Honestly it’s kind of a good sign. I grew up pre-internet, where all you had to do was get the nightly news to report your version of reality and there was literally no other way that people could find out it was all gimmicks. A person could maybe run across Noam Chomsky or something, but they would be the only one (there was literally one person I knew in school, and one person at my office, who was a super-lefty person like me, and everyone else thought we were more or less terrorists at any point if we talked about it). Now with the internet it’s easy for people to run across criticisms of anything, so you can’t just report the bullshit and move on, so they have to get more sophisticated with it. It’s good that they are having to work and be creative.

The bad news is that they’ve worked at it and got creative. Like what I mean is Bernie Sanders would never have gotten near power in 1996. The system would have been able to shut him down way earlier, they still had to ratfuck him a little but he was (and still is) wildly popular in a way that Ron Paul never was outside of a select internet demographic. But of course along with that comes Trump. The information free-for-all is a mixed blessing.

There’s a reason for that. Certain framings resonate well, and especially if they are synced up with how the target audience likes to view things anyway and who their “good guys” and “bad guys” tend to be. It’s just a matter of plugging the right people and situations into the powerful framings and then repeating the construction from a wide variety of sources. It’s like turnkey social engineering. It works incredibly well when it is done at a big scale.

Some examples:

• Maduro / Zelensky / etc as noted
• “You can’t criticize Israel / Democrats on lemmy.world, all the mods are zios”
• “AOC / Mamdani / Bernie betrayed Israel, she/he’s a genocide supporter and I feel so betrayed and she/he’s lost my vote forever, just another DNC faker”
• “The West pushed Russia into war with Ukraine, Russia didn’t want to do it but they just kept pushing and so Russia felt threatened and had no choice, it’s all NATO’s fault at the end of the day”

And so on. None of this has anything to do with reality. A person who was starting from first principles would never reach those conclusions, since they are precisely literally the opposite of what happened. And, if you press the people pushing them for details, they’ll always fall back on basically the exact same individual anecdote or thought-pattern to support the backwards-land conclusion and push really really hard on that one anecdote. They are always super confident and pushy about the conclusions.

Supporting anecdote examples:

• “Look at this time I called another user a pedophile fascist hacker furry porn bad faith Zionist and also said something pro-Palestinian, and my comment got deleted! Definitely because of the pro-Palestinian part which is super unpopular on lemmy.world which is definitely full of people supporting Israel and Hakeem Jeffries! So don’t go there and definitely don’t listen to what they have to say about Uyghurs!”
• “Remember that one individual time when AOC voted for that one amendment which stripped Israel of all its offensive weaponry which wasn’t going to pass anyway and was a waste of time but then also the amendment she voted for would have kept in place grants for some anti-missile systems which is the most important thing about AOC’s entire Israel history now going forward indefinitely and has now become all I want to talk about and let’s not talk about any other stuff about her!”

I can’t continue, I am getting genuinely annoyed lol. But anyway. There are other examples, they went all-out coming up with new ones of these leading up to the 2024 election and deployed a handful of pretty effective ones against Democrats. But those are the ones I currently see in active rotation.

No! Stay and talk with them and make them ban you for saying reasonable things! And then whine about it!

(I am joking, anyone can do what they want, I’m just saying my preferred solution.)

Bro who the FUCK on Lemmy was upset about pulling out of Afghanistan lmao

These people live in bizarro world

(For what it’s worth, I think pulling out of Afghanistan was a clusterfuck, because it was always going to be a clusterfuck because that’s what happens when you pull out in the middle of a war. Maybe Biden made it worse in certain ways, maybe Trump tied his hands with certain elements of the deal he made with the Taliban, I honestly don’t really know. But regardless, the fact that it was a clusterfuck and did a bunch of damage in the way it was handled and made everyone involved look like morons should always have been an expected part of the proposition of pulling out, which is why no one up until Biden was willing to take the hit to pull the trigger on it and preferred just to keep killing Afghans indefinitely.)

