If reading is the only driver to voting preference
Reading is a powerful tool because writing/publishing has a very low barrier to entry.
By contrast, audio and video tend to carry incrementally higher cost for production/distribution.
But you do still need peer groups with good politics to send you in the right direction. You can't expect good politics to emerge ex nihilio across an entire population.
I mean, you think this is happening exclusively in red states?
DC is bright blue and they've got some of the worst schools in the country. And if you want to know why...
Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error
Privatization, downsizing, teaching to the test... Twenty years of NCLB has taken its toll.
Even then, there is something of a silver lining
The advent of modern text communications has created significant social incentives for improving literacy at younger ages.
But in business you’re supposed to read emails to know what you’re supposed to do.
So often I get a set of instructions that's missing information, out of date, or deliberately misleading.
I'm often on the line with support walking through the steps and saying "How did you get from D to E?" and then finding out there's a second secret set of instructions only tech support has - possibly even a different website or application - that they don't want to tell you about unless you're talking to an agent for some reason.
Menus have the descriptions of what you want to eat but no one reads them
Sometimes. Often they do not. They also regularly use shorthand or code.
My favorite is a series of red chili peppers next to a menu item. If I order the 1 pepper meal, am I going to be shitting blood for a weak? If I order the 5 pepper meal, are you going to White Guy Spicy it for the table because not everyone looks like they can handle it? It's anyone's guess. If I don't explicitly see the words "peanut" or "shellfish", am I confident it won't have allergens?
Why even have a waiter if you're not allowed to ask these questions, anyway? Just make everything a vending machine.
Also a big fan of
if you see a price list/menu/price tag or similar and you accidentally read it, better double check the price by asking “does this item cost what it says here”
Because it happens when management has three different prices and five confusing "discount" offers scattered in line of sight. Is this 50% off or does that happen at the register or does it no longer apply? And you've got the same thing on the menu as a side and a meal, which one am I ordering, again?
And
“employees only” actually means “for adventurous customers”
Oh, bathroom for employees only? At every location inside three city blocks? I guess I should just take a crap on the floor.
$100B for generically engineered babies.
Not one penny on education or health care.
And you know none of these kids are getting vaccinated.
The man with the perfect dick size, but he ejaculates in ten seconds and immediately lapses into a coma.
That's why you can have a Democrat running around hand in hand with Liz Cheney while the corporate media cheers.
Hitler is easy to fixate on as a bad guy because he's an evil dead foreigner. Cheney is harder
His presidency was more like these prior administrations as well.
Trump is not a unique aberration in American politics. He's a continuation of a historical trend.
We still need some of us to be willing to clean up the shit to preserve the truth.
People like this exist and you can find them. You just won't have them advertised to you. Real journalism exists, but its speaks floating in a sea of disinformation.
I can only be so upset a people for failing to find it. There but for the grace of God go I.
I’m not sure I understand how your last sentiment relates
A great deal of informed opinion and intelligently dissenting views have been actively suppressed at the educational, political, and industry levels.
Whether you're Cori Bush or Norm Finkelstein, you're fighting and uphill battle just to be recognized.
The point here is that Hitler is cleraly the most famous crazy dictator.
He's the Big Historical National Enemy. The one that we famously ground into humiliating defeat.
it’s looking like this Trump fellow is going to be remember quite a lot as well
Trump didn't pattern his campaign after Hitler. He patterned it after Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.
"If you don't vote my way then you must be an idiot" is the endless refrain of the losing party. I hear it every election cycle
Had Harris been the one edging out Trump on a razor thin margin, it would be conservatives whining about American voter stupidity.
But if all these people are so thick headed, why do politicians find it so hard to get them to vote their way?
your message comes across as quite anti-semitic, because you went to some deliberate effort to write “Israeli Jew”. Why?
It's a self-identified religious apartheid state. You say it for the same reason you'd talk about Irish Catholics versus Irish Protestants, or Hinduvistas, or Radical Islamic Terrorists.
