49 replies to this topic

[TVCasualty]

Shitter's new Chief Executive Tool just changed their policy in a way that favors the wanna-be Fascists and neo-Nazis (some of whom are already using it to silence activists who expose them).

 

This has the details about what's up from one of the people whose accounts are probably going to vanish soon:

https://twitter.com/...365741644824576

 

It's time to add Shitter to the list of antisocial media platforms to avoid under all circumstances. Which I guess is all of them, or will be eventually.

 

 

We really do seem to be going full-Nazi Retard in the U.S.. It's probably time to ponder where your own personal line in the sand is, and what you intend to do once the reactionary meatheads cross it.

 

 

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

It's the old censorship flip flop haha. Something I struggle with greatly, some days I think no censorship would be king but places like that often degrade into cesspools. Thinking of your 4Chans and 8Kuns of the world.

Of course now that the shoes have switched to the other feet folks that were decrying too much censorship on social media are now applauding it ® and those pushing for more of it are now upset that they got it (L). Seems like I am destined to join

Personally I like to think of twitter like a drug addiction. Causal use is fine but abuse comes easily and can be detrimental to our mental well being. Not being able to dox and cancel people at the drop of a media mobs hat sounds like step forward if you ask me. Who made stan1269 and his millions of followers the judge jury and executioners of public discourse? If gladly destroying someones career and or life because they made a distasteful joke is not considered a form of hate I don't know what is. (Remember even those Qanon folk were convinced they were acting out for altruistic reasons, saving their country from blood drinking pedophiles) If people are committing actual crimes then let the justice system deal with it. Granted it can be frustrating and often lacking and I have had my disagreements about the way the justice system works, but more than ever I have come to realize how important courts are to maintaining sanity when we start going down the path of division. (Turns out we like to watch our political opponents squirm) Sadly the courts feels like the best we can do at the moment

In regards to the toxic discourse that now seems to permeate the internet, how does one separate an important conversation that both parties can come together to discuss and learn something together. From two folks repeating curated talking points to one another. The latter is destructive and seeks to eliminate nuance, the manipulators are enraging the public in order to either make money or to seize power. The strange part is twitter does have a way of facilitating both things, the information is there it's the snarky anger and malice that come with it that are bad.

The current social media climate is ripping us apart at the seams. So maybe removing a function that is used to spread hate is not necessarily a bad thing, people can still report bad behavior and have it banned or removed. A guy just might not be ale to destroy someones life via twitter from the comfort of their living room anymore. I would be happy if they all ended up in the garbage at this point but the amount of monetary incentive suggest that they will be sticking around for quite some time. So reforming them is really our only option. I think it is probably a step by big tech to get ahead of any government mandates that might follow the fall of its public idolization as we realize just how damaging it has become to the public discourse.

Good or bad who's to say? Depends who you ask I guess

Edited by FLASHINGROOSTER, 08 December 2021 - 02:38 PM.

[shiftingshadows]

So follow Edward Snowden or Ralph Nader or whatever seems legit, and delete crap, and avoid click bait, and don't spend more than 15 min or so on it at a time. Same as reading a magazine, you find lying around, of course its mostly crap. There is also some psychedelic & mushroom info and or news, posters.

Edited by shiftingshadows, 09 December 2021 - 09:12 AM.

[TVCasualty]

When social media becomes the de facto Commons, this kind of thing is a problem whose ultimate consequences have not yet begun to manifest. And when they do there will be no stopping them.

 

It's not a matter of just picking a different media source when all relevant discourse is funneled through a tiny handful of overwhelmingly-powerful corporations. "Alternative media" may exist, but will be so fringe and hard to access (remember Net Neutrality?) that they will be irrelevant to what actually happens in society and politics.

 

Those who write the algorithms call the shots now. And many of them are high-functioning psychopaths, like Peter Thiel.

[shiftingshadows]

.   I have no argument with you as to whether the human world continues to head in the wrong direction, probably at an accelerating rate.

.   Perhaps a few decades ago I naively wanted to know everything; but now I buy books like: "America the Farewell Tour" by Chris Hedges, and another like "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power" 

by Alfred W. McCoy, and  don't finish them; probably because I find they are too depressing. So in my personal case, its not a lack of access, to truth, the impoverishes me.

.   Rather I already know in an intuitive way, having lived over 70 years, and grown up where there were woods, fields, unleashed dogs, and a lake. And having lived abroad as a kid for 3 years by the time I was 15, and then visited India; I knew that nothing was as most people believed it to be, long before weed was a thing for white kids.

