mozz

There are two issues that make me offended to see this stuff in such a volume:

1. It's dishonest. It consistently constructs, out of individual data points that are accurate, an overall reality that doesn't exist. It went seamlessly from "Biden's support TANKS after the debate", then when polls showed him dropping 2-3 percentage points and most and sometimes not by that much, to simply claiming his polls were tanking when they weren't, to then suddenly pivoting to claiming that something else was the issue when he pulled back to where he had been or ahead of it. Now it's reporting an avalanching drumbeat of increasing numbers of people calling for him to drop out, always with headlines that create the perception that it's a growing inevitable crowd and that him dropping out is already a given, and he's just holding out before he will inevitably crumble.

Read the headlines. They are constructing through artful phrasing a consistent picture of a snowballing lack of support for Biden, with the facts to underlie it purely invented, by subtle dodges like asking Democrats and Republicans alike whether he should drop out and then reporting the (fairly high) resulting number, instead of just reporting the delta in his support numbers. Or, by taking one local chapter of a national union who wants him to drop out as a "major union" that wants him to drop out, not mentioning that the vast majority of unions want him to stay in.

Here's a selection of headlines from !politics@lemmy.world, one contiguous chunk I grabbed to illustrate the problem:

• Majority of Democrats think Kamala Harris would make a good president, AP-NORC poll shows (asking a misleading question so you can report the answer you want to highlight in the headline)
• Joe Biden faces increasing pressure to quit the race, but has spent a lifetime overcoming the odds (fact-free editorial amplifying the framing)
• Biden feels angry and betrayed by top Dems as family discusses ‘possible’ plan to drop out (I skimmed the sources and couldn't find any particular backing for the statement that he feels angry or betrayed, although for all I know he may well do)
• Larry Hogan blasts Project 2025 as a ‘dangerous path’ for GOP (news)
• Biden's family starts discussing his possible exit plan from the 2024 race (story seems perfectly reasonable but being framed to create the perception that his resolve is buckling and he may exit soon, it's a done deal -- I see no backing at all for the idea that these conversations "started" recently. I have to assume he's talked about backing out of the race before, and they're just purely inventing the idea that the conversations "started" recently just to create the framing).

Like I say, that's not necessarily this sub or your problem. And maybe it all sounds thin skinned on my part. But also, I can't see how you can't see that as a problem, if your sub meant to inform people about what's going on is being subjected to propaganda on a big scale.

Which brings us to:

2. It never stops. It's seeking to overwhelm any alternate narrative by sheer volume of repetition. It would be absurd for me to counter each and every "here's a new person who wants Biden to drop out!" story by finding a "here's the 99% of unions that don't want him to drop out!" story to counterbalance it.

It is, to me, engineering a certain public perception, not reporting on the world as it exists. There's a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about what the Democrats should do and whether Biden should stay in. But phrasing the conversation with one side of it amplified by constant repetition in every single forum, with the facts twisted up pretty much as far as they can go to support that conclusion, seems dishonest. No?

How that impacts moderation, or what rule might make it difficult to do, I have no idea. I'm just reporting what I see in terms of the result and how it's harming people's ability to understand the world when they read the news they find on Lemmy.

I want you to guess what is the answer to this question

I think I eventually did install a DHCP server with a high-up reserved range for it to allocate IP addresses out of. The main body of machines were still statically configured, though, because we needed them on static IPs and I couldn't really get dhcpd to get it right consistently after a not too long amount of trying.

Appoint a head of ICE that will fire every single officer, terminate every contract and sell off or destroy the assets before Republicans get in power again. Hunting down immigrants is an objective evil and ICE should not exist.

This is where I want the simulator again

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I turned in a time card once that had over 24 hours of work on it in a row. The boss was dating a stripper, and she would sometimes bring stripper friends to our parties and hangouts. We had ninja weapons in the office. The heat was shitty, so in the winter we had to use space heaters, but that would overload the house’s power which would cause a breaker to blow which obviously caused significant issues, so a lot of people would wear coats at their desks in the winter, but that obviously doesn’t do much for your typing fingers which was an issue. I frequently would sleep in the office on the couch (a couple of people were living in bedrooms in the upstairs of the house).

Like I say, it’s not surprising that we went out of business. It was definitely pretty fuckin memorable though. Those are just some of the stories or right-away memorable pieces off the top of my head.

O

Someone’s been on !unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org

The disinformation problem

Not this shit already this early in the morning

Sure. Let's pick out immigration. On Israel you kind of have a point, although refusing to vote against Trump in this election because you're concerned about the Palestinians is kind of like shooting the family dog in the head because you're concerned its food might not be good enough. But you also brought up immigration, so let's delve into that in a little bit of detail.

So there are two big problems in immigration in this country:

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

There's also a problem that the whole agency in charge of the border police is for the most part made of racist people, but that one is unfixable unless Biden can fire the whole agency en masse and then find 40,000 people who want to be immigration police who are not racist. So, unfixable. The other two problems do have legislative solutions, but 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 the number of judges to reduce the backlog, 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.

So: What should he do? You are angry at him because he is deporting a large number of migrants who have lost their cases. What should he do instead, to improve this situation?

The #1 upvoted comment in this thread is one of your users saying they're tired of being carpet-bombed with these articles. Saying "Please stop." I feel pretty much the exact same way. Isn't that relevant? The existence of the articles on this newsworthy topic isn't the issue, of course, just their incredible volume and frequency and the laziness of the "new" features of the situation that are then graced with a whole new cycle of stories.

I looked over the articles in !news@lemmy.world specifically, and it actually doesn't look like there's any particular excessive coverage of it here -- so maybe criticizing moderation in this sub specifically because of it is unfair, yeah. I think it's more a statement about the flood of various article restating the exact same thing with some minor reframing, in Lemmy as a whole. And yes, I feel exactly the same way about the ridiculously front-and-center coverage it's been getting in a lot of mainstream media outlets, frequently framed in ways that are explicitly opposed to the factual reality (he's dropping in the polls!) and almost always framed towards one particular conclusion.

Ha. All good, glad to be of service

I went into the office I now work at, greeted 2 coworkers I've already worked with, they looked at me, said nothing, kept talking to themselves.

How am I supposed to interpret that?

I think you should interpret it exactly how it sounds like

It may or may not be fair. Personally, with a very few exceptions, I dislike coworkers and want few interactions with them whether positive or negative. I just don't care. But regardless of that, your coworkers are there because they have to be, and if they've decided they don't want to interact with you and are now letting you know, that is their option, whether it's fair or not.