did I tell you that a great place to meet Bob and talk about Jesus is at the Safeway on Pine street every Friday at 6:30pm? Because that's where and when he picks up his diabetes medication.
And of course it's also a spy's dream. You mean to tell me that these evangelicals will report how sgt. Alice drinks heavily every Thursday night, and I don't even have to pay them to collect this info for me? They just collect this with all sorts of other habit- and behavioral- data on Alice, and hand it to me on a single free platter?
Hemant, I have to disagree with you about 'since it's all public information, it's probably okay.' As noted above, the "add notes" function can easily create a non-public record. A very dangerous one, in fact. But also, as many people in the classified world know, a record shifting from public to sensitive to controlled to classified "by compilation" is a real thing. The act of collecting lots of public bits of information in one place can make the compiled record non-public.
That's what they taught us in spook school. Every bit of info, no matter how seemingly irrelevant it seems, adds a piece to a bigger picture. Every. Little. Bit.
And this is precisely why I won't go online in any form to tell people everything about what I say, do, believe, etc. because no one ever needs to know completely everything about me. Period.
Except that, AIUI, this app doesn't need you to go online. It scrapes all your publicly available information, and the fundies themselves add notes to it based on their observations of you.
If this app takes off and becomes well-known, I predict it won't be long before it gets used for swatting. Some *non* fundie angry neighbor can login, and put a note in it saying "OwossoHarpist's daughter is planning on getting an abortion. Please everyone show up at their house today at 4pm to show your love and convince her not to" and voila, angry mob at your door. Plus, unlike a police call fiction, this swatter doesn't risk jail because what they did is not a crime.
But the FBI can crack down on swatting. Case in point: they found a man responsible for all the swatting being done to target President Biden's officials. He's from Serbia and they were able to locate and confiscate all his computer devices so he won't swat on anyone anymore. https://www.joemygod.com/2024/03/feds-locate-person-behind-swatting-of-biden-officials/
That's because making a false police report is a crime.
Making a false report to this private app is free speech. The FBI won't do anything because it has no crime to investigate and no justification for arresting the individual even if they find them. It's not even incitement if the swatter suggests some course of action which is itself legal (such as a mob showing up on the sidewalk outside your door). I mean, *maybe* if you're important enough they go after your swatter for creating a public disturbance. But for most of us regular schmucks, nope.
Even if that last bit were 100% legal and above board... most public information isn't public in the sense that everyone knows it. It's public in the sense that anyone can 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥 it, if they put in the time and effort to 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬. This app changes the meaning of "public information" to bring it closer to the former than the latter, which in and of itself would have troubling implications.
Right now, most people enjoy a layer of "soft privacy" above and beyond their absolute legal right to it. You have a legal right to not have people break into your house and rummage through your things, for example... but the 𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 of your house (and the fact that it 𝘪𝘴 your house) is also likely only known to people you are familiar with, even if it is a matter of public record, which insulates you from most people who might want to do you harm. What kind of society do we end up living in, if that is stripped away?
I don’t like the idea they flag houses with children! With all the pedophiles in Christian organizations, that is one invasion of privacy too far.
🎯
The scary part of this is that it can be used to target "those people" like atheists or LGBTQ or POC.
Want to go paint swastikas on someone's house? Check the app for where the Jews are!
Need to know who is behind the petition circulating around school to bring back banned books, or supporting LGBTQ kids? Check the app, see if anyone made a note about rainbow flags!
Want to SWAT someone? There it is, right on the APP!
Insane.
Feature, not bug.
Christians are predators.
They're more like the extinct Andrewsarchus, a huge, prehistoric, carnivorous mammal related to sheep, than actual sheep. (google it, yikes!)
May they follow its example and fade into extinction. This is not acceptable; it's intrusive and can easily be used abusively. I'm about at the end of my Rope of Tolerance with this sort of thing. It's dangerous in the hands of a fanatic. It has a lot of negative potential.
Maybe it's time to invest in door signs informing such unwanted visitors that their presence is not welcome at your house. Ignore the signs at your peril, you nosy-ass pieces of evangelistic stool!