.   And how is the human world different from what most imagine? It is full of suffering on an unimaginably vast scale, seemingly way beyond anything the Buddha imagined, even with his first noble truth.

.   Sadly even folks like Richard Dawkins, & Edward Snowden, who post on twitter, seem to do so because of something personal that is lacking in their lives, but little real communication happens in the comments.

.   It is the same with face book. So whether the media  management is corrupt or not, the people who use it seem stuck at a level of unsatisfying superficiality. It seems there may be groups on face book for people who share common interests, like for example basket making,   , that work for a limited purpose.

.   Long before, both technology, modern manipulation of the masses, Edward Bernays, and even Machiavelli; leaders had no problem finding soldiers and religious converts, and implementing methods of hierarchical control, and starting wars.

.   I don't know if I will live to see, what happens when human genetic engineering and robotic warfare get 'thrown into the mix', along with the already existing massive unsolvable world wide issues faced by 'humanity'.

.    I suspect a dystopia, beyond what most have imagined, is not unlikely.

[shiftingshadows]

.   Seems to me anyone who posts on forums like this, is among a selected group of the privileged on the planet, and that for many the idea of a future dystopia is a joke. I'm not well informed, but a few of the current hells on earth are:

North Korea

Diamond mines of Africa

Venezuela

Syria

Iran

Afghanistan

Tibet

much of Africa

Yemen

Somalia

much of China

A few of the worst Horribly polluted cities, with life shortening smog, etc:

Mexico City

Beijing

LA

or other toxins:

Flint Michigan

cities around Fukashima

cities around Chernobyl

next

plight of refugees traveling thru Mexico

& plight of refugees in boats in the Mediterranean

refugees from Syria,

refugees trying to get into Poland.

next

The millions living in poverty all over, &

Women in Arab countries

Blacks in America, especially, but not only, in the South ...&

workers in the world's 'sweat shops' making products Americans consume:

clothing from Bangladesh, & Apple computers from China for example ... &

uneducated & uninformed diabetics, world wide, consuming fast food, a life style the US has exported ... &

Native peoples displaced and exterminated by logging in Brazil

Animal habitats and animals currently being exterminated by deforestation, for palm oil, in Southwest Asia.

and this is probably just a small sample of places/situations we never want to be in

oh

I forgot Hong Kong

and the Muslims in China's 'camps' ... anyway

.    Hence I'm not upset about the follies of Zuck, Facebbook, twitter, & Elon Musk's silly ideas (in spite of his very high IQ in a narrow sense) of escaping to Mars, Biden failures, etc., and much that, seems to worry many.

.    Should Trump get re-elected, the damage would probably be more noticeable - and it does unfortunately actually seem possible.

.   But again what ever he did, might ultimately prove to be only a footnote, to Global warming etc.

.   And the wild card we all forget, is the speeding up of the shifting of the magnetic poles of earth, which no one understands.

As humans, (other than those full of adrenaline, testosterone, &/or various stimulants etc.), the desire for security seems one of the stronger drives, however, it is of course, always illusory.

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

 

As humans, (other than those full of adrenaline, testosterone, &/or various stimulants etc.), the desire for security seems one of the stronger drives, however, it is of course, always illusory.

 

Amen to that. Thinking about the illusion of safety our home creates, as if someone could not easily smash a window and walk right in.

 

I think we should make the point that social media exists everywhere and so do the problems it creates. The truth is it can be more of a problem in certain places. I remember reading about how bad facebook moderation was in other countries. They used some examples in I think rural India where all it took was a doctored picture of a twitter post to work up an angry mob that ended up lynching a falsely accused rapist.

 

On a more positive note there does appear to be a shift happening in the information game. A temporary reprieve perhaps. Legacy media is on its last legs and it looks like independent will eventually take it over, although having thousands of different information sources comes with its own set of issues. That being an increase in conflicting information and inherent chaos. Then we have to contend with them becoming heavily influenced by money and corruption lather rinse repeat right.

 

So maybe part of life is hoping you catch a cylce while it is in the sweet spot. Climate has been pretty good for a while so maybe that in turn fuels prosperous political and civil interaction and its only a matter of time before that starts to degrade.

 

More and more I am starting to perceive mankind in cylces. Cylces that have repeated themselves countless times, the loops in our own lives. The generational loops of sons repeating their fathers sins. The cycles of nature, and the rise and fall of empires across the globe. So in some sense it does feel like this inevitable endless loop that we have no control over. But then on the macro level we do seem to have ultimate control. Like in what food I eat, where I go, what I watch and listen too. Who I talk to and do things with. All components that can have major influence on how my day might go.

