MTG shows Hunter Biden revenge porn for congress.
OpenStars @ OpenStars @kbin.social Posts 0Comments 370Joined 2 yr. ago
OpenStars @ OpenStars @kbin.social
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hacking itself into...
If you will take a friendly criticism meant to be helpful? As the ancient philosophers mentioned, you cannot control the world, only yourself. Language such as this is biased and shows that you lack understanding of the phenomena involved. You hate it bc you fear it, maybe, even while you do not know precisely what it is. Like what exactly can they do with a phone once they have access, what are the limits, what are the supposed benefits even, and most important, what are the ways around it, and yet what hidden costs are associated with circumventing it? You seem to feel that you are trapped, that you lack power - and yes, you are and you do, but also... so very much not at the same time!!!
Like for protesting, simply do not take a phone, and instead bring something like a walkie talkie, or even arrange visual cues such as flags, bandanas, a particular style of hat (red = cops are near, whatever), done, problem solved. Spend some time learning about the things you care about, and separate yourself from the "sheep" mentality that expects everything to be spoon-fed to you 100% of the time.
Or else go the other way and lean into it, realizing that using a mobile device is nothing at all like using something you "own", and instead you "rent" your time on the cell tower network, so whoever owns & controls that gets the ultimate say in how they want it done. "Engagement media" aka click bait articles never seem to get around to presenting the full picture of what is happening. Like, you do not control that, and never ever will, but ultimately they do take fairly good care of people. People that do not go to protests even have little to fear, unless one springs up around them, and even then all that happens is...what? You still have full control over your device, except they can also ping it, maybe turn on the camera? (Inside your pocket what will they see or hear?)
Either way, you will be happier once you've resolved your intention of how you want to live your life. Right now you feel the stress of being on the fence, wanting the best of all worlds, but it will take sacrifice and effort to achieve a fraction of what you want, so defining what that even is can be the first step towards achieving your goals. e.g., coming here rather than Reddit should have helped:-). Now, spend time reading to help you define your next actionable step.
You missed a chance to say he is losing winning "bigly". It is not too late... :-D
Never heard of it, maybe it did me:-D
I mean I went to the effort of including the link... you could click it and find out? :-P
But yeah, conservative media says whatever it needs to in order to achieve its aim, it does not sweat the small details like accuracy or whatever, while liberal media gets bogged down in those and forgets what it was even talking about in the first place.
Obama ignored the rural areas following the fiscal crisis (this is not true in actual fact, but the perception, which carries much greater weight than real facts, yes?), thus they turned to someone who they felt "listened" to them. Bernie did, and while in many ways Bernie may have been a horrible president - idealistic, not grounded in reality, unable to make compromises (as Obama said, Bernie is a "prophet in the wilderness, pointing to the way we should go, but not a king, able to make the tough choices", paraphrased) - Hillary's and more relevant the DNC's treatment of him pushed many into the act of voting "for" Trump, as a protest "against" her.
As the story goes, his wife Melania cried that night that he won, and not tears of joy. Trump himself even briefly explored turning down the offer... he never had any intention of winning, it was all a publicity stunt for his next TV show, as it always was, every time he did it. Trump - while he is a prime mover / cause all on his own - is nonetheless also a "victim" of the set of circumstances that put him into office, and may yet do so again. The media claims to have learned something from the whole event, but has it, really, when it continues to do exactly as it did before?
Those who do not learn from their history... will be given unlimited chances to do so still yet again and again!:-P
As Jon Stewart said in his podcast, liberal media aims to be correct, while conservative media is effective. It's a real thing - like when you marshal ALL your forces to stop abortion, whether you should have or not, and keep at it for a full decade, tying it to everything else like fiscal conservatism and more important NOT being liberal, it can achieve a powerful end...even if originally it was not meant to be taken entirely seriously.
