PoliticalAgitator
@PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
- Comment on It's 2023/2024 and Roseanne Barr is now more attractive than Madonna. 1 year ago:
This was so awkward I had to check if you were joking but nope, actual conservative who got his feelings hurt and retaliated with the two most generic right-wing insults there are.
I could teach your entire personality to a bird.
- Comment on Republicans slam broadband discounts for poor people, threaten to kill program 1 year ago:
they can give millions in subsidies direct to corporations
That’s exactly why they’re fighting it – every dollar they give to poor people is a dollar less they can give to rich people.
- Comment on Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma 1 year ago:
I also have to subscribe to and use Adobe software but suggesting it’s less buggy and less expensive than other apps is delusional.
The moment you try and do anything outside of basic image editing, Photoshop immediately shits the bed.
It’s riddled with features that were half developed or half removed. Tried using any of the 3D stuff? It pops up a box saying “We’ve abandoned this and it probably won’t work, but go ahead and try because we haven’t properly removed it”. Using artboards? Probably not, since half the app seems to break with them, including their brand new features like Live Gradients that rearrange themselves when you save.
Looking for a filter? Well there’s 2 places to look since they seem to have lost interest in the filter gallery half way through, then piled mediocre AI filters on top. It’ll be a slow search, since for some reason some popup windows take fully 3 seconds to open, probably due to their 4 different UI systems in various states of abandoned.
Photoshop is widely used today because it was good 15 years ago. If someone hasn’t already creating a leaner, more stable, better designed, more ambitious piece of software, it’s only a matter of time until they do.
- Comment on YouTube Video Recommendations Lead to More Extremist Content for Right-Leaning Users, Researchers Suggest 1 year ago:
We also have no idea what measures they take to stop the system being manipulated (if any).
The far-right could be working to ensure they’re recommended as often as possible and if it just shows up as “engagement” or “impressions” on their stats, YouTube is unlikely to fight it with much enthusiasm.
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 1 year ago:
But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.
Google made a promise they didn’t keep and articles like this are the consequence of that.
It’s not ideal, but it still feels better than “let them lie and then blame their victims for believing it”.
- Comment on Financial optimism linked to lower cognitive ability 1 year ago:
WSB
- Comment on If other countries can afford massive internet pysops why can't I find a job in the states where I get to meme and troll all day for the US military? 1 year ago:
You don’t need to look to the military either.
Coca-cola experimented with subliminal advertising to see if they could mind control people into buying their products but for some reason we think they wouldn’t stoop to manipulating social media, the Clockwork Orange reprogramming system that we pin our own eyelids open for.
- Comment on Right-wing influencers pledge to bail out Elon Musk after Apple, Disney, others suspend advertising on X 1 year ago:
Because he lets them say slurs.
- Comment on It's all the same no matter what they say 1 year ago:
Unfortunately, they probably didn’t feel it at all.
They could live off their fortunes for 1000 years without ever slipping into “middle class” so a few years of slower profits wouldn’t have any real effect on their day to day lives.
Getting upset that their wealth isn’t accumulating fast enough is also their natural state of being – before, during and after COVID. If they weren’t throwing tantrums because people weren’t willing to die a gasping, terrified death in the name of corporate profits, they would have been throwing a tantrum because they weren’t allowed to pay children half the minimum wage to mine national parks.
And of course, they come out the other side with even more leverage. Thousands of cafes and restaurants went out of business, but Starbucks and McDonald’s didn’t. The shortages and scalping made companies realise they could have been squeezing people even harder, a mistake they seem determined to never make again.
Pandemics aren’t the solution, prising neoliberals out of positions of power is.
- Comment on Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth 1 year ago:
And either way, a public square where violent fascists are attacking people and screaming over everyone with megaphones isn’t a place where anything important is being discussed anyway.
Screaming over everyone with megaphones about how they’re not allowed to scream over everyone with megaphones, to a crowd that’s 50% mannequins that have been wired up to play pre-recorded cheering.
Unfortunately, the discussion is important. Everybody hangs out in that public square which means everybody is forced to hear the megaphone Mein Kamph. It’s how the far-right procreate now
- Comment on First planned small nuclear reactor plant in the US has been canceled 1 year ago:
It was such a unnecessary opinion that turned up so often on social media that I have to imagine it was seeded by mining companies.
- Comment on X runs 'timeline takeover' ad promoting anti-trans film 1 year ago:
As is the social media site. This is the kind of shit he bought it for and it someone made a film full of trans people saying “yep I feel much better now”, there isn’t a chance in hell he’d let them run these kinds of ads for it.