[shiftingshadows]

going off on a slight tangent:

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC3917651/

 

Published online 2013 Mar 28. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.2-98.v1

 

also

 

https://www.eurekale...releases/803330

 

Over 30 million psychedelic users in the United States

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 

 

https://www.worldome.../us-population/

 

he current population of the United States of America is 333,807,743 as of Monday, December 13, 2021, based on Worldometer elaboration of the latest United Nations data.

 

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

 

333,807,743 / 30,000,000 = 11.1269247666666

 

seems to have had no effect on a macro scale

Edited by shiftingshadows, 13 December 2021 - 03:22 PM.

[TVCasualty]

If we can't deal with the resurgence and promotion of Fascism in the media I guess we'll have to go old-school. The pen can be mightier than the sword but even Orwell was known to use a bayonet on occasion.

 

 

These worries were almost immediately proven to be valid. Not long after Twitter unveiled its new policy, one well known neo-Nazi took to Telegram to make explicit what these new rules meant for the far right (as well as anyone else out to game the rules to get back at their enemies).

 

“Due to the new privacy policy at Twitter, things now unexpectedly work more in our favour as we can take down Antifa doxxing pages more easily,” he wrote on Telegram. “Anyone with a Twitter account should be reporting doxxing posts from the following accounts to deplatform.”

 

He listed several anti-fascist accounts afterwards for his followers to target. 

 

One of those listed, Atlanta Antifascists, was brought down shortly after Twitter introduced the new rules. In a statement, the people behind the account said they were taken offline following a post regarding the identity of a “White Student Union” organizer. They weren’t allowed to reinstate their account, they said, until they deleted the post.

 

“Already, neo-Nazis are using the new policy to attempt to shut down their critics,” their statement read. “Twitter’s policy is an attempt to shield white power and far-right organizers from public scrutiny. It is unacceptable, but unsurprising.”

 

 

https://www.vice.com...e-people-warned

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

Imagine being one of the oldest newspapers in the country and having your news story suppressed because "it may be harmful" to an election candidate.  It is nice to see the shoe on the other foot so to speak but not happy that dire prediction seems to be coming true and the implications of how this progresses moving forward as a society are depressing.  Time and time again people say about censorship, don't be so quick to promote it, because its only a matter of time for when it gets turned around on you.

 

Here is an interesting test.

 

Type this into duck duck go's search engine and notice how many photo's have been removed. ( For some reason if I made infront one word there were way more deleted photo's)

 

"democrats pose as white nationalists in front of bus"

 

A story you would think would be in the mainstream, a group of politicians literally pretending to be white nationalist in a pathetic attempt to win an election race. That should tell us peasants something. That they are well aware of how stoking fears of white nationalism is a voting issue. Same as immigrants and critical race theory. All those things we could make arguments for and against but ultimately to me they seem to be primarily used in the media to manipulate people. Don't get me wrong you know as well as I do that I have rallied against PC culture on here many times but these days I am starting to wonder how much of it is real and how much of it is hyper inflated in order to provoke a response out of us. Being a cyclical bastard I am sure I will be ranting about it soon enough though so don't count me out yet

[shiftingshadows]

.    Some countries' governments are probably less corrupt than others' , (such as Iceland vs say Brazil & Venezuela).

Here in the USA, we consider North Korea to have the most 'brain washed' populace;

.   But it seems to me much of the US populace, has "drunk the koolaid", we were taught in elementary school: about Abe Lincoln & George Washington and the cherry tree, and still believes that the US is particularly wonderful & exceptional, in all ways.

But IMO the US gov. has always been corrupt - and always will be.

.   If it is true that, society has become more chaotic, the police more militarized, wealth inequality more absurd, cyber hacking & fake news more prevalent - then it seems to me that I should expect the US gov., and their henchmen the media, to become more corrupt, in keeping with the downward trend.

[TVCasualty]

I forget who said it but I read a quote years ago where someone said that "The U.S. is like the healthiest patient in the cancer ward."

 

Not sure if that's still the case but it did make the point about ubiquitous corruption while also pointing out that the nature of said corruption was not universal. So I'd still much rather live in a corrupt USA than a corrupt North Korea, though I'd prefer to live in a corrupt Iceland if I could.

