The Decline and Fall

I understand the problems, "brain rot", whatever but- A government banning a social media app that opened the world for many people is legitimately scary and upsetting. Say what you want but, there are MANY global and local issues that would not have gotten the same traction, recognition, and outreach without TikTok.

Tying these concerns to a specific actor, instead of to the system at large, will do absolutely nothing, unless the case against TikTok can be levied against other companies perpetuating the same bad behavior.

And yes, masks mess with facial recognition. Filters to make you look like XYZ train the recognition models. 'which celebrity do you look like' trains the model.

There’s a lot of emphasis in leftist circles on like, “don’t be sad if your kid is gay or trans or autistic,” and… I honestly think it’s kind of wrongheaded?

Like don’t get it twisted! I I absolutely don’t think you should SAY TO your kid “you should be normal” because that will just upset them for no gain.

But if you had a vision of what the good life is supposed to be and it became clear your life isn’t that, including your life “as a parent” which EVERYONE HAS A MENTAL IMAGEABOUT grief is… predictable! Maybe even understandable.

My mom once told me someone had come to her for advice on how to accept their kid who’d just come out as gay.

They knew they SHOULD accept their kid and had no interest in harming their kid by rejecting them, but they’d always thought that was Wrong. They weren’t sure what to do with those feelings but couldn’t seem to just will them away.

They had to be helped to see things differently, which started with acknowledging “these are the feelings I currently have, which exist in spite of me wishing they didn’t.”

There’s a LOT in leftism, especially online leftism, where people who’ve rejected their bad views or feelings brag about it rather than acknowledge “I felt this way, and my reasons were crappy but understandable.”

Said it before will say it again but I thought for several years that accepting asexual people as queer would fundamentally alter gay culture in ways that would disconnect us from our history.

I was wrong, I’m glad I was wrong, and I feel very stupid for ever thinking it.

But fears of cultural shift, of losing traditions and associated spaces, are common, not rare. And they’re not always wrongheaded. It depends on things like what the traditions are and how the new people feel about helping preserve them.

Often, pseudoscience and misinformation comes packaged with a lot of very important sounding words, and the jargon gets to the point where it seems like a lot of work to fact check it. Which makes the 'I encourage you to do your own research' statements real obnoxious. If it's phrased in a way that's impossible to navigate, good luck.

It sucks, but you gotta.

If you don't want to fact check individual words, that's fine. That's a lot to ask of someone that's just trying to figure out whether something is true.

This is where we get into something called 'lateral research.' Instead of trying to draw a map to a sentence, you check the credibility of their source material.

This is your Snopes, your Fact Check/Media Bias, your Follow The Money.

Knowing more context about what someone is saying will save you a lot of time and energy.

Practice SIFT! SIFT is based on lateral research and can be very helpful for these situations.

DON'T just share information without doing your due diligence.

i have found this post and infographic and i want to share it

INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE

zetabrarian's blog says they are a socially progressive librarian monsterfucker, which a quick scroll through their blog seems to support. This makes them pretty cool but not necessarily the perfect source -- anyone can say they are a librarian, and surely not every librarian is correct about processing information

FIND BETTER COVERAGE

if i go to a search engine (in this case google via firefox) i see that several universities, libraries from large municipalities (like Los Angeles) as well as the BBC all agree that this is a real method experts in information fields recommend. I wouldn't necessarily take any single one of these sources as 100% credible, but they are individually reasonably reliable, and taken together indicate a high probability of factual information

TRACE TO ORIGINAL CONTEXT

A brief search reveals that the SIFT method was created by Mike Caulfield, who is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. This is an extremely good source of information for how to process information on the internet. As the creator of the SIFT method, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops.

I could not find a post or page about SIFT written by Mike Caulfield himself, so i went to the University of Washington's website for this page about it, since that is the university that employs him.

It corroborates the above information, though there are a few notable differences. For example, under the "trace to original context" section in the Washington U. source (again, as close to the original as i could find) this step contains advice to check the date. This seems very good to include, as in the fast moving world of internet information, things become outdated or get updated very quickly, and yet first takes and outdated articles hang around and get shared for a long time.

EXTRA CREDIT

The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax. “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers. The Onion acquired the conspiracy theory platform’s website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; and video archive. The sale price was not immediately disclosed. The Onion said its “exclusive launch advertiser” will be the gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety. “Everytown will continue to raise awareness on InfoWars’ channels about gun violence prevention and present actual solutions to our nation’s gun violence crisis, including bipartisan, common-sense measures and public safety initiatives backed by Everytown,” The Onion said in a statement Thursday. Jones confirmed The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars in a social media video Thursday and said he planned to file legal challenges to stop it.