- Comment on Housing market affordability is so bad that Zillow says it will take you 13.5 years to break even on a purchase from July onward 1 year ago:
It never will. If it so much as dips, the ultra wealthy will buy up everything they can find, inflating it once again.
Regulations could stop it easily, but profits are apparently more important.
- Comment on Apple expected to post fourth consecutive quarterly sales decline Thursday 1 year ago:
But they’re a conspicuous luxury, which many people clearly feel the pressure to own, even if it means sacrificing more basic needs.
- Comment on An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Ensh*ttification ... 1 year ago:
That’s the neoliberal secret – you have to play the game, no matter how immoral the rules.
- Comment on 1Password discloses security incident linked to Okta breach 1 year ago:
Not as clearly as you seem to think. You’ll struggle to find qualified people with criticism of their response.
- Comment on New York Bill Would Require a Criminal Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer 1 year ago:
They dismiss it because it’s bullshit. Every stop on the slope is not inevitable.
In this particular case, why is the pro-gun community able to prevent changes to gun laws – despite those laws being deeply flawed and with only a minority of Americans supporting them – but somehow unable to prevent the floodgates after that?
The response the gun lobby wants to hear is “they gubbermint won’t do it because they’re scared we’ll shoot them!” but it’s pure bravado. Grossly negligent gun laws haven’t prevented the American government from doing things to its citizens that would make China blush and the pro-gun crowd didn’t even change their vote, let alone sacrifice their lives to prevent it.
Because everything is a bullshit slippery slope to them. “Oh you want to get rid of the second amendment? What’s next? The first amendment? The fourth?”
Nope. Just the second. It’s repealing an amendment, not dabbling with heroin. They’re not going to say “oh why not, maybe one more”.
Making the “responsible” part of “responsible gun owner” mandatory is not going to cause the collapse of civilisation.
- Comment on YouTube intensifies fight against ad blockers showing pop-ups, and users are frustrated | Blocking ad-block users 1 year ago:
Also they literally go on killing sprees.
- Comment on New York Bill Would Require a Criminal Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer 1 year ago:
Isn’t it lucky where that slippery slope starts?
It doesn’t start before guns with high explosives, despite them being arguably “arms” and inarguably more useful in a tyrant-overthrowing war.
And it doesn’t start after guns with knives and all the other things you’re sure they’re going to take, even though they could have taken them at any point in the past 20 years.
Nope, the slippery slope starts exactly at the point it cuts into the profits of the gun lobby and the convenience of reactionaries, the moment they “grab guns” by introducing things like “licenses issued at the completion of a background check, safety and operation test and demonstrated ability to store safely”.
The pro-gun community sure hit the jackpot there.
- Comment on New York Bill Would Require a Criminal Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer 1 year ago:
What a shame
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
Your insults are even worse than your hot takes. Are you sure you want to branch out into armchair psychology as well?
- Comment on YouTube cracking on ad blockers. 1 year ago:
I doubt the information needed to accurately predict their costs is publicly available.
But they announced $29.2 billion in revenue in 2022. That’s about as much as countries like Australia, Canada and Italy spent on their entire military.
And that’s just money. Google is absolutely aware of how much indirect value there is in the internationally recognised brand and near total capture of a communication medium.
So again, who exactly am I supposed to feel sorry for? Who is supposed to be suffering? It’s not their staff. It’s not their shareholders. It’s not their suppliers.
They pay a lot of creators fuck all, despite the platform being nothing without them. Will the extra revenue be going to them? Because nobody has mentioned them in any of their guilt trips so far.
As far as I can tell, I’m supposed to feel morally obligated to listen to KFC advertisements at ear splitting volume every 2 minutes for the privilege of watching a video that will make the creator nothing so that some of the wealthiest people in the world can grow wealthier.
To put it bluntly, that’s corporate propaganda.
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
What is this, early 2000s internet?
Wasn’t a thing on my 2000s internet. Maybe it’s just because you were 3?
Fuck off dude, you’re irrelevant, stop acting like the world is ending because you could never figure out how to turn on a printer.
I’m sure that would have really hurt my feelings if I knew absolutely nothing about myself.
The world wasn’t better when you were young, your shitty attitude is evidence of that.
Not a thing I actually claimed and not actually evidence of the thing I never claimed. Do you need me to put it in a Spongebob Squarepants meme for you?
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
Whatever helps you self soothe kid.
But the funniest part of all of this, is that I wasn’t even talking about Andrew Tate supporters. They were an example of the embarrassingly stupid shit that people believe, despite your claims that the internet has made everybody better informed than pre-internet relics.