[shiftingshadows]

..." "The U.S. is like the healthiest patient in the cancer ward." Not sure if that's still the case "

 

Sounds true in some ways, but, if as some predict, China shortly becomes the dominant world power, I have no idea how that may affect the amount of corruption in the US.

 

Ironically where I found a detailed analysis of China's rise, and increasing global economic power, was on twitter from a guy who calls himself; "Expound the profound".

 

Here is a small sample of a series of his posts:

 

"Nov 15

China was happy to receive interest payments from USA government and USA government was happy to keep increasing its debt without having to raise taxes.

 

In 2010 Hillary Clinton - the then Secretary of State - visited Hanoi, Vietnam in the ASEAN Regional Forum.

Expound the profound

@frankoz95967943

·

Nov 15

There she publicly stated that the US would "contain the rise of China" and adopted a  “rebalance to Asia-Pacific” policy.

 

This really pissed off China.

 

It not only failed to contain the rise of China, but also deepened China’s strategic mistrust of the US.

Expound the profound

@frankoz95967943

·

Nov 15

In 2013-China decided it had to make a strategic move of their own,&China adopted a new policy called "One Belt, One Road".

 

Instead of recycling dollars back into their new sworn enemies economy,China instead would LEND those US Dollars to other countries in USD denominated debt

Expound the profound

@frankoz95967943

 

Nov 15

China would lending these acquired dollars they gathered from USA trade to smaller countries for them to buildout their power grid, roads, trains, internet, etc.

 

China would supply the materials, the labor, the parts - pretty much everything - to the developing nation.

Expound the profound

@frankoz95967943

·

Nov 15

What this did is it helped employ MILLIONS of the Chinese poor, moving them from sustenance living to a good life working in factories and offices in newly built  - and uninhabited - cities.  Chinese citizens prospered greatly.

Expound the profound

@frankoz95967943

 

Nov 15

These loans were usually written with non-disclosure terms, &the receiving nation would need to also agree to never go against China at the UN or the WTO.  China in essence created debt-vassal states.

Most of the projects funded were of strategic importance to China -

Expound the profound

@frankoz95967943"

 

etc etc ... interesting stuff

 

Seems what is really happing in the world, is that (generally) the gangsters that run things, compete, and the most brutal, devious, & clever, usually win so that, things, always continue to get worse for 'the peasants'. [No hidden conspiracy theories seem necessary to explain the big picture] **. And this would seem to operate both at the level of governments and corporations.

 

I would guess that some small rich countries, like Switzerland, Monaco, & Lichtenstein, have generally escaped this trend; but its only a guess, and may only be temporary, as when things worsen, none of them have any military might.

 

- - - - - - - -

 

**

I don't mean that there are no conspiracies, or evil plots, or false flag operations, etc.

 

But, what I refer to is that if it isn't one, it will be another, so the importance of any particular one is probably not as important as assumed.

 

And that huge evils that we do know about (like big tobacco) are so taken for granted, that they are not considered as conspiracies, despite well known evidence of long continuing efforts, to fool both people and the government, as well as to addict and harm people.

The same is the case with 'big oil' and funding climate change deception.

In fact evil acts by corporations, are so common, that no one is surprised any longer.

 

So it seems to me the preoccupation that some have to fault the Rothschilds family, The setting up of the federal reserve & the IRS, and so on, as the cornerstone of evil, that if removed would fix everything, is misguided.

 

.   So it seems to me that the gangsters run things, compete, and the most brutal, devious, & clever, usually win, and that perhaps the real conspiracy is within us and our silly tendency, to wish things were different & hope that there might be some political fix, or secret knowledge leading to a fix.

Edited by shiftingshadows, 19 December 2021 - 04:55 PM.

[shiftingshadows]

Meanwhile....

https://www.reuters....ces-2021-12-17/

[TVCasualty]

China is making a lot of troubling moves lately, but I take some consolation in the apparent fact that China is succumbing to the same insanity that we are, and for the same reasons (i.e., the inevitable consequences of good ol' fashioned greed).

 

No amount of authoritarian control-freakiness can prevent those chickens from coming home to roost, and that example is just the beginning. They're going to be too preoccupied with survival and maintaining internal cohesion to manifest most of their global imperial aspirations real soon. As will we for a change.

 

Will that finally be peace at last for the world because we're all economically interconnected now? Or will all nations just seize/repatriate/whatever all foreign assets within their borders and then go to good ol' fashioned war again?  We'll probably be finding out soon enough.