All Democrats had to do back then was have someone else run other than Hillary - ANYONE else would have done just fine. People forget, but Republicans did not "win" that election - it was Democrats that did this to us. More people voted against her than for him in the "Never Hillary" movement, including lifelong liberals even immigrants. The "email scandal" - no not the one people talked about afterwards for so long where it was her emails that were leaked (well that too I suppose), the but the earlier one with the DNC emails were leaked and showed the collusion against Bernie Sanders - did a great deal of harm. e.g. we will never know (we are literally prevented from accurate measurements) exactly how many people died excess deaths from the pandemic that could possibly have been prevented, if truth had been reported from the halls of power rather than lies.
That is worth considering now that Kamala Harris will become our next Presidential candidate, under Biden's name but after he dies or becomes incapacitated somewhere along the way she will take the position. That may not be a 100% certainty, but it does seem a possibility that it might happen, with a greater-than-average chance given his age. So is that just handing Republicans the House and Senate, once again? I do not know...
I am not exempting Republicans from blame here, just saying that neither am I exempting those who claim to be the more responsible party. Like if the only thing standing between us and a horde of zombies is a locked door, then the person who swings that door open wide has some measure of responsibility, no? Even if they do none of the flesh-eating directly. And whoever handed that person the only key to the door has a level of responsibility as well, no? By this I mean our for-profit media, who all but outright lies to us, even if technically telling the truth then still spinning it wildly out of proportion, in order to clickbait. I just wish there were any options at all between shooting yourself in the head vs. a slow death by poison.
Oh well, who wants to live forever!?! :-D
Pro-Tip: Hit the enemies to win!
(Hint: yes this is a real quote from a real game...:-)
Who says you have to sit to read? Do squats between paragraph breaks for awhile!? ;-P
Seriously, your body might be trying to say that you crave exercise, so maybe go for a 5K+ jog first, then relax with a book, to meet both needs.:-)
Edit: or take in content with videos - like while standing. I recommend the Crash Course YouTube series, it's amazing.:-)
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of your doing your search: they got paid for the results that they delivered, and for the ad traffic of you having received it! Don't you see why this is best for them you? /s
What's really weird - and I hope you take some comfort in this rather than be offended - is that you stand with Jesus in thinking that. I know, extremely ironic right?! :-P
"Do not heap heavy burdens upon others without offering to lift a finger to help them...", "Pay the worker their due wages, immediately not waiting until some other day...", "Consider the poor and alien among you as one of your own...", a lot of Christians would be shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED (well, they shouldn't be all that shocked) to find out what lays hidden in that B-I-B-L-E that so many claim to cherish.
Like somehow the church-going, cis-het family-man with 2.3 kids and a picket fence Obama is the Spawn of Satan while the oh-so-pious Donald tRump who shits on gold toilets and doesn't even drive his own car in NYC but instead flies above the common man on a heli is "God's Man", as well as a "true man of the people", "he gets us"? (to be clear: by "us" I mean "them") Uh... nope. The Bible has a few things to say about False Doctrine as well... flee from it!
So like, even if you believed in hell, and in fact all the more so if you do, then that's all the more reason to not be a bigoted asshole, not less!
Jesus was okay with honest sinners - but the ones he HATED the most (in fact, the ONLY ones He hated), with an absolute PASSION even, where the Karens of His day, aka the "super-Christians" of the time, loudmouthed bigots who literally killed Him b/c he kept trying to like feed the poor and shit, claiming that they were just as good as the Religious Leaders (and in fact way better).
Spoiler alert: most people don't really have faith, especially the ones screaming at you loudly how much they have it.
When you realize that, you'll see that people are a lot more similar across all religions - authentic/thinking people from any background at all on one side, vs. those who merely "inherit" their beliefs without every really challenging them at all on the other.
Right now there are many people leaving a religion and going to atheism so much like lemmy/kbin it has that "early-generation" ring to it, but give it a few hundred years and dumb people who inherit it will just as dumbly smash others over the head with that non-religion as people have for countless millennia with past religions.