The Arabs aren't the ones bombing Gaza, blockading the ports to induce a famine, and systematically raping captives.
We've been watching fascists pile into legislatures from Russia to the UK for decades. It's cute to make everything about Hitler, but this isn't an event unique to '33.
- Fearmomgering over migrants
- Secular violence encouraged by colonial powers
- Stagnating global economies and bottlenecks in critical resources
- Anti-colonialism in the third world
- Those damned Marxists refusing to sit down, shut up, and back the liberal party
You can find historical parallels in the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Irish Troubles, Modi's rise in India and the Nixon/Reagan reaction to the US civil rights movement, the military coups in Guatemala and El Salvador, the dictatorships of South Korea and South Vietnam...
There's deeper historical roots to Trumpism than just "America made another oopsie cause we're dumb-dumbs"
Isn’t as one-sided as you regarding a war in another country
Dems pandered to an Israeli government that was actively campaigning for their opposition. This wasn't just "your anti-genocide views are simply too extreme for the average American voter". It was "Netanyahu is funneling Russian money and propaganda into the Republican campaign apparatus while you keep telling him he's a good boy on national TV."
Talk about leopards eating your face.
The lesson is that people don’t have the time or attention to fact check, and frankly I think we should have known that.
Why bother to fact check any one thing when it means hunting for the single edible chocolate in a pile of rabbit shit?
You can't even fucking Google an answer anymore, as the AI generated response is trained on all the bad data that's bloated the system.
Objective morality in terms of universal human rights and behavioral science can be integrated into a better regulated social media, for example. It just has to be more appealing somehow and easier to access. It also has to be sexy and come with some status, and other benefits.
I would settle for it being a view that won't get you expelled from a college campus, primaried out of an elected office, or purged from a high profile business position.
All this reporting reminds me of the "But actually this Man on The Street Hated Brexit even though he voted for it" slew of stories.
It's all just nutpicking. You'll find far more Muslim Trump voters who don't know who any of these people are. And you'll find plenty who are clapping like seals, because they're just as Murdoch Pilled and MAGA headed as their white peers.
You don't need AI to generate hack art. Corporate Memphis aesthetic has been around for ages precisely because its cheap, hacky clip-art you can apply to ad copy in order to give it a hint of life without spending much money.
These AI models make the new art comparatively dirt cheap (if you ignore all the negative external costs) without relying on the even more cheap and bland techniques of the past. It's absolutely "better" relative to what's come before.
Tucker Carlson appeared to blame abortions for the deadly hurricanes that have ravaged the United States over the last few months.
You can't do that, you can't kill children on purpose knowing that you're doing that in exchange for power, freedom or happiness whatever you think you're getting in return. You can't participate in human sacrifice without consequences
Elon Musk lawyer says $1 mln voter giveaway winners are not random
Elon Musk's pro-Trump group does not choose the winners of its $1 million-a-day giveaway to registered voters at random, but instead picks people who would be good spokespeople for its agenda, a lawyer for the billionaire said on Monday.
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"There is no prize to be won, instead recipients must fulfill contractual obligations to serve as a spokesperson for the PAC," Gober said in the hearing before Judge Angelo Foglietta, referring to Musk's political action committee, known as America PAC.
Idaho Public Health Department Barred From Giving COVID Vaccine— Experts say it's a first
A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.
Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines. Vaccinations are an essential function of a public health department.
While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccinesopens in a new tab or window and Florida's surgeon generalopens in a new tab or window bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven't blocked the vaccinesopens in a new tab or window outright.
"It is so disastrous": MAGA men are freaking out that wives may be secretly voting for Kamala Harris
While millions will still vote for the Republican candidate, perhaps hating immigrants more than they love reproductive rights, the only certainty at this point is that many millions more will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. In the latest ABC News/Ipsos national poll, the Democrat enjoyed a 14% advantage with women over Trump; among women with a college degree, that number rose to 23%; among women voters under 40, it rocketed to 34%.
