UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on AI Agents Can Autonomously Coordinate Propaganda Campaigns Without Human Direction 27 minutes ago:
Excited to see smear campaigns that become increasingly surreal and disturbing
- Comment on This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes 1 day ago:
I’d rather that than a disappearance state with cardboard walls
Would be crazy if South Korea had a massive, brutal police state or a long history of improvised slums and ruthless exploitation of it’s citizenry.
Good thing we’re sanctioning North Korea to the hilt, guaranting none of those horrible practices become common place throughout the Western aligned Asian states
- Comment on This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes 2 days ago:
Had a friend’s son tell me, very insistently, that Kim Jong Un convinced everyone in his county that he doesn’t poop. Also, that he’s planning to nuke South Korea, and we need to do something to stop him.
This was a kid with very liberal parents going to a very liberal middle school.
Red Scare shit is already everywhere. But I guess we’ve got to keep cranking the hysteria up to 11
- Comment on This Fall, Florida Students Will Be Forced to Take “Anti-Communist” Classes 2 days ago:
Then let people decide for themselves.
The more you learn about history, the more you realize you don’t know. Very difficult to “just teach history” when you’re talking about an unfathomable number of people making an unfathomable number of decisions with unclear cause and effect.
What you learn in school is a very high level and narrow reading of events, largely informed by documents and transcriptions preserved by the wealthiest people in a region.
The only thing that can ever come out of that kind of historical study is nationalist jingoism of one flavor or another.
This dumbing people down and telling them what to think isn’t helping anyone at all.
The purpose of public education history classes is to craft a shared national identity.
Dumbing down events and telling people what to think is a simple and effective way of achieving that end.
- Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT 2 days ago:
Walking up to a game of Three Card Monte and saying “It’s pretty obvious he’s palmed the Queen” mostly just gets you heckled and chased away.
Part of the problem with digital spaces is that you’ve got your person setting up the scam, and then you’ve got your layer of people marketing the scam, and then you’ve got your first layer of suckers who think they are coming out ahead on the scam, and then you’ve got the second layer of suckers who all know a tier-one sucker who just got rich. And then you’ve got the bots and the ideologues and the contrarians and the know-it-alls, all repeating the line that the person who set up the scam encourages them to say.
And it’s over all that cacophony that you announce “It’s obviously a scam”. Then Reddit boots you for violating terms and conditions of the platform.
- Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT 2 days ago:
If there is an authority who recognizes the nft, then it has the utility value of the authority. End of story.
My man has been doomed off by the Anarcho-Capitalist fairy and is currently circling the planet Heinlein.
- Comment on From millions of dollars to under a grand: The dramatic fall of the NFT 2 days ago:
Etherium was run out of the offices of JP Morgan Chase and NFTs were a gimmick to boost the deal flow of their then-underperforming crypto offering.
It was, by and large, an enormous investment in sales and marketing on top of a ton of insanely shady business practices. Case in point, the infamous Beeple NFT that sold for $69.3M was purchased with Etherium to showcase Christie’s auction house accepting cryptocurrency for auction bids. The winning bidder for artwork was an early crypto adopter and marketer named Vignesh Sundaresan who was flush with these tokens, but lacked any kind of liquid market to sell them into yet.
It’s trite to say that the whole thing was a scam because… duh. But I think people read this as “just dumb people being stupid with their stupid dumb money” and ignore the layer upon layer of market manipulation and con-artistry that went into making cryptocurrencies what they are today.
The fact that Donald Trump is using them to launder bribes from Middle Eastern dictators and East Asian kleptocrats should illustrate how deep these rabbit holes can go. It’s so much more than just peddling bad clipart to dumb bros.
- Comment on YouTube ads are about to get even longer and they’ll be unskippable 2 days ago:
There’s an abundance of work arounds, for certain. I’ve been using NewPipe for a year or two now.
Mostly just annoying to go through this ritual of jury rigging every new device to use basic Internet services.
- Comment on Hisense TVs force owners to watch intrusive ads when switching inputs, visiting the home screen, or even changing channels — practice infuriates consumers, brand denies wrongdoing 2 days ago:
Increasingly difficult to find a dumb one. If Walmart or Best Buy carries them, they don’t make a show of it.
- Comment on Hisense TVs force owners to watch intrusive ads when switching inputs, visiting the home screen, or even changing channels — practice infuriates consumers, brand denies wrongdoing 2 days ago:
I believe this is roughly the premise of the Humancentipad South Park episode.
- Comment on Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve 3 days ago:
And “was a rapist in FL and a private island”
- Comment on Steam :: About the New York Attorney General lawsuit against Valve 3 days ago:
Gotta wonder why the NY AG is so interested in prosecuting Steam and so blase about pursuing anyone in the Epstein Files.
- Comment on ‘Happy (and safe) shooting!’ AI chatbots helped teen users plan violence in hundreds of tests 3 days ago:
Americans consistently bemoan violent teenagers until they put on a uniform.
- Comment on online my honesty makes people think i'm trolling, baiting, etc.😒 3 days ago:
Actually, that’s not the truth. That’s propaganda from <insert person or group I don’t like>.
- Comment on Sometimes I wonder if the subtext of religion is; if you join one youre telling on yourself that you can easily be manipulated. 3 days ago:
if you’re born into a religious family initially you just adopt it
Right. Because there’s no inherent reason not to do so. And little kids tend to want to follow along with what they’re elders are doing.
Compare it to how most kids initially believe Santa Claus exists because they were told so.
Kids are told that they get presents by pleasing their parents. And then the decision making / agency is displaced onto a fictitious figure. That’s a very neat analogy for religion in the aggregate. Whether or not you “believe in Santa”, you’re still getting gifts based on your parents’ resources and generosity. If you want the newest kids’ favorite widget, you’re following the letter of the law whether or not you adhere to the spirit.
