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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Most of the people I know who endorse this view would assent to it because it is consistent with how they feel about the world around them, not because it is a proposition they have seriously considered.

    It just feels like everyone hates Christians, so if someone told them they were being persecuted, they would agree. In the same way, it just feels like nefarious forces are trying to “ban Christmas”, so when idiots on TV claim that is whats happening, they nod their heads along. When challenged they just retreat into ignorance, saying things like “well that’s what I’ve heard” or “I have no idea about that”, because ideas like “the war on Christmas” are not factual claims about the world, they are expressions of sentiments about what the world is like.



  • I’ve been playing around with this idea I have called “n-link civic literacy” it’s an unscientific measure of civic literacy (how good are you at extracting and understanding information from the news) that works by measuring the number of links it takes to successfully obscure bullshit from the reader.

    Did you read a headline, form an opinion and react to it without reading the article? Then you are -1 link literate. Do you open the article but believe it’s claims without checking the source material? Then you are 0 link literate. Click through to the study cited by the article? 1 link literate.

    Probably would not work for edge cases, but I think could work to get a rough measure of the civic literacy of a community.


  • I think one of the problems with citing that first study as evidence Russian disinfo is targeted at conservatives more than liberals is that it only studied one case, and Russian disinformation campaigns tailor their disinfo to different demographics, often through brute force/trial and error. So it is quite possible that the particular case they studied happens to be tailored to (or more successfully resonated with) conservatives, while another specific case would have resonated with liberals more thus resulting in more liberal exposure by their metrics.



  • The point I was making was that the people who are in power are in power because about half of all voters are fine with them being in power and about a third actively want facist rule. Ultimately thisis not a failure of government structure. It’s a failure of citizens. Maybe that will change as those who supported trump from ignorance experience the consequences of their decisions. Maybe not. But trump won the popular vote last election cycle and has always enjoyed a fairly substantial base. A base that penalizes conservatives who worked against him by removing them from power. You cannot ignore the role that the people played in bringing about the current state of affairs. We are getting what people voted for.

    Btw the checks do still work. They work in lower courts as they apply the law without regard to partisanship. They, surprisingly, work in grand juries. And they work for non MAGA states to the extent that our federalized system gives more influence to local governments. Where they have failed is where maga politicians enjoy wide support.




  • “Checks and balances” in the context of US federal government just means that each branch has the ability to check the growth of power of the others. It’s not “a lie” because it’s still true. Right now congress could, if they wanted to, impeach the president or pass laws preventing him from doing the things he wants. The SCOTUS could stop him too if they wanted to actually take up cases on the law instead of using the shadow docket to avoid making rulings.

    Trump partisans hold a trifecta in government right now so they are not going to use their checks they have available to them. But one branch refusing to check another because its members were elected from the same stock of partisan lunatics is not the same as checks and balances not existing.




  • JollyG@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    5 months ago

    The post title makes it sound like Reddit is doing some sort of automated classification of user politics with some sort of ml technique. But the screenshot does not show that. It shows an llm summary of a users posting history . If the tool was run on a user that posted exclusively to a cat subreddit, the summary would have been about how the user likes cats. Despite the utility or accuracy of llm summaries, what the screenshot shows is far more anodyne than what this post’s title implies is happening.






  • Recently there was a news story about how people earning 150k were struggling financially. Even just reading the article was enough to know the idea was bullshit (which is probably why the headline used such mealy-mouthed language). But that did not stop a bunch of users from prognosticating about how terrible the economy is and how we are on the verge of collapse.

    The idea that households earning more than 150k are struggling is objectively wrong. They are not. But that idea is consistent with the political sentiments of users here ( billionaires vs everyone else in a zero sum economy ) so it gets traction.

    People pass around trash sources like the new republic which often just copies other news outlets but reframes stories to be consistent with lefty sentiments about whatever current events are going on.

    In one community I encountered an image macro criticizing a judge for making a ruling against some plaintiffs suing Trump that was completely divorced from any context, making it appear the judge was in the tank for trump when, if you knew even a little about her, or the ruling you would immediately recognize that idea as bullshit.

    Those are just a few examples off the top of my head



  • Is this really that precise? Reading through these 10 points, many of them seem quite vague to me. Phrases like:

    [. . .] a structural renewal of a wider movement for social autonomy [. . .]

    or

    [ . . .] emancipatory defence [sic] of the need for communal constraint of harmful technology [. . .]

    could mean a million different things, for example.