Any thinking person, the world over, should hate the American government. It's being run by violent psychopathic terrorists with dreams of world domination.
But do NOT hate Americans for it. We are even bigger victims of those terrorists than you are. Not only are the DC terrorists plundering resources, runiing economies, and killing people here just as in the rest of the world, but they're making US pay for it!
In ancient hunter-gatherer societies, some people evolved a particular hyper-awareness of their surroundings. They are able to be maintain a low-level awareness of everything around them, and to very quickly separate what's important and deserves attention from what is unimportant. They are able to easily switch tasks and react on instinct to immediately deal with a new situation, often before others have had time to think about it. These hyper-aware individuals were critical to the survival of the tribe, when a predator or danger might appear at any moment, and that quick instinctual action might mean the difference between life and death.
Unfortunately, these individuals sacrificed the ability to focus for long periods on mundane tasks they found uninteresting, even if they knew it had to be done.
Modern society has far fewer immediate dangers. Value is placed on the ability to focus on the mundane; for its people to behave like automatons. There is little place in modern society for people with this hyperawareness trait.
And so, modern society now diagnoses these people as somehow "broken". We invented a name, "ADHD", and called what they are a disorder. From early childhood, we give them mind-altering drugs to transform their personality into something society finds more acceptable. We break our children's minds, because we don't want to deal with them as they evolved to be.
@Vox This exactly. Thank you for putting words to what I was trying to say.
Perhaps it's a result of growing up before social media, but I remember what actual bullying is like. Being poked, kicked, and hit between classes. Getting penned in the locker room by four guys all bigger than you, with no physical way out. Social media has absolutely none of that. It is always possible to simply disengage. Log out. Go outside and smell the pollen.
I made a personal rule many years ago that if someone online isn't willing to have an intelligent conversation in good faith, then I simply won't interact with them. It has served me well.
For example, a couple weeks ago, I too somehow got on the bad side of a bunch of poa.st neanderthals. It went from people telling me to harm myself, all the way up to death threats. I suppose that qualifies as the "harassment" that @wjmaggos is talking about. Like you, Vox, I simply stopped having the conversation. Problem solved. (Well, then I went on my podcast and made fun of them about it, but that's just a bonus)
> so do you use spam blocking on your email server?
Of course, but you're setting up a false dichotomy.
First of all, the problem with spam is less about what is said than about the methods used. Providing information about a mattress sale doesn't violate my rights. Abusing my resources (bandwidth, disk space, time and attention) in order to push your marketing message does.
Secondly, I'll say it again for the people in the back. You have a right to say anything you want. I do not have an obligation to listen. This seems to be the distinction you're blurring. Blocking your messages from entering my server does not violate your rights. Shadowbanning your account on your server (or on a de facto public square) does. Putting your server on a global shared blocklist does. Freezing your bank account because you said the wrong thing, or throwing you in a gulag for three years without due process because you attended the wrong political protest ... does.
@wjmaggos@Dhowjen@nam Lawsuits are possibly the most inefficient, and expensive method we have to arrive at the truth, especially given how often they don't get there. Infinitely more effective would be to simply not censor opposing viewpoints.
> I don't know how we otherwise stop wannabes from saying crazy shit that can go viral.
You don't. You seem to keep intentionally missing this point. The way you fight misinformation is not with enforcement and censorship - that provably doesn't work. You fight misinformation by doing two things: 1) providing access to true information, AND 2) by teaching people the critical thinking skills necessary to tell the difference.
This isn't some bike shed crap like whether to take red or green salsa. This is the fucking Presidency of the United States. I'd say at LEAST as much as we piss away sending to foreign places like Ukraine.
