mozz

mozz, 8 hours ago

I think Rove is wrong. He's like Carville -- he used to be a legendary master because he absorbed the shape of the landscape, but then he solidified, and he thinks it's still 2004 and always will be, and that nothing's changed since then.

Trump's base wants to start a civil war with the Democrats. If Trump wants to win, he needs to sound like an angry crazy person. It's when he tries to be normal that it all goes sour for him. That has no spice to inspire the electorate, and it doesn't suit him and he doesn't do a good job with it anyway, and all the people who were looking for a sensible leader have long since left the GOP's tent.

mozz, 6 hours ago

Part of the activist left is absolutely voting for Biden; anyone who’s been working for progress in this country and actively working and experiencing success and failure and the hard work that goes with it would I think easily able to see that letting Trump come to power would be such a severe and wide ranging setback to so many of the things they’ve been working for, and the action of just showing up one morning is so trivial in comparison to a lot of the other things they have to do for years to even move the needle by a tiny amount’s worth of difference, that it’s a no brainer.

I think there’s a significant grouping, also, that’s so horrified by his enabling of a genocide that they don’t plan to vote for him. But, their main focus right now is on putting pressure on the Democrats to stop their support for Israel (with apparently a certain small amount of success), and on direct action against the war, not really specifically anything focused on the general election except for a general feeling of disgust at the Democrats.

Depending on what you mean by “hard left,” you may or may not mean those groupings, and may instead mean some other people on the internet who are super vocal (and often seem weirdly fixated on criticizing Biden for a variety of reasons honest or dishonest, not just the war, and on the vital importance of people not voting for him, much more so than other left activist things that they seem not to be as interested in.)

mozz, 9 hours ago

In general, they get grants of cash from the US which they are required to use to "purchase" from US suppliers more or less any weapons (with few export restrictions). We're giving them weapons but they still get to pick out what they think they need. This is a pretty good overview which seems like it's mainly missing:

• The fact that congress authorizes aid, and then the White House is generally responsible for actually sending it. That's important in cases like the most recent aid package congress passed, which Biden is at least partially simply deciding not to provide, which he is more or less able to do (the "more or less" is complicated and I don't really understand it).
• A detailed breakdown of what shipments got "paused" and what aid has actually been delivered since then. Presumably, the White House is able to keep the details of this information secret. Currently, Netanyahu is claiming that they're cutting off a lot of shipments they should be giving, and the White House is claiming that that's wrong and they've been delivering aid as normal (and as far as I know not saying how much that is); it would be nice to know the detail of what's being sent and who is lying (although I have a theory).

mozz, 9 hours ago

It has yet to pass the Senate, and Biden said he would veto it.

Of course, Biden is still swearing to everyone that he is still sending shipments except for the one that he paused because of Rafah, and that he plans to keep doing it. And, his administration conducted an investigation which somehow managed to conclude that they "may have" been committing war crimes but that it's not clear enough that we would have to stop shipping them weapons or anything which we would be legally obligated to do if they "conclusively" were doing anything criminal.

Fuckin assholes

mozz, 13 hours ago

political extremists, tech nerds, privacy enthusiasts, and shitposters

Dude thank god

I miss my old nerd internet. I won’t say you’re wrong for wanting something that isn’t that, but I personally wish it was more that way than it currently is. SDF or mander is honestly a lot closer to how I like the culture and interactions to be, than Lemmy.world. I was super psyched when I came on and there were all these communists and science weirdos.

for the general masses? Lemmy is just not good.

For example, a NBA post on the NBA subreddit can get you thousands of interactions in a couple of hours. An NBA post on here will maybe get you a dozen over the course of a couple of days.

