There is a huge amount of fake and bot accounts on social medias, probably as much as the population of many cities, made and used to manipulate the public opinion.
I wonder how many visits lemmy admins are seeing from Eglin AFB IPs.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s been studied and shown true over and over.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-020-0340-4
https://medium.com/@robhat/an-analysis-of-propaganda-bots-on-twitter-7b7ec57256ae
https://headlineusa.com/china-bots-boost-propaganda/
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/computational-propaganda/
Theres a huge network of private surveillance cameras, microphones, and other sensors constantly collecting everyone’s information and selling it to whomever can pay, or just straight up giving the feds access to the data.
I like to refer to that corporation as “Little Brother”.
Media has been using nonviolence as a propaganda tool to quash rebellions and silence dissent in the U.S. for decades.
Think about it: almost every single story you ever see across all media that has the heroes using violence in a positive light, especially revenge content, will always portray that character’s actions as a negative even when objectively they are not. They always look to the same playbook of cliched arguments, one-liners, and tropes to do this. They are all oversimplified caricatures of or misrepresentations of nonviolence, violence, and revenge, justice, forgiveness, etc. A lot are just outright lies or ad-homs.
It’s even departmental policy in some companies to force writers to write their scripts in such a manner.
The only director I’ve ever seen rebel against it is Quentin Tarantino and I don’t think he has been doing it deliberately.
It’s definitely more complicated than this. A fundamental premise of enlightenment democracy is the establishment of a framework for the mediation of political power without the need for violence. So that ideal of nonviolence goes back much farther than both the US or the fourth estate, and it can be argued that it is actually a starting point for much of the modern world’s political philosophy.
But in general, it doesn’t take a ton of thought to imagine why cycles of political violence are unsustainable and unproductive. If violence becomes a primary form of political expression, then you will simply have every different group trying their hand. This is why we prescribe the state with a monopoly on violence - a principle even older than democracy.
That isn’t to say that violence is never just. Ironically, contemporary existentialism tackles this issue pretty nicely by establishing some imperatives which revolve around the relationship between oppressor and oppressed. Primary among them is the acknowledgement that the most sustainable and desirable form of change is done through conversation with the oppressor (as in liberal democracy), and that anyone who rejects this imperative acts in bad faith, just as the oppressor does when they refuse to treat.
Simply put, to engage in violence is to ordain yourself the oppressor, and understanding the heavy implications of this action is critical to just violence. De Beauvoir argues that idealism is therefore one critical aspect of justice in all forms, as it seeks, by nature, to preserve transcendent humanity in others. And this is the ambiguity of the freedom fighter - the classic dialectical struggle will always reduce itself to mystification because ideals are not fixed like the flesh, against which violence acts. Therefore, while violence can be just, it cannot be justice, because it does not directly serve any ideal. As such, our morality must be “opposed to the totalitarian doctrines which raise up beyond man the mirage of Mankind” and “freedom can only be achieved through the freedom of others.”
I’m talking specifically about modern media which is very plainly obviously propaganizing itself with the agenda I laid down. It’s so obvious it’s hard not to notice. Older media wasn’t like that; there were anti-revenge stories back in the day but most were neutral or pro, and that only changed in like the mid 20th century when, for whatever dumbass reason, Hollywood and U.S. media in general decided to do this.
You don’t even usually see it in other countries, though there are outliers like Hayao Miyazaki though that’s easily chalked up to WW2 and how that war completely ratfucked Japan (and given what their government did, was well-deserved and a minority of their people like him knew it …)
Simply put, to engage in violence is to ordain yourself the oppressor,
Oh, I get it. You’re just one of those types out here defending it. 😕
No, I’m literally quoting a very well known, in depth discussion of the issue from Ethics of Ambiguity
The media is very much establishment. So, even liberal media is old and establishment liberal. Old and establishment liberal are the kinds of people who tend to trade power with the old and established conservatives. (Or, at least they did until the establishment conservatives went nuts and went Tea Party then Trump.)
If you can expect to regularly get power every few years, there’s no reason to take radical action.
As for Hollywood, it’s even more conservative than most media. They want to make movies that appeal to audiences worldwide. They don’t want to challenge their audiences, or offend them. They just want their money.
