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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • Reminds me of that great joke -

    A KGB agent and CIA agent meet up in a bar.

    “I have to admit, I’m always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.

    “Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”

    The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused… There’s no propaganda in America.”

    Over analysis caveat of the joke

    Of course it’s not state media directly in the states, but the same billionaires who own the state own the media, so it turns out all to be the same thing in the end.



  • There were some things she did early in the primary that kind of inspired me tbh. I really liked the Walz VP pick, especially when it looked like she was going to pick a more conservative Dem like Shapiro the Zionist or Mark Kelly. She also had a more youthful energy to contrast against Biden’s clearly aging and tired energy during his campaign. But then they squandered it by listening to the consultants and focus groups trying to triangulate to get Haley Republicans or whatever they were trying to do.



  • I blame a lot of the problems on The Third Way Democrats, like Clinton. Basically they tried to take Republican talking points and the Republicans just went more right. It’s also when we got policies like NAFTA which destroyed US manufacturing, emptied a lot of rural and working-class areas, and weakened the Dems connection to labor.

    But like you said, we can keep going back and back, to the US reliance on capitalists and imperialism that made these policies inevitable, the failures of Reconstruction, or the compromises made with slave holders back with the founding fathers, etc.





  • Just wanted to give an update that I started learning Linux. It’s been a pain in the ass to look up every basic thing I could do in Windows without thinking, but I’m sure I’ll get it down with enough use and googling for every error. Only been using it a couple days so far, but already starting to prefer the console over the UI for some things, thanks to the ability to quickly repeat old commands with the up and down arrow keys. It’s kind of exciting, like I’m starting the first steps to join the Linux club I see so much on Lemmy.




  • Again, I don’t understand why we have to keep going back to a known problem and try to use it to justify a different concern. The topic is China’s TikTok.

    Because the other problem is worse and more of a concern? Because it shows our politicians are either hypocrites, have a different agenda, or both? Because it tricks people into thinking their enemies are abroad rather than the rich at home, preventing international solidarity and underselling the problem of the influence of our own home grown businesses, billionaires, lobbyists? Because it strengthens their power by preventing another alternative avenue of information away from their censorship? Because usually the first solution takes away momentum from the problem, preventing a better solution for a longer period of time?

    “They’re teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can’t take it away.”

    But did all those calls actually result in anything? No, Tik Tok is still being banned. Did the things I talk about result in anything, the influence of American companies? Yes, it’s increased and strengthened conservatives, the Citizens United scandal helped lead to Trump the first time, they’ve suppressed dissent against Israel, helping to justify genocide, normalized racist, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric online in a more mainstream space (X), etc. These are hard facts, not conspiracy theories dreamed up about what China could do.

    Not to mention that asking users to save their app is something literally any app run by a business would do. They would do that even if they were owned by an American company and were getting threatened by a ban. Like I said, no worse than the SOPA blackout by companies like Google and Reddit where they asked users to contact representatives. Meanwhile, American companies Uber and Lyft did huge lobbying efforts and spent record breaking amounts of money making life harder for gig workers in California with Prop 22, for example, and did a huge advertising campaign lying about the effects of it.

    Let me ask another way: Do you really, in your heart, truly believe that they’re going to circle back to dealing with the privacy of American companies after Tik Tok? Be honest. This conversation will be permanently tabled once these Tik Tok articles are out of the zeitgeist.


  • TikTok , controlled by China, was easily able to influence their users to take action when the initial talks of banning the app occurred.

    Were they? I don’t really recall users doing much to help Tik Tok at all.

    And US companies do the same thing but arguably in a way that’s worse for our country. Elon is actively interfering with X/Twitter to make a more conservative user base, and Facebook is famous for giving this influence to other private companies leading to Trump. US companies, and the billionaires who own them, are using their influence to make the country more fascist by actually getting us people like Trump or asking the next President to change out the effective FTC leader or making us give tax money to a foreign power like Israel instead of US citizens. Meanwhile Tik Tok is, so far, just kind of limply asking users to save them when banned (equivalent to Google’s pleas during like the SOPA talks) and it resulting in… not much.

    Do I want Chinese companies having my data? No. But I also don’t want US companies having my data, and I’d rank them equally, if not the danger of the latter to my well being actually higher.