Honestly it’s kind of a good sign. I grew up pre-internet, where all you had to do was get the nightly news to report your version of reality and there was literally no other way that people could find out it was all gimmicks. A person could maybe run across Noam Chomsky or something, but they would be the only one (there was literally one person I knew in school, and one person at my office, who was a super-lefty person like me, and everyone else thought we were more or less terrorists at any point if we talked about it). Now with the internet it’s easy for people to run across criticisms of anything, so you can’t just report the bullshit and move on, so they have to get more sophisticated with it. It’s good that they are having to work and be creative.

The bad news is that they’ve worked at it and got creative. Like what I mean is Bernie Sanders would never have gotten near power in 1996. The system would have been able to shut him down way earlier, they still had to ratfuck him a little but he was (and still is) wildly popular in a way that Ron Paul never was outside of a select internet demographic. But of course along with that comes Trump. The information free-for-all is a mixed blessing.

There’s a reason for that. Certain framings resonate well, and especially if they are synced up with how the target audience likes to view things anyway and who their “good guys” and “bad guys” tend to be. It’s just a matter of plugging the right people and situations into the powerful framings and then repeating the construction from a wide variety of sources. It’s like turnkey social engineering. It works incredibly well when it is done at a big scale.

Some examples:

• Maduro / Zelensky / etc as noted
• “You can’t criticize Israel / Democrats on lemmy.world, all the mods are zios”
• “AOC / Mamdani / Bernie betrayed Israel, she/he’s a genocide supporter and I feel so betrayed and she/he’s lost my vote forever, just another DNC faker”
• “The West pushed Russia into war with Ukraine, Russia didn’t want to do it but they just kept pushing and so Russia felt threatened and had no choice, it’s all NATO’s fault at the end of the day”

And so on. None of this has anything to do with reality. A person who was starting from first principles would never reach those conclusions, since they are precisely literally the opposite of what happened. And, if you press the people pushing them for details, they’ll always fall back on basically the exact same individual anecdote or thought-pattern to support the backwards-land conclusion and push really really hard on that one anecdote. They are always super confident and pushy about the conclusions.

Supporting anecdote examples:

• “Look at this time I called another user a pedophile fascist hacker furry porn bad faith Zionist and also said something pro-Palestinian, and my comment got deleted! Definitely because of the pro-Palestinian part which is super unpopular on lemmy.world which is definitely full of people supporting Israel and Hakeem Jeffries! So don’t go there and definitely don’t listen to what they have to say about Uyghurs!”
• “Remember that one individual time when AOC voted for that one amendment which stripped Israel of all its offensive weaponry which wasn’t going to pass anyway and was a waste of time but then also the amendment she voted for would have kept in place grants for some anti-missile systems which is the most important thing about AOC’s entire Israel history now going forward indefinitely and has now become all I want to talk about and let’s not talk about any other stuff about her!”

I can’t continue, I am getting genuinely annoyed lol. But anyway. There are other examples, they went all-out coming up with new ones of these leading up to the 2024 election and deployed a handful of pretty effective ones against Democrats. But those are the ones I currently see in active rotation.

This thing is never going to be completed. It’s going to be just as much of an extended failure prone clusterfuck that eventually gets moved on from, with nothing whatsoever to show for it in the end, as his health care plan or anything else.

Releasing the grand jury materials was always a strawman.

“Release the materials seized from Epstein”

“Okay okay since I’m completely committed to transparency and definitely my name’s not all over Epstein’s documents in all kinds of incriminating ways I will release the grand jury materials! See? Full transparency. Just like you definitely asked for. Hopefully this brings the matter to a close.”

It’s an artful dodge, moderately effective so far at shifting the conversation.

why isn’t the media talking about the murders of the fisherman for drug trafficking being tied to trump pardoning a drug trafficker in the same fucking week

Because they, too, are some bitches.

No! Stay and talk with them and make them ban you for saying reasonable things! And then whine about it!

(I am joking, anyone can do what they want, I’m just saying my preferred solution.)

Bro who the FUCK on Lemmy was upset about pulling out of Afghanistan lmao

These people live in bizarro world

(For what it’s worth, I think pulling out of Afghanistan was a clusterfuck, because it was always going to be a clusterfuck because that’s what happens when you pull out in the middle of a war. Maybe Biden made it worse in certain ways, maybe Trump tied his hands with certain elements of the deal he made with the Taliban, I honestly don’t really know. But regardless, the fact that it was a clusterfuck and did a bunch of damage in the way it was handled and made everyone involved look like morons should always have been an expected part of the proposition of pulling out, which is why no one up until Biden was willing to take the hit to pull the trigger on it and preferred just to keep killing Afghans indefinitely.)

Honestly, Librewolf is pretty functional. It used to break all kinds of stuff, but now it’s just a couple of sites with fingerprint protection issues, and there’s a couple-of-clicks way to disable the strict fingerprint protection on any site you care about where it’s causing problems.

It’s worse now. There are a lot of apartment building facilities management systems on the public internet now with poor security.

Want to make yourself a fob to get into the building, or into someone’s apartment? Want to get a listing of when those people enter and exit the building and when they’re generally not home? Well, now you can. It’s not a real high percentage of buildings that have their management systems exposed that way, but in raw numbers, there are a whole fucking bunch of them.

Done.

“And so then Lemmy said ‘Hey you know what would be a good idea is if we copied that model exactly’” :-(

I absolutely have observed mods on Lemmy engaging in the same shitty behaviors (I am sitting on a post about a little cabal of !progressivepolitics@lemmy.world people who seem to be trying to rig the discourse in a particular direction to meet their electoral goals). But the simple fact of it being less centralized and more transparent (and with more of a culture of effective pushback against the mods) makes it a lot harder. They can’t just say “lol get fucked” like the mod from this post did and have that be the end of the story.

Oops, you are 100% correct, I fixed the title.

to stay within the 2°C goal of the Paris Agreement

Good to see we’re acknowledging reality finally as far as 1.5 degrees

and avoid catastrophic climate change

If not as far as some other areas 🫤

I think I’m going to stop making fun of your point of view now, I think the point is made

Soldiering is a middle class profession currently

https://www.military-ranks.org/army-pay

Starts at $24k per year. Not to worry, though, once you’re a sergeant with 14 years experience it caps out at $48k, and once you’ve reached literally the highest rank of enlisted man it is possible to achieve, of which there is only one in the entire army, it goes up to $118k!

(You do get a signing bonus, too, which since you’re a middle-class person and not being taken advantage of, you’ll stick into an investment account to start saving up for your middle-class life, instead of buying a new Dodge Charger. All those new recruits with their investment accounts are practically a meme at this point.)

That used to be true, but Claude is now getting substantially worse.

I suspect that what’s happening is that they are trying to bleed out money in slightly less torrential amounts every month, so they’re trying hard to constrain how much resources the thing is allowed to consume, meaning that it started out smart and is now getting steadily dumber over time. I was trying to use Claude for a coding project today, and while I’ll admit the questions were complex, it really was remarkably dumb in a way that it didn’t used to be.

Well… maybe so, but the judge definitely said he was also “outright lying” in his deposition (meaning under oath).

So he’s about to be charged with perjury and also battery and false imprisonment right