Not American, or really knowledgeable about it but from the outside, I think this looks like ordinary politicking.

IVF is a proxy war for abortion. Dems want the talking point that abortion bans hurt/block IVF. Republicans/Trump want to remove that talking point by saying they love IVF “we want more babies right?” and will support laws to protect it as a separate and unrelated issue to abortion.

Dems put forward a bill that not only protects it but makes insurance companies pay for it. Trump is fine with that because it benefits him but Republicans in Congress get big money from insurance lobbyists and so they can’t vote for it. They also have fears that they’ll piss off their homophobic supporters by making them pay for something the gays might use (insurance costs will go up to help someone who isn’t me!").

Republicans put forward another bill that protects IVF without hurting their insurance company buddies but the Dems block it. Republicans then have to vote against the IVF bill and the Dems can now say “see! They really don’t care about reproductive rights at all!”

Feels a bit like nobody involved actually cares about IVF at all and just wants votes and lobbyist money.

In case this take comes across too centrist: Republicans and Trump are really quite shit.

Yep, and even when talking about living things it’s not a clear distinction.

In biology, poison is a substance that causes harm when an organism is exposed to it. Venom is a poison that enters the body through a sting or bite. In a bunch of medical fields though, poisons only apply to toxins that are ingested or absorbed through the skin and that definition sometimes carries across to zoology.

Venomous creatures are poisonous by most definitions because venom is a poison. But if the distinction is useful in a medical or zoological context then they’re not.

tldr: The pedantry of eg. correcting someone who says a snake is poisonous is totally pointless and mostly wrong.

You forgot interrobang‽ The most important and incredulous reason for a compose key.

Hmmm…

That looks pretty paywally to me. That said, I’m all for people supporting independent media.

This is called “semantic satiation” which are both pleasingly weird words now that I think about it…

I don’t think that’s how it works? It’s the client application that has the key for the end to end encryption, not the server. I don’t think you need to trust the matrix server you use? I could be wrong, I don’t know matrix particularly well.

Yeah, that’s fair enough, though I’m not sure it’s very different from malicious instances creating normal user accounts?

You can see when users from an instance are all suspiciously voting the same way at the same time regardless of whether they are usernames or IDs.

There’s lots of legitimate users that only vote but never post so doing it based on that doesn’t seem very effective?

The second problem is solved using public key cryptography, the same way that you can’t impersonate someone else’s username to post comments. Votes and comments are digitally signed (There would need to be a different public key for voting to maintain pseudonymity though).

How about pseudonymous as a compromise? Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

It might be theoretically possible to correlate the uuids with an account’s activity and dox the user in some cases, especially with some instances having a single user, but it would be very difficult or impossible to do on larger instances and would add an extra layer. Single user instances would be kind of impossible to make totally private anyway because they can be identified by instance.