Politics & Stuff

[Fernando 6,585]

Don't know where to put this but I'm shock with the prices in the US when it comes to Houses and Cars. 

Cousin where he lives in New Jersey told me that a year ago the average prices where he lives for house was like 285. Now it's almost 100k up. 

100k in one year? insane!

And cars here in NYC, dealers are marking up the prices by 10k. Was looking at a Kia telluride and they are charging for an sx value at 48k msrp 58k. 

It's insane the prices here in the US with Housing and Cars. 

I think in partly because Covid has created a low of supply and Americans have money to spend after one year of quarantine on top of the stimulus money. 

Insane.....

[Vesper 30,119]

Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago

A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake. It’s ridiculous, but possibly not that ridiculous?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/

If you search the phrase i hate texting on Twitter and scroll down, you will start to notice a pattern. An account with the handle @pixyIuvr and a glowing heart as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting i just want to hold your hand,” receiving 16,000 likes. An account with the handle @f41rygf and a pink orb as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting just come live with me,” receiving nearly 33,000 likes. An account with the handle @itspureluv and a pink orb as a profile picture tweets, “i hate texting i just wanna kiss u,” receiving more than 48,000 likes.

There are slight changes to the verb choice and girlish username and color scheme, but the idea is the same each time: I’m a person with a crush in the age of smartphones, and isn’t that relatable? Yes, it sure is! But some people on Twitter have wondered whether these are really, truly, just people with crushes in the age of smartphones saying something relatable. They’ve pointed at them as possible evidence validating a wild idea called “dead-internet theory.”

Let me explain. Dead-internet theory suggests that the internet has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence. Like lots of other online conspiracy theories, the audience for this one is growing because of discussion led by a mix of true believers, sarcastic trolls, and idly curious lovers of chitchat. One might, for example, point to @_capr1corn, a Twitter account with what looks like a blue orb with a pink spot in the middle as a profile picture. In the spring, the account tweeted “i hate texting come over and cuddle me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna hug you,” and then “i hate texting just come live with me,” and then “i hate texting i just wanna kiss u,” which got 1,300 likes but didn’t perform as well as it did for @itspureluv. But unlike lots of other online conspiracy theories, this one has a morsel of truth to it. Person or bot: Does it really matter?

Read: The internet is mostly bots

Dead-internet theory. It’s terrifying, but I love it. I read about it on Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe, an online forum with a pixelated-Margaritaville vibe and the self-awarded honor “Best Kept Secret of the Internet!” Right now, the background is a repeated image of palm trees, a hot-pink sunset, and some kind of liquor pouring into a rocks glass. The site is largely for discussing lo-fi hip-hop, which I don’t listen to, but it is also for discussing conspiracy theories, which I do.

In January, I stumbled across a new thread there titled “Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake,” shared by a user named IlluminatiPirate. Over the next few months, this would become the your-text for those interested in the theory. The post is very long, and some of it is too confusing to bother with; the author claims to have pieced together the theory from ideas shared by anonymous users of 4chan’s paranormal section and another forum called Wizardchan, an online community premised on earning wisdom and magic through celibacy. (In an email, IlluminatiPirate, who is an operations supervisor for a logistics company in California, told me that he “truly believes” in the theory. I agreed not to identify him by name because he said he fears harassment.)

Peppered with casually offensive language, the post suggests that the internet died in 2016 or early 2017, and that now it is “empty and devoid of people,” as well as “entirely sterile.” Much of the “supposedly human-produced content” you see online was actually created using AI, IlluminatiPirate claims, and was propagated by bots, possibly aided by a group of “influencers” on the payroll of various corporations that are in cahoots with the government. The conspiring group’s intention is, of course, to control our thoughts and get us to purchase stuff.

As evidence, IlluminatiPirate offers, “I’ve seen the same threads, the same pics, and the same replies reposted over and over across the years.” He argues that all modern entertainment is generated and recommended by an algorithm; gestures at the existence of deepfakes, which suggest that anything at all may be an illusion; and links to a New York story from 2018 titled “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.” “I think it’s entirely obvious what I’m subtly suggesting here given this setup,” the post continues. “The U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.” So far, the original post has been viewed more than 73,000 times.