Honestly, when sports started showing up on the main page of Reddit it was confusing and alarming to me. I recognize that I am the weird one here (from the POV of the ordinary person society), but I much prefer just having my nerd stuff and having it be unencumbered by any normal person stuff

I think we actually have exactly the same view of Lemmy and its accurate position in relation to most normal people, just disagreeing over whether that is or isn’t a good thing

mozz, 15 hours ago

I know it’s officially not cool to like Rick and Morty anymore, but I cannot read a description of a suspicious bad thing called “Project Nimbus” that Google is getting itself involved in, without picturing a weird creepy sexual supervillain riding a giant seashell into a meeting with their executives

mozz, 13 hours ago

Please no let’s not start this

mozz, 12 hours ago

It became associated with aggressive internet shutins bleating about Pickle Rick and the szechuan sauce, although it's hard to tell where exactly the line was between "these guys are losers yelling and being obnoxious at McDonalds," and "stop cyberbullying we're all just internet weirdos who like a funny cartoon and that is fine." And then, Justin Roiland had some kind of sex abuse allegations and the worm turned and the world is officially supposed to hate Rick and Morty now, I think.

I mean, allegedly. I'm with you; some of it is still some great funny shit.

mozz, 6 hours ago

I hadn’t fully been aware of the changeover, but yeah I saw season 7 and it was definitely more coherent and solid and less wandery and desperate than some of the middle seasons, absolutely there was an uptick in quality to me yes

mozz, 17 hours ago

I know this whole message is preaching to the choir but:

You guys managed to find like the one time in history that US military ordinance killed civilians that unequivocally wasn't our fault, when they were attacking a clearly military target under occupation from a clearly malicious invading force

And you are, predictably, complaining like it's our fault you put the airfield right next to a fucking public beach and then didn't sound any kind of warning that it was under active bombardment and knocked one of the missiles off its military target and it fell on some people

Pack up

Go home

mozz, 18 hours ago

I mean it’s certainly not a policy reality, or a fucking priority or anything

😢

mozz, 16 hours ago

I won't say you're wrong about yes he made it worse but he did ultimately accept the compromise version and help make it happen, but even that is a sort of charitable reading. He waited until the much more aggressive first iteration had gotten most of the way through to completion, and then fucked it all up (presumably in the hopes they'd just give up), and so everyone had to go back to the drawing board and do it again with a pared back version, which was the Inflation Reduction Act, and then when that passed he took all kinds of credit for it, even though he still did his best to kneecap its actual implementation when it came to anything that might lose money for any of his campaign contributors or personal investments, which are many and mostly destructive.

It is almost impossible to overstate what a piece of shit Joe Manchin is.

mozz, 15 hours ago

Hm, I thought it was missing some big stuff -- I had some impression that BBBA was targeting a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030, and the IRA reduced it to 40% (this was the only actual list I could find in quick searching, and says it was missing "A range of policies that were previously part of the Build Back Better Act ... like electric power transmission, CO2 pipelines, and building energy efficiency" which makes basically 0 sense to me and sounds like an LLM hallucination. What the fuck is a CO2 pipeline.)

I wasn't able to find a really detailed breakdown of what might have been missing from it, so honestly I could be wrong.

I do agree with you that the IRA was a massive step forward from the usual US government "total inaction or else make it worse" policy, and that Manchin supporting it despite the fact that it was actually trying to do some significant good things is a shocking and welcome surprise. You kinda have a point there.

mozz, 20 hours ago

Well, that's an impressively misleading headline.

If you mean denying a visa to the spouse of someone who's in the United States, say so. "Separate families" in this context is very obviously an attempt to imply he's doing something much darker which he isn't doing. Biden actually started the task force to find and reunite those separated families, although the policy itself had already been abandoned, being too evil to continue for all that long under even the Trump administration.

As with a lot of these stories, I am interested to know why someone who is supposedly deeply concerned with the plight of migrant families is specifically attacking one of the parts of the US government equation that is trying to do something good for them, and instead creating (with quite a bit of success) a whole Goebbels-style reality where he's doing the exact opposite, partly by blaming him and specifically him for anything any part of the fairly racist and unreasonable US immigration apparatus ever does even down to the individual level, and ignoring the question of what the Biden administration itself is doing to shape policy, to the benefit of the team that actually is thirsting and sharpening their knives for what terribly overly malicious things they might get to do to migrants as an affirmative goal of theirs (and not a minor one) under a second Trump administration.

mozz, 19 hours ago

Yeah, but a big part of the Goebbels game is to create an overall picture of separate events that paint the larger falsehood you want to create. For anyone other than the single-digit percent of people who decide to click on the article, the headline forms one more little thing they're scrolling past that paints an overall picture of "Biden is malicious on immigration and trying to hurt people," which I think is actually one of the most successful totally-made-up realities they've managed to get into the public consciousness to try to depress support for him among people that would otherwise be inclined to.

