QAnon follower wins Senate primary in Oregon

Perkins has made her support of QAnon a central plank of her campaign, telling Right Wing Watch in a January interview, “It’s a very highly calculated risk that I’m taking. Most people play it a lot safer than I do. It’s either pure genius or pure insanity. It’s one of the two. The voters are going to have to be the ones that make that decision.”

I know we keep saying this, bit doesn't it feel like this is really the end of the American project? It doesn't feel like it'll take much to tip things over into civil war. Imagine if the military are asked to fire on civilians?

Twitter are finally starting to push back against Trump’s shite, btw. That tweet has been censored, it was the second one shown here.

Gremill wrote:

I know we keep saying this, bit doesn't it feel like this is really the end of the American project? It doesn't feel like it'll take much to tip things over into civil war. Imagine if the military are asked to fire on civilians?

It would be the National Guard that was doing the shooting, not that unheard of. Their history is full of things far worse than this that had zero repercussions. The constitution and the way they structure the country makes this sort of near conflict state inevitable, but they cherish both.

I_R wrote:

Gremill wrote:

I know we keep saying this, bit doesn't it feel like this is really the end of the American project? It doesn't feel like it'll take much to tip things over into civil war. Imagine if the military are asked to fire on civilians?

It would be the National Guard that was doing the shooting, not that unheard of. Their history is full of things far worse than this that had zero repercussions. The constitution and the way they structure the country makes this sort of near conflict state inevitable, but they cherish both.

"4 dead in Ohio"

I'm still reeling from 

Roujin wrote:

They should stop the policy of not recruiting officers who score too highly on the intelligence tests.

/shrug

Twitter, FB etc. have plenty of lawyers on staff, and there's all kinds of constitutional wrangling that'll tie it up in courts for years. Meanwhile, I'm sure Twitter are analysing their metrics to see if slapping down POTUS increases engagement, clickthrough and all that - they're only doing this because they currently believe it's in their end interests. And Trump is only tweeting madly, as he always does, to keep the plates spinning in order to distract the last/current disaster - so it's probably a win-win for both parties, as Twitter gets to play the "we have integrity, honest!" card, while Trump and Fox get to play the "liberal elites are censoring free speech! Big Govt needs to censure free enterprise, or something, we don't know what we want!" victim card.

There needs to be some kind of essentially unregulated user-created media source, for proper information dissemination and discussion free of top down censorship and corruption, that gives the user the ability to self filter the incoming feed appropriately, either fully manually or by opting into externally managed filter lists. An almost total decentralisation of media, at least of the social variety.

There are things like that already it seems, such as Mastodon which I have yet to check out, the big names have put me off social media generally.

GurtTractor wrote:

There needs to be some kind of essentially unregulated user-created media source, for proper information dissemination and discussion free of top down censorship and corruption, that gives the user the ability to self filter the incoming feed appropriately, either fully manually or by opting into externally managed filter lists. An almost total decentralisation of media, at least of the social variety. There are things like that already it seems, such as Mastodon which I have yet to check out, the big names have put me off social media generally.

/pol
/4chan
/8chan

There is no such thing as "unregulated user-created media source" that can be trusted. they can all be infiltrated, they can all be abused, and they usually become a sanctuary for the worst type of people, sowing distrust and discord and ignorance all over the world. It turns out being a trained, dedicated journalist who follows the basic rules of sourcing and fact checking is hard, backbreaking work - who knew?

It's just so much easier to churn out or enable uninformed or ignorant opinion pieces, blatant demagoguery, and unverified bullshit that accords with your audience's cognitive biases, and rake in the advertising cash. Hence Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, Twitter...

Funkstain wrote:

There needs to be some kind of essentially unregulated user-created media source, for proper information dissemination and discussion free of top down censorship and corruption, that gives the user the ability to self filter the incoming feed appropriately, either fully manually or by opting into externally managed filter lists. An almost total decentralisation of media, at least of the social variety. There are things like that already it seems, such as Mastodon which I have yet to check out, the big names have put me off social media generally.

/pol /4chan /8chan There is no such thing as "unregulated user-created media source" that can be trusted. they can all be infiltrated, they can all be abused, and they usually become a sanctuary for the worst type of people, sowing distrust and discord and ignorance all over the world. It turns out being a trained, dedicated journalist who follows the basic rules of sourcing and fact checking is hard, backbreaking work - who knew? It's just so much easier to churn out or enable uninformed or ignorant opinion pieces, blatant demagoguery, and unverified bullshit that accords with your audience's cognitive biases, and rake in the advertising cash. Hence Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, Twitter...

