Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,238]

1 minute ago, cosmicway said:

For Ukraine Trump messaged Zelensky saying "in 38 days your allowance will be cut".

come on!

at least get your basic facts straight

POTUS Trump did not say that

his son shared an Insta post meme from Sarah Palin, it was not not a statement sent to Zelenskyy by POTUS Trump (I am NOT saying that Trump the POTUS will not cut the aid btw)

 

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-jr-volodymyr-zelenskyy-donald-trump-cut-funding-ukraine-war/

Donald Trump Jr. has doubled down on his father's campaign pledge to cut funding for Ukraine in its war effort against Russia.

The United States president-elect's eldest son shared on Instagram a clip posted by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin which read "POV [point of view]: You're 38 days from losing your allowance" over a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, Vesper said:

come on!

at least get your basic facts straight

POTUS Trump did not say that

his son shared an Insta post meme from Sarah Palin, it was not not a statement sent to Zelenskyy by POTUS Trump (I am NOT saying that Trump the POTUS will not cut the aid btw)

 

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-jr-volodymyr-zelenskyy-donald-trump-cut-funding-ukraine-war/

Donald Trump Jr. has doubled down on his father's campaign pledge to cut funding for Ukraine in its war effort against Russia.

The United States president-elect's eldest son shared on Instagram a clip posted by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin which read "POV [point of view]: You're 38 days from losing your allowance" over a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

 

And ? Trump the Trump was out of it you think ?

[Vesper 30,238]

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Imaginations.
First of all real primaries would not start in July 2024 but in 2023.
And I repeat, Biden was never criticised by any dems.
What happened was they expressed worries about his mental fatigue.

I said a REGULAR LENGTH Dem primary, which would have started (not the voting, the campaign) in mid 2022

and multiple Dems DID criticise Biden, concerned about his mental state, which IS criticism

also you forget (at least you have not mentioned it) that Biden himself cast himself (before he was elected) as a one term 'bridge candidate/POTUS'

then reneged on that stance

[Vesper 30,238]

6 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

And ? Trump the Trump was out of it you think ?

you posted a factually wrong claim

simple as that

[cosmicway 1,333]

Just now, Vesper said:

I said a REGULAR LENGTH Dem primary, which would have started (not the voting, the campaign) in mid 2022

and multiple Dems DID criticise Biden, concerned about his mental state, which IS criticism

also you forget (at least you have not mentioned it) that Biden himself cast himself (before he was elected) as a one term 'bridge candidate/POTUS'

then reneged on that stance

You have a thing against Harris because she lost and imagine things.
I mean Biden's policies were not criticised by anyone in the dem party.
It was a situation similar to that of Andreas Papandreou in 1995. Did n't want to resign as prime minister although his was ill, from the party were pressurising him to do that, finally his condition became critical and had to resign and died in June 1996.

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

5 minutes ago, Vesper said:

you posted a factually wrong claim

simple as that

I did n't want to repeat all the story with Sarah Palin and the images and all that.
But you think Trump is not behind it ?
Stop writing childish posts - increases the bandwith used by the site for no reason - TC will have to pay.

[cosmicway 1,333]

Btw Sarah Palin used to be a never Trumper.
Now she is licking his boots.

Edited November 11, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,238]

6 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

You have a thing against Harris because she lost and imagine things.

false

I warned on structural weaknesses in the US Democratic Party and also danger points in terms of the US voting populace for years

and

a large problem (far from the only problem, but a big one nonetheless) in this election was processed-based

[Vesper 30,238]

9 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

Stop writing childish posts

lol

talk about projection!

[cosmicway 1,333]

3 minutes ago, Vesper said:

false

I warned on structural weaknesses in the US Democratic Party and also danger points in terms of the US voting populace for years

and

a large problem (far from the only problem, but a big one nonetheless) in this election was processed-based

I too warned about structural weaknesses but others than those you present.
Maybe the clincher was the 7/10 in the end, engineered by Putin to have this effect.
What is a processed-based ?
 

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12 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

What is a processed-based ?

