comfy @ comfy @lemmy.ml

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I'll look around to see if I can find those show segments online, but as for 'are they panicking?', mass media has a vested interest in influencing public opinion (that's effectively the only reason a private business bothers with news) and therefore control over public opinion. If the people who own the show and the channel give orders, the writers and actors probably won't risk getting fired. (oh, and obligatory quick clip to demonstrate what ownership looks like, for those who haven't seen it: "This Is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy")

So, with that in mind, recall the reactions of almost all mass media to the UnitedHealthcare assassination: consistent critique and denouncement. Surely this wasn't how all the news anchors felt, given how positive general opinion was! The people with ownership and executive power over these media channels obviously don't want the idea of citizens shooting the dangerously rich and powerful to get popular, so we saw their ideas echoed in all the news.

Compare that to here: media channels outside of China don't really want that counter-narrative to gain traction. It goes against their inherent interest of influencing public opinion, it's a competitor which all the biggest media companies can agree to call bad news. So I have no doubt this unexpected and surprising turn would make them panic.

edit: the clips I found from Colbert and The Daily Show were a surprisingly mixed bag. For example, this Daily Show clip comes off more as a satirical jab at the US than any panic.

Personally, I suspect the bigger problem for their platform will be handling the contrasting values of Western social media norms against their own.

Even sinophobic reactionaries have been pointing out for years that "[Douyin] Chinese TikTok is Wholesome, American TikTok is Corrupting our Youths!" with product influencers/grifters, rampant sexualization up to and including pornography, etc., albeit the reactionaries are interpreting the difference from a conspiratorial moral-panic viewpoint claiming it's weaponization by The Chinese Government to corrode Western society, rather than the difference being that the US TikTok is social media with liberalist freedoms combined with the capitalist pursuit of profit above society, and is in line with the content on Xitter, reddit and other familiar social media.

The point being, that people rise to the top of TikTok through sexual suggestion, flashing symbols of wealth and other normalized habits which I've heard are banned on Lil'RedBook (which sounds like a great decision!).

Now added to my comment :)

Now added to my comment :)

Now added to my comment :)

And if you’re a dictator, at that point you dont care for any left or right leaning values…

But this just evidently isn't true. Take the fascist dictators like ᴉuᴉlossnW and Hitler, who clearly believed in their ultranationalism, irredentism, anti-communism, anti-liberalism, militarism, etc. etc. until the days they died (ᴉuᴉlossnW even created a last testament while captured shortly before death re-iterating all their beliefs despite their lost of dictatorship). Then take socialist-party dictators like Castro, Stalin and Mao, who, despite any and all critiques and shortcomings and hypocrisies and failures, intentionally took actions with measurable results to improve living conditions, health and literacy for the worker class as a whole, while limiting and even oppressing the owner class (bourgeoisie). If you already checked out that video in my last reply then we'd know 'left leaning values' can mean a heap of different things in different contexts, but I believe that these progressive and anti-capitalist efforts are solid examples to prove the point.

Also those that think they’re marxists or whatever, you’re even bigger idiot, enjoying your materialistic ps5 and 4090 dreaming of a communism… oh the irony

I don't have either of those, but I can't understand why there would be any irony or contradiction there, at all. Marxism isn't an anti-technology or anti-fun lifestyle or some religious glorification of poverty. At its core, it's an analysis of society which (long-story-short) concludes capitalism is an exploitative system and socialism is an alternative economic system where the worker class, as opposed to an owner class, control the tools and resources of production. There's far more depth than that, but how much time or money someone has doesn't (directly!) come into that analysis. The famous rallying cry in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is "Workers of the World, Unite!", and those workers rich enough to afford luxuries are still workers with shared class interest with other workers. You don't need to be committing crimes against labor to reach that level, they're not buying factories, commissioning mega-yachts and flying to space.

And about anarchists, some people just want to see world burn… or profit in a lawless society

I'm talking about the political philosophy and movement, anarchism. Most of them want to abolish the concept of profit whatsoever, and they make up a major part of the environmental and social justice movements. There's plenty of critiques of their movement, but they really only want to burn down the state which exploits us.

Since you're bringing up instance stereotypes, I have to say I'm disappointed to see baseless conspiracy claims from a dbzer0 user. dbzer0 is usually decent.

And as we all know if someone says they’re a certain way that makes it so!

Are you implying that this active community is somehow just an elaborate hoax? Why?

North Korea is a particularly tough topic to have objectivity on. On one hand, their isolation in itself means they're not a typical country by any interpretation, and not gonna lie I'd be surprised if even their supporters claimed it was perfectly normal. On the other hand, its portrayal in the media is highly propagandized, to the point where some defectors (e.g. Yeonmi Park) have made ridiculous claims like that citizens sometimes push a passenger train to work in power outages, and reputable news outlets simultaneously report that everyone must have the same haircut as Kimmy and that having that haircut is also illegal, or claiming multiple officials have been executed with an anti-aircraft gun but it turns out they're alive. It's hard to have a meaningful discussion when this is the information we're given to work with! While NK is often open for work and tourism (albeit stricter tourism than in most countries) and those tourists often enough share videos or write articles, they're enough to get a peak inside and learn that ok, it's not a literal cartoon place, they have a water park and rail with a nicer metro than my city and people's lives are much closer to normal than what we often hear, but there's only so much we can really learn from these foreigners' experiences.

