The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest....
It is not about being anonymous. We all are that way here, and we value that.
It is about them weaponizing this totally normal thing, abusing it to cause problems irl. i.e. one person making multiple accounts to act as if something is more popular than it really is.
Jon Stewart spent most of his entire career railing against the Fox News, as he called it, “bullshit mountain”, and there is very much evidence that its founder came from Russia with the express intention of making it that way. Or if not, then like Tucker Carlson, at least did not turn away free money when it was offered to him to act in a certain particular manner.
Though what I will point you to instead, b/c you seem like you will REALLY enjoy it, is the video series from Innuendo Studios called “The Alt-Right Playbook”, which contains essentially the material from a college-level course in this exact subject matter, yet expressed in extremely accessible language by anyone willing to put in the effort to think it through. You should LOVE it!:-P It’s entirely free too, though hopefully people donate to help him make more of such fantastic material.
Anyway, imagine if you will: a bird does not “know” how to build a nest, they just do it. If asked, a bird cannot explain the matters of structural integrity, materials resiliency, and so on, even if it somehow could speak (or like if you could read its thoughts). Even so, it manages to accomplish the task b/c of the instincts built into it - i.e., as Daniel Dennett explains (famous atheist apologetics philosopher, here I refer to his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, though the following is my paraphrase not direct quote), “Nobody is arguing that design work was not done, the question lies rather in who did that design work - a God or the blind natural forces of millions of years of evolution.”
In short: conservatives can be quite effective, even without having the slightest clue of what precisely they are doing or why, as in they (or imagine another hypothetical example of a con-man or -woman) may not know the details of the underlying processes by which it works, yet they still recognize what works vs. does not, and act to exploit what they see. Those January 6th protesters, despite being traitors who tried to perform literally treasonous and fully murderous acts within Congress and the White House, at the same time also thought of themselves as “patriots” who were there to “defend the Constitution” - despite most never having read the actual primary document, or how incongruous those two thoughts would seem to anyone who gives the matter even 10 seconds of rational thought, yet despite that they literally believe both at the same time, and others who were not there choose to believe that it was “peaceful”. The Alt-Right Playbook series explains how this can be accomplished, but even from what I have said so far, you can see that it works.
Another quick peek into it is that few people believe all the crazy stuff, nor is the goal (of those putting it out in the first place, e.g. many of the material has been directly traced to Russian interference e.g. anti-vax memes) even to get someone to truly believe even a single one of them. Rather, the goal is to foment distrust in the overall systems. Which let us be frank: the government truly is corrupt - the conservatives do not have to lie about that much at least - and so then that creates an opening with which they can further widen the divide, maybe even getting them to do something more drastic like secretly tamper with COVID vaccine stocks even in the midst of the pandemic. And then in the meantime, they vote Republican, which has the effect of halting aid to Ukraine, which furthers the Russian agenda - so despite the fact that whatever happens to us here in the USA may even be mostly irrelevant, still we (the general populace) have been used to further an agenda that is not our own. Yet, as time marches on, it might become so, and we may one day form an alliance together with Russia, rather than act to repel it, if Trump gets elected again. Russia is using a quite brilliant strategic maneuver there - what boggles my mind is that it is working. But, we (Americans) are weak as we have faced no true aggressors in most of our lifetimes - even Boomers grew up after WWII, and Korea and Vietnam were somewhat far-off affairs, as too was the Gulf War. We could not imagine a nation (Russia) wanting to literally eat us alive. So we seem to have not truly feared its influence over us anywhere close to the degree that we should have.
And that video series explains in large part why: b/c of the onion-layer effect whereby people get sucked in by the more inoffensive material, even while being groomed to be brought deeper in to the more insidious stuff later on, but only when they are ready do they finally start to realize that all their “joking” previously (like: “it’s the fault of the Jews!:-P”, which they did not truly believe… at the time) has, at first, a grain of truth inside of it, and then later, that it was never a joke to begin with at all. However, if they were to have been presented with the full Nazi/fascist agenda all at once, they would have turned it away, yet like a frog in a cooked pot (a false analogy btw - frogs are smart enough to jump out, it is people who are that dumb as to not!!) they continue to be changed by marinating in the shallower stuff, until as they get deeper and deeper over time, one day they finally are ready to accept the whole reality. Or not, but even so, them remaining in the shallower regions still helps further the agenda overall - e.g. in voting, and in being able to use those people like a magic story’s mage or a necromancer uses a “meat shield”: to deflect attention away from those who truly do believe.
