Yeah. And that is a foolish delusion, because it will, of course, affect them. They may get lucky and be able to turn the chaos into becoming absurdly wealthy (more so than they are) some way. But more likely is that they’ll have to scramble to stay safe and profitable, and they are already soft and slow to react after years and years of soft living in this safe society, so they might find it pretty hard. The fall and privatization of the U.S.S.R. might not be a bad example to look at for a similar example to how things might play out in a Trump unleashed chaos world.
mozz
joined 2 years ago
I was specifically thinking of /c/politics and /c/news on Lemmy.world; probably should have been explicit about that. Philosophy aside and just in your personal opinion / judgement, would you say the overall discourse in those communities right now looks to have any nontrivial amount of misinformation in it?
Hm
Last question I guess; do you feel that misinformation or propaganda is any kind of issue on Lemmy right now? Like if you look at the posts and comments, does the overall conversation “look right” to you in that regard?
You’ve identified the issue yes
Kamala Harris is the only option that polls better than Biden, and she’s not a great option, no. I wish there were one that seemed like “oh that is the answer yes.”
I think - this is a completely serious statement - that Jon Stewart would be a great option. But because our political system is broken, we can’t do that.
Hold up
Am I imagining things, or is this entire article spun up from the single fact that Schumer didn’t comment on anything after the press conference, followed by a grand adventure of wild speculation about what he might be thinking or doing and how it might possibly be related to dropping Biden?
And then with this just kinda dropped in there casually towards the end?:
Christie Roberts, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s executive director, told Bloomberg News that internal data since the debate shows Senate races “holding steady or even moved a little in our direction in the last two weeks,”
and then editorialized with:
indicating that voters are prepared to split their ticket between races for president or Senate.
Initial data had suggested senators in Montana, Ohio and Nevada would not be helped by having Harris instead of Biden running at the top of the ticket, two people close to Senate leadership said.
And then editorialized with:
The political situation is incredibly fluid, however, and it will take time to see the full picture.
100% agree
The idea that some other strategy besides Biden might be better, as nutty as that sounds this late in the campaign, has quite a bit of merit. The idea that him resigning should come first, and figuring out and solidifying that strategy should come second, is clinically insane. Which is why outlets hostile to the Democrats are pushing it, which is why Democrats who have gotten confused into starting to back it themselves should be ashamed of themselves. Pretty sure that is the exact thesis of the article that dude is rudely insisting that you need to be reading.
Is this Beehaw?
I remember seeing the defederation from Lemmy.world announcement, saying (as I remember it) that as much as they weren’t happy about taking that step, the flood of unwanted garbage was getting too overwhelming for any other realistic approach. I thought to myself, whoa that’s weird. Then I hung out on Lemmy.world for a while and said oooh this is what they were talking about, this is fuckin unpleasant.
Dude the tankies when I first joined Lemmy I thought were awesome; I went in and argued with them about the Ukraine war. I actually learned a bunch of stuff although not exactly what they were attempting to teach me. This relentless tide of single comments always on the same handful of talking points is something entirely different.
Hm
I’ve been on the internet a long time. I have seen many many different types of bad faith users and people I disagree with. That part isn’t the part that led me to jump to “these accounts are fake.”
I feel like I’ve already explained why I feel there are propaganda accounts, or the difference between someone I disagree with vs. someone who has weird little inconsistencies in their story in addition to a pattern of behavior that’s very unlike any other type of authentic user I’ve ever seen before. Who I also, on top of that, disagree with.
This whole core of this post reads like "I like this, BUT there are totally fake posters and we need to call them out".
Because as you pointed out, calling out the fake posters directly doesn’t usually lead anywhere good. Surely you can understand the idea that I’m saying the flood of propaganda is a bad thing, but also that I can agree that adding a flood of arguing and impossible-to-prove accusations on top is also a further bad thing?
In all likelihood you're probably wrong
Glad we cleared that up, then.
Rampant bot and Russian accusations are poison to online discourse
I have a one word edit I would like to make to this comment
Ha! Yeah, I appreciate it, thank you. I mean you’re not wrong about it. I just meant I didn’t want to shut down discussion of ways in which I get in arguments with the shills like it’s out of scope or pretending it doesn’t happen and I’m offended by the suggestion that it does, or anything like that. 🙂
But it is solely up to the mod team, and the users who like to bounce on the “report” button, and not the consensus of the community as a whole?
I mean… you don’t have to answer that. I’m not trying to get in an argument about it and you can do what you like obviously. I just was a little surprised to hear that this is the big problem people want to solve - I feel pretty confident that if you surveyed the user base outside the bounds of the report button, most people would feel as I do that the propaganda is a much bigger issue than the people who get rude about the propaganda.
I think also that a lot of my prickliness in this comes not from the specific rule but from wondering about the question I asked OP - like I say, as written it seems perfectly reasonable (sort of just a clarification on the personal attack rule). But it’s interesting to me the question I asked, is this gonna creep into a “no talking about the shills or you get banned” or “no pointing out inconsistencies in another user’s story” rule.
One question I am curious about; do you personally feel that propaganda accounts are a problem at all on Lemmy? Do you feel like anything should be done to address that, in cases that aren’t bots or obvious sockpuppets or other things that can be administratively detected with surety?
Hold the fuck up
This has got to be wrong
The IRA alone was a trillion dollars, roughly speaking, in new “social and economic spending”. Where is that on this chart?
I’m gonna do some digging and see what this is. My guess is that “social and economic spending” is cunningly defined as within certain existing programs, which took a back seat to the massive new programs which are not included, but let me see what I can find about it.
Edit: Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is 100% just made up numbers. Like literally just writing any random shit on the chart and bald faced lying that it's the actual numbers. He has citations, but they're all citations to other articles of his.
Here are the numbers:
Military spending is easy to measure, because it's a whole separate slice in the infographic. It went up, but not to where he says -- over those three years it went from $742B to $751B to $805B. His chart shows it climbing up way up to $900B.
Social spending is a little more complex, because it's not a single category in the same way, but you can literally add up things that are separated on the chart and see that even the sum of selected social/economic programs adds up to more than he says. I knew this was wrong because the scale of social spending, under Biden or before him, was so massive that you don't even have to get detailed to show why it's wrong.
He doesn't really break down what he means by "economic and social," so maybe he's using a definition that doesn't include social security or student loan forgiveness in social and economic spending or something, but given the fact that he lied about military spending I feel fairly comfortable saying that he probably just made up some random shit and posted up a chart full of Fox News style total lies.