Just because this is legal (to me this is worse than the threat from Tik Tok, because you can choose not to be a part of TT.) doesn’t make this ethical. But ethics are not a concern for evangelicals. Maybe it’s because their morals are based on abject obedience, or because they’re more concerned with money and influence, or all of the above.
And they say atheists are immoral.
Projection, it's always projection with that lot.
" One missionary told TNR that he used information about which homes have children to send them invitations to Vacation Bible School. Harmless enough—just more junk mail—but it’s not hard to imagine how that information could be used for more direct forms of contact later on. "
Groooooooooooooooming.
The United States enjoys as much religious freedom as can be found on planet earth, and I will never understand why that isn't enough for some Christians. Anyone who wants to hear about the many flavors of Jesus has no trouble doing so. Churches abound, religious broadcasters are everywhere, and Christian bookstores aren't hard to find. Never the less, these people are so driven to force their views on others they're now using computers to target possible marks. There isn't much of anything that cannot be justified in the name of religion.
"The United States enjoys as much religious freedom as can be found on planet earth"
Not true for those of us who aren't Christian.
Not from government. Religion has no role to play in our government.
You don't know the first thing about me, and your infantile personal attack has been reported.
My immediate thought: Download the app and write a note about myself! "If you show up at my door, I'm going to thrust a copy of the book I wrote about your religion in your face and challenge you to read it! Is your faith really strong? I've read your Bible, so fair is fair. Come back after you've read my book and I promise I'll talk with you."
I can't decide whether my note should read "Enjoys roasted babies" or "Stands His Ground with shotgun if you ring his doorbell."
Roasted babies is funnier, but stand your Ground is mode American.
Beware! Satanists live here, and they will rip your soul from your body and send it screaming to hell if you knock on this door. Also, ringing this doorbell summons Cenobites.
I’d put, very fat woman who answers the door naked and screaming. Might crush you accidentally.
I am not as fat as I was in my 20's but the rest is not a bad idea and between theater club when I was younger and having Aria for 14 years I can scream quite loudly. If a JW lost their way into my building again 😁
Mine should be "This is a free fire zone. NatC SOBs will be shot on sight."
How about...
"My Indian/Indigenous name is: Dem Fem Lesbian Marksman Standing Her Ground."
Excellent idea. Almost worth writing a book just to do this.
I would be tempted to put up a sign that says, "Door to door Jesus salespeople will be shot on sight." Which would probably would get me a visit from the local constabulary.
Tell 'em you were taken out of context.
You're absolutely right, a super soaker filled with unholy water isn't a firearm. 😁
Years ago, they were geo-fencing women ar abortion clinics. So, this is an obvious, distopian upgrade. It bring a whole new meanibg to Big Brother is watching.
Not only can christians target your, pedophiles and sexual predators can easily locate homes where a parent might be in the hospita. While they arel being "prayed" for, their children are being preyed for.
Given the volume of shootings in religious centers, this will certainly make hate crimes easier. What's a little antisemitism between neighbors?
"Mother is in hospital" isn't publically available information, it's privately shared, privileged information. Imagine having an ambulance rush your spouse to the hospital only to return home hours later to discover you have been burgled. How? This app flagged you for prayer with private medical details, and criminals used that to target your home.
What's to stop a nosy, spiteful neighbor from broadcasting your every move?
The government watching you is one thing, they don't care about you until you cross certain lines. Your neighbors, they're watching for you to cross any lines
And when you're an atheist whose neighbors are broadcasting your every move to christian nationalists targeting you, harm is just a notification away.
That is very similar to the problems with that 'Next-Door' App. Thieves use it to find out who is on vacation, and who has just bought some expensive toy. Our community advised us never to use it, because it is easily hacked, and the security is poor. Also, I keep getting invitations to join from supposed 'neighbors' that live at non-existent addresses. This all screams SCAM to me.
Everything about these people is fucking creepy.