I would not know

I am a child

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[Fulham Broadway 17,338]

 

[Vesper 30,238]

Billionaires like Elon Musk don’t just think they’re better than the rest of us – they hate us

The ultra-wealthy talk about solving the climate crisis or ending inequality. But what they’re really interested in is outliving or escaping anyone poorer than them

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/11/billionaires-elon-musk-hate-us-ultra-wealthy-climate-crisis

Nearly three years ago, I started working on an idea for a book. It started out with the pretty mild proposition: we’re in a class war, but it’s a weird one, because one side is curiously coy. The capital class used to strut its stuff. It used to build libraries and great estates; it used to tell you it thought it was superior, and why. Now that it is billionaires on one side and everyone else on the other, they are like ghosts. They might tell you what they think, in Ted Talks, at Davos, but it can’t be real: according to them, all they care about is fixing climate change, solving inequality and bringing about world peace. Mysteriously, none of those things ever come about.

I dragged my feet a little bit, and while I did so, the billionaires got louder, and maybe truer to their authentic selves. Vladimir Putin, estimated to be worth billions, invaded Ukraine. Elon Musk bought Twitter. Sam Bankman-Fried got outed as not-a-billionaire – the billions turned out to either belong to someone else, be fictional, be priced in crypto, or all three – and a lot of his fantasies for the future came tumbling out in the same legal proceedings: a plan, stated in a memo, to purchase the sovereign nation of Nauru in order to construct a “bunker/shelter” that would be used for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs [effective altruists] survive” and to develop “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there”.

This same memo noted that “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too”. It distilled in a single paragraph the mind-map of the billionaire class: apocalypse fantasies and bunker futures; a fervent belief in their own, gene-level superiority; a hatred of any sovereignty higher than theirs; and an almost childlike lack of self-reflection, to the extent that you would call yourself an “effective altruist” just by dint of having fictionalised enough net worth to potentially help others, while simultaneously planning for a future in which all the others have perished.

It turned out a lot of billionaires had a plan for that event where 50-99.99% of us all died. An awesome number of them had a private island, or were looking for one. The OpenAI chief Sam Altman and the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel were gonna split to New Zealand and go halvsies on a bunker. The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa was by no means the only “high net worth individual” trying to shoot himself into space, though he was the only one who went on YouTube to describe his exploratory trip, rumoured to have cost $80m (£62m), to the International Space Station.

“I did not get aroused whatsoever,” he said. “When you wake up in the morning, it’s quite normal for us men to have a happy manhood.” But in two weeks on the ISS, “not even once did my manhood greet me with energy”.

What they’re trying to escape is civilisation, the rule of law, other people. They’re trying to escape us

More predictably, and to make matters worse, the lack of gravity made his penis float upwards, causing a perspective disturbance that “made it look like a child’s … I didn’t feel confident about my manhood in space,” he concluded.

What’s it to you, whether or not a billionaire can get an erection in space? Childlike lack of self-reflection, again. Between that and the coming apocalypse, the bunkers, the private islands, the space exploration, the dreams of colonising the sea and living on it, and the land wars, I couldn’t help but notice that what they’re trying to escape is civilisation, the rule of law, other people – bluntly, us. They’re trying to escape us.

When you add in their dreams of living for ever, of siring scores of children, the picture is even clearer: they hate us. They’re not neutral about us; we’re not mere flies on their windscreen. They think any one of them, living to be 700, is worth an infinite number of us in our prime. They think their children are more precious than our children. Who knows, maybe some billionaires don’t hate us or fantasise about our annihilation. But even one should be a red flag.

Then on 6 November, I realised the ship had sailed. This is an open secret now. The whole world has watched Musk seize a mature democracy, and you can see he hates us with one look at his face. You don’t even have to scroll through his X feed.

My procrastination wasn’t just uselessness (though a bit of that, sure); it was that I couldn’t keep my mind on this hatred for five minutes straight without getting distracted by something I loved. So while, without question, Musk is faster than me, more ambitious and more effective, I am happier than he is. To pilfer an uncharacteristically cheerful line from Albert Camus: in the midst of this billionaires’ winter, there is, within me and probably you, an invincible summer.

And that’s great, but we’ve still got an almighty class war on our hands.

[Vesper 30,238]

3 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

 

a great example of a post that would VERY likely be alerted on and then hidden by a random jury on Democratic Undergound

they stifle a tonne of real debate

so many on there just blindly follow anything the establishment Dems do and how they frame the limits of action/debate

[Fulham Broadway 17,338]

2 minutes ago, Vesper said:

a great example of a post that would VERY likely be alerted on and then hidden by a random jury on Democratic Undergound

they stifle a tonne of real debate

so many on there just blindly follow anything the establishment Dems do and how they frame the limits of action/debate

Yes -and the Social Media platforms, owned by the billionaires are behaving similarly. 