 

 

 

 

.   So it seems to me that the gangsters run things, compete, and the most brutal, devious, & clever, usually win, and that perhaps the real conspiracy is within us and our silly tendency, to wish things were different & hope that there might be some political fix, or secret knowledge leading to a fix.

 

 

Sociopathy and Narcissism are clearly advantages when playing the game of politics, but I suspect that the ultimate source of our collective lunacy (political or otherwise) when gathered into large groups is that we have simply not evolved to coexist in such vast numbers. We seem to be genetically predisposed to a hard limit of meaningful personal relationships an individual can maintain. Beyond that number, strange things begin to happen, like the invention of the concepts of monarchy and republics and so on. A guy named Dunbar came up with ~150 as that limit, aka Dunbar's Number.

 

Dunbar's Number might explain what takes a pretty long read to explain, e.g. almost all of our sociopolitical problems. The following link ties it all together. it's on par with reading a book online, but IMO is absolutely worth it: https://waitbutwhy.c...tory-of-us.html

 

I've posted about that amazing piece of work before but I don't think anyone ever checked it out, or stuck with it long enough to get to the mind-blowing stuff. It's long, and seems almost condescendingly simplistic at first, but it quickly builds beyond the basics and gets into some really, really interesting insights. It connected some major dots and changed how I think about the world (and myself) fairly recently, and not many things do that anymore.

 

It did not, however, change my suspicion that we're ultimately just a bunch of apes who are in way over our heads and are now ruled by industrial inertia as much (or more) as by self-serving, sociopathic humans.

 

It's going to get weird when we finally reach the tipping point and the majority of the human race can no longer pretend that there's any kind of fix possible to avert what we're collectively facing. I fully expect to live to see it.

 

To sort of get back on topic, Twitter is somehow exploiting this quirk of our nature in ways that I can sense intuitively but not articulate very well yet. Work in progress.

[shiftingshadows]

Generally agree, and hope you are right about China.

 

1) As regards violence / aggression Richard Wrangham, differentiates between reactive & proactive as regards violence / aggression from his study of primates, and man, etc. He is a good speaker, & lived in Africa studying primates, many good talks by him here:

 

https://www.youtube....hard Wrangham, 

 

2) I too felt Dunbar changed my thinking a decade or so ago.

more recently Mark W. Moffett, challenges this in his book, he is also on Youtube

I am not sure his arguments are entirely correct.

Just as human metabolism has not evolved to thrive on processed & junk food, although it can 'get by for a while' on it,

just so although we can get by in large anonymous societies (unlike chimps, etc., but like ants according to Moffett) it could be that we are doing so at our peril, as Dunbar's argument implies.

 

a written summary of Moffett is here:

 

https://blog.12min.c...rm-pdf-summary/

 

& utube talks here

 

https://www.youtube....tt, human swarm

 

and book

 

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall Hardcover – April 16, 2019

by Mark W. Moffett (Author)

 

here

 

https://www.amazon.c...&s=books&sr=1-1

Edited by shiftingshadows, 20 December 2021 - 12:25 AM.

[shiftingshadows]

I followed your link to:

The Story of Us: Intro, August 26, 2019 By Tim Urban

It says nothing about Dunbar. Does it tie him into the story eventually? Or it just a general sort of anthropology?

[TVCasualty]

 

I followed your link to:

The Story of Us: Intro, August 26, 2019 By Tim Urban

It says nothing about Dunbar. Does it tie him into the story eventually? Or it just a general sort of anthropology?

 

 

Dunbar's Number and The Story of Us are dots we have to connect ourselves.

[shiftingshadows]

Thanks TV

I emailed Prof Richard Wrangham, re: Dundar's #, & got a reply:

I quote one sentence: "Briefly - I see it as utterly unscientific to choose a single ("Dunbar's") number from graphs that relate "group size" to some measure of brain size." etc.

and he referred me to this article:

 

link here:

 

www.lindenfors.se/publications/Lindenfors_et_al_2021.pdf

 

a search for the article also yielded this:

 

https://duckduckgo.c...021&t=h_&ia=web

 

I have not had time to read Lindenfors yet, but it seems that 'Dunbar's Number' is an idea I found attractive, at one time, that may not bear closer scrutiny.

Edited by shiftingshadows, 20 December 2021 - 05:18 PM.

[FLASHINGROOSTER]

I always thought it was insane that China was literally building cities with nobody living in them. How long could this last I wondered. The official story was the people would come. If we build it they..... as shit