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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • Trump is happening because far right republicans realized after Watergate that if they wanted to get away with crimes in the future, that they needed to have news that presents “alternate” facts that are favorable to their narrative or that would at the least muddy the waters. Roger Ailes his plan worked basically.

    Without censoring his appearances, Trump comes across as petulant/weak/selfish/stupid/hateful/… Without censoring his history, republican voters would have known that he was a serial scam artist, serial adulterer, … Basically without that alternate fact media supporting rightwing skullduggery, there would never have been a president Trump.

    Imo it’s nonsense to claim that Trump getting elected, is happening because voters are angry because of mysterious reasons that no one can figure out, when those voters are so misinformed that they consistently vote against their own interests and believe stupid conspiracy theories that are being pushed to rile them up against the “other”. As long as that many people live in an alternate reality based on lies and hate, there is no helping them. So the challenge becomes: how do you bring them out of it and how do you prevent it from happening again in the future.




  • The consequences of prolife politicians and their voters: “This corresponds with a 7% absolute increase in infant mortality overall ( ≈ 247 excess deaths; 95% CI, 73-421) and 10% in infant mortality with congenital anomalies ( ≈ 204 excess deaths; 95% CI, 60-348) in relevant months after Dobbs.”.

    The excess deaths are still ongoing probably and i’m interested in extrapolating it to a per year statistic, but I can’t make out over how many months this data was, that part of the article reads like a convoluted mess for me and I have no desire to decipher it.





  • Parallel construction requires real evidence though. This company just seems to fabricate evidence to confirm police hypothesises. I think what happens is: Police ask “was this person there at that time on that day”, the company conjures up a report that the person’s mystical digital profile pinged a wireless printer at that place at roughly the right time, but also at a second other time for a tiny bit of credibility (but by only changing the date of the timestamp, which actually makes it more suspect). People go search for that printer, and then there never was a printer.

    And given that the only thing that external parties saw, was less than a 1000 lines of code for automatic searches and none for interpretation, it might not even be automated, but just a human pasting together reports. A human pretending to be ai.

    I’d call it outsourced fabrication of evidence.


  • It’s not only their faulty Overton window, imo the big problem is that their “methodology” of determining bias/credibility is very poor. It’s basically 1 volunteer scoring a few metrics of the site being reviewed, which has lead to some very questionable credibility scores in the past, probably caused by the bias and/or amateurism of the volunteers. When those odd scores caused enough controversy, then those scores got arbitrarily adjusted, but only those scores. In particular the owner + volunteer staff of mbfc appears to be very pro Israel, so Zionist propaganda outlets like unwatch get given high scores, while media outlets like the guardian were given the same mixed credibility rating as fox news, for no other reason than that the reviewing volunteer happened to be extremely biased.

    If a biased organisation uses a weak process to assign bias ratings, then the output is going to be nonsense. After numerous controversies, they probably have corrected ratings for all large news and propaganda organizations, but smaller ones will not have caused the same controversies and since those ratings are a product of the same process, they’re going to be just as faulty. We just don’t know it because there have been no public controversies about those yet.

    Basically you can’t trust their credibility scores. If you know the site being reviewed, then you can make an assessment yourself if the rating is actually credible, in which case you also actually didn’t need the bot to tell you that. And if it’s a small unknown site, then there is no way to know that that credibility rating can be trusted, making the bot useless. And if people were to start trusting the bot, it would be worse than useless.



  • I had found a good quote earlier by another American who had actually visited other places, I think now is a good time to share it:

    "Americans who have never left their own little reality will tell you that American homes are actually solid… they’re not… I have lived in and visited many countries. American houses are built like shit.

    My cousin built a house in Europe out of brick and concrete… and it’s WAY WAY WAY WAY better than the most expensive, nicest house I’ve ever been to in the US. I have anger issues and have punched through my walls on repeated occasions. You can’t do that with brick and concrete… probably a good thing I live in the US.

    This is why when a tornado comes around, entire towns are demolished… All that would happen in other countries is some broken windows and shingles would come off the roof.

    Americans pay more for their houses in terms of price, property taxes (insanely high), and repairs… to live in the lowest form of construction on this planet second to bamboo huts.

    This is all due to American greed. America is a big mall where you get shit quality everywhere you go, but you think you’re actually winning because you are so self-deluded and isolated. Most Americans have never been anywhere else, but yet they will defend their garbage buildings that fall apart in a couple of decades or less. Speaking from my piece of shit house that was built 20 years ago that needs all floors and walls replaced because of mold seeping into the… wood… everything… wood and cardboard. ".

    I also don’t get how you came to believe that there are no natural disasters in Europe. We have a stereotype of dumb arrogant Americans who are confidently incorrect, but still, what the hell man :)


  • “Their homes are robust, and built to last 400 years (estimated) without having to make substantial repairs.” You must have missed that part, so much for reading comprehension.

    The difference in building quality between houses in the usa and northern Europe really is night and day. Tornadoes which would only take off the roof from European houses, tear down entire American neighborhoods. To us, it’s just shocking how bad those American buildings hold up. There are of course also Americans who chose to build to a higher standard, but they end up with smaller houses at a higher price, like we do in Europe. I don’t get why this is so hard to accept for you. We pay more for a smaller house, but that house is then build to a much higher standard. It’s really not a mystery.


  • Those are historical buildings, this discussion was about new construction.

    Historically people used to use what was locally available. Most of Italy has plenty of stones, that were also easily accessible, so regular people could build out of stone. But in other regions of Europe there were no stones lying about, so cheap houses were being build out of mud + straw, more expensive ones out of brick and much more expensive ones from imported stones.

    Thatched roofs will survive storms without issue. The reason why they aren’t used anymore except by rich people is cost: very labor intensive to place and on top of that the thatching has to be replaced every x years. They made sense when labor was cheap and transporting heavy goods expensive.