@wjmaggos@Dhowjen@nam It represents tremendous progress that a Biden-supporter is even willing to talk about the vote count, rather than just stuff their hands in their ears and scream "NO EVIDENCE, NO EVIDENCE"
Hard to take this seriously when the only source is a severely biased progressive tabloid. Quick scan for biased adjectives: "conservative media company", "widespread conspiracy", "falsely depicted", "right-wing commentator", "widely debunked", "false claim", "baselessly accused", "abruptly recalled", and putting "ballot tracfficking" in air quotes. A quick news search turned up links from CNN and MSNBC (which are even worse), but not one article that scanned with a neutral bent.
I'm not really sure what you think you're refuting here. The lawsuit does nothing to refute the truthfulness in the claims laid out in 2000 Mules. It merely demonstrates that one person (whose biases I can guess at) got angry enough to attempt lawfare against what he perceived to be a political enemy. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a lot of that going on these days.
Supposing that the lawsuit-happy Mr. Andrews is actually telling the truth, and that he was singled out unjustly. In that case, the documentary could simply be amended to remove any mention of him without any loss of impact. You could rename it to "1999 Mules"
3a) Even if you threw out the whole documentary, are you going to link to NPR articles individually "debunking" each and every other piece of evidence of fraud? Actaully scratch that. It wouldn't surprise me if someone at NPR had actually written an article with this level of bias for each one.
Salem Media issued the retraction, not D'Souza. The latter made the documentary, and is responsible for its contents. The former merely entered a business engagement. And being a publishing business, is understandably more exposed to lawfare.
4a) It's a settlement, not a verdict. Settlements are designed to explicitly avoid any question of findings of fact. Everything else is pure supposition.
And finally, this argument demonstrates the kind of wishful thinking that I see a lot from cancel culture fetishists. The documentary laid out an argument with evidence and reasoning to reach a conclusion. That doesn't go away just because you ad-hominem away the person making the argument. That's not how information works. Even if D'Souza himself wanted to retract it, he could only do so by presenting a new argument with new evidence that contradicts the argument already made.
You seem to be making the extremely common leftist assumption that the only reason to follow Trump is because he's a cult of personality, and that people agree with him only because he said it. I'm not sure if that's projection from people who do that, or merely a genuine disbelief that anybody you disagree with could have any critical thinking skills of their own.
I personally don't "follow" Trump anywhere. I don't have a twitter or truth.social account. I don't follow the news, or pay attention to the rallies. If Trump says something noteworthy, I usually find out from memes or second-hand clips on podcasts. If there's a MAGA "community", I'm not part of it.
But what I do have is the ability to look with my own eyes, and question what authority figures are telling me. I watched as the Pennsylvania and Georgia Secretaries of State made last-minute changes to election rules that opened significant vulnerabilities to fraud. That day in November 2020, I was up late (on the left coast), so I was awake to see the reports of election workers putting up paper to keep observers out. Of too many coincidences, like a "water leak" that forced all other observers out of a different place. Of the completely unprecedented and improper move of "halting" vote counting in the middle of the night - a decision made simultaneously in six different states who are all supposed to be operating independently. Of the famous graph with red and blue lines, demonstrating the STATISTICAL IMPOSSIBILITY of hundreds of thousands of votes coming in for one candidate, in multiple states (and in some cases, being subtracted from the other), all within the same hour of the morning.
Before I even went to bed that night, it was obvious that not everything was above board. It was obvious to me. It was obvious to Donald Trump. It was obvious to millions of people who were paying attention, and not blinded by their ideology. The only people to whom it was not obvious were the willfully oblivious.
When we woke up on November 4, those of us who were honest and rational did not know enough to be sure that Trump won. But we did know that there were far too many irregularities to conclude that Biden did. Irregularities that, if the election had been above board, needed to be analyzed and investigated, to find out if and where any fraud occurred before deciding on a winner.
But that's not what happened. Instead, leftist media told us to shut up, to ignore our own eyes. Leftist talking heads declared that Biden was the unconditional winner. Leftist social media warriors shouted down anybody who asked any questions about what happened. Trump noticed this too.