Well, big surprise. Turns out, evangelicals are all about the money ... YOUR money. And they'll dun you any way they can to get it. This kind of shameless moneygrubbing is disturbing if utterly unsurprising. What they are trying to do is build the influence of their church, of course, buy their way into power and position, much in the same way as Dimwit Donald does with his rallies.
They just do it with the tithing plate rather than with MAGA hats.
Remember, these are the same people who vehemently oppose China's credit score system. Now, they have created an identical christian credit score system.
What's the difference between Chinese communism and christianity? The spelling.
Chinese aren't Communist though.
True. Certainly not Marxist Communism, which has never been practiced as a form of government. So, we've got various bastardized versions of it floating about.
But, that cardboard caricature that republicans/christian/conservatives/libertarians rely on when they use the term "communism" is definitely what they (the conservatives) are working toward practicing.
I even once had a republican consplain* to me that childless couples should be fined and heavily taxed for flouting the law.
Flouting the law, you ask. I did too. He consplained to me that the tax laws were written to encourage people to have children (write offs) and by not having children, they were breaking the law.
Yes. He said that.
Do you know who else thought, and did, fine and tax women and couples for not having, or producing enough children? Nicolae Ceaușescu, former communist president of Romania.
Republicans talk like communist.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
* Conservatives tell me things.
If only magas politicians could end like the ceauşescus.
A fond hope of mine as well especially the Orange primate.
From the Wikipedia page on China, "China is a unitary one-party socialist republic led by the CCP, and the party de jure still considers itself committed to Marxism–Leninism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China
They kept the label but economically they are somewhere between an oligarchy like Russia and a hyper capitalist country like yours.
Russia was an oligarchy even when they were still the USSR. The USA is also an oligarchy, just look how our so-called justice system works based on how much money you have.
They're committed, that's true. Wikipedia is only repeating what the Chinese government is saying. Communism is a goal. In theory. It'll happen. In two weeks. For sure. Any Day now. On February 30. La semaine des quatre jeudi. No country has established communism. No.matter what they said.
"La semaine des quatre jeudis"
Ça faisait longtemps que je n'avais pas vu cette expression 🤣
Ah, les français aussi l'utilise ! Je l'entendait souvent quand j'étais enfant.
Plus trop depuis que la pause scolaire est passée du jeudi, époque DM, au mercredi, la mienne.
"We are fully committed to Marxism–Leninism and will be happy to give advice to anyone else who actually wants to continue doing it. We'll watch."
- CCP, possibly.
You didn't find a way to opt out either, right? That's what makes me so crazy. If downloading the app and adding notes saying that I kill and eat all proselytizers who come to my door would make that information visible to every user of the app then THAT would be a useful feature. But I don't think the notes are for anything other than the gamification (sp?) of their own personal brand of evangelical weirdness. And the dangers of the app are so obvious. I do wonder if TCOS could purchase access to this app, for helpful information on future converts. Turnabout is fair play and all.
OT: just saw this notification: Trump can't secure $454 million appeal bond in New York fraud case, his lawyers say. Boo fucking hoo
Hey, he's a successful businessman. He said so himself. I'm pretty sure he can get the cash he needs, right?
He can write a cheque. “Trust me” he said.
Bet that cheque has some bounce to it. It was manufactured by Wham-O.
But, the RNC should be getting that. Laura Trump said…
Not selling enough gaudy butt-ugly gold tennis shoes I guess. 😂
Not selling the idea of gaudy butt ugly gold tennis shoes, they haven’t actually made them yet, what you’ve seen are a prototype. He pulled a Tesla on his fans, and no one actually expects him to follow through with producing them.
He'd have to pay people to manufacture them.
Trump pay people? I made a funny.
According to Farron Cousins they only have $8M on hand.
Time to put a "for sale" sign on Mar-a-Lago!
Comes with a lifetime supply of classified toilet paper!
The orange fraud has made a career of manipulating the legal system (delays, frivolous motions, projection). Now the financial system which he has tried to game over the years, has shot him in his fat ass.
I posted late last night about his scheme to gofundme is stalled at 1.3 mill.
