Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration....
His kids lack a great deal of his rizz. DT Jr is too weak, Eric is dumb as dishwater, and Ivanka has the girl cooties that sink every woman Republican candidate for the Presidency.
One reason Russia took over Crimea so easily was due to the high Russian-national identifying residents. Same with South Ossetia and Abkhazia. East Ukraine had an enormous Russia-aligned population, which drove the split that provoked the 2014 civil war and ended in the invasion.
And funny you bring up Afghanistan, USSR went down also because of invading it.
The USSR went down to perestroika. Gorbachev's reform and opening of markets invited record rates of corruption and graft, leading to the oligarchs that installed Yeltsin and Putin a decade later. The Russian military was just about the only institution that survived the hollowing out of the national economy and the dissolution of the old republican system of governance.
Third party candidates don’t typically siphon votes away from the party that religiously tows the line.
Trump doesn't really tow the line, through. He's a manifestation of a revolt from inside the GOP's white nationalist electoral core, against the financial internationalist who have controlled the party since Reagan.
I don't think it's clear who RFK is really feeding from. It's possible his voters simply wouldn't turn out if he wasn't on the ballot. But it's doubtful that he can steal Biden voters by parroting Trump positions.
The dems and the left will debate procedural shit for how to accomplish similar goals. The right is all emotional appeals/reactionaries.
Liberal admins don't debate procedural shit, they kill legislation hostile to their donors with technicalities. These same technicalities never affect our illegal wars or unconstitutional policing or criminally unconscionable polluting or corrupt corporate bailouts.
The big difference between libs and cons is that cons demand their red meat and are willing to lose an election or two to guarantee it, while liberals are constantly running scared of their replacements in the next election.
The emotion you see isn't unique to conservatives. It's simply rewarded rather than shamed.
Netflix has managed to annoy a good number of its users with an announcement about an upcoming update to its Windows 11 (and Windows 10) app: support for adverts and live events will be added, but the ability to download content is being taken away....
A federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, on Friday blocked a new Biden administration rule that would prohibit credit card companies from charging customers late fees higher than $8....
I want stories like this bombarded at the morons on here saying Biden does nothing
Biden putting up rules and then failing to enforce them because of a predictable Texas appeallate court issuing a predictable injunction amounts to nothing.
Biden had the opportunity to pack the courts back in 2021 and... didn't. He still has the opportunity, right now, while he has a Senate majority.
This isn't just a Biden problem. I could name a dozen of Senate Dems who paved the way for a stacked court, going back to the McCain-friendly Democrats caving to Frist's Nuclear Option back in 2005 (senior senator from Delaware whatsisface notwithstanding).
But this is a kind of learned liberal helplessness, when a guy like Biden can throw you an empty headline and get "See! He tried to do something! We just need to give him 2009 supermajorities before they'll work!" Meanwhile, if any Republican wins any branch of any level of government, that's all they need to eviscerate democracy forever.
good things the left-wing is trying to pass that the right-wing is stopping
When you can pass bills that can TikTok from the minority by stapling them to foreign military aid, but you can't expand Medicare or sanction polluters or secure women's rights to health care or enfranchise DC voters...
This isn't "the right just sabotaged us!" it's "the moderates just sided with reactionaries again".
Caps on credit card fees? Left proposed, right killed.
So much of this boils down to Dems green lighting GOP judicial nominees while Repubs block Dem nominees without consequences.
What is the remedy for this obstruction other than to scream "Vote or things will get worse!" every two years?
The Dens won't pack the court. They won't use our majorities when we have them. They won't stop giving their economic rivals tons of free money. They won't stop sending cops into university campuses to crack heads.
Throwing up a rule so a Trump judge can skeet shoot it isn't "doing anything" when you already know the outcome.
I'm reminded of Congressman Henry Hyde wrapping up the day's House hearing on Presidental Blowjobs a bit early so he could run across town a boink his mistress.
You have to be careful, though. In the wrong hands, philosophy can be a dangerous thing.
Keep promoting ideas like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", "Keep the Sabbath Holy", and "Don't Worship False Idols", and people might start thinking all our wars, our insane work schedules, and our fetishistic consumer culture aren't good.
Given the habits of your average Louisiana legislator, you might want to scrap the Seventh Commandment entirely.
Wouldn't even be the first time this month that a bunch of religious zealots and government thugs stormed a school full of peace-loving hippies and dragged them off by their hair.
The Big Ten were written at a time when paganism/animism was the dominant religious view and the idea of monotheism was weird and foreign. You really had to hammer those home early on, because one minute you're up on a mountain having the acid trip spiritual moment to define a millennium and the next you're down in the valley watching all your friends jerk off to a big bronze bull just like you told them not to!
When your parish flock is that prone to stray, I'm almost surprised they don't have a few more.
There is no freedom of speech guarantee in private or public enterprise.
And the consequence of this policy is a back-door path to censorship. A combination of surveillance, selective-admittance, and media saturation allow certain ideological beliefs to suffice the "marketplace of ideas" while others are silenced.
“I want to force people to listen to my bullshit.”
Its more that privatized media infrastructure allows for a monopolization of speech.
Big media companies still force people to listen to bullshit, by way of advertising and algorithmic promotion. Go on YouTube, click through their "recommended" list a few times, and you'll quickly find yourself watching some Mr. Beast episode or PraegerU video, simply because these folks have invested so heavily in self-promotion.
