Things have a way of becoming what the ruling class wants them to become. Eventually, every crisis, however minor, becomes another excuse for them to grab more money and power from the rest of us.
1,513 karma · joined March 17, 2021
"No woke ideology allowed."
That's it. No explanation needed. Those who pretend they don't know what the rule means, or protest, are in violation. The radical left has been co-opting every organization they can get their hands on and kicking out the "non-believers" for years. It's time the handful of sane people that are left band together and start doing the same. The left loves the phrase "toxic," but their ideology genuinely is toxic, and no project, company, or group can thrive once it takes root.
"But why is that-"
"Because OTHER people are doing it!"
"Oh no!"
This a feature, not a bug. The point of Brexit was to crush the bones of globalists who think it's acceptable to run society on the backs of a quasi-slave class that can't afford a decent life for themselves no matter how hard their work. This whole article is a bunch of hand-wringing because people doing hard, unpleasant work that (unlike most white collar work) ACTUALLY NEEDS TO BE DONE are finally getting paid well for it. The horror!
Regardless this is the Sun, and probably all of this is a flash in the pan and the UK will return to slave wages soon. Be nice if it didn't though.
If you simply offer me a product, maybe it's safe, maybe it isn't. If you INSIST on me taking it, and engage in vast, sweeping propaganda campaigns across all media, brutally censoring all opposition and criticism and attempting to brow-beat the public into submission via a campaign of fear and intimidation, for a disease with a minuscule fatality rate, you have utterly convinced me that there's something wrong with the product and I should stay far, far away. At BEST, Big Pharama is once again hellbent on pushing a sketchy frankenstein creation to rake in the cash. At worst, something much more dark is happening.
For almost a year, the "Lab Leak Hypothesis" was scorned as deranged conspiracy blather. Now it is widely accepted as mundane, mainstream fact that ethics-free phrama researchers, in China but with US funding, created this disaster. It took about a year for the media admit reality. Now the "conspiracy theory" is that the vaccines are unsafe, for a variety of reasons ranging from mundane lack of care to more sinister motives. How long will it take for the media, and the establishment, to be forced to admit reality this time? And how many will end up crippled or dead in the meantime?
That gripe aside, if you're just training on a bunch of headshots and generating new ones, it's been done, over and over at this point. Want to impress? Figure out how to generate a full sequence of coherent animation frames.
Is the Everything Bubble finally bursting?
But I can't help reading this whole article between the lines as "back to work wage slave!" Free time is good. Not being forced to waste your time for others is good. You just have to learn how to structure your life, and that's a muscle that atrophies when you're enslaved in the current economic system.
So it's censored. No thanks, not interested.
What would happen? WE WOULD MAKE MORE. Violence is inherent in determining power and hierarchy, and an intelligent species is always going to pursue the most effective technologies for inflicting violence and use those technologies to maintain a monopoly on violence, ie a government. Failure to do so just means someone else will come along and do it for you.
Guns are not the problem. Violence is inherent to the human condition, and to intelligent species more generally, because only beings willing to inflict violence when needed survive and reproduce. This is why gun control, in the modern sense, is so deranged. It fetishizes one manifestation of an ancient, atavistic urge while failing to understand that said urge runs much deeper than any given technology for inflicting it.
Discord is an obscene drain on resources. That's the problem that's easy to solve: just stop with the bad programming choices.
That said, I didn't realize at first that Revolt is in fact meant to be a REPLACEMENT top to bottom, and not just a rogue Discord client like Ripcord. You're hawking it on the basis of privacy, rather than speed (since it obviously won't be much better there). But the privacy angle is laughable from the start. Do we run our own servers? It's not clear to me from reading the site. You talk about "creating" servers, but Discord users "create" servers as well: on Discord's hardware. If Revolt genuinely allows for the creation of independant servers, with no control or access by the Revolt devs, that is at least something. If not, I don't see the point.
I mean, this seems accurate to me. Clearly there's a loosely-affiliated group of hyper-rich, hyper-influential elites that push and shove around US and global politics to suit their needs, and their desires end up mattering a lot more than anyone's vote does.
Good article though. Author is brave to actually accurately describe the sickness devouring modern journalism, where everything is about catering to ideology. And there's some interesting stuff here overall.
>The conspiracy-minded, Kay says, “come to see the world as presented by the mainstream media and other institutions as sort of a counterfeit hoax.”
It IS. It literally is. That's the most accurate description of modern "journalism" I've ever seen. For the millionth time, we stopped trusting "the system" because it was addicted to lying for profit (and influence). Sooner or later people catch on.
The assertion of "Dead Internet" is not (necessarily) that 99% of everything on the net is made by one sinister literal AI run by the US government (though things might well converge to this point eventually). The point is that currently, less and less of the content is organic or real anymore.