I'm a little suspicious of the meat of the article, too -- like how much connection is there between these particular lawyers who made this filing, and Biden (presumably he didn't weigh in on this particular case, but are they even State Dept lawyers? The article says so, but I thought usually the lawyers for this kind of thing would be rank and file DOJ immigration lawyers, maybe I am mistaken)

Are the tattoos that they said justified non renewal really totally innocent non MS13 tattoos that the racist immigration apparatus freaked out about, as his lawyers are claiming? (easily possible but also not guaranteed to me simply because his lawyers are claiming it)

But the meat of the article is maybe at the "IDK I have some questions" level, whereas the headline is what'll have honestly most of the impact on the public consciousness, and it's well up into "get the fuck out of here with that explicit propaganda" level.

mozz, 19 hours ago (edited 18 hours ago)

Heyo, let's go

announced a "keep families together" campaign

I don't even know what you're talking about here. "Announced a keep families together campaign" is horseshit. (Edit: see below) He started a specific task force to go through all the kids still in custody, try to find their families (which given the general chaos and sloppiness level of the bureaucracies involved on both sides of the border was pretty fucking difficult) and give them back. Before that they were just in custody, basically just waiting to grow up in a lifetime of orphaned misery. Now they're home, when they could even find the families.

(Edit: I see it; I read more of the article. (a) What I was talking about was reuniting the confiscated kids with their families, not the more recent campaign (b) is it possible perhaps that this specific campaign a few days ago was specifically a reaction by Biden to change policies in a way so that spouses in the US would be a bigger factor in visa decisions, specifically because of actions like this example over the course of the last few years that Biden wanted to make a change to?)

his administration pushed the issue

Want to explain a little more what you mean by this?

granted the state department the ability to deny visas to people legally married to US citizens.

The State Department can do whatever it wants with renewing or denying visas. Then, if something wrong happens, someone can challenge it in court, which is exactly what happened here -- and lawyers from both sides get to present a vigorous case; in this case the lawyers for the government side (part and parcel of a pretty racist and careless system which Biden didn't create, the reform of which I would be 1,000% behind the idea of but which getting rid of Biden will make 10 times worse) made their argument for his MS-13 membership.

Painting this whole thing that "forget Biden's policies, let's find something that a government lawyer argued in one particular case that many judges agreed with once they saw the details and pretend that Biden told those particular lawyers to do exactly that and that that one event represents a good representation of his whole policy, and that the outcome was definitely wrong (which -- again -- it might have been), and a huge new thing he enacted personally and not a continuation of longstanding US immigration policy of fucking up people's lives sometimes, and that something he actually did specifically order which I talked about up at the beginning which affected many many people in an unequivocally good way just kind of didn't happen"... and then summarize it with specific misleading words to make it sound even worse than that whole weirdly slant-on-top-of-slant construction... it doesn't sit well with me, sir. No sir I do not like it.

mozz, 18 hours ago

I have begun to identify arguing against something that isn’t quite what your opponent is saying, as a way of disagreeing with something that it’s hard to muster up any good faith arguments against, as one of the key hallmarks of bad faith debating on Lemmy.

