i sometimes worry the newbs won’t realize the joke, but i love you magat satire account

and thus america became that much more like russia

100% i agree there’s a time and a place for civility, but when someone is posting the most vile ass shit, they don’t deserve kindness

fair enough. i just can’t mentally deal with that bullshit. i have a friend who fought in Ukraine’s civil war. she won’t say anything about it, like any veteran, other than that she hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in 10 years. as much as i would like to help put up counter propaganda with you, this shit puts me in a foul enough mood it makes me want to quit lemmy entirely. i’ve done hiatuses before, and i likely will again. but in these cases, i simply don’t have it in me to be the one.

pretty much yeah. only it’s not that the cat grows upeand has to deal with how gorgeous it is, it’s that the cat, who was always a skunk and didn’t realize, just needed to keep looking for their people. there’s a line in one piece

“the world is too vast for anyone to be born into it alone. take to the sea. you will find your people”

glad you put in the effort instead of using ai tho

everyone, report, downvote, and block this… <insult>

not for lack of trying, you ass

we had this book! it’s about self perception. i don’t think it was literally titled this, but i vividly remember the illustrations and it starts with that the other cats don’t like the smelly cats stench, and then they don’t like its games, but then it finds some animals that appreciate its stench and doing handstands with it, so they go home to their community where the smelly cat meets its birth mother, a skunk. on the last page the smelly cat is shown with the skunk, and they’re both skunks

what the fuck is the constitution?

they fell for that authoritarianism is inherent and exclusive to communism. corporate authoritarianism tricked them into thinking it was their only protection from authoritarianism

The thing to understand is that a journalist and an outlet have different motivations and goals. A journalist seeks to get the truth put int front of people. An outlet seeks to keep the wave forms going out. The outlet has a variety of motivations for this, and each outlet will have different balances of these motivations. The most common motivations are money, a desire to get the truth in front of the people, and personal political influence for the owner of the outlet. Given that the journalist and the outlet are not necessarily aligned, the journalist makes a deal with the devil every time they work with the outlet. They are ultimately making a choice between more reach and more integrity because the biggest outlets skew further and further away from getting truth in front of the people being their primary motivator.

So what does this all mean? It means you can actually learn a lot about how news media works by studying street art. The basic mechanism of street art is that you are co-opting a wave form to disseminate your message to people who didn’t ask for it. A jounralist does the same thing when they make their deal with the devil at the outlet. They follow the rules of the outlet to get their message in front of people who would not have otherwise seen it. The good news is that this outlet, commondreams, has a strong track record of seemingly being motivated by getting the truth in front of people. However, they have a strong enough record and reach that they also have the attention of the FCC who could be wielded against them, so it seems the editors have requested the language be adjusted to keep the waveforms going out.

However, there’s also another possibility. Journalism, just like street art, is a community. What one journalist takes up, so will another. If one journalist talks about “purchasing goodwill” suddenly that’s the terms that this will be discussed under by multiple journalists. Some journalists for the less good outlets weaponize this and perform a process called “sane-washing” where they create new euphemisms (newspeak, effectively) to let other journalists pick up and use. In the street art community we call this a “meme.” Yes. It’s a meme. We’re all netizens. We know what a meme is and how they work. How many memes have you disseminated without ever thinking about “Who created this? Why did they create it? What was their goal? When did they have the time to create this (if the meme is time relevant)? What is this meme saying to me, what is it saying when I share it, and is that something I want?”

If you’re like most people, you probably didn’t put that much thought into any of that when disseminating a meme. But a lot of meme creators do. You know. It’s ironic. Alex Jones called his show “info wars” and then just broadcast a bunch of bullshit. But at the very core of his show was a truth. There is an information war going on. It’s just that Alex Jones is not on the side he claims to be. His show’s purpose was to disseminate right wing memes and influence culture at large to become more right wing. In this he succeeded.

Anyway. What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah. “Purchasing goodwill.” So. There’s several possibilities here.

1. The journalist originally wrote “bribe” and the editor changed it
2. The journalist originally wrote “purchasing goodwill” because it’s a meme that started with another journalist
3. The journalist originally wrote “purchasing goodwill” because they’re performing the sane-washing (I think this is the least likely scenario given the outlet)

If you want real actual news about the things going on, here are some outlets to keep an eye on:

• commondreams.org
• propublica.org
• itsgoingdown.org
• anarchistnews.org

(worth noting, I am biased towards anarchist news sources because of my world view. But! Because of my world view, I also think it is better to present your bias and say “Here’s what I think and here’s how it influences how I engage with the propaganda machines around us” than it is to say “I’m an unbiased sources writing from a position of authority” because the latter is inherently a lie. Everyone is biased. Everything is biased.)

What a terrible terrible example. Bottled water is just theft

time for james donald bowman to tour russia, see what’s going on there

tech, food, anything

i’d be willing to give tesla buyers benefit of the doubt up to 2016. after 2016, no excuse.

100%. i’m only trying to explain how the brainwashing works and why it’s effective. to combat it you must be aware of its mechanisms

and the one of pre-modern times, too

oh i know. i’m speaking on this as a rural citizen who’s seen how my neighbors are manipulated. per capita, rural tax payers get more back from their taxes as benefits than city dwellers. the rural voter sees that it’s not enough though and seeths with anger. being isolated by the land around them, they’re easier to manipulate into blaming someone in an apartment than in a penthouse or mansion. the best way to resist fascism is to go out into the world and talk to people. the rural voters who fuel fascism are less able to do this thanks to their material conditions, making them more vulnerable to bullshit propaganda. urban voters meanwhile, are not immune to fascism, but are far more likely to encounter perspectives other than their own by the nature of their lived experience in a large community.

the most terrifying in all this are the suburbs. the places where people actively choose to tune out of being connected in favor of a 1950s vision of america that would be easier to manipulate a la brave new world and 1984 into working against their own best interests.

fuck. i’m gonna have to go listen to nazi by chumbawamba now…

how is that the point you were making? it seems like the opposite of the point you were making. i’m confused and i think i just don’t understand what you’re trying to say when you say matrix doesn’t federate. because from one matrix server you can talk to other matrix servers, but from rocket chat, that’s it, that’s the end of the line. your server is your server