Getting back to what you said: does Musk, or Trump, truly believe in what they are saying and doing? I would rather rephrase the question to be instead: does the authenticity of their belief systems even matter, when they are acting effectively in the services of the facists either way? At what point do they need to cross over to become a “true believer”, when all along their actions were operationally indistinguishable from one anyway? Then, as you say there are people such as Greene, who regardless of their “true beliefs”, are nonetheless useful to the cause.
I applaud your asking these questions - so few people do it seems. True answers are difficult to come by, requiring many hours (and days/weeks/months, maybe years?) of thought, though fortunately there are resources that can help speed that along, and yet how does one even find such things in this era of enshittification where you cannot trust half 90% of what you see & hear - but even so, I maintain that some things like that video series have the “ring of truth” about them, and that once you see the logic behind it, you can never go back to not knowing ever again. Enjoy it!:-)
It’s worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).
And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.
Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going “back”, ever, even if you wanted to, it’s not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.
Americans are living through the toughest housing market in a generation and, for some young people, the quintessential dream of owning a home is slipping away....
The trolly problem is designed to teach us that no matter what lies in front of us, we have to make choices. So whatever THEY did then, what will WE do now?
The answer ofc is that the USA will elect Donald Trump a second time. I wish I was kidding but… we are starting to see that there’s a good chance of that at this point. We might have to find out whether a President can run the country from a jail cell, or if that acts as a “I can get away with rape” card, or what. We’ve got some tough choices coming our way…
One thing I’ve been expecting for awhile now to start seeing - just b/c it has happened before, therefore is inevitable to happen again - is corporations making some living arrangements as a “perk” of doing business. Some places do this already, but as the competition drives towards making that an option, corporations could buy out a building for that purpose, then offer an “optional” subsidized living arrangement (as in technically you could turn it down, assuming you had somewhere else to go). That way we, focusing on those in the USA for a moment, would have all of salary, medical care (possibly including preexisting conditions), and then living arrangements all tied up in your workplace. Thus if the boss says suck my… whatever, you do it, b/c you cannot afford to become literally homeless - especially with the pandemic (almost plural at this point) of the unvaccinated greatly increasing the chances of actual death. So that’s slavery in the good ole USA, but also a step towards that elsewhere in the rest of the “Western” world as well (and the Eastern world already offers that iirc).
A set of smart vending machines at the University of Waterloo is expected to be removed from campus after students raised privacy concerns about their software....
The definition of pretty much every word these days has been hijacked to mean the exact opposite - like Google lets you “search” for things you “want”, and Reddit would “connect” you to “humans people”, FaceBook will steal all of your data share “news”, again from “people”, and so on.
I pretty much think of “smart” as now meaning “tactically weaponized to maximize corpo profits” - you know, “for your convenience”!:-P 🤮
Rachael Gambino and Garrett Mazzeo planned their financial life by the book: They went to college, paid down debt, saved aggressively, got married, bought a house, started a family. The dream....
Hey, I have an idea: let’s put Donald Trump in charge again for the next four years? /s Don’t act like this is an unrelated issue. We reap what we sow (even those we don’t understand it - it still happens regardless of awareness, or of consent).
Before I begin- Again, please no medical advice or suggestions. I am going to the Mayo Clinic in March and I will get their advice and I am just going to ignore any medical advice posted, sorry. Please no pity party either, I’m just angry and need a a place to rant and vent, that’s it. Feel free to ignore this post and move...
American healthcare does suck donkey balls, but I am glad that you are able to find a source to get the diagnostic aid that you need.
Knowledge is power, so whatever the cause, if you can find ways to deal with it (like somehow eat food that has no smell? well you already said crackers don’t work… but if you can find SOMETHING) then that would be great!