First came the bots, then came the bosses - we’re entering Musk and Zuck’s new era of disinformation

Tech leaders’ politics are encoded into their platforms – and with Trump’s ascent, they have direct access to the Oval Office

I’m a researcher of media manipulation, and watching the 2024 US election returns was like seeing the Titanic sink.

Every day leading up to 5 November, there were more and more outrageous claims being made in an attempt across social media to undermine election integrity: conspiracy theories focused on a tidal wave of immigrants plotting to undermine the right wing, allegations that there were millions of excess ballots circulating in California, and rumors that the voting machines were already corrupted by malicious algorithms.

 

All of the disinformation about corrupt vote counts turned out not to be necessary, as Donald Trump won the election decisively. But the election proved that disinformation is no longer the provenance of anonymous accounts amplified by bots to mimic human engagement, like it was in 2016. In 2024, lies travel further and faster across social media, which is now a battleground for narrative dominance. And now, the owners of the platforms circulating the most incendiary lies have direct access to the Oval Office.

We talk a lot about social media “platforms”. The word “platform” is interesting as it means both a stated political position and a technological communication system. Over the past decade, we have watched social media platforms warp public opinion by deciding what is seen and when users see it, as algorithms double as newsfeed and timeline editors. When tech CEOs encode their political beliefs into the design of platforms, it’s a form of technofascism, where technology is used for political suppression of speech and to repress the organization of resistance to the state or capitalism.

Content moderation at these platforms now reflects the principles of the CEO and what that person believes is in the public’s interest. The political opinions of tech’s overlords, like Musk and Zuckerberg, are now directly embedded in their algorithms.

For example, Meta has limited the circulation of critical discussions about political power, reportedly even downranking posts that use the word “vote” on Instagram. Meta’s Twitter clone, Threads, suspended journalists for reporting on Trump’s former chief of staff describing Trump’s admiration of Hitler. Threads built in a politics filter that is turned on by default.

Implementing these filtering mechanisms illustrates a sharp difference from Meta’s embrace of politicians who got personalized white-glove service in 2016 as Facebook embedded employees directly in political campaigns, who advised on branding and reaching new audiences. It’s also a striking reversal of Zuckerberg’s free speech position in 2019. Zuckerberg gave a presentation at Georgetown University claiming that he was inspired to create Facebook because he wanted to give students a voice during the Iraq war. This historical revisionism was quickly skewered in the media. (Facebook’s predecessor allowed users to rate the appearance of Harvard female freshmen. Misogyny was the core of its design.) Nevertheless, his false origin story encapsulated a vision of how Zuckerberg once believed society and politics should be organized, where political discussion was his guiding reason to bring people into community.

However, he now appears to have abandoned this position in favor of disincentivizing political discussion altogether. Recently, Zuckerberg wrote to the Republican Jim Jordan saying he regretted his content moderation decisions during the pandemic because he acted under pressure from the Biden administration. The letter itself was an obvious attempt to curry favor as Trump rose as the Republican presidential candidate. Zuckerberg has reason to fear Trump, who has mentioned wanting to arrest Zuckerberg for deplatforming him on Meta products after the January 6 Capitol riot.

X seems to have embraced the disinformation chaos and fully fused Trump’s campaign into the design of X’s content strategies. Outrageous assertions circle the drain on X, including false claims such as that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, Kamala Harris’s Jamaican grandmother was white, and that immigrants are siphoning aid meant for Fema. It’s also worth noting that Musk is the biggest purveyor of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories on X. The hiss and crackle of disinformation is as ambient as it is unsettling.

There are no clearer signs of Musk’s willingness to use platform power than his relentless amplification of his own account as well as Trump’s Twitter account on X’s “For You” algorithm. Moreover, Musk bemoaned the link suppression by Twitter in 2020 over Hunter Biden’s laptop while then hypocritically working with the Trump campaign in 2024 to ban accounts and links to leaked documents emanating from the Trump campaign that painted JD Vance in a negative light.

Musk understands that he will personally benefit from being close to power. He supported Trump with a controversial political action committee that gave away cash to those who signed his online petition. Musk also paid millions for canvassers and spent many evenings in Pennsylvania stumping for Trump. With Trump’s win, he will need to make good on his promise of placing Musk in a position on the not-yet-created “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge – which is also the name of Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency). While it sure seems like a joke taken too far, Musk has said he plans to cut $2tn from the national budget, which will wreak havoc on the economy and could be devastating when coupled with the mass deportation of 10 million people.