Read: Artificial intelligence is misreading human emotion

Obviously, the internet is not a government psyop, even though the Department of Defense had a role in its invention. But if it were, the most compelling evidence to me is the dead-internet theory’s observation that the same news items about unusual moon-related events seem to repeat year after year. I swear I’ve been saying this for years. What is a super flower blood moon? What is a pink supermoon? A quick search of headlines from just this month brings up: “There’s Something Special About This Weekend’s Moon,” “Don’t Miss: Rare, Seasonal ‘Blue Moon’ Rises Tonight,” and “Why This Weekend’s Blue Moon Is Extra Rare.” I just don’t understand why everyone is so invested in making me look at the moon all the time? Leave me alone about the moon!

Dead-internet theory is a niche idea because it’s patently ridiculous, but it has been spreading. Caroline Busta, the Berlin-based founder of the media platform New Models, recently referenced it in her contribution to an online group show organized by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. “Of course a lot of that post is paranoid fantasy,” she told me. But the “overarching idea” seems right to her. The theory has become fodder for dramatic YouTube explainers, including one that summarizes the original post in Spanish and has been viewed nearly 260,000 times. Speculation about the theory’s validity has started appearing in the widely read Hacker News forum and among fans of the massively popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips. In a Reddit forum about the paranormal, the theory is discussed as a possible explanation for why threads about UFOs seem to be “hijacked” by bots so often.

The theory’s spread hasn’t been entirely organic. IlluminatiPirate has posted a link to his manifesto in several Reddit forums that discuss conspiracy theories, including the Joe Rogan subreddit, which has 709,000 subscribers. In the r/JoeRogan comments, users argue sarcastically—or sincerely?—about who among them is a bot. “I’m absolutely the type of loser who would get swindled into living among bots and never realize it,” a member of the 4chan-adjacent Something Awful forum commented when the theory was shared there in February. “Seems like something a bot would post,” someone replied. Even the playful arguments about how everything is the same are the same.

Read: Why is Joe Rogan so popular?

That particular conversation continued down the bleakest path imaginable, to the point of this comment: “If I was real I’m pretty sure I’d be out there living each day to the fullest and experiencing everything I possibly could with every given moment of the relatively infinitesimal amount of time I’ll exist for instead of posting on the internet about nonsense.”

Anyway … dead-internet theory is pretty far out-there. But unlike the internet’s many other conspiracy theorists, who are boring or really gullible or motivated by odd politics, the dead-internet people kind of have a point. In the New York story that IlluminatiPirate invokes, the writer Max Read plays with paranoia. “Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake,” he writes. But he makes a solid argument: He notes that a majority of web traffic probably comes from bots, and that YouTube, for a time, had such high bot traffic that some employees feared “the Inversion”—the point when its systems would start to see bots as authentic and humans as inauthentic. He also points out that even engagement metrics on sites as big and powerful as Facebook have been grossly inflated or easily gamed, and that human presence can be mimicked with click farms or cheap bots.

Some of this may be improving now, for better or for worse. Social-media companies have gotten a lot better at preventing the purchase of fake views and fake likes, while some bot farmers have, in response, become all the more sophisticated. Major platforms still play whack-a-mole with inauthentic activity, so the average internet user has no way of knowing how much of what they see is “real.”

But more than that, the theory feels true: Most weeks, Twitter is taken over by an argument about how best to practice personal hygiene, or which cities have the worst food and air quality, which somehow devolves into allegations of classism and accusations of murder, which for whatever reason is actually not as offensive as classism anymore. A celebrity is sorry. A music video has broken the internet. A meme has gotten popular and then boring. “Bennifer Might Be Back On, and No One’s More Excited Than Twitter.” At this point, you could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it’s cliché—people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the “old” internet. The big platforms do encourage their users to make the same conversations and arcs of feeling and cycles of outrage happen over and over, so much so that people may find themselves acting like bots, responding on impulse in predictable ways to things that were created, in all likelihood, to elicit that very response.

Thankfully, if all of this starts to bother you, you don’t have to rely on a wacky conspiracy theory for mental comfort. You can just look for evidence of life: The best proof I have that the internet isn’t dead is that I wandered onto some weird website and found an absurd rant about how the internet is so, so dead.

