#OldAndWeird

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 10th, 2023

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  • The problem is this is the US. This is the world’s most major superpower. This is the nation whose companies fed and propped up the Nazis. Because what little of democracy there was in the US is now certainly going to fall, it’s going to drag the whole world with it. Too many shitheads in too many countries, including Germany, will be willing to follow suit, and all the major superpowers left will be all too willing to prop them up with little to no regard for what rules they won’t break in the process. We might even see the US trying to strong-arm nations in the same way China has been trying to strong-arm Taiwan. At a time where the surveillance and control tools at their disposal are at a dystopian high. At a time ramping up for chaos due to major environment and resource collapses that we have been foreseeing for decades.



  • Just as a side note, those models are not invulnerable to manipulation. In my country it’s the same, but the central government is ruling from one of the flimsiest coalition governments, with the same lack of power that goes along that dumbasses still claim they are solely responsible for. The opposition claims they ‘won’ because they got more votes than any other party (which should have also made it easier for them to form their coalition and they weren’t able to) and now it is getting so bad and stupid (and troll factory brigaded) that people getting convinced by the rhetoric are trying to pass off the US electoral system as a success story.

    It provides more representation, but it does not provide infallibility. I think we have the technology today to do considerably better than what we had several centuries back - in fact, to a large extent we could be voting ourselves on key issues instead of letting it fall back to representatives and false promises if we wanted to. The biggest problem isn’t that people in a democracy aren’t on equal grounds when grasping different issues and yet they can be radicalized to vote out of rhetoric more than those who would and should be more informed. I think we could have better democracies if we shifted to meritocracies, where you could vote on issues only if you certify you were more informed and the history, reality, and minutiae that govern those issues through exams. But that would also create a system that could be gamed.

    Any system can be corrupt, and in democracies it’s not just the political candidates but society as a whole when it becomes complacent, ignorant, yet loud and willing to break the system for those that manipulate then into doing it.




  • This subreddit is pretty ban-happy and unaware of itself, “trolling or worse”, but I can confirm that at least on reddit, I went back to see what a user who claimed Trump would be better for Palestinians than Kamala now that it is clearer what is going to happen, and the user had been deleted although the comment remained.

    There are astroturfing and troll factories active throughout all social networks that people are too dumb to acknowledge, they seem to expect straight up propaganda posters. The worst thing is, they probably have lists of people and timezones they should focus on, and their participation is so targeted that your comment calling out their flagrant manipulation doesn’t matter no matter how many upvotes it gets. They are probably even able to identify who users are across networks based on participation patterns alone.




  • Because of targeted social networks circles. The candidate to prop got a radicalized base, the candidate to lose got messaging that either indicated people should disengage (“Genocide Kamala!”) or were given the same sort of messaging in 2016 that made Hillary such a surefire win you didn’t even have to go to vote, because what’s one more vote (appeal to laziness). Cambridge Analytica’s successors were also armed with LLM AI as well as Big Data personal data identification this time around.

    They clearly prepped up in case the votes didn’t go their way, but the post- truth politics paired with people who consider their social network fueled emotions more credible than the facts and merits of lifetime experts was more effective than they could have ever predicted, and this will mark the tendency for all future elections in our “democracies” were education clearly has had no long term impact.



  • Trump probably has more allegiance to Putin than he does to Netanyahu’s money, which might mean forcing it to compromise on a compromise. But frankly, I’ve always seen US support of Israel as a means to drive out Russian influence in Israel, whose cooperation has increased the last few decades before becoming clouded with the latest conflict. The conflict with Iran and its proxies might stop, but Palestinians are still getting genocided, if anything with more of a focus.





  • The problem isn’t the values. The values don’t matter when they are complete fiction and tailored for bubbles. The problem is that Cambridge Analytica has served as a basis for what to do, not as a basis for what not to do, and societies and democracies are getting treated like cattle with the biggest giveaway being the world richest man outright buying a social network and abusing it as he has and the people who should be most aware and reactive to it acting like if it isn’t a core portion of the problem.

    This comedy bit mocks what is happening now with all the political mud slinging regarding the loss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPHH5trgC1w

    And all the better that the animals in the animal farm fight against each other lest they realize whom they are a victim of.





  • The problem is the technology gap between nations. Europeans are literally sending over their smartest and they are going over because all they care about is greed, politics be damned because because to them it’s a rest of the world going around in a cycle of stupid problem. Which is stagnating both societies, science, and global security.

    Europe militarily has been in shambles since WW2, evidenced by how much of its colonial ambitions it had to give up. It wasn’t just oligarchs suddenly becoming good. What is going to happen is not that Europe is suddenly going to become capable of sustaining NATO, it’s that it is going to have to give concessions to the nations that aren’t going to be cutting them off. Before, that was the US, now it will have to be Russia and China.