My advice: KEEP QUESTIONING! If you happened to come from a Christian or Muslim background, there is 1 Thessalonians 5:21 that literally commands that, therefore asking questions is in no way contradictory to whatever "faith" means - and anyway how could someone have that if they did not even know what it meant?
Oh no... Oh no... Maybe someday but it's too soon right now, for those still feeling the sharp sting.
Nvm, I misunderstood and probably should delete this, but instead will leave it edited like this.
As mentioned, this is part 2 of 2, which I am going to try to be more diligent about NOT giving such long-winded replies, but in case this is of interest, at least this way you'll have the choice of whether to read it or not:
Even if the person speaking has -10000000 karma (at that point it would be a wonder they were not banned already, but setting that aside in this hypothetical:-), let their voice carry equal weight than someone else with that amount of positive karma. And I get that, I do, so long as there are only like 20 comments that's a GREAT way to get along. Except actually no, even then while the "average" situation could handle it well (you simply read through all 20 to find what you want, discarding the rest), it seems to me like even then it would be heavily vulnerable to a purposeful worst-case trolling scenario where someone writes up content to look like it is valid, and it requires some DEEPER digging to avoid spreading misinformation? Like if some tells you to drink bleach, and someone ELSE tells you to NOT drink bleach, who will you listen to? The guy who spent 10 years getting a degree specifically in medicinal matters, or the guy on the TV screaming at you? (legit, a couple of people ACTUALLY did drink bleach, upon being told that it cured Covid from an authority figure, that is a REAL STORY I told just now - and it was only a precursor to what came next with the Ivermectin scenario, in-between which one of my family members even thought she got Covid and went outside to "soak up sunlight" trying to cure it, misunderstanding that direct sunlight onto the actual virus like on an exposed surface would sterilize said surface, but that sunlight cannot penatrate someone's lungs to kill it!? oh, and it was below freezing temps when she did it too) On the other hand, this isn't a "news" site, this is "social media", so what the goal is should perhaps be thought of very much differently. I like the idea of equal access for everyone who is honestly engaging in the due-diligence process... the problem, as you mentioned for the Ennui Engine article, is when people do not do that.
And speaking of, I seem to recall its' ending quite differently - while it did acknowledge that while that may very well be the only solution that has any chance of working, even so, it continued on to state as you and I are also doing now that people simply will not do it. So that, as they say, is that. All you can do is engage, or not engage, with the mindset of heavy skepticism. And engaging less overall is preferable, plus more to the point, doing so with intentionality (like you have half an hour to kill and want mindless meme entertainment, then time-box it and go for it!:-P) is what prevents its worst effects on a person, much like alcohol that can be used to relax muscles, ease breathing passages, warm a person up after coming in from the cold - in short has valid, even medicinal uses, as well as horrible outcomes for those who allow it to get the better of them.
Though I do wish that there was an algorithmic way to help prune through all the "popular" content for the real stuff. As I took over the mod position of a small (couple of) gaming subs, I read articles written by former mods who had put a lot of thought into that, as they watched Reddit turn from a discussion forum into a social media site. Guides, FAQs, discussion megathreads, and the like are higly desirable content for people to read, yet Reddit refuses to allow more than 2 pinned posts, and even those only show up when sorted by Hot. Also, NO MATTER WHAT you tell people, they will ADAMANTLY REFUSE to follow the simplest of directions - e.g. if a "Guide" flair is meant to be reserved for those articles that are among the top 1% of all posts for a given year, people not only will slap it onto their sinlege-semtanx misplellddded "guides", but they will will even slap it onto their QUESTIONS "hey uh, I haven't played for a whole month, and despite seeing the pinned post CLEARLY stating This Is What To Do If You Have Not Played In The Past Month, I would like to ask: what should I do, you know, since I have not played in the past month?" (sadly, if they were trolling, I could not detect it - some at least seemed quite genuine in asking thus). I suspect that such an algorithmic way might not exist, since it too would rely on people to uphold even the slightest set of standards, at which point it is perhaps doomed to failure? But it is an interesting problem for me to think about latey:-). The solution for the Guides matter btw was to shift the content away from Reddit and migrate it into an external wiki, which allowed for significantly easier discoverability. Not that it lessened the sheer flood of questions asking for it in the slightest (noticeably at any rate), you understand:-).
