Rottcodd
@Rottcodd@lemmy.world
- Comment on If a leftist ran for president, would liberals support him? 4 days ago:
I sincerely have no idea.
The narrative that a leftist couldn’t win is repeated so predictably and so often and by so many people that the whole idea has become sort of detached from reality, and there’s no telling what would happen if it was actually a possibility.
And particularly since the one thing I’d pretty much guarantee is that the concerted efforts on the part of the ruling class to prevent a leftist from running would be as nothing compared to what they’d do and say in order to prevent one from winning.
- Comment on New Israel FM says Palestinian state not 'realistic' 1 week ago:
The most maddening, astonishing and discouraging part of the whole thing, for me, is that that isn’t even really debatable. From any reasonable, purely fact-based and unbiased viewpoint, Israel has been clearly maneuvering for decades now to conquer everything from the river to the sea, and to oppress, displace or kill as many Palestinians as it takes to do it.
The Gaza genocide isn’t an aberration - it’s the direct culmination of decades of very deliberate Israeli policy and strategy. It’s not a coincidence that they had exactly one Prime Minister who advocated for Palestinian statehood and they assassinated him - it’s because Palestinian statehood has never really been an option.
The plain fact is simply that the only reason there’s even any difference of opinion about the matter is that some number of assholes - power-hungry assholes and greedy assholes and hateful assholes and ignorant assholes - have a vested interest in lying about it or at the least promoting the lies that their fellow assholes tell.
- Comment on New Israel FM says Palestinian state not 'realistic' 1 week ago:
I think the clearest indicator of the philosophical and moral bankruptcy of the entire matter is the fact that anyone believes for even a second that Israel has a meaningful opinion on whether or not a Palestinian state can or should exist.
In any sane and rarional world, Israel would not be seen to have the right to make that decision, or even to hold a meaningful opinion on the matter. It should be ENTIRELY a matter to be decided by the Palestinian people.
But this is not a sane or rational world.
- Comment on Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done' 4 weeks ago:
Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
- Comment on Turkey to confront Israel attempts to set region on fire: Erdogan 3 months ago:
Well… yeah. There is that.
Like the US and slavery and institutional racism and Manifest Destiny and such, I don’t understand what the problem is with admitting to it and facing up to it.
It’s not even so much from a moral standpoint (though that is of course a factor) as from a practical one - the people who avoid facing up to it are apparently driven by a desire to not be haunted by it - to effectively put it behind them and clear the slate. But not admitting to it guarantees that that won’t and in fact can’t happen, so it’s actually directly contrary to their apparent goals.
The people who want it to not matter going foward should be the ones most eager to drag it out into the open and fully expose all of the ugliness. It’s like lancing a boil - yeah, it’ll be painful and messy, but then it’s over and done with and you can get on with healing rather than just dragging it on and on and on and on …
- Comment on Turkey to confront Israel attempts to set region on fire: Erdogan 3 months ago:
Damn I love Turkey.
Sitting there as it does at the crossroads between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, it’s cultivated an international presence that might be summed up as conditional cooperation with or opposition to anybody, and absolute loyalty or submission to nobody. It’s the national embodiment of playing both (all) sides against the middle, and it just regularly amuses the hell out of me.
- Comment on Anyone else feel like Trump has a much higher chance to win then Presidency than Kamala? 3 months ago:
He doesn’t need to do it this time - he has a veritable army of fascists, a brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court and a squad of billionaire plutocrats to do it all on his behalf, and not coincidentally they have a detailed blueprint in Project 2025 that tells them exactly what to do, step by step, to transform the US into a christofascist/plutocratic autocracy.
All Trump has to do this time around is just carry on being Trump, while all those other people do all the dirty work.
- Comment on Anyone else feel like Trump has a much higher chance to win then Presidency than Kamala? 3 months ago:
To “win?” No - not really.
But I don’t think that matters much.
Honestly, I think that Trump and the overt fascists and plutocrats who are backing him fully intend to get him into office or destroy the country trying - that if he doesn’t win legitimately, he’ll “win” through fraud, or through the machinations of the brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court, or through violent revolution.
His backers - the Heritage Foundation and the rest of the fascists and Musk and Thiel and the rest of the plutocrats and so on - don’t just want to try to get him into office - they want to destroy American liberty and democracy. It’s not even so much about him specifically - he’s just the right combination of charismatic and shallow that they see him as their opportunity to impose the autocracy they want. And I don’t think they’re going to let anything stand in their way. So whether or not he actually wins the election isn’t even really relevant, other than to the degree that that will determine what other strategies they might have to, and will, implement.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
Right, nor did I expect a rating based an on individual article - sorry if that’s the way I made it sound.
It’s simply that the rating of high credibility accompanying an article that was so obviously little more than a barrage of loaded language cast the problem into such sharp relief that I went from being unimpressed by MBFC to actively not wanting to see it.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
All I see here is someone whose ego relies on a steady diet of derision hurled in the general direction of strangers on the internet.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
I haven’t seen any evidence that it does that, and quite the contrary, evidence that it does not - examples from publications ranging from Israel Times to New York Times to Slate in which it accompanied an article with clearly loaded language with an assessment of high credibility.
It’s possible that it’s improved of late - I don’t know, since I blocked it weeks ago, after a particularly egregious example of that accompanied a technically factually accurate but brazenly biased Israel Times article.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
If you’re not going to answer then I’ll just default to the obvious: you think you’re special and that everyone else is an idiot/sheeple/etc.
