GarbageShoot

@GarbageShoot@hexbear.net

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Toxic X users sabotage Community Notes that could derail disinfo, report says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Among the most-viewed misleading claims where X failed to add accurate notes were posts spreading lies that “welfare offices in 49 states are handing out voter registration applications to illegal aliens,” the Democratic party is importing voters, most states don’t require ID to vote, and both electronic and mail-in voting are “too risky.”

  This is just normal Republican lies. There’s no particular reason to attribute it to foreign influence. In fact:

  One false narrative—that Dems import voters—was amplified in a post from Elon Musk that got 51 million views. In the background, proposed notes sought to correct the disinformation by noting that “lawful permanent residents (green card holders)” cannot vote in US elections until they’re granted citizenship after living in the US for five years. But even these seemingly straightforward citations to government resources did not pass muster for users politically motivated to hide the note.

  This appears to be a common pattern on X, the CCDH suggested, and Musk is seemingly a multiplier. In July, the CCDH reported that Musk’s misleading posts about the 2024 election in particular were viewed more than a billion times without any notes ever added.

  It seems like some of it is nearly-openly lead by the platform owner, with judgements on veracity handed down from him to his fanboys.

  The calls are coming from inside the house. You can’t pin everything on foreigners, least of all things where you have no specific information on them being to blame.

  “But bots!”

  Even setting aside that the article doesn’t attribute even most of what’s happening to bots (hence its title), that’s not an adequate counterclaim. Do you really, really think that among the mountain of Republican think tanks and other organizations, none of them are running a bot farm of even a few dozen accounts, like the 45 cited in the article? Granted, it could be Russia (logically, it probably isn’t China, which Republicans are usually harder on), but there have also been domestic operations, haven’t there?

  Here’s an easy example that does not directly “prove” the above case is not foreign interference (again, it’s at an overlap point of the interest of different groups) but demonstrates that it clearly seems that there are domestic bot nets doing numbers and thus that such a possibility needs to be considered for other cases where a Republican bot net might have an interest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a limp deflection. Is it really so difficult to not go around mocking people for typing errors like a 13-year-old?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Go back to Reddit

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Whatever problems you might have with low-effort digital art, the two are not remotely comparable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Vassalage is a term describing social position, not a moralism. Your indignation at this has no bearing on the fact and you sound just like the morons who say white privilege doesn’t exist because poor white people exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Socialists should seek to be pro-social in all contexts

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As a member of a vassal state, it makes sense to thereby call the citizens vassals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your shrugging is incredibly annoying and disingenuous and “soft power” is being used to weasel completely illegitimate claims. Does China like doing soft power with its pop culture exports (such as they exist) and even the mere existence of platforms like AliExpress? Sure. Does a platform run more by western than China represent a threat by the latter to subvert the US? Not without actual substantiation.

  China’s interest in bilateralism is neither saintly nor even particularly based on being a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but the fact that it knows that it wins by playing the long game and giving itself time to develop, while its main enemy is perhaps the most effectively pugnacious in world history (contrast with a state like the DPRK that talks a lot of shit but ultimately isn’t getting into any new wars, just staying in the one it was founded under). China is averse to fomenting revolt in the US or elsewhere because it wants to undercut power politics and play to its strengths rather than those of its enemy. To do that, it has a reputation to uphold that it won’t imperil with some hail mary tiktok brainwashing scheme that would certainly fail if it even had the power to pull it off (and, again, tiktok is already run by parties who don’t take orders from China).

  The US isn’t doing this out of strategic interests against the platform inherently, it is doing it as some combination of a scapegoating kabuki theater and to pave the way for further protectionist policy by normalizing banning things just for being Chinese on a flimsy red scare pretext.

  I think you’ve already had this quote paraphrased to you, but I didn’t see it properly rendered, so here’s the original:

  Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.

  From the excellent essayist Roderic Day, “Why Marxism?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Explain how China having their own ecosystem is better

  This seems self-explanatory to me. The US will do whatever it can to instigate color revolution – having a record of doing so in the past, see Facebook being used for revolts in the Middle East – so having companies that ultimately need to answer to the Chinese government rather than the US one is better for national security. It’s also better for China’s own economic development to have domestic companies need to figure out how to make decent platforms.

  China has no such record of instigating revolts and historically is much more opposed to infringing on the sovereignty of UN members (except Vietnam angery ).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dude, if NATO wanted them destroyed they wouldn’t be as passive as they have been. It has nothing to do with race. There are plenty of Russian/Caucasian people in the west.

  This is a bit silly. With how NATO works, they’d be inviting WWIII and do serious damage to ties with China that they are critically dependent on, and there’s a good chance the alliance would implode if they were that much more aggressive since many of the countries in it don’t want war, they just want to cower behind whoever has the biggest gun, to say nothing of the fact that the US government is already unpopular and would probably be forced to start conscripting soldiers, which would produce massive backlash. There are a lot of reasons for the US to stick to proxy wars for as long as it can manage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US lawmakers vote 50-0 to force sale of TikTok despite angry calls from users⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re being a bit antisocial and I don’t defend that, but they’re referencing en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes , an intelligence agreement among the anglosphere, and then saying you’re from a vassal state of that alliance (really just a vassal of the US).