🤔🤔🤔
There has to be something we can do. What they did prevented Americans from overthrowing their government when they should have leading to tyranny and the destabilization of the U.S. Perhaps if we created new franchises that opposed and refuted their paradigm, we could help our people move on from their awful garbage.
P×dophiles are flocking to churches because they’re unregulated by the government. They’re becoming a safe haven for these sick fucks because they often attempt to handle conflict and scandals within their own walls. Also, due to a high need for childcare, often no background check is needed!
A “scandal” is bad for
businessattendance numbers, so they like to keep it quiet, if they can.My family has gone to so many churches throughout the years, and at least 5 or 6 have had the sexual abuse of a child come to light within church leadership.
I am dead serious about this: KEEP YOUR KIDS OUT OF CHURCHES!!!
EDIT: I forgot to mention that most clergy are not bound by laws that would make them mandated reporters for child abuse.
Even better, stop going to churches at all.
I mean, yeah, that’s how I deal with it.
But even some non-church-going folks with drop off their kids at “youth group” essentially for free childcare and debatable “moral development.”
It’s true. There will be some volunteer that has inappropriate behavior with a minor that gets kicked out then just does the same at a different church. No one tells the police because of the intense sexual shaming and stigma. This is when you’re lucky enough to be somewhere where the church doesn’t outright protect the abuser and force the abused out.
Even when it does come out, church people often rush to support the perpetrators. They do the “I’ve had a beer with them and I like them so they couldn’t be a bad guy” thing that I do not understand at all about people.
I was involved in the BLM protests of 2021. The cops were legitimately pulling people off the street into unmarked, black vans. Some of the people that were grabbed were not even involved in the protests, they were just outside past the citywide curfew.
I had heard about this happening in Oregon and Washington through the ever reliable internet, but I didn’t actually believe it until I saw it happen in my moderately sized Midwestern city.
And yet they let a bunch of reactionary fascists storm the capitol with minimal resistance.
Yeah, about that… let’s talk about a conspiracy theory. I remember reading, I think on Twitter, either just before, or maybe it was a retweet after the fact, someone local to DC saying that the security that had been established around town (or maybe around the capitol specifically) that day in preparation for the demonstrations was weaker than they had ever seen for any run of the mill event there. This would seem very strange because word was very much out that something was going to go down that day, so one would have expected a much higher level of security to have been established. Although I didn’t look very closely into what happened that day and the days surrounding it, it still seems strange that I’ve never heard this discussed since I read it.
I remember the livestreams. Did anyone ever find out what happened to those poor people?
They fucking shot people on their own porches. They fucking arrested a journalist just standing doing nothing live on the air.
I was driving with a friend on in Louisiana about 3am one night in the late 90s. I thought I saw something ahead in the right lane so I moved into the left lane just in case.
As we got closer there was a giant shadow of some kind with only tiny reflectors at the edges. It was a HUGE matte black boat filling the lane on a matte black trailer with no plates. Closest comparison I can come up with would be one of those river patrol boats from the Vietnam war.
We were on cruise so it took a few seconds to pass them. The boat was being towed by a matte black F-550 (?) MDT with no plates and no lights other than headlights.
I did not look up at the driver when we passed. I have no idea if this was a drug thing, an intel thing, or what.
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Can you elaborate?
Celestial Seasonings tea and Shen Yun both have ties to cults. With Celestial Seasonings the cult that founded it no longer own or profit off it thankfully, but their tea is shit so I still dont recommended buying it.
I saw UFO’s. I don’t want to believe in aliens, but I witnessed it when I was with a pretty big group of friends and we all remember it and none of us have a better explanation. The people who saw it first were outside smoking pot, the rest of us didn’t believe them until we went outside and saw it ourselves. I was sober that night fwiw. We tried recording it but no one’s phone had good enough dark recording to pick up anything, and no one had a real camera on hand. The flight style didn’t match any craft any of us knew of - it was an array of lights that moved together, and then separated into smaller groups, and eventually individually. They moved unnaturally, with near-instant acceleration, deceleration, and extreme direction changes. It was too high up to be likely to be drones or helicopters, and right above a major Canadian city, not near any military base. If this was, like, Nevada or something, I would assume it was a government test craft. The closest match I’ve ever heard was in an interview with a pilot who saw UFO’s, and that scared the shit out of me. I’d love to find a non alien explanation, because I don’t want to believe and also I know it sounds crazy. Like, I myself probably wouldn’t believe someone else telling me this story.