And I could pull out 100 more examples. They supported a president that suggested injecting bleach or “finding a way to get sunlight inside the body” as potential COVID cures both before and after. They’ve literally killed people based on the cold-reading of a shit-tier, 4chan Nostradamus. There are people who genuinely believe the earth is flat. There is a sitting politician that talks about “Jewish space lasers” and “peach tree dishes” and people donate money to help her keep her job.
But you can’t, because you don’t actually know shit about the world before the internet, the people who lived in it or if the claims about them you pulled from your ass will hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
Do you not remember the Christian groups of the… 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s? They always have, you just weren’t informed via the internet about it.
Oh yeah, you’re clearly talking about Andrew Tate followers. Good lie you fucking clown.
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
Okay, so you don’t actually know who you’re talking about, but you’re certain you’re correct.
- Comment on YouTube cracking on ad blockers. 1 year ago:
Every single piece of apologism here casually pushes the idea that YouTube isn’t profitable and their poor staff are starving.
In 2020, YouTube gleefully declared they were generating $5 billion in ad revenue every 3 months.
Even after their bandwidth, storage and incredibly well paid engineers, there’s no way they’re burning that much money on expenses. That’s a billion dollars – 1000 million – per data center, per quarter. Enough to buy half of the CPUs leaving Intel’s factories
They’re not attacking ad blockers because they’re struggling to make ends meet as they hack away in their garage.
They’re doing it because there is no amount of money that can quench the greed of their shareholders.
And there’s you, grovelling at their feet.
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
I think all of these are refinements of the same sleazy, manipulative tactic that is growing more effective with each iteration.
Newspapers pushing xenophobia is about as old as newspapers themselves. But you had to actually buy the newspaper then actively sit down and read it, which isn’t a great start if you want to build an army of deliberately misinformed idiots.
Then we had your hate radio. Not only was it free, people could just let it passively wash over them, absorbing opinions like a sponge, unable to take a moment to think critically about what was just said, even if they cared to.
But even the worst of them struggled to openly advocate white supremacy and genocide.
That was left to extremists spreading xeroxed propaganda and they struggled to find an audience. They often targeted things like punk gigs, searching for an angry, disaffected group of young white men, instead finding a kick in the head from people who would be considered “woke” today.
Fortunately for people with dogshit where their personality should be, 24 hour reactionary TV was here to escalate things. With its constant barrage of flashing lights and blaring stingers, it was a struggle to ignore for even a second.
Bigotry was no longer just an opinion, it was full blown entertainment. But underneath it all the careful stage management and production value, you could see them seething at being unable to go mask off.
The internet eventually became accessible enough that they found it and for a while, they were so excited. They could say whatever vile shit they wanted! Their friends and family would never find out! Nobody could punch them!
But they had all the same pitfalls as the newspapers did. People needed to actively seek them out and people just weren’t typing “top ten reasons it’s cool to be a Nazi” into AskJeeves.
Sites like Stormfront tried their old tricks, “raiding” other forums to spam propaganda, but it was so easy to mop up. They struggled to get their misinformation out there without making it clear it was just 12 people with 80 IQs on a warm who couldn’t regulate their emotions.
Then social media arrived to give them everything they wanted, short of an ethnostate and a wife that was too scared to say no. It was passive, it was entertainment and you could say whatever horrific shit you wanted without worrying about repercussions in the form of violence or bad PR.
It took them a while to figure things out at first. Initially they tried just openly admitting they were white supremacists but quickly found platforms wouldn’t tolerate that. And so the “alt-right” was invented and they insisted they weren’t neo-nazis, they just happened to have the same opinions, talking points, figureheads and tattoos.
That plausible deniability took them to dizzying new heights. They were on the news! People were listening to their opinions and then not spitting on them! They were so confident, when “Unite the Right” came around, they tore off their masks, grabbed their tiki torches, paraded around with their swastika flags then killed an innocent woman for disagreeing with them in an act of domestic terrorism.
Which is when they learned they’re not as bulletproof as they thought. They were immediately fired, disowned and deplatformed. But the lesson they learned wasn’t “don’t be genocide promoting fuckstains”, it was to always stay mask on, no matter what. To cling to that plausible deniability even in the face of the most damning evidence to the contrary.
From that, the modern reactionary movement was born.
You just use social media to feed them a constant stream of talking points, “jokes” and trigger words, denying it the whole time. They’ll self-select and signal boost their favourites, form their own little incestuous relationships and get pushed deeper into culthood, guided by the gentle hand of “the algorithm”.
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
No, hard stop. Not even fucking close.
Articulate the group of people you’re talking about then, because you’re awful confident about who they are, how many of them, what they believed and how much power they weilded.
- Comment on This war shows just how broken social media has become — The global town square is in ruins 1 year ago:
I’ve got no idea why you’re saying that like it makes you correct.