1. Obviously I am not saying that any part of the article is purely made up; I am saying this is a specific technique of highlighting individual data points to paint a misleading picture, and then giving what I feel is additional context which gives the lie to the picture that they’re trying to paint. And, I would add that it’s also using wildly inaccurate phrasing to communicate technically-not-lies to dial even further up the level of dishonesty that can be achieved. But no, I’m not aware of any of the data points actually being lies or made up.
2. I think I made my explanation pretty clear already
3. Because the State Dept actually does work for Biden, whereas the DOJ is very specifically separated from direct control by the executive weighing in on individual cases even though it’s part of the executive branch
4. If you have actual gang tattoos that’s an indication of criminality. Again, for all I know, that part is crap and US immigration is just being racist against innocent tattoos; I’m just pointing out that there is such a thing as gang tattoos and I would support using them as a reason to make a bad inference about the person.
5. “Unrestricted power” is patently false; no less than 3 different courts spent quite a while evaluating whether to restrict the State Dept’s power in this case, and presumably they’ll still be able to do that and US immigration will still have to show a judge good reasons if they want to remove someone from the country in the future. The issue is just where are the boundaries and restrictions on the power. Also, “separate families” is grossly misleading, since it could lead a reasonable reader who wasn’t up to speed on the minutiae of immigration policy to claim (as multiple Lemmy users have done to me in the past) that Biden is continuing and even expanding the policies of removing children from parents that were so infamous in the Trump administration.

mozz, 18 hours ago

Do you intentionally try to start arguments with your comments?

Yeah, that’s fair. This issue is somewhat personal for me and so I get more short tempered or rude about it than I really should. I apologize about being inflammatory about it.

That said, let me try again more polite: I think I was pretty explicit that the issue isn’t that I know the article is lying; it is that it’s presenting true facts in an engineered and wildly misleading fashion.

They intentionally baited the spouse of a US citizen to leave the country to strip the person of due process

This is another very misleading construction (and one that echoes another one in the article that I didn’t bother touching on.) Since you have been deeply involved in immigration activism, you are surely aware that this isn’t anything specific to this case or even a new Biden thing - it’s just always how it works; to renew your visa you have to leave the US, apply for renewal at the embassy, and then if they approve it you can come back in. It’s a heart-stopping and somewhat punitive process but pretending that the State Department somehow decided to apply it in only this case is flat out wrong. That’s how it works for everyone. The fact that the article pretends that they somehow singled out this guy and tricked him into going through that same process is another example of its open dishonesty.

When the appellate court reversed the trial decision, the Biden administration could have let the issue rest, gave an apology, and issued the visa.

Again, if you want to tell me that US immigration is vindictive and racist, I definitely won’t disagree. Going from there to implying they asked Biden what to do about this specific immigration case and had him decide, seems unlikely to me. Choosing to ignore things that we do know that he definitely did do to change policy seems partisan. Choosing to pick out ways in which he’s now trying to change policy to undo some of the maybe unjust things that happened in this case starting back a few years ago, at a systemic level, and trying to pretend that means he’s lying and wants to hurt people (instead of trying to now change the policies to help people), seems dishonest (and again in a way that’s specifically likely to help some people who really do want to hurt migrants, very very badly). To me.

mozz, 1 day ago

IDK if I am the clueless one, but I had absolutely no idea what “S’pore” was supposed to mean.

mozz, 1 day ago

Try that in a small town

Oh wait hang on, I'm confused now

mozz, 2 days ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HdOHrc3OQ

mozz, 2 days ago

In 2019, Texan Zackey Rahimi assaulted his girlfriend and fired his gun at a witness. He was put under a domestic violence restraining order, which he violated by possessing a firearm—an infraction under a 1994 federal laws—which he fired at people on multiple occasions. In his defense, Rahimi argued that the restraining order’s gun ban violated his 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed: there was no 18th century law analogous enough to the statute barring Rahimi from possessing a gun, and therefore under Bruen, that statute must be unconstitutional.

Yo what the FUCK

I can see why Texas is the venue that Republicans go to when they wanna get some crazy shit into precedent on a federal level

mozz, 2 days ago

I mean it’s basically a gateway to bad laws

“If there’s any dispute between how it used to be and how it is now, we want to make it so how it used to be wins”

“Wait isn’t there usually a reason they changed it?”

“I said no questions”

mozz, 2 days ago

What the hell is happening

Is this like some advanced level of trolling to drive the mods away to create anarchy

More importantly who the fuck is upvoting it

mozz, 1 day ago

I could be wrong, but my assumption is that he's in quite a lot of trouble and going to be in an extended limbo of custody and probation for quite a while going forward because of his other charges, whichever way the more minor issue of violating the protective order comes out (i.e. his lawyers are just mounting a vigorous defense as they're supposed to do, and they found one of them that they can fight effectively through this weird little argument.)

mozz, 1 day ago

Firing "at" people could be attempted murder or all the way down to negligent discharge or something, depends on the details of the circumstance (what "at" means) and any plea deals and how vigorous the DA wants to be about it. And this could have all happened before everything wound it way through the courts and he was found guilty of attempted murder even if it was the felony route. It's hard to say just from that much how fucked he really is (well, until the next time he does something like this which sounds fairly likely to happen as his life continues on its present course).