And then, on January 6, whether through coercion, plot, or conspiracy, Congress certified what was clearly a questionable election, without so much as one investigation being started.
Some people investigated anyway, and evidence began mounting later of mules stuffing ballot boxes. Of boxes of pre-printed ballots trucked into counting centers. Of election workers specifically told to kick out Republican observers (and signing legal affidavits to that effect)
If you can ignore all of that, and still tell me that Biden won fairly, that the election doesn't need any investigation, and that every single person who thinks otherwise only does so because Trump told us to...
Then get the fuck out of here with your "reason" bullshit. You're the one letting your ideology blind you.
There is nothing liberal about fascism, and I'm tired of pretending it is.
If you support authoritarian parties like Marxists, Communists, and Democrats, please stop using the word "liberal" to identify yourself. Those regimes today are as far from true liberty as it's possible to get without gas chambers and outright slavery. This level of cognitive dissonance is too 1984 even for 2024.
@wjmaggos I don't know what that means, but if you mean to say that while you agree with me deep down because you're smart enough to recognize that the party you support is being run by authoritarian fascists who would sooner see you rotting in a gulag than offer you anything resembling liberty, however your partisan programming runs so deep you are unable to admit to yourself that you're being lied to by your chosen political clique, and further that, since you are unable to articulate any reasons that "democrat" and "liberty" should appear anywhere in the same sentence, you instead opted to post a cryptic image of someone making a hand gesture in an attempt to salvage what shreds are left from your shattered sense of superiority, then yes, that's about what I expected.
Socialist sales pitches like UBI always promote how you, the common plebeian, will have more money. They seldom address where that money will come from. Even when they do, it's a base appeal to envy about taking it by force from people richer than you. This is easy to sell because a smart person with the luck to be in the right place and time can make a lot of money under a capitalist system.
But it's unworkable, because under the socialist system being proposed, they never could have become that wealthy in the first place. Anyone who becomes the slightest bit wealthy will have it taken away by the system. The incentive to succeed is thus eliminated.
Therefore, the money necessary to keep the system moving - money created under capitalism - would never have been created in socialism.
Worse, what socialists never address is who will be the ones taking that money by force. All redistribution schemes require someone to do the redistributing. When pressed, the socialists will wave their hands and say "the state", but in the end, there's always a person. No matter who is selected for that job, it is human nature that the position will, given time, be filled by someone corrupt and power-mad.
@wjmaggos
> I'm not opposed to taking some of that difference
But who will do the taking, that's my point? Identify who is in charge of deciding what should be taken, and directing people to take it (by force, of course), and you have identified your despot - the one person who effectively owns everything.
> UBI might work better than min wage and social programs
Yes, and moldy bread tastes better than a turd sandwich. I'm against the other socialist programs you named as well, and for many of the same reasons.
Democracy is the political expression of mob rule, in which the majority group can impose its will with impunity on minority groups.
Progressives - the people whose ideology is based on lifting up minorities above all others - are coincidentally also the ones who shout the loudest about "preserving our democracy". The cognitive dissonance from this is only possible to reconcile if you either lack the ability to think about it rationally, or you have no integrity to get in the way of your double-standard.
Helpful tip to all of those woke activists who want to lie down in freeways and make cars swerve around you because you think it will somehow help your cause du jour:
Far more goods are moved by train than by truck. To serve your cause better, go lie down on some railroad tracks instead.
@wjmaggos
Eh, point taken. But when tracks are blocked, it's not some tragedy of the commons head scratching with cops milling around in confusion. Rail companies lose money directly, and they employ their own thugs for track clearing.
And maybe, just maybe, one of these morons will pick a track in front of a train that can't stop. How doesn't matter, as long as karma is satisfied.
And hey, if nothing else, it sure would raise awareness.
I know I'm showing my age when I recall to younger people the bygone era, when technology was created to serve mankind, rather than the other way around.
