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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I don’t know who this Jack person is but it seems like you know a lot about someone you don’t want to know anything about. Also have never heard of “truth broker” but that sounds like something to avoid as much as an “influencer”. Do people wear this title willingly?

    But I would agree that a lot of once-respectable or thought-to-have-been-respectable outlets have been twisting headlines for clicks. The New Republic is one that I subscribe to for what I thought was valuable reporting but every day it’s just full of narrative-enforcing click bait, similar to what you’ve described. Time to unsub.

    The greater problem is that responsible journalism has a hard time staying in business when it competes with 15 seconds of rage bait. Our attention spans are minuscule and we don’t want or are unable to pay for anything that promotes authenticity. Nervermind “the algorithm” pushing salacious content over informative content and how you have little control over what you take in.

    And it’s just going to get worse as time goes on. John Stewart and Amanpour were talking a bit about this on Monday’s show.


  • Holy ever living fuck - this is some of the worst click bait I’ve ever read.

    Karoline later shared another quote that read, “What a privilege it is to have your bed taken up by a small human who thinks it’s the safest place in the world to be,” and wrote “crying” over it.

    She’s fucking “crying” at the thought of her child sleeping in a safe place. She’s “crying” about the privilege of being a mother.

    There is nothing at all in this article about her crying about burnout. This entire article is about her having a good time then quoting some completely random psychologist making assumptions about the stress someone must live with in this position (no fucking doi).


  • Jesus. This article is like getting through a recipe blog. The first third (at leas, I didn’t make it further) is about the author’s knowledge of pennies.

    I can only assume, as a person with a functioning brain who has lived on planet earth for nearly 50 years, that the pennies are not in fact trash but perfectly legal tender. I was hoping to find a line in this story to contradict its initial bold claim but…

    The initial draft of the story I filed for a popular New York City–based publication was 20,000 words long. (Sadly, all of the best parts everyone would have loved were cut by my psychotic editor, whose No. 1 passion in life was removing 13,000 perfect words from my first drafts; I’m not worried about him reading these words, because a low-class butcher like that doesn’t possess enough humanity to subscribe to The Atlantic—though, if you happen to know William, I would thank you not to send him a gift link to this article.) And what I learned was that there was no sane reason why.

    This article should be title: Journalism is Trash.








  • During an exchange in the Oval Office, Real America’s Voice correspondent Brian Glenn showed Trump a photo of a trans flag currently on display in Washington, DC, and claimed that “a lot of people are very threatened” by it.

    Dear motherfucker, what are you going to do about those of us who feel threatened by the American Flag?

    Reading this article, I have never in my nearly fifty years of life witnessed anything like this. Jackson is calling to detain all transgender people. Loomer is calling to designate transgender people terrorists.

    These people - I’ll say all conservatives - are so pathetic and dysfunctional that they’re unable to observe reality and deal with it in a responsible manner. Instead, they choose to turn something difficult or uncomfortable into an enemy or a cancer and deal with things as an immature child would - just stomp on it.




  • I think the reason why this may be something you’re wondering about is because we have given podcasters a larger influence in recent years. Not to say that’s bad, but it’s new.

    Personally, I don’t consider podcasters or YouTubers, etc., trustworthy sources of information or honest dialog. I’m not sure that’s something that even exists anyway now.

    There’s a much larger conversation to be had about where we spend our time and give our attention and why. The real news is boring so we turn to salacious clickbait that we often know has a bias to it. The more time we hand our emotions over to this content, then more it becomes part of our psyche. Sometimes we don’t have a choice but I still know a ton of people who are entirely clueless about politics. So, some people are making choices, for better or worse.

    I see Kirk’s legacy the same as Rogan’s and Trump’s. These people are a reflection of our times. Something is very wrong in our world today and we’ve spent the last twenty five years shifting, metaphorically, from CBS Evening News to The National Enquirer.

    This is the result of great freedom: a wild storm of ideas with equal opportunity to be expressed and heard. Not something that existed before the internet or having instant world wide communications in your hand or selling your information in order to maintain your attention with biased (mis/dis)information.


  • I just want to ask on behalf of people who don’t care about this, “why should I care about this”?

    Because every time I bring up how much we’re being spied on by the government or Amazon or Google, et al, people just shrug it off. At best, they’ll admit it’s a problem - for people who should be worried about it. Meaning, “I’ve got nothing to hide”. If nothing else, Americans lack (or choose to reject) the basic concept of a shared society. If there’s a threat that the government is spying on people, we believe it’s the “other” people, not “us”.

    Threats to our privacy is largely hypothetical for the majority of people. I’d even argue that the whole premise of privacy is no longer what it was just 15-20 years ago. I’ve even had people argue with me that they ‘want’ to be tracked so the ads they see are relevant to them.

    So, I could see some Americans read this story and be in full support of this. They believe in a spy state as a means of protection. Ironically, these are also often the same people flying “Don’t Tread On Me” flags.



  • Yes. I find anime-style erotic content to be super weird and gross. I think people who fawn over drawings of cartoons are suffering from and / or burying mental health disorders.
    I don’t think your issue is with AI though. You seem to have some other issues that, outside of professional counseling, may be helped by changing some of your lifestyle choices and avoiding the internet. I mean, there are plenty of horrors in this world (war / famine), but the world itself (the one we call reality) is not a horror; certainly not one with corpses readily on display.
    You seem troubled in a lost-control-of-your-addiction sort of way. “Waking up” is a choice you have.


  • A lot has been written about “ai”, decades and generations ago. I’m not sure if anyone considered the impact on human emotions in a manner that’s toxic and widespread. I’m just thinking of a future story where a portion of the population are so traumatized by conversations with machines that they escape their realities in various ways. People talking with computers as if they’re human seems very dystopian from the start. The next ten yers is going to be wild.

    But also, this is a damn good start to the Thought Police. Imagine if a government gained access to these logs. Actually, I’d be surprised if the US govt didn’t already have access to twitter. They’re already cracking down on free speech that criticizes them / him.



  • Babbitt, an Air Force veteran, was shot and killed by law enforcement during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot as she attempted to climb through a barricaded door to the Speaker’s lobby near the House chamber.

    In May, the government agreed to pay Babbitt’s family nearly $5 million as part of a settlement.

    The lawsuit alleged that the officer, who was not in uniform, failed to deescalate the situation and did not give her any warnings or commands before opening fire.

    Remember this when the conservatives scream about “rioters” and the “thin blue line”. Fucking traitors and hypocrites.