technocrit

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1059590

A spinoff of the company "Protector" — an Uber-style rentier app that lets users temporarily hire an armed bodyguard — Patrol offers property owners the chance to rent out "off-duty police officers to help protect their homes."

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5542552

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plague-kills-arizona-resident-health-officials-say/

Large media companies, and the NY Times in particular these days, like to use the phrase “experts said” instead of simply stating facts. The thing is, many other statements of plain truth in that brief Times post lack the confirmation of expertise.

To me, it felt like waking up from the Matrix. The more I learned, the more I saw it everywhere. LA, I realized, is full of contradictions. We have density, but more often than not, it’s placed right along loud, dangerous, car-dominated corridors like Venice, La Brea, and Pico. We build apartments facing six-lane boulevards with no trees, no safe crossings, and nowhere to walk to. Meanwhile, the quiet, leafy streets just behind those corridors are protected, reserved almost exclusively for single-family homes and mansions. In LA, comfort and quiet are privatized. Everyone else gets noise and fumes.

I grew angry. Not just at the noise and fumes. But the systems that allowed this to be normalized. At a government that underfunds transit but widens highways. At a culture that treats cars as a birthright and housing as a commodity. At the way we’ve built a society that quietly inflicts violence on the most vulnerable people. Kids growing up with asthma, unhoused neighbors driven mad by all the traffic noise, families forced to trade safety and health for an affordable place to live.

I started to see the street not just as a place, but as a symptom. Of deeper choices. Of political cowardice. Of whose comfort we protect, and whose we sacrifice. And I can never unsee it. I didn’t just want to complain, I wanted to understand how we got here, and how we could get out of this.

Not only was Trump intimately close to Jeffrey Epstein, but there is a wealth of reporting tying the billionaire pedophile to intelligence circles. Trump is once again protecting the elites he claimed he would fight on the campaign trail.

Observing media coverage of the bombing of Iran, you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching a rerun of Iraq two decades ago. Mainstream outlets were all too happy to parrot the Trump and Netanyahu administrations’ line.

It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.

The liberal establishment's war on the New York City mayoral candidate reflects panic over a growing left challenge to Zionist orthodoxy and the mainstreaming of Palestine solidarity

Disinformation around a “weather weapon” and cloud seeding is being widely promoted by everyone from anti-government extremists to GOP influencers—leading to real-world consequences.