Right - you’ll just assume that I see it as some sort of competition that I’m winning.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
So are you saying that you wouldn’t be able to recognize my second example as a biased statement without the MBFC bot’s guidance?
Or did you just entirely miss the point?
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
I didn’t say it was a competition or anything remotely like that. Please show me where I did if you believe otherwise.
Okay
So you have a very high opinion of your own discretion but assume everyone else is trash or what?
Where would you put yourself as a percentile?
Right there. Obviously. In fact, that’s the exact point of a percentile - it’s a ranking system, which is to say, a competition.
So are you going to answer or not?
No.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
No - actually I do the bulk of it based on presentation.
“Facts” fall into two categories - ones that can be independently verified, which are generally reported accurately regardless of bias, and ones that cannot be independently verified, which should be treated as mere possibilities, the likelihood of which can generally be at least better judged by the rest of the article. In neither case are the nominal facts particularly relevant.
Rather, if for instance the article has an incendiary title, a buried lede and a lot of emotive language, that clearly implies bias, regardless of the nominal facts.
That still doesn’t mean or even imply that it’s factually incorrect, and to the contrary, the odds are that it’s technically not - most journalists at least possess the basic skill of framing things such that they’re not technically untrue. If nothing else, they can always fall back on the tried and true, “According to informed sources…” phrasing. That phrase can then be followed by literally anything, and in order to be true, all it requires is that somebody who might colorably be called an “informed source” said it.
The assertion itself doesn’t have to be true, because they’re not reporting that it’s true. They’re just reporting that someone said that it’s true.
So again, nominal facts aren’t really the issue. Bias is better recognized by technique, and that’s something that any attentive reader can learn to recognize.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
The main problem that I see with MBFC, aside from the simple fact that it’s a third party rather than ones own judgment (which is not infallible, but should still certainly be exercised, in both senses of the term) is that it appears to only measure factuality, which is just a tiny part of bias.
In spite of all of the noise about “fake news,” very little news is actually fake. The vast majority of bias resides not in the nominal facts of a story, but in which stories are run and how they’re reported - how those nominal facts are presented.
As an example, admittedly exaggerated for effect, compare:
Tom walked his dog Rex.
with
Rex the mangy cur was only barely restrained by Tom’s limp hold on his thin leash.
Both relay the same basic facts, and it’s likely that by MBFC’s standards, both would be rated the same for that reason alone. But it’s plain to see that the two are not even vaguely similar.
Again, exaggerated for effect.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
The only competition here is between relying on ones own judgment vs. relying on a third party.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
No it doesn’t. That assumption just fits the strawman living inside your head.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
Of course I’m not “immune” - nobody and nothing is perfect.
But I pay attention and weigh and analyze and review and question, which beats the shit out of slavishly believing whatever I read.
- Comment on Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker not? 3 months ago:
The alternative is to use your own brain.
The fact that people are so often so ignorant and/or ideologically blinkered that they can’t see plain bias when it’s staring them in the face is the problem, and relying on a bot to tell you what to believe does not in any way, shape or form help to solve that problem. If anything, it makes it even worse.
- Comment on What are your favorite Nintendo 64 games? 3 months ago:
Paper Mario
Jet Force Gemini
Majora’s Mask / Ocarina of Time
Blast Corps
Custom Robo
Mario Golf
Space Station Silicon Valley
Goemon’s Great Adventure
- Comment on Universal basic income is 'straight out of the Karl Marx playbook,' financial guru Dave Ramsey says 4 months ago:
Handing out cash with no strings attached discourages people from working and
reaping the rewards of individual successmaking some undeserving piece of shit even richer. - Comment on block this account if you haven't already 4 months ago:
Already did, though instead of the bot, I blocked the entire instance.
- Comment on Dozens killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City 4 months ago:
And just the other day, the Israelis were wringing their hands over the fact that 11 Israeli soldiers died in one day, but here they are, right back to killing Palestinian civilians at many times that rate, pretty much every single day.
It’s as if they’ve made sociopathy official policy.
- Comment on Well-known Jewish historian, Ilan Pappe, says that he was detained Monday at Detroit airport, questioned by federal agents and had his phone copied 6 months ago:
When ones actions can be justified, one can counter opposition with argument or persuasion.
When ones actions cannot be justified, one must rely on diversions, lies, intimidation, harassment and violence.
- Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left 6 months ago:
Gosh - who would’ve thought that people might have a negative view of an explicitly elitist and xenophobic ideology bent on the violent appropriation of land and the wholesale slaughter of any of the “filthy animals” currently living there who might dare to oppose them?
- Comment on Killing the Middlemen in the Rideshare Industry 6 months ago:
Best of luck to them.
It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”
Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.
- Comment on DeSantis signs controversial bill banning civilian boards from investigating police misconduct 7 months ago:
law enforcement officials who support the law say that the boards subject their officers to unwanted scrutiny.
Exactly. The thugs, thieves, murderers and rapists are uncomfortable with the fact that the public is becoming aware of the fact that they’re thugs, thieves, murderers and rapists, and they want to go back to being able to beat, steal, murder and rape with impunity, and that requires eliminating oversight. So they’re actively moving to eliminate meaningful oversight.
It really is just that simple.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”
If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.
The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.
- Comment on If you were to train a chatbot on all public statements of Donald Trump, you probably won't get a single factual answer. 11 months ago:
I doubt you’d even get a coherent sentence. Just random strings of emotive nouns and adjectives with irrelevant verbs sprinkled in here and there.