Well I'm not saying there's no place for trained journalists, that would be daft. My point as I said in the other thread, is that top down management of truth is ineffective, or unlikely to work to our benefit in the long term, and that the only reasonable way forward is to equip the majority of people with the mental tools necessary to navigate information streams and come to reasoned conclusions.

I'm not envisioning a truly unconstrained flow of information and opinion, that would drive anyone insane, but a system where the regulation was in the hands of the individual users as opposed to being controlled by our lords and saviours in the government and corporations. A general open source filter could be applied, and the typically adopted version of which might look a lot like what we have now except much safer from meddling by those in positions of power.

GurtTractor wrote:

There needs to be some kind of essentially unregulated user-created media source, for proper information dissemination and discussion free of top down censorship and corruption, that gives the user the ability to self filter the incoming feed appropriately, either fully manually or by opting into externally managed filter lists. An almost total decentralisation of media, at least of the social variety. There are things like that already it seems, such as Mastodon which I have yet to check out, the big names have put me off social media generally.

/pol /4chan /8chan There is no such thing as "unregulated user-created media source" that can be trusted. they can all be infiltrated, they can all be abused, and they usually become a sanctuary for the worst type of people, sowing distrust and discord and ignorance all over the world. It turns out being a trained, dedicated journalist who follows the basic rules of sourcing and fact checking is hard, backbreaking work - who knew? It's just so much easier to churn out or enable uninformed or ignorant opinion pieces, blatant demagoguery, and unverified bullshit that accords with your audience's cognitive biases, and rake in the advertising cash. Hence Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, Twitter...

Well I'm not saying there's no place for trained journalists, that would be daft. My point as I said in the other thread, is that top down management of truth is ineffective, or unlikely to work to our benefit in the long term, and that the only reasonable way forward is to equip the majority of people with the mental tools necessary to navigate information streams and come to reasoned conclusions. I'm not envisioning a truly unconstrained flow of information and opinion, that would drive anyone insane, but a system where the regulation was in the hands of the individual users as opposed to being controlled by our lords and saviours in the government and corporations. A general open source filter could be applied, and the typically adopted version of which might look a lot like what we have now except much safer from meddling by those in positions of power.

I like your proposition but for it to work people would have to be 'educated' to be able to navigate information. Won't ever happen with our current 1/9/90 class system as it would break conventions. The upper and middle class (most of 'em) wouldn't want the system to change and it's the the upper and middle class who are in charge politically and economically. Classic Catch-22.

The internet is a tool which has good and bad utilisations. Free speech and using it for educative purposes is definitely a good point.The proliferation of propaganda and misinformation and feeding it to humanity of which 90% is clueless and unprepared? Bad utilisation.

Sadly most of the 1% and some of the 9% don't give a ff. They  just want the social 1/9/90 pyramid manintained. Disrupting it would be bad for business.

hunk wrote:

The internet is a tool which has good and bad utilisations. Free speech and using it for educative purposes is definitely a good point. The proliferation of propaganda and misinformation and feeding it to humanity of which 90% is clueless and unprepared? Bad utilisation. Sadly most of the 1% and some of the 9% don't give a ff. They  just want the social 1/9/90 pyramid manintained. Disrupting it would be bad for business.

Yep, certainly. That also happens regardless of the internet, see newspapers and traditional media. The internet is different in it's dynamism and scale, and the ability to use computation to parse the stream of information in various ways, to give people a way of seperating truth from bullshit. I can imagine some kind of open system that collates media on a subjuct and presents the relative differences and similarities in an understandable way, to at least give the average user a chance of possibly making sense of a complex situation.

Kazuo wrote:

Wow so the police have arrested a CNN crew. Held them for an hour and let them go. Arresting the press. Does this not seem like fascism rising in front of us?

That the police tried to claim it was because the crew refused to move, which was clearly untrue as the whole thing was broadcast live as it happened, is also quite something.

Yeah this is unbefuckinglievable -



I can't imagine how this must make so many people feel over there, this seems bad, like rapid escalation bad. Seems like he's been released now, and there's been an apology, but holy fucking shit this is fucked up. I have yet to see any excuse for detaining him.