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That, in turn, is causing some MAGA commentators to break from their usual posture of feigned confidence to outright panic.
“Early vote has been disproportionately female,” Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA and helping to lead the Trump campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort, posted on social media. “If men stay at home, Kamala is president. It’s that simple.”
U.S. inundated with claims that American arms killed Gaza civilians
The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims, according to people familiar with the matter.
At least some of these cases presented to the State Department over the past year probably amount to violations of U.S. and international law, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.
Pro-Trump groups have spent years building election denial networks that, combined with Big Tech’s hands-off approach and continued foreign interference, have created a toxic information ecosystem.
Election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are not destroying mail-in ballots cast for former President Donald Trump. The Department of Defense did not issue a directive last month giving US soldiers unprecedented authority to use lethal force against Trump supporters who riot if the former president loses next week. And no, 180,000 Amish people did not register to vote in Pennsylvania—given there are only 92,600 Amish living in the state, including minors. Ron DeSantis never said that Florida would not use Dominion Voting machines in next week’s election. And municipalities in California are not allowing noncitizens to vote in this year’s presidential elections.
These are just a small sample of the flood of voting-related disinformation narratives that are being seeded and spread on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook in the build up to November 5.
Read the complaints filed with the FTC about scams that use Elon Musk's face.
Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FTC to get complaints sent to the federal agency about crypto scams that pretend to be affiliated with Musk. We obtained 247 complaints, all filed between Feb. and Oct. of this year, and they’re filled with stories of people who believed they were watching ads for authentic crypto investments sanctioned by Musk on social media.
The ads sometimes featured the names of Musk’s various companies, like SpaceX, Tesla, and X, while other times they utilized Musk’s association with neo-fascist presidential candidate Donald Trump.
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Some people in the complaints believed they were talking directly with Musk, a sadly common story that has popped up in news reports before. But they weren’t talking with Musk, of course. They were communicating with scammers engaging in what’s called pig butchering—the name for a type of fraud popularized in the mid-2010s where scammers extract as much money as possible through flattery and promises of tremendous profits if the victim just “invests” where they’re told.
A lengthy investigation of the deadly pile-up on the North Tarrant Express toll road in Fort Worth three years ago shows Texas transportation officials were...
Reporter Yamil Berard scoured through thousands of pages of court records, documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, and videos of that tragic day in February 2021 when 130 cars, trucks and semis piled up along a stretch of the North Tarrant Express. Early morning commuters, unaware of the black ice beneath them, crashed one after another along two lanes bound by concrete barriers on both sides. The horrific scene spanned the length of three football fields.
Elon Musk offered swing-state voters $47 for getting others to sign a petition, but they say the payments haven't come through
In early October, some signatories received hand deliveries of $47 in cash, posing for photo-ops to tout the deal. Most, though, are expecting checks in the mail, and some have grown impatient. One issue, to judge by replies to Musk’s posts on X (formerly Twitter), is that voters have misread the terms of the America PAC offer, and think that just signing the petition will earn them money. “WHERE’S MY $47? I SIGNED ALREADY,” one Donald Trump supporter replied to Musk on Sunday. “I signed up and didn’t get $47,” another X user attempted to inform Musk earlier this month, appending a skull emoji to his message. And even those who apparently understood the referral system have complained of not receiving payments. “I signed up three people but didn’t get the $47,” another person replied to Musk this week, adding, “still glad I did it but wondering if that was a scam.”
Italy's Meloni tells Israel's Netanyahu attacks on UN peacekeepers are unacceptable
Italy is a significant contributor to the U.N. mission known as UNIFIL.
In a phone conversation with Netanyahu, Meloni also called for the "full implementation" of the UN's Security Council Resolution 1701 on Lebanon and stressed the urgent need for a de-escalation of conflict in the region, her office said.