You can also participate in some church community stuff without being a member or even going to church.
If you’ve got friends/family who are members/do go, sure. Because they’re your social connection.
But you’ll struggle to join a community event if you don’t know anybody - or even when/where the event takes place. Nevermind knowing what’s in the works, what needs volunteers, what needs money, and who is in charge of leading them. The more you want to participate, the more you need to attend the religious church functions. The more you want to get into leadership, the more you need to demonstrate your piety.
- Comment on Sometimes I wonder if the subtext of religion is; if you join one youre telling on yourself that you can easily be manipulated. 3 days ago:
Everyone is born into the world entirely ignorant. Cultures, customs, languages, and superstitions espoused by their parents, teachers, and peers are adopted as a matter of survival. And as the individual develops more autonomy, they use the information they gathered in their youth to navigate into new cultures and belief systems, in pursuit of improved material conditions.
You can be born into a Catholic family and become Atheist just as easily as you can be born into an Atheist family and become Catholic. What has driven the modern collapse in religiosity is - at least in my view - the mass migration driven by economic expansion and ecological collapse. People aren’t just waking up one day and deciding they aren’t gullible anymore. They’re being shuffled around by tidal forces and torn away from the historical cultures and infrastructure that had reproduced their families’ beliefs.
As a kid, my mom was deeply Catholic and tried to get us to attend church. But we moved several times, and after each move we found ourselves at a new church (often not even a Catholic church) with an alien congregation and divergent dogma. So what had rooted her and her sisters and parents and grandparents in Catholicism never took root with me or my sister.
By contrast, my wife’s family lived in Galveston for four generations. Virtually her entire family is devote practicing Catholics. She only slipped through the cracks because… her dad moved around a lot, particularly after her parents got divorced. Everyone else - even two of her transgender cousins - are still practicing. Churches are, at their heart, social institutions. And I think modern New Atheists often miss that fact in their quest to Own The Dumb Pious Folks.
- Submitted 4 days ago to [deleted] | 11 comments
- Comment on U.S. Solar Installations Fell in 2025 as Trump Attacked Clean Energy 4 days ago:
Pay more for what? The supply chain is cut. There’s less fuel globally at any price.
- Comment on U.S. Solar Installations Fell in 2025 as Trump Attacked Clean Energy 4 days ago:
God news is we’ve shut down the Straight of Hormuz. So a spike in fossil fuel prices will pump up global demand for alternatives.
- Comment on Sociology textbooks made illegal by a board that has no educators on it. Schools will become propaganda machines. 4 days ago:
Honestly, I don’t see how any state managed educational system, or any educational system controlled by any powerful entity, wouldn’t eventually slip in propaganda.
Propaganda, strictly defined, is information from a slanted perspective.
At a really high level - where schools have limited time in the day/year and have to select their focus of study.
You can always and forever make hay about “what schools AREN’T teaching your kids!!!” because there’s always choices being made and people unhappy with those choices.
What’s happening in the US, today, is a deliberate effort to reverse historical liberal education regimes.
It’s not propaganda people are noticing, but the change in propaganda.
In short, nothing new under the sun.
I mean, it’s definitely different
- Comment on EA Lays Off Staff Across All Battlefield Studios Following Record-Breaking Battlefield 6 Launch - IGN 4 days ago:
Yeah, but we’re on 6
- Comment on Checkers, not chess. 5 days ago:
we applauded nixon for making inroads with china.
YMMV. The John Birchers hated that shit.
- Comment on EA Lays Off Staff Across All Battlefield Studios Following Record-Breaking Battlefield 6 Launch - IGN 5 days ago:
Battlefield was already refried slop before LLM development was a thing.
- Comment on EA Lays Off Staff Across All Battlefield Studios Following Record-Breaking Battlefield 6 Launch - IGN 5 days ago:
Doesn’t EA do this after pretty much every major release? Bring in a ton of part-timers and consultants in the rush to release. Go live with a buggy half-assed product. Fire most of the team to save costs. Then coast on marketing and DLC for a few years, before you kick off the next dev cycle and do it again?
- Comment on Sociology textbooks made illegal by a board that has no educators on it. Schools will become propaganda machines. 5 days ago:
I think it helps that, at least by high school, it wasn’t even something (normal) kids argued about. Just another annoying school policy, like when they put “Evolution is Just A Theory” label on biology textbooks and kicked a star athlete off the basketball team for having a boyfriend.
- Comment on Sociology textbooks made illegal by a board that has no educators on it. Schools will become propaganda machines. 5 days ago:
Schools will become propaganda machines
- Comment on Checkers, not chess. 5 days ago:
And decoupling only started to really happen last year.
We began decoupling when we took a militant policy against immigration. You can take that back to Clinton in the 90s or all the way back to Eisenhower in the 50s. But we’ve been adopting strains of isolationism straight back to the final days of WW2.
You could describe the Cold War as an enormous globalized decoupling event, which we tentatively recoiled from a few times before collapsing back into it.
- Comment on Checkers, not chess. 5 days ago:
You were not born when the decoupling began. You will not live to see it end.
I suppose the plan was to decouple the world from the dollar all the time.
I mean, depends on who you ask. But there’s definitely been a deliberately effort from within the Silicon Valley wing of the economy to force people into using Cryptocurrency as a legally-compulsory dollar alternative.
- Comment on Checkers, not chess. 5 days ago:
laughing from my desk job at a Fortune 500 O&G company
- Comment on BYD’s Second-Generation Blade Battery Makes Western EV Tech Look Ancient 5 days ago:
Isn’t that just a modern Tesla at this point?