Some of the big points that often get overlooked are:

• Their mindset, especially the skepticism and national security extremism didn't come from nowhere. A major cause of their lack of development are that the UN Command bombing 'destroyed nearly all of the country's cities and towns, including an estimated 85% of its buildings.' [wiki] and the US and later UN sanctioned them [wiki].
• The pervasive propaganda is VERY blunt by our standards. That said, their nationalism and idolization of political leaders is certainly not unique, even if the pictures and statues of their 'glorious leaders' everywhere are freakin' weird. For a comparison to a more familiar country: the US pledge of allegiance, idolization of the Founding Fathers and pervasive flag display are also unusual manifestations of ingrained nationalism, even if to a lesser degree than NKs patriotism.
• South Korea is also pretty far from normal. Their First Republic stage included their leader getting exempted from 8-year term limits and executing the opposition leader while arresting other members, and has repeatedly become a dictatorship up to the present Sixth Republic, where the current president just got impeached for establishing a dictatorship, making them the third SK president to be impeached so far (the second-previous president was being directed by a cult leader's daughter along with the 'Eight Goddesses' group of billionaires who were basically writing legislation themselves.)

But, at the end of the day, with all that context, I would never call North Korea normal or typical, just nowhere near as bizarre as the mass media portrayal from even reputable outlets. And I suppose that's why some (imo silly) people will overcompensate and try to say that they're just the same as other countries.

I can’t help but wonder if tankies are the political equivalent of flat-earthers.

One way forward is to ask them for evidence for their viewpoints and investigate their sources for errors. The problem of the flat-earther is that there is objective evidence of a 3D rounded Earth that they can't adequately counter with objective evidence.

The left-right spectrum itself just isn't a useful model, but the mere existence of anarchists contradicts horseshoe theory.

That's a bold claim. A quick look at their top communities list (one of the top 15 being explicitly a 'community for transgender and gender diverse people') and the first two rules of their CoC make it seem especially trans friendly.

I am clearly not asking how this differs from other platforms. I've been here since 2022.

“What if 4chan was communist instead of neonazi”

Not quite, that would be /leftypol/

wiki page / KnowYourMeme

Better politics.

This reminds me of one of their site banners:

While I doubt the concept is unique, the script is: a keyboard shortcut will check the clipboard for a YouTube link and then show launcher options for mpv or yt-dlp, including launch arguments for lower quality format and audio only. It launches that in a terminal for easier handling when yt-dlp doesn't work properly (much more common if using proxies, but also if a video is age-restricted or deleted).

So when I see a yt link here, I can just copy it, keyboard shortcut and then it's playing in my local video player.

edit: here's the script. It assumes xsel (clipboard access), rofi (menu creator), gnome-terminal (terminal) and notify-send (system notification on failure) are installed and working, you'll need to replace any which don't match your system. My DE just runs it in bash when the shortcut is entered.

Spice/spiced could work. But it's still an allusion, not sure if that defeats the point.

For example, 4chan forcibly invented the use of the ok hand for “white power”, as a collective prank

Which, outside of specific contexts where you're already confident someone is a WN, was quickly forgotten and never really took off. It's not a great example of a social shift.

Well, switching from Proton was more painful for me, at least on a free account, as it won't gel with a desktop client like Thunderbird or Outlook, and last I checked, didn't allow email forwarding.

Maybe Waluigi will make a prominent appearance at the inauguration too.

I still use Invidious and Piped for searches and looking at comments, but they are currently broken (as far as I've seen).

(Conditionally) journals, studies and some books. And, for that matter, most television, film and music.

Particularly when paying is not supporting the creator, only the publisher.

These points both make sense given ideal conditions. People and businesses should have liberty over themselves, with the government serving as a neutral foundation representing the interest of voters.

Unfortunately, these ideal conditions don't exist. The government isn't neutral, but that's not because of themselves or a democratic decision, but because businesses have more power to influence politics than you and me. Look at the major shareholders of mass media and social media, look at fundraisers for political parties, look at the laws made to bias the system. The government is evidently not a neutral foundation or a representative of the common people, but a dictatorship of the owning class (I'm using the term dictatorship not to imply one person ruling, but rather, that business owners as a class dictate the actions of politicians and therefore the government). And while it's easy to consider this a crony capitalism or corporatocracy, it's ultimately just capitalism itself taking its logical course, as business owners generally have a common class interest and the government cannot work without the complicity of business owners. We see this consistently in capitalist states, all the way back to the first ones. It's not a fluke, it's the power of capital.

We also see the trend of monopolization emerge - more money makes more money, more resources makes more resources, so small businesses are generally muscled out or incorporated into larger companies unless the government can force them to stop. So while you technically don't have to interact with a specific business at all, there are many industries where you are effectively forced to interact with a small collection of the most powerful businesses or even a duopoly, even more so if you don't have enough money to be picky.

So, while I agree, the government is supposed to be representing voters' best interests, and business should not have power comparable to governance, they don't represent us and businesses do govern, and history shows this won't be changed through the electoral system they control. It has only changed when the worker class, as opposed to the businesses, has become the class directing the government.