“And so then Lemmy said ‘Hey you know what would be a good idea is if we copied that model exactly’” :-(

I absolutely have observed mods on Lemmy engaging in the same shitty behaviors (I am sitting on a post about a little cabal of !progressivepolitics@lemmy.world people who seem to be trying to rig the discourse in a particular direction to meet their electoral goals). But the simple fact of it being less centralized and more transparent (and with more of a culture of effective pushback against the mods) makes it a lot harder. They can’t just say “lol get fucked” like the mod from this post did and have that be the end of the story.

Oops, you are 100% correct, I fixed the title.

dbzer0 has been starting to become more than a little power trippy recently.

My favorite 🙄 was when a trans user disagreed with some of their assertions about trans issues, so they banned her for being transphobic.

I think I’m going to stop making fun of your point of view now, I think the point is made

Soldiering is a middle class profession currently

https://www.military-ranks.org/army-pay

Starts at $24k per year. Not to worry, though, once you’re a sergeant with 14 years experience it caps out at $48k, and once you’ve reached literally the highest rank of enlisted man it is possible to achieve, of which there is only one in the entire army, it goes up to $118k!

(You do get a signing bonus, too, which since you’re a middle-class person and not being taken advantage of, you’ll stick into an investment account to start saving up for your middle-class life, instead of buying a new Dodge Charger. All those new recruits with their investment accounts are practically a meme at this point.)

That used to be true, but Claude is now getting substantially worse.

I suspect that what’s happening is that they are trying to bleed out money in slightly less torrential amounts every month, so they’re trying hard to constrain how much resources the thing is allowed to consume, meaning that it started out smart and is now getting steadily dumber over time. I was trying to use Claude for a coding project today, and while I’ll admit the questions were complex, it really was remarkably dumb in a way that it didn’t used to be.

Bank powder

Oh, sweet - yeah, that makes sense. I tried my debit card and cash app both and it failed on both. I just tried it from a credit card and it worked.

They now have $50 more to defend with.

Trump is probably nettled about Russia’s claim to have tested a long-range, nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik

Let me tell you a little story about an American missile called the “snark.”

The name was the sort of joke that weapons engineers like to make. It was supposed to navigate itself autonomously to its target in the Soviet Union by watching the stars. It did not have horizontal stabilizers, and flew itself pointed in a weird nose-up attitude the entire way. Once it arrived at its destination, it was supposed to detach the warhead and then pull up violently in order not to get in the warhead’s way, which caused it to break apart in flight. They said with a straight face that the falling debris would help to confuse enemy radar, as if this had been a purposeful design element rather than something that they weren’t bothering to fix.

It did not do its navigation very well. One of the strategic bomber pilots was quoted as saying that he felt a hell of a lot better about flying his bomber knowing that the plan was for a bunch of these things to be wandering aimlessly above Asia and distracting everyone’s attention from what his bomber was up to.

Anyway, they tried it in about 1961, and it sucked so they stopped. And I think the US in 1961 was in a lot better position than modern Russia to do these kinds of things effectively.

Just a little story to distract everyone from the horror of Trump and what he is doing

One thing about this is that it seems to labor under the assumption of a symmetrical (or near symmetrical) fight, and that is exactly the last thing that a resistance group should be doing.

He talks about guerilla war in parts of it.

All these human traffickers have homes to go back to at night, and if enough face repercussions, it will quickly become difficult to find people willing to stick their neck out and possibly become yet another new fountain.

The same is true of judges, Democratic congresspeople, state governors… all kinds of people. So you’re right back to the symmetrical conflict.

His patch says “US Border Patrol,” so presumably CBP. Of course the whole thing is such a shit show that it could potentially be just a patch he slapped on there or something, but I would guess that he is CBP.

I demand satisfaction

You are totally besmirching me

Look, buddy. I know a lot about the law and the various other lawerings. I’m well educated. Well versed. I know that situations like this – agg assault wise – they’re very complex.