Speaking of people misusing a feature, I think the very act of "faving" something would be misappropriated - if it was meant to be what the user thinks is good, then people applying different definitions of "good" would be working at cross-purposes. e.g. someone who claims that the holocaust never happened could either be making a wildly popular and perfectly acceptable statement, or else the exact opposite, depending on context. THAT issue... seems insurmountable to me, personally, unless a LOT more effort went into implementation. Maybe if it were something like an automated cross-posting / nomination process to the BestOf magazine, that could work? So one user could nominate the comment to a Best-Of mag, another could nominate the same comment to a Worst-Of one, still another could nominate it to a Most-Silly one, etc. Just like crowsourcing restaurant reviews!:-) In any case, people barely use that mag as it is, so it seems a nonstarter at least atm, and also, look out vulnerable restaurant reviews turned out to be:-(.
We almost might need like a separate voting system - one for "likes" and another for "something else", so that when you sort, you can either see the "popular" stuff, or you could shuffle past that and get to the "other". In Reddit, I think that was mostly accomplished by having each sub be the arbiter of its own policies - so something "popular" in r/AskHistorians would NOT be so popular in r/Memes, and vice versa. Good fences make good neighbors and so on. Although mods and users alike would also decry even in a place such as AskHistorians how end-users would abuse the upvote, turning it into a "like" button where you click it if you agree with the content, rather than indicating its relevance to the discussion. Also relevant is how large the communities are, so like if r/AskHistorian had only, lets say for ease of theoretical discussion "100 active members" (or rather, that being a useful approxomation thereof, like 100 people that contribute daily, or 200 people that contribute every other day, or 5-700 people that contribute once a week, and so on), while if r/Memes has "1 million active members", then even inside a post within the r/AskHistorian sub, if the users of r/Memes were to ever see it somehow (it appearing on r/All lets say), then they could unintentionally brigade the smaller community, completely overwhelming their normal likes and dislikes with artificial ones, even (and highly likely) entirely unintentionally.
Potentially that could be solved by using sub-specific karma, like someone's vote who has been in the sub for ten years could carry substantially more weight than someone who literally just joined a moment ago, made a reply, then immediately unsubscribed. The down-side there is that someone who had been in the sub for ten years would have to be careful to not throw their weighting around willy-nilly, and drown out people who have "only" been there like 2 years. The devil is in the details indeed, to working out such a system.
Although people on the Fediverse seem ADAMANTLY opposed to any such system of weighted voting, despite the best intentions. I think the argument goes: let the content be the deciding factor. ...
And... I am exceeding the character limit again. I guess I should be more diligent about cutting back on my social media, as that Enui Engine article said:-), and if a response is worth writing, then I should find a way to do it within the limitations provided. That said, I'm going to allow myself to do it one more time b/c it is nearly midnight and I'm too tired to rewrite it, and having come this far it seems better than simply not responding at all?
First, actually reading before speaking? And going to the trouble of citing your references?! This is absolutely an example of what I was talking about in terms of holding ourselves to higher standards. I get it - it is outright fun to share memes and short quick snippets, and there is room and value for doing that too, in line with the context that is offered (some posts call for more serious discussions, memes call for just fun, but oftentimes an article/thread can have responses of both types), and I do that myself too even, but there should also be room for deeper thoughts as well? Which by their nature tend to be downvoted or at least ignored, b/c people are not always in the mood for a wall of text, even if thoughtfully and lovingly crafted.