But there's a wide swath of content you won't see, either because YouTube's algorithm explicitly censors it for policy reasons, because the media isn't maxing out the SEO YouTube execs desire (the classic Soy Face thumbnail for instance), or because you're not spending enough money to boost visibility.
This has nothing to do with what the generic video watcher wants to see and everything to do with what YouTube administration wants that watcher to see.
RFK Jr is a nasty little freak with some very toxic beliefs. But that's not why he's struggling to get noticed on the platform, when plenty of other nasty freaks with toxic beliefs get mainstream circulation.
I mean, regional coding makes sense from a language perspective. I don't really want to see a bunch of foreign language recommendations on my feed, unless I'm explicitly searching for content in that language.
But I do agree there's a lack of transparency. And I further agree that The Algorithm creates a rarified collection of "popular" content entirely by way of excluding so much else. The end result is a very generic stream of crap in the main feed and some truly freaky gamed content that's entirely focused on click-baiting children. Incidentally, jesus fucking christ whomever is responsible for promoting "unboxing" videos should be beaten to death with a flaming bag of nalpam.
None of this is socially desirable or good, but it all appears to be incredibly profitable. Its a social media environment that's converged on "Oops! All Ads!" and is steadily making its way to "Oops! All scams!" as the content gets worse and worse and worse.
The shadowbanning and segregation of content is just a part of the equation that makes all this possible. But funneling people down into a handful of the most awful, libidinal content generators is really not good.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it's been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
It wastes bot’s time
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That's far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don't want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
In business, it's described as a kind of Principal-Agent problem. What happens when the person you're working with has goals that deviate from what you contracted with them to do?
A classic "unsolved problem" of social relationships.
have you contracted police to, well, police your area?
Sadly, I've been outvoted in every election that centers on inflating police budgets.
Had Soviet citizens contract NKVD?
The NKVD was a tool of the Russian Soviets to police itself. So, less a contract between citizens than between party bosses.
But Soviet police were far closer to the ideal community policing model than their Western peers, simply because they weren't built atop the framework of plantation overseers, slave catchers, and anti-indigenious paramilitary.
Pick up a copy of Fanshen (Chinese Cultural Revolution, not Russian Stalinist era, but it's the same through line). The social transition from a country of sovereign landlords to egalitarian policing was rocky, but it was real and significant.
it’s a mechanism imposed on you with power
All societies are. The question becomes whether you find value in this mechanism or whether it is entirely extractive.
The difference between a plantation overseer and a union rep is significant primarily because of who they answer to.
Chinese police hunting international corruption targets were allowed into Australia by the federal police and subsequently escorted a woman back to China for trial, in a major breach of Chinese-Australian police protocols....
The Chinese prison system. Whereas the Australian prison system that kills people with heat stroke isn't a problem, because...
the Chinese prison system is preferable is laughable
Of course. Its doing all the progressive-y policies that big liberal states like California rolled back under the Reagan Era. Rehabilitation, job training, quality health care, and public reintegration are all policies the US system dismantled a generation ago, because it was seen as "Hugs for Thugs" and "Soft on Crime".
The New York Penal Law Sections 130.25, 130.30 and 130.35, define statutory rape. This crime is defined as having consensual sex with a minor that is under the age of 17 years old.
Trump floats idea of three-term presidency at NRA convention ( www.theguardian.com )
Donald Trump flirted with the idea of being president for three terms – a clear violation of the US constitution – during a bombastic speech for the National Rifle Association in which he vowed to reverse gun safety measures green-lighted during the Biden administration....
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy rejects Macron’s Olympic truce proposal ( www.politico.eu )
We may clown on him a lot but it's genuinely quite dystopian how much power Elon Musk has. ( lemmy.world )
Netflix Windows app is set to remove its downloads feature, while introducing ads ( www.techradar.com )
Netflix has managed to annoy a good number of its users with an announcement about an upcoming update to its Windows 11 (and Windows 10) app: support for adverts and live events will be added, but the ability to download content is being taken away....
Judge blocks Biden administration rule capping credit card late fees at $8 ( www.cnn.com )
A federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, on Friday blocked a new Biden administration rule that would prohibit credit card companies from charging customers late fees higher than $8....
Explosive police report reveals how Moms for Liberty co-founder arranged bisexual threesomes ( www.lgbtqnation.com )
Louisiana becomes 1st state to require the Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms ( www.nola.com )
Do they want Baphomet in their schools? Because this is how you get Baphomet in your schools.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban ( arstechnica.com )
OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts ( www.theverge.com )
As conservatives put religion in schools, Satanists want in, too ( www.nbcnews.com )
Mississippi governor signs bill to let cis people sue trans people if they use the bathroom ( www.lgbtqnation.com )
First they tried to "cure" gayness. Now they're fixated on "healing" trans people. ( www.motherjones.com )
Chinese police were allowed into Australia to speak with a woman. They breached protocol and escorted her back to China ( www.abc.net.au )
Chinese police hunting international corruption targets were allowed into Australia by the federal police and subsequently escorted a woman back to China for trial, in a major breach of Chinese-Australian police protocols....
Jerry Seinfeld’s Teen Girlfriend Saga Resurfaces After Duke Walkout ( www.thedailybeast.com )
Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much ( lemm.ee )
Do any of them know what the word "liberal" actually means?