[Vesper 30,119]

[Vesper 30,119]

 

 

A lot of people may be confused about Texas and why the women don’t just use birth control, so I’d like to talk about my personal experience in this state to give some insight; first of all, Texas teaches abstinence only sex education. Purity culture reigns supreme.

long thread, continued here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1434557502272724995.html

Rest of thread:

The idea is that if you have sex as a female you are unclean and lose your worth in the eyes of male suitors, and god. Your dad may even take you to purity balls where you promise him, in a room full of other dads, not to have sex with any man until you’re married.
You may be thinking that this sounds like a period piece, some movie set in the 1500’s depicting how women should behave, until they are sold into marriage by their father. Honestly, this is very much a holdover from that era. Our religious indoctrination will also enforce this.

The high school/ middle school Bible study classes will be divided by sex, this is the first time our classes aren’t coed. The female classes are heavily reliant on the ideals of being sexually chaste. How birth control is basically for dirty women. Good girls don’t have sex.

Our middle school will have actors come on stage during assembly meetings to rap (yes literally rap) about not having sex and waiting for marriage because of god. The girls who have sex are depicted as worthless.

From almost every angle, our sexuality is demonized, our education, our religion, and our parents… the only people not demonizing our sexuality is boys, and older male creeps. They pressure us relentlessly. They aren’t educated on birth control, and they aren’t ashamed.

The coercion, begging, pressure, and eventual sexual assault are part of a purity culture female’s right of passage. TW: rape. My first boyfriend begged to just be able to touch it, and after days of begging and fighting him off of me I finally allowed him to.

He escalated the situation, soon he inside me with me crying, begging him to stop, until he completed inside of me, and apologized. I ran to the bathroom, and punched myself in the stomach, scared I was pregnant, and everyone would know I was unclean. I was 13.
I knew it was all my fault, I tempted him, I allowed him to touch me, I should have left, I should have fought harder, I should have dressed more conservatively. Based on my education, I internalized my own sexual assault. I clung to him after that. You’d think I’d leave, but no.

See I was taught that because I had sex, no other man would want me. David had to be my husband, David had to stay with me no matter what. Even after he raped me, repeatedly. Even after he cheated on me. Even after he got addicted to drugs.
Even after I found stories about grooming and raping minors on his computer. I thought I could fix him, I thought I could save him. I told his parents expecting them to help me save him, but they denied he had ever done anything wrong, and accused me of corrupting him.

Eventually, I ended up attempting suicide. In the hospital one of my friends visited me and showed me David’s online journal, where he chronicled everything he had done to me, and more importantly how funny it was to him.

The last line was “I don’t know why I can’t just let her go, it’s not because I love her, I guess it’s just because she’s so stupid she always comes back.”

I finally left him after that. I decided I’d rather be alone forever than stay with him.

I was released from the hospital and the next day sold his game systems to game stop, where I met a nice guy, who was interested in me. I finally realized I had been lied to, and that men will find you attractive, even if you have had sex.

It wasn’t until I was in my 20’s that I realized how much trauma purity culture had put me through. I put all of the blame on David, and myself, for years. The truth is that the system was never designed to stop girls from having sex…

It was to shame them and punish them when they did. The goal wasn’t to stop teenage pregnancy, the goal was to control, subjugate, and demonize us. The goal was to make us internalize misogyny and loathe ourselves.

How many school classes teach boys not to rape, not to beg, not to cause damage? None. How many classes taught us how to use birth control, and gave it away for free? None. How many parents helped us to accept safe sex and an alternative? None.

All of the pressure is on young, impressionable female children. They are brainwashed. They are submerged in a culture that breaks them down. And now, they will be forced to carry shame pregnancies to term. They will be forced to raise babies when they are babies themselves.

Innocence lost forever…

[Vesper 30,119]

Daily Express front cover backfires spectacularly

Talk about a self own!

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-express-front-cover-backfires-spectacularly-289551/

The Daily Express was caught in two minds this morning after publishing an anti-immigrant story next to news of a ‘history’ victory for British tennis player Emma Raducanu, who was born in Canada to a Romanian father and a Chinese mother.

Late last night news broke that Priti Patel has sanctioned new tactics to redirect migrant boats in the Channel back to France amid crunch talks over crossings – much to the delight of the right ring rag.

According to reports, the home secretary has ordered officials to rewrite maritime laws to allow Border Force to turn boats around, forcing them to be dealt with by French authorities.