One example could be to add to the upvote system (or on kbin there is a "boost" that is the true upvote, actual upvotes are not counted even though they are displayed - yes it is complicated!:-D) a new thing like "favorited" or "loved". Yes, people would game that too, but maybe if you could only use one of those a day, or ten per month or some such, then people would have an incentive to hold those in reserve (people could still game it with alts, so like anything else, it may need some attention, but perhaps that is not enough of a criticism to simply not move forward and start doing it?). Netflix similarly now has "up=like", "down=did not like", but also "double up=LOVE". Implementing that across the Fediverse could allow distinctions between content that you merely agreed with, vs. content that needs special distinction as being LOVED. Even Reddit allowed awards, to meet that same need. Btw, I nominated your comment in the m/BestOf magazine for a vaguely similar effect, except that magazine has extremely little traffic (I am not even subscribed to it myself, although in my defense I do keep trying but it always goes to a new page displaying the single word "Error" whenever I try), and also it is far too much effort to do for every post that is worthy of such distinction.
I almost hesitated to respond with these thoughts, b/c who am I to suggest something that I am not willing to implement into actual code? That said, my responding to your existing comment seems a different matter, since you do seem interested in this topic, rather than an entire post requesting/demanding that something be done.
I wrote out a somewhat long-winded I suppose explanation of my personal experiences that led me to believe what I do, but I exceeded the character limit so I will have to post it separately, at which point you can peruse it at your leisure or just skip it if you'd rather.
More importantly though, if you are interested, here is an - I think - extremely insightful article about the short-term blurting types of comments, which again I do myself, we all do, acting to drown out serious discussions: https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/113715/The-Ennui-Engine-or-how-chasing-short-term-gratification-drains-our. I am not sure that I hold out any hope for change, but at least I enjoy trying to educate myself on such things for the sake of my own sanity:-).
I'm not sure if you want to hear this from me or not, but your answer seems to me to be an example of the Binary Fallacy, or Principle of False Dilemma, where you assume that there are only two sides, with no room for subtly or nuance in-between.
For instance, as on Reddit, here too individual communities could moderate according to different principles, depending on the magazine and what they wanted. At least, even Reddit used to have that, so I'm guessing it's actually possible here as well.
That ignores the effect of bad actors who will do it regardless though. There may actually be something to using such a score, at least as a qualitative if not quantitative measurement of trustworthiness, like for anyone with a magazine-specific karma score in the negative and spread out over at least ten comments, start hiding their comments by default (like still visible but you have to click to expand now), and allow the mods to decide what their communities rules will be.
Irl it's like: punch me in the face once, twice, three times, and eventually ten times, and maybe one day I'll finally start to think about considering making a plan of action to help you realize that there may be consequences... one day! (maybe) That could help so that if a troll is popular in one place but always shits outside of where they live, those receiving the raw end of that deal could have a way to automatically deal with it?
On second thought though, it's probably too easily gamified, especially by alts created for explicitly that purpose, like it's not that hard to make 10 accounts. But aside from minor UI concerns, something like that could actually change whether/how often someone feels welcomed to go visit a site.
It might be different if there was noplace else for them to go. But why does EVERY place on the internet - Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Threads - all have to cater to it? Can't there be just ONE place where we hold ourselves to a higher standard? Maybe this means we'll see fewer posts / comments / "activity" - but is that a bad thing, necessarily?
Still, as I learned how to drive, I realized something: if you leave a space somewhere, someone will fill it. If we want to build something different, it will require expended effort to make that happen.
Very true. Kudos to being skeptical btw - keep asking questions!:-) We may not agree on this particular matter but I hope we can agree on that much at least. If not... I am still going to do it anyway:-P. Also, I have no skin in that game - I do not work in the industry, but he is somewhat of an expert on the topic, having worked in it for several decades, so I offered in case people wanted to hear what he had to say.