First the crazy: Alabama has been calling embryos and fetuses ‘people’ for a long time. The latest ruling says that even frozen embryos are ‘people’. This ruling says:...
Naw, Martok fits the nature of the discussion bette… wait, did you just misspell Gowron’s name!? It was nice knowing you… this is him when he’s being friendly!
It’s a rite of passage! I had to learn it so now you do too! Why, when I was young I used to have to walk to school, uphill both ways, in the snow… :-P
I’m done, I’ve been banned for expressing a different opinion (without insulting or personally attacking anyone), I’ve been accused of evading a ban with multiple accounts (this is my only account I’ve ever had on any lemmy instance), I’ve had people selectively ignore my comments and accuse me of things which I never...
There is one MAJOR difference: here you can make not only your own sub/community, where you can be your own mod, but you can spin up your own whole entire instance, and become your own admin. Oh Reddit, you serve The Man (spez) or you can GTFO - so we did the latter:-P (some perhaps due to being kicked out of their former mod role bc of the protests) - but here, nobody can tell us what to do, in the end.
Ofc there are limits even there, like someone can defederate from you if you refuse to control yourself, even unintentionally like if you don’t follow basic security and constantly get hacked.
It’s like being able to own your own home. When you visit a community on someone else’s instance, you are their GUEST, and you have to follow THEIR rules. The homeowner owns the community while the mayor or governor or President or Prime Minister or whatever controls the entire city / state / country or in this case “instance”. Right or wrong, it’s THEIRS, so your options are limited - you don’t get to just walk into someone else’s HOME and tell them what to do!?
But here, unlike Reddit, on your own personal computer (desktop machine even, doesn’t need a whole “server”) you can make your own place. From there, you could invite others… or not, as you choose. Inside your own home, unless you do something that may cause the police (like FBI) to come knocking, you control yourself, and also you have the responsibility and right to kick off anyone you choose who refuses to play by the rules that YOU set forth.
So do whatever you want. Ofc others have the same freedom too.
I know what you mean - it sounds like a conspiracy theory, except there’s tons of evidence to support it which makes it by definition not. Or I mean, that that stuff happens, not necessarily about any one situation in particular.
And Putin’s troll farms have been caught influencing both sides of debates involving popular topics before, it is not hard at all to imagine it happening again.
Also sheeple are fairly mindless - once something like that is first made, it would involve far less effort to just allow it to coast forward from there…
So at this point it actually could be entirely authentic douchy people, just living their best lives by acting that way - it is sad to think that people could be really like that, but I am sure that some at least are.:-(
Spez did manage to understand something real about Reddit: that many people (not all but enough for the sake of his profits, he hoped) want to speak, rather than listen. Never mind about feeling heard or it being worthwhile by adding anything to the conversation, just simply, plainly, shouting your opinions into the void. Like Discord chat except based on topics rather than channels.
Those of us who HATE that about Reddit, and want a greater balance, enjoy it here much more.:-)
Even toddlers learn to speak first by babbling, and only later to converse and communicate with someone rather than talk at them. Some technological platforms have even evolved to facilitate that - like instead of “^This” and “I also choose this guy’s wife”, what about emoji reactions that do not extend the length that you have to scroll through to find the next substantive comment? Except that - this is the enshittification part - when ads can be placed in-between comments, or even someone hopes that they could be in the future, or more likely they want to purposefully obscure the signal so that “x number of comments appear on this post”, rather than “x number of comments + y number of emoji reactions”, that works against their profit model. (and yeah, there was “awards”, but who even used those, plus they just were not… good, especially for this purpose)
About both that and being combative: fwiw, we all are that way - the good thing is that some of us are honest about it, which gives hope for change.:-) But we all will have bad days when we are cranky and especially when we feel “attacked” we feel the need to strike back, and the feelings at least are not wrong, just how we handle them may not be so productive.
So I get you - I am the same way, though fortunately less and less over time. Leaving Reddit truly has helped me leave a lot of that behind. Over there that is just the “expectation” that people encourage you to do, but the culture is better here.:-)
TLDR: not worth reading the article, it’s just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”. It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests lasts (edit: lasted) for “weeks” - not the more truthful “months”, not “permanent changes”, but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.