It comes following a G7 interior minister’s meeting on Wednesday, during which Ms Patel told her French counterpart that the British public “expect to see results” from French efforts to prevent ongoing migrant crossings.

Several newspapers reported that members of Border Force are being given special training to handle migrant boats, but would only deploy the “pushback” tactics when deemed practical and safe to do so.

The story took pride of place on the front cover of the Daily Express, next to the jubilant Emma Raducanu, who made US Open history with stunning quarter-final victory last night.

 

[nyikolajevics 2,690]

Ouch..

[Vesper 30,119]

Billboards hailing former President Donald Trump as the Son of God, Jesus Christ, have just appeared in Georgia, USA.

 

[Atomiswave 6,117]

On 03/09/2021 at 13:11, Vesper said:

Geez thats one ugly uniform....they look like 10 different things and all bad.

14 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Billboards hailing former President Donald Trump as the Son of God, Jesus Christ, have just appeared in Georgia, USA.

 

Blasphemers......bunch of satanists.

[Vesper 30,119]

21 minutes ago, Atomiswave said:

Geez thats one ugly uniform....they look like 10 different things and all bad.

It is satire

Texas passing the insane abortion bounty hunter law

so they made the Dallas cheerleaders into Handmaids Tale handmaidens via changing the colour and adding the Cowboy stars

 

Edited September 14, 2021 by Vesper

[Atomiswave 6,117]

27 minutes ago, Vesper said:

It is satire

Texas passing the insane abortion bounty hunter law

so they made the Dallas cheerleaders into Handmaids Tale handmaidens via changing the colour and adding the Cowboy stars

 

Aha that way then....alright then mate

[cosmicway 1,333]

On 09/09/2021 at 13:05, Vesper said:

Daily Express front cover backfires spectacularly

Talk about a self own!

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-express-front-cover-backfires-spectacularly-289551/

The Daily Express was caught in two minds this morning after publishing an anti-immigrant story next to news of a ‘history’ victory for British tennis player Emma Raducanu, who was born in Canada to a Romanian father and a Chinese mother.

Late last night news broke that Priti Patel has sanctioned new tactics to redirect migrant boats in the Channel back to France amid crunch talks over crossings – much to the delight of the right ring rag.

According to reports, the home secretary has ordered officials to rewrite maritime laws to allow Border Force to turn boats around, forcing them to be dealt with by French authorities.

It comes following a G7 interior minister’s meeting on Wednesday, during which Ms Patel told her French counterpart that the British public “expect to see results” from French efforts to prevent ongoing migrant crossings.

Several newspapers reported that members of Border Force are being given special training to handle migrant boats, but would only deploy the “pushback” tactics when deemed practical and safe to do so.

The story took pride of place on the front cover of the Daily Express, next to the jubilant Emma Raducanu, who made US Open history with stunning quarter-final victory last night.

 

How on earth are there migrants (boat people) in the channel ?
In the Med I understand, in the Aegean I understand, but in the channel ?
I just think the brexiteer press are just feeding their readers with grass on this one.

[Vesper 30,119]

THE SOCIOPATHIC STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/09/the-sociopathic-style-in-american-politics

The hysterical reaction on the right to Joe Biden’s eminently moderate vaccine mandates provides a kind of textbook example of what I will call the sociopathic style in American politics.

I’m alluding here to Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay on the paranoid style, and, following his usage, I don’t pretend to be making some sort of formal clinical diagnosis. In any event, sociopathy isn’t, strictly speaking, a formal concept in contemporary psychology; rather it is a variety of what psychologists call anti-social personality disorder.

And that is exactly what American right wing thought, and its avatar the contemporary Republican party, have both become: an elaborately rationalized form of anti-social personality disorder. Take for example this reaction from rising Republican star Dan Crenshaw:

People who haven’t given themselves over to the sociopathic style will find it difficult to understand what Crenshaw is even arguing for here. This is because, to people who haven’t fetishized individual liberty as being the one moral value that always trumps all other moral and practical considerations (important caveat: note that this commitment only holds when this value is being exercised by the right sorts of people), arguing against these sorts of mandates must seem inexplicable.

And it is inexplicable, from any reasonable — which in this context simply means non-sociopathic — point of view.