The fact that they're going after him for having the firearm under the protection order instead of for being a felon makes it likely to me that he wasn't a felon at the time he was doing all these shooting-ats.

mozz, 1 day ago

it's a major oversight to not indict or convict him of a felony charge

I don't disagree with you in any respect. For reasons that aren't really clear to me, courts commit major oversights of charging people every single day. Except drugs! For some reason they really like fucking people because of drugs. Punching your girlfriend and firing a weapon near some people who shouldn't get hit with bullets strikes me as exactly one of those things that someone might some way-too-large minority of the time look at and go "you know what it's hard to say what happened and it might be tough to prosecute, fuck it, 8 months probation, let's go have a beer it is Friday."

mozz, 2 days ago

Absolutely without fail, the arc is:

• We're so strong that no one can stop us
• Might makes right
• Buddy you better not mess with me, we can ruin and throw aside like garbage anyone who displeases us
• Ma they throwin me aside like garbage, please help, it's not fair

Somehow they never get the idea that maybe there's a better way, that they might not always be able to count on being the fuck-er and not the fuck-ee.

mozz, 2 days ago

You know what's weird? Trying to think about who are the people to line up in little pairings of who represents who, actually gave me a weird sense of hope, like it's very early in the whole process compared to looking back on the Nazis, and it's not going anywhere near as well as it did for them in Germany. Putting the two next to each other (Beer Hall Putsch vs January 6th, Goebbels vs Bannon, SA versus Oathkeepers, things like that) makes the MAGA people look pretty wimpy. People looked at the Nazis like a joke early on but they had real combat experience, organization, they got shit done, they weren't afraid to get in the streets by the thousands and fight this actual war that the Right on the internet keeps talking about but seems (a couple outliers aside) to be constantly waiting for someone else to instigate and then win, for them.

Himmler was like this suspectedly wimpy guy, like oh he never saw combat, he only single handedly oversaw the construction of and then commanded a million-strong paramilitary force and then supervised the extermination of six million people. If that's the bar for "we're not sure about this guy," then what the fuck are you going to say in the credit of Steve Bannon or Jared Kushner and their displayed abilities. Nothing, that's what.

On the other hand, the society they're trying to take over is itself a lot more vulnerable and less vigorous and more sitting-on-TikTok based, so maybe it's not any real assurance of safety.

mozz, 3 days ago

Every single American who isn’t living in a yurt is carrying or wearing or interacting with made-in-China merch, most of the time as they go about their day.

mozz, 3 days ago

The Chinese are pursuing a very weird passive aggressive strategy here that I do not at all understand.

"Surely if we spray water at the other boats and run our boats into them and jump on board the opposing ships with poking weapons like some kind of Maori tribesmen the rest of the world will get sick of it and go away and give us what we want i.e. full control of the South China Sea, without us having to actually start a war about it"

I really don't understand. I can't even say for sure it is a bad idea, because like I say I just don't understand, but it seems unlikely that it's going to produce the impact that they seem like they want it to produce.

mozz, 3 days ago

But they do this shit with the US too. Their fighter planes play the "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you" game with US aircraft right up until the point it turns into the "oh no I did touch you and now I'm dead and my airplane is falling apart in fiery chunks and your airplane is crippled what an exercise in futility that whole thing was" game.

Like I say, I won't even say that that didn't impact US policy in some way similar to what they wanted. I don't know that it did but I don't know that it didn't. Overall my main reaction is just wtf are you guys doing why is your strategy like this.