In short, what we learn from the content strategies of X and Meta is simple: the design of platforms is now inextricable from the politics of the owner.

 

This wasn’t inevitable. In 2016, there was a public reckoning that social media had been weaponized by foreign adversaries and domestic actors to spread disinformation on a number of wedge issues to millions of unsuspecting users. Hundreds of studies were conducted in the intervening years, by internal corporate researchers and independent academics, showing that platforms amplify and expose audiences to conspiracy theories and fake news, which can lead to networked incitement and political violence.

By 2020, disinformation had become its own industry and the need for anonymity lessened as rightwing media makers directly impugned election results, culminating in January 6. That led to an unprecedented decision by social media companies to ban Trump, who was still the sitting president, and a number of other high-profile rightwing pundits, thus illustrating just how powerful social media platforms had become as political actors.

In reaction to this unprecedented move to curb disinformation, the richest man in the world, Musk, bought Twitter, laid off much of the staff, and sent internal company communications to journalists and politicians in 2022. Major investigations of university researchers and government agencies ensued, naming and shaming those who engaged with Twitter’s former leadership and made appeals for the companies to enforce its own terms of service during the 2020 election.

Since then, these CEOs have ossified their political beliefs in the design of algorithms and by extension dictated political discourse for the rest of us.

Whether it’s Musk’s strategy of overloading users with posts from himself and Trump, or Zuckerberg’s silencing of political discussion, it’s citizens who suffer from such chilling of speech. Of course, there is no way to know decisively how disinformation affected individual voters, but a recent Ipsos poll shows Trump voters believed disinformation on a number of wedge issues, claiming that immigration, crime, and the economy are all worse than data indicates. For now, let this knowledge be the canary warning of technofascism, where the US is not only ruled by elected politicians, but also by technological authoritarians who control speech on a global scale.

If we are to disarm disinformers, we need a whole of society approach that values real Talk (Timely, Accurate Local Knowledge) and community safety. This might look like states passing legislation to fund local journalism in the public interest, because local news can bridge divides between neighbors and bring some accountability to the government. It will require our institutions, such as medicine, journalism, and academia, to fight for truth and justice, even in the face of anticipated retaliation. But most of all, it’s going to require that you and I do something quickly to protect those already in the crosshairs of Trump’s new world order, by donating to or joining community organizations tackling issues such as women’s rights and immigration. Even subscribing to a local news outlet is a profound political act these days. Let that sink in.

Joan Donovan is the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and assistant professor of journalism at Boston University

 

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Archbishop of Canterbury under pressure to resign over church abuse scandal

https://www.channel4.com/news/archbishop-of-canterbury-under-pressure-to-resign-over-church-abuse-scandal

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s position is now untenable, according to the Bishop of Newcastle who joined the growing calls for Justin Welby to resign.

More than 6,500 people have signed a petition by some General Synod members urging him to quit, over his failure to act more rigorously over the serial abuser John Smyth.

The abuse of boys and young men in South Africa continued after Justin Welby was informed.

But despite a report which said Mr Welby “could and should” have reported the allegations to police years before Mr Smyth died.

 

video at the link

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'Hail Hitler and hail Trump': People wave Nazi flags outside Jewish play in Michigan

https://www.rawstory.com/nazi-flags-michigan/

 

President-elect Donald Trump's reelection was credited for emboldening a group of people waving Nazi flags in Michigan over the weekend.

WLNS reported that the flags were seen in two cities, including at a Jewish play.

According to the report, "many people" were seen displaying flags with swastikas on Saturday night as the Fowlerville Community Theater performed the "Diary of Anne Frank." The same group was also seen outside the American Legion Post in Howell.

"It was upsetting," cast member Becky Frank said. "You know, just knowing the character I was playing, knowing a lot of the research that I did on my character."

Witnesses said the protest began in Howell before moving to Fowlerville. Protesters were seen wearing masks with the number 1488, a white supremacist symbol.

"There was a group of people at the four-way intersection in downtown that had swastika flags and American flags," witness Alex Sutfill told WLNS. "They were sticking their arms up and yelling hail Hitler and Hail Trump and everything like that."

Peter Damerow said the group told him to go back to his country.

"They looked at me and one of them said," Damerow recalled. "No this is Pureville now, and we're here to make sure it stays pure."

"I really felt like they felt comfortable enough to do this because of Trump's re-election, and what they said to me at the stop light made that quite clear," he added.