Bagen Onuts
7 hrs ago
Now the MAGAts have stopped supporting him at $1.3 million.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/donald-trump-355m-gofundme-stalls-010840184.html
Unclear as to why it's come to a halt? Seems pretty clear to me. Trump's MAGAts, the poor-as-dirt slobs who are his demented base, are clearly tapped out. They can't afford to support an alleged millionaire anymore.
My ass bleeds for him.
mine makes lots of shit to feed hi---it.
No, that's not creepy. Not at all.
"And that’s before you consider what they could do if Christian Nationalists take over the government after the 2024 elections."
Yeah, that's the part that worries me more than being mildly annoyed by junk mail: giving the would-be American inquisition a tool to track your fervency for white, supply-side Jesus so they can decide who needs a round of disappearing and torture this week.
The "compiling notes" section is a pedophile, kidnapper, mugger, or rapist's dream. Yes by all means, tell me exactly when and where your neighbor's 10-year-old daughter is. Or that your neighbor likes to jog alone every morning at exactly 6:43am.
It also easily allows neighbors to share non-public medical information on their neighbors. Did I tell you that a great place to meet Bob and talk about Jesus is at the Safeway on Pine street every Friday at 6:30pm? Because that's where and when he picks up his diabetes medication.
And of course it's also a spy's dream. You mean to tell me that these evangelicals will report how sgt. Alice drinks heavily every Thursday night, and I don't even have to pay them to collect this info for me? They just collect this with all sorts of other habit- and behavioral- data on Alice, and hand it to me on a single free platter?
Hemant, I have to disagree with you about 'since it's all public information, it's probably okay.' As noted above, the "add notes" function can easily create a non-public record. A very dangerous one, in fact. But also, as many people in the classified world know, a record shifting from public to sensitive to controlled to classified "by compilation" is a real thing. The act of collecting lots of public bits of information in one place can make the compiled record non-public.
That's what they taught us in spook school. Every bit of info, no matter how seemingly irrelevant it seems, adds a piece to a bigger picture. Every. Little. Bit.
And this is precisely why I won't go online in any form to tell people everything about what I say, do, believe, etc. because no one ever needs to know completely everything about me. Period.
Except that, AIUI, this app doesn't need you to go online. It scrapes all your publicly available information, and the fundies themselves add notes to it based on their observations of you.
If this app takes off and becomes well-known, I predict it won't be long before it gets used for swatting. Some *non* fundie angry neighbor can login, and put a note in it saying "OwossoHarpist's daughter is planning on getting an abortion. Please everyone show up at their house today at 4pm to show your love and convince her not to" and voila, angry mob at your door. Plus, unlike a police call fiction, this swatter doesn't risk jail because what they did is not a crime.
But the FBI can crack down on swatting. Case in point: they found a man responsible for all the swatting being done to target President Biden's officials. He's from Serbia and they were able to locate and confiscate all his computer devices so he won't swat on anyone anymore. https://www.joemygod.com/2024/03/feds-locate-person-behind-swatting-of-biden-officials/
That's because making a false police report is a crime.
Making a false report to this private app is free speech. The FBI won't do anything because it has no crime to investigate and no justification for arresting the individual even if they find them. It's not even incitement if the swatter suggests some course of action which is itself legal (such as a mob showing up on the sidewalk outside your door). I mean, *maybe* if you're important enough they go after your swatter for creating a public disturbance. But for most of us regular schmucks, nope.
Even if that last bit were 100% legal and above board... most public information isn't public in the sense that everyone knows it. It's public in the sense that anyone can 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘥 it, if they put in the time and effort to 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬. This app changes the meaning of "public information" to bring it closer to the former than the latter, which in and of itself would have troubling implications.
Right now, most people enjoy a layer of "soft privacy" above and beyond their absolute legal right to it. You have a legal right to not have people break into your house and rummage through your things, for example... but the 𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 of your house (and the fact that it 𝘪𝘴 your house) is also likely only known to people you are familiar with, even if it is a matter of public record, which insulates you from most people who might want to do you harm. What kind of society do we end up living in, if that is stripped away?