(I do of course suspect that they will not try to play the firehoses and spear wielding game with the US Navy. Just some similar version of the same type of tactics.)

mozz, 3 days ago

That "China/Taiwan" is just kinda thrown in there without even an asterisk or anything

(Actually I guess leaving Taiwan out of the legend entirely would have looked like an accident or something, and having a separate color for it would have been a huge deal and they'd have started to get phone calls, and so they just shrugged and put that down and said you know what it's not a perfect world let's move on)

mozz, 3 days ago

Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.

That actually might be it. We can't look to people in our own government / own country like we're anything other than the boss and everyone knows it, but also, we definitely don't want to pick a massive fight with another nuclear armed power and our biggest trading partner for literally no reason at all. And so, let's play this stupid fighter-plane-chicken game with them and spin it at home like we're out there telling them what's what.

IDK if I buy it. It sorta makes sense.

It's hard to square that, though, with actually fucking up the sailors on Filipino ships in a way that seems like it should demand some kind of response. Maybe the orders were to just be pushy in a non-escalational way and things got out of hand on the ground in a way that for-real wasn't intended?

mozz, 2 days ago

Bloody hell, you are right (well, sort of; apparently it's complex.) That's convenient for the map makers, I guess, although best of luck to them in enforcing any of it (and according to that article they've sort of clarified that that doesn't mean they're actually claiming the sea, as best as I can understand it.)

mozz, 4 days ago

The polls are absolute shit. You can draw a little bit of a conclusion that if Biden went up by 2 points, that probably means that wherever the real answer is, it might not be crazy to think it went up by somewhere from 1 to 3 points because of something that happened. That part may be worth being slightly happy about. But whether that real answer is +2 like they say, or -10, or +20, modern polls actually can't tell you, and all these people that are telling you they can, are lying. In my opinion.

Source: I looked through the methodology they actually use for this polling and found it to be dogshit, and then looked up a few polls for recent elections and found that the poll differed from the actual result of the election by an average of 16 percentage points.

mozz, 4 days ago

There absolutely is a border crisis, just not the type that the right is claiming there is. For the most part, it roots back to a sudden wild spike upwards in the number of people coming into the country, which causes two big problems:

1. There's a huge backlog of asylum / deportation cases which means people stay in custody in racist and oppressive overcrowded prisons
2. We're rate limiting the people coming into the country (see point #1), which means a lot of asylum seekers who are trying to do it legally wind up waiting for months (maybe years now, IDK) on the other side of the Mexican border, basically just living in a big, dangerous, squalid, crime-ridden open-air field with no facilities for life, and no job, no medical care for anyone no matter how young or old, it's fuckin dangerous

Then, add to that that the whole agency in charge of the border police is for the most part made of racist people, and then add overcrowding and shortage of resources, and it's fuckin bad for the people who are winding their way slowly through the system.

Biden is unable to fix the problems, although (aside from the racist police) they do have legislative solutions, because the Republicans block anything he does, even when he tried promising to do some cruel or racist things as a compromise in order to get them to also agree to some badly needed things (mostly, increasing ICE funding so they can at least house the people they have in better conditions, and increasing the number of judges to process cases so people don't wait for a year before their case is heard).

And, any time he tries to do anything about it, e.g. reducing the rate of people allowed to come across the border or increasing funding for ICE, everyone on the left as far as I can tell thinks he's just being cruel on purpose for no reason and gets really mad at him.

mozz, 4 days ago

I’ll ask you, then, the same thing I have asked a few other people who have made this same assertion: what should Biden do, then? If presumably we can agree that it’s bad people waiting in ICE custody for over a year for their cases to be heard, then what solution to it should he pursue, that you wouldn’t then criticize as cruelty?

mozz, 3 days ago

That's awesome -- an actual answer. I can work with this. Follow-up question: Why is "nothing" the right answer to this and this? Why would you describe hiring more judges as deliberate cruelty?

I do actually agree on some of the actual cruelty things he tried to offer the Republicans, as a compromise, but that's a very small minority of the things this administration has tried to do about the border, and when they did it didn't happen anyway. The majority of what they're doing as far as I know has been things like hiring more judges (i.e. obviously the right thing to do) or limiting the number of people coming in the country (which was an attempt to deal with problem #2 which also worsened problem #1, but it's hard to see it as some villainous act, to me, given that problem #1 exists).

mozz, 3 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Interesting. So, if you want to clarify that "the only action he can take is deliberate cruelty" doesn't apply to hiring more judges, and that you think hiring more judges isn't deliberately cruel, then cool -- obviously, I agree with you about that.