Got cheap, no-name, unbranded LED bulbs off of eBay. Years later, not one of them had broken.
But Philips LED bulbs? Those things don’t last a year. In fact, none of the high-rated, “high quality,” top-ten-list, LED light bulbs have ever outlasted an incandescent in my experience.
If you want your LEDs to last, buy the no-name bulbs, guys. The Phoebus Cartel is still out there.
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Oh. Huh. Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting to encounter anyone who had good experience with those bulbs.
That… blows a hole in my theory.
I still don’t regret the cheap, foreign light bulbs I got off of eBay (best LEDs I’ve bought thus far)… but maybe my family and I have just been unlucky with name brand LEDs.
If you’re using the power switch on the wall to turn on and off your hue bulbs they will die ultra quick. Use Zigbee to turn them on and off and they will last a LONG time. I buried my wall switches with blank plates when I set up my system.
I don’t think they were hue bulbs. I think they were just regular LED light fixture bulbs.
Gonna add on to your comment by suggesting ESP-based lights running WLED for any fans of smart lighting; having smart lights that run FOSS firmware, don’t need an external internet connection to work, and integrate well with reactive lighting solutions like HyperHDR and LedFX is pretty dang nifty!
Just got my first WLED project working last night! So much fun.
The MOVE bombing. The fact that the Philadelphia police dropped not one but TWO explosive devices on the roof of their house via helicopter is still nuts to me. What made it even worse was the fact that the fire department showed up and let it continue to burn, destroying 61 evacuated neighboring homes and leaving 250 people homeless.
Any time I tell someone about it that hasn’t heard the story, they’re skeptical.
Another one is the time I learned that I was under local surveillance for being an activist that was part of a local non-violent black liberation org. The police would send a unit weekly to check my whereabouts and movements. I learned through a friend of a friend that didn’t even know who I was, but knew my name and that I was on a surveillance list. Pretty sure they were checking in on everyone involved.
American government told the whole world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. America used this as justification to invade Iraq and murder its people. It turns out there were no weapons of mass destruction after all.
Since giving waterboarding a go I’ve found myself disgusted by any government that allows the use of waterboarding on anybody - governments that encourage it are even worse, and the way the Americans handled Gitmo is fucking disgraceful.
Gitmo is still open, there’s no past tense involved
And our buddy DeSantis oversaw torture there and laughed about it.
And they knew it.
It’s worth going back to the 1980s to start pulling that thread though. The US and west have been messing around in Iraq since the Iran Iraq war. Probably Saddam’s greatest mistake was shaking hands with the devil.
I drove by a house in my neighborhood. There was a pure white van, no windows, license was VAN 3. A man was walking towards the van dressed in white coveralls and gloves.
As I passed, I stared at him. He stared at me with cold murderers eyes. I’ve seen that look twice before and both guys turned out to be murderers.
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How often did you get it?
Freak accidents? Or health?
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So what was it like knowing Trevor Moore?
The people in charge in the U.S. want to eliminate transgender people so that they can have men and women in neat, separate boxes and continue to oppress women as they have been for centuries.
There’s no single unified group of “people in charge in the U.S.”. There are various people with varying amounts of power. Some of them are religious nutters who interpret their religion as saying that anything other than traditional gender roles is satanic. Some of them are opportunists who see religious nutters as useful idiots, they rile them up over transgender issues in order to get their support for other things (i.e. tax cuts / loopholes for special interests, etc.). Some of them are somewhat liberal, but are still uncomfortable with transgender people and see their political opponents using transgender issues to rile up their base while they do really destructive things (tax cuts / loopholes for special interests, etc.), so they focus their efforts not on defending transgender people, but in trying to attack what they see as the real issues. A small minority of “people in charge in the U.S.” are transgender, or very concerned with transgender issues, and are doing everything they can to fight for transgender rights.
Don’t forget that the majority of the “people in charge in the U.S.” are over 60 years old, and so even basic gay rights are a major departure from the world they were raised in.
It’s pointless to argue. Anyone who says “the people in charge” when talking about a government have no idea how the world really works.
Remember that democracy is not something done to you. It is something you do.
And they’re doing startlingly well in their attempts…