"Bot" in modern Internet parlance is shorthand. It CAN mean a GPT-style program posting stuff on its own. It can also mean a human guiding said program, editing and cherry-picking before posting. It can also mean a bunch of humans in a room somewhere who have been paid to blend into various communities and spread propaganda and disinfo, for the sake of nudging opinion or just to muddy the waters. Sometimes in the employ of nation states, sometimes by a company just trying to sell a new pair of shoes. It can also mean the countless rogue individuals who make such posts just because they like to be disruptive.
It can also mean the so-called "algorithms" at work on every major platform now, a near infinite set of interlocking rules twisting and churning beneath the surface. What video will be recommended? What tweet will rise, and which will be buried? What information will be easy to come across, and what will be nearly impossible? This is a level of control and propaganda the tyrants of the previous era could only have dreamed of, and it is the reality of the modern Internet. Not simply to crudely censor or broadcast an idea, but to nudge the population this way or that in ways that are often almost undetectable.
The Internet used to be largely unfiltered, aside from basic trash collection. Now it is highly MANAGED, in ways that are never clear or honest, by agents that wear many masks. THIS is what is meant by "bots." The Atlantic article itself is a perfect example. What is the point of the article? To inform or empower the reader? Of course not. It's to MANAGE. To address the "Dead Internet" theory, a theory that's dangerous because it's true, and blunt it, to shift your opinion by "debunking"/"clarifying"/scoffing.
The Atlantic article was (probably) not written by an AI. It was (probably) written by a real human, working for other real humans. But why was the decision made, by those real people, to write and publish such an article? Because the "Dead Internet" theory is true: the Internet has become an enormous propaganda machine, exploited in turn by any number of powerful groups. The Atlantic is tied into those groups, and they want to keep the gravy train rolling. Maybe Kaitlyn Tiffany was specifically directed to write such an article. Maybe (more likely) she was hired because she was the sort of person who would write a dismissive article like this unbidden as soon as she encountered the "Dead Internet" theory (a "good cultural match for us"). Either way she's no longer an individual simply expressing HER views, but a tool for the small group of people that increasingly dominate the net to express THEIRS.
She's a bot.
And the Dead Internet is full of them.
All that said:
"The plan from which the Great Reset originated was called the Global Redesign Initiative. Drafted by the WEF after the 2008 economic crisis, the initiative contains a 600-page report on transforming global governance. In the WEF’s vision, 'the government voice would be one among many, without always being the final arbiter.'"
I'd say the "Conspiracy Theorists" are pretty on the money here. It's literally an attempt to take power away from existing governments and deliver it to a cabal of multinational corporations, which is, in effect, the "One World Government" the Theorists love to crow about. And never forget, they've been trying to do this, in some form or another, since at least the 30s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
"Companies including Nokia Corp. still manufacture “feature phones,” devices that look, feel and operate like the cellphones of the ’00s.
But most feature phones still follow a design philosophy of abundance, cramming all the features they can into a limited operating system, said Petter Neby..."
Bullshit. They can't get on the Internet, that's what matters. You can call, you can text (awkwardly) and that's pretty much it. Is it really worth $250+ to strip out the shitty version of Snake or whatever the Feature phone comes with? The whole issue is distraction, and I'm pretty sure a tiny monochrome display with no Internet poses little threat in that regard.
Pure wankery, especially when you consider they could probably sell THIS phone for $80 too, if they wanted to. Buy a feature phone if this is what you want (and more power to you). Don't reward this nonsense.
Look, it's all very well to talk about leaving, but the reality is if you have a product to sell, a business to promote, if you want to keep up with what's going on in your communities, physical and virtual, if you want to connect with people at all, you've got to do it through the hellscape of social media. There are no other options. Everyone's locked in. If you want to do something involving people, you've got to go where the people are.
It's a catch-22. Social media won't die until all the people leave, but all the people won't leave until social media dies.
"Jones said there are some theories about why there's a summer surge this year.
'For the last year and a half, a lot of us have been in these. In masks. We were also social distancing,' Jones said."
In other words, as you said the natural ebb and flow of RSV has probably been interrupted by Covid containment measures, then restarted at an unexpected time as those measured briefly started to be relaxed. Which means that in a sense, the lack of beds was caused BY the mask mandate, not by a refusal to adhere to it more strictly. Propaganda and fear-mongering, over and over. Also:
"'We are all on team public health,' the judge said. 'And every person needs to understand that the enemy is the virus, it's not each other.'" Our enemy is clearly both, because "experts" and officials have been lying since day 1. And of the two, it seems like the lies have caused more damage than the actual virus at this point.
If people fail to understand something so simple, it can only be due to cognitive dissonance caused by a refusal to acknowledge their own moral and ethical bankruptcy. You cannot go around murdering people day and night and then stand, drenched in their blood, and complain that no one RESPECTS you anymore.
And lest anyone think this is hyperbolic, remember that lies have consequences, and when "experts" in power lie, those consequences are often injury and death.