If you want to seize on that one sentence to pretend I'm engaged in bad faith and flee the conversation at this stage -- and not engage with anything else I said or asked you -- I won't stop you. I think actually it's probably a good idea tactically for you to do so. Cheers.

mozz, 3 days ago

I know, right? It would be insane to claim that trying to hire more judges is an exercise in deliberate cruelty. I am glad to have you as an ally in this assertion, because there are lots of people who are claiming all kinds of weird things about what Biden's attempting to do at the border and why.

Anyway, like I said, I won't keep you; I'll go and sealion somewhere else I guess.

mozz, 4 days ago

The vast majority of people do not know enough about the world to be able to work out what they're receiving from the news is or isn't bullshit, and wouldn't have the mental tools to be able to work it out if they did have access to it. Their choice is between accepting what the news and social media are telling them, or else living in an incoherent jumble where all points of view are equally invalid and suspect and they are left with no idea at all of what's going on.

They actually get really uncomfortable in the landscape of "let's work out what is going on by subjecting these claims to criticism." It's disorienting for them, like upending of a bedrock unanimous-consensus world view that has been projected very sternly at them out of the TV. Like the introduction of something subversive and obviously wrong that they are going to let into their brain, and then they'll become wrong, too.

I actually can think of only one time when I was able to talk someone into admitting that the overall picture he was telling me probably wasn't true even though the internet had told him, and it took over an hour, and then he instantly followed it up by saying -- I am only slightly exaggerating -- that he was going to keep believing it anyway because holding onto it made him feel better.

Honestly, I'm somewhat surprised that American elections are still as connected to reality as they currently are. Their outcomes are like 25% connected to the reality of the candidates, where I would have expected more like 5.

mozz, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

"Well, he tried to kill the vice president and many congress people because he lost the election and wanted to seize power anyway and they wouldn't help him. Also, he got dozens of CIA agents killed by just handing over top secret information for no reason at all to our active enemies during a shooting war. He stole, he lied, he got people killed, he put Hispanics in concentration camps, and during a second term he wants to do it all again, but with less guard rails of the people who were able to stop him doing much much worse the first time. He wants to shoot protestors and have the military seize the voting machines. He wants to do away with term limits and make it illegal for the media to criticize him. He wants to put all his enemies in prison. He wants a nationwide database of any woman that gets an abortion. It's literally impossible to even list what he has done or wants to do without missing something so grave that it would disqualify any other human being on the planet, but there are so many that they begin to blend together and you can lose sight of how terrifying they truly are individually."

"But wait, now you're telling me he fucked a lady who wasn't his wife and lied about it? Well, in that case, I gotta tell you my mind is pretty much made up about this guy then."

mozz, 4 days ago

Good old TV ads

Everyone knows! That is the way

mozz, 3 days ago

Because modern technology is so efficient that it creates an absolute endless firehose of resources and power which could do more or less anything, but the criteria that go into selecting who's going to be in charge of making decisions, and who keeps the bulk of the profit, are often a bunch of semi-random crap. So you wind up with people sitting on top of billions of dollars born of profits from donut-making, who have no real idea of what to do with the rest once they've kept most of it for themselves and their friends, and so they buy advertising with it.

Some advertising is quite effective; the leading edges of its technological development are targeted and refined to a terrifying degree. But there's also an incredible amount that's just noisy ineffective crap, basically an illustration of Sturgeon's law in the form of an expensive and irritating waste of energy for everyone involved in the process.

mozz, 4 days ago

Hence why I said not currently

mozz, 4 days ago

You broke the code yes

😢

It is changing slowly but that doesn’t do anything for someone whose child is dying quickly, right now

Part of it is just the news. They would present it VERY differently and in a much more compelling fashion than they present what’s happening in Palestine today. But that’s only part. The average American also cares far more about white people and countries that are “our friends” than they do about people who are neither of those things.