I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as “news”.
Likewise I also moved on from Kbin. Obviously we have no power over that project, that belongs solely to the person who created it, but we do control our own actions. e.g. I used to sing the praises of the Fediverse and go out of my way to not equate it with Lemmy - always saying like Lemmy/Kbin. Now I still do the former but I actively tell people that Kbin might not be a good match for them. Ernest has kept it as alpha version software - which is fine, there is a need for such things, and it will become great, someday… hopefully. But today is not that day, and that is super good for people to know, e.g. that they don’t have to leave the Fediverse entirely to get a more functional experience, just Kbin.social.
GoFundMe Is a Boon for Disaster Survivors. Especially the Wealthy Ones. Campaigns on the crowdfunding site raised more money for wildfire survivors with high incomes than for those who need help most (www.nytimes.com)
Makes total sense to me (midwest.social)
Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online. They also spread false information (apnews.com)
The reposts and expressions of shock from public figures followed quickly after a user on the social platform X who uses a pseudonym claimed that a government website had revealed “skyrocketing” rates of voters registering without a photo ID in three states this year — two of them crucial to the presidential contest....
Higher vehicle hoods significantly increase pedestrian deaths, study finds (arstechnica.com)
Reddit Advised to Target at Least $5 Billion Valuation in IPO (www.bloomberg.com)
An affordability crisis is making some young Americans give up on ever owning a home (www.cnn.com)
Americans are living through the toughest housing market in a generation and, for some young people, the quintessential dream of owning a home is slipping away....
'Facial recognition' error message on vending machine sparks concern at University of Waterloo (kitchener.ctvnews.ca)
A set of smart vending machines at the University of Waterloo is expected to be removed from campus after students raised privacy concerns about their software....
The downturns, debts, and bad vibes that broke the American Dream for Millennials (www.cnn.com)
Rachael Gambino and Garrett Mazzeo planned their financial life by the book: They went to college, paid down debt, saved aggressively, got married, bought a house, started a family. The dream....
Wow! (lemmy.world)
It was so bright and helpful (lemmy.world)
On social media we have these huge conversations where nobody involved has any actual experience. They're just repeating what other people said. Isn't that literally insane?
And when you have a billion people doing this, that’s a lot of insanity. Like, world-spanning plague-level insanity.
It's a very special anniversary for me: I haven't had solid food in my stomach for six months as of 9:30 this morning. [This is a very long rant, please no medical advice.]
Before I begin- Again, please no medical advice or suggestions. I am going to the Mayo Clinic in March and I will get their advice and I am just going to ignore any medical advice posted, sorry. Please no pity party either, I’m just angry and need a a place to rant and vent, that’s it. Feel free to ignore this post and move...
Junior Dev VS Machine Learning (lemmy.world)
Is there any up-side to Alabama's crazy embryo ruling (which hit the logical conclusion to their arguments)
First the crazy: Alabama has been calling embryos and fetuses ‘people’ for a long time. The latest ruling says that even frozen embryos are ‘people’. This ruling says:...
It was worth a shot (lemmy.world)
The pain is felt on other planets as well... (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Lemmy is not immune to trolls, bad fait actors or propaganda - in fact, despite how bad reddit is, a lot of Lemmy instances are worse
I’m done, I’ve been banned for expressing a different opinion (without insulting or personally attacking anyone), I’ve been accused of evading a ban with multiple accounts (this is my only account I’ve ever had on any lemmy instance), I’ve had people selectively ignore my comments and accuse me of things which I never...
Is Trump Really, Truly Going to Be a Dictator? (nymag.com)
His intellectual defenders make their case that the danger is overblown.
Lemmy Babies of the Rexodus - it's been 9 months, how has Lemmy changed you?
Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment 7 months after the APIcalypse (arstechnica.com)
Couples should be limited to a maximum of 2 children, in the whole world.
Continuing to increase the world population is absolutely nuts....
Do the "Ernest needs to add more maintainers to KBin!" comments remind anyone else of the xz social engineering malarkey?
Comments such as:...