The position of the Republican party is that individual liberty is always and everywhere (again, note the caveat above) of such overwhelming importance that people should suffer no negative consequences whatsoever for refusing a free, safe, and highly effective vaccine, in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed millions around the world, and that by the end of this year will have, directly and indirectly, killed more than one million Americans.

This is merely a particularly vivid example of how contemporary right wing ideology in America consists of defending the indefensible, via arguments that no reasonable (again, non-sociopathic) person could possibly accept.

It’s also an example of, when you state a core right wing political belief in straightforward terms, it sounds like some sort parody. I mean surely they’re not arguing for that, are they? Surely some nuance, some complexity, is being omitted by the hostile polemicist here.

No: this is quite literally their position. People should be free to acquire and transmit to others a deadly and extremely communicable virus, that is causing a catastrophic pandemic, even though this catastrophe could be avoided completely if people chose to take a free and safe vaccine. Furthermore, it’s morally wrong for the government to engage in even the mildest coercion to nudge people toward getting vaccinated, because such coercion interferes with individual liberty, which is always the highest social value in every circumstance.

This is the sociopathic style in action. In contemporary conservative thought, anti-social personality disorder is, via the magic of ideology, transformed into an all-purpose political doctrine. In its cruder forms, as illustrated 24/7 by the workings of the nation’s massive right wing mass media propaganda complex, this ideology manifests itself as a kind of oppositional defiant disorder, as millions of chronological adults are encouraged to behave like cranky toddlers, whenever they are asked by the Liberal Conspiracy to perform the political equivalent of picking up their toys and going to bed on time.

In the tonier regions of the right wing ideological bubble, emotionally stunted sociopathy is tarted up constantly with ponderous (and highly selective) citations to Burke, Hayek, Orwell, Milton Friedman etc. But in both the Limbaughverse or the Buckleyverse the idea is the same: the invocation of the word “freedom” is supposed to cut off all higher cognitive function, just as surely as the word “God” is supposed to do in some adjacent ideological zip codes.

Thus the sacral status of Individual Liberty requires allowing countless individual choices to wreck the ecosphere via what economists refer to primly as the failure to take into account unpriced externalities, while elementary schools are shot up by semi-automatic weapons, and millions of Americans have no income other than food stamps, even as multi-billionaires rig the tax code ever-more in the favor, because that what Freedom means, according to the Constitution or the Bible or possibly both.

Of course the dictum You’re Not the Boss of Me is not a sustainable basis for even the most tenuous society. The concept of a sociopathic society is an oxymoron on its face, as the right wing is more than happy to acknowledge implicitly when it undertakes all sorts of vigorous steps to make sure that Individual Liberty means the Individual Liberty to live in an authoritarian ethno-state. Yet the apparent contradiction between the sociopathic style and the authoritarian personality is resolved easily enough when we remember that, to those who long to make America great again, freedom means freedom for me and not for you.

But perhaps the most crucial aspect of the sociopathic style is that it’s dedicated to not remembering that — which is easy enough to do when an ideology has no allegiance whatsoever to rational discourse, intellectual consistency, or any other form of honest argumentation. Expecting such things from the sociopathic style represents a fundamental failure to understand what that style is all about, which of course doesn’t stop plenty liberals, centrists, and delusional center-right conservatives to continue to expect them.

At this point in American history, sincere engagement with the nation’s right wing in general and the Republican party in particular is about as advisable as going on a blind date with Ted Bundy. And the otherwise inexplicably bizarre reaction of these people to even the mildest vaccine mandates makes perfect sense when we remember who we are actually dealing with.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Vesper

[Vesper 30,119]

https://www.democraticunderground.com/108821049

[Vesper 30,119]

Haitian roundup by horseback

Texas border

😢😡

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10004201/US-nears-plan-widescale-expulsions-Haitian-migrants.html

[Vesper 30,119]

 

Jumped the shark they have...

At yesterday’s anti-vax rally in London, people told us they wanted to see the Capitol insurrection happen in the UK.

 

This. In. London............

'There's a global fucking agenda right now'
'We know this is a scam, we know that Covid does not exist'
'The BBC has done a right proper job on you'
'So I will fight, fight, fight... whatever my ancestors had to do I will do to fight for freedom'
'We take to the streets, we take down the vaccine centres, and take down the town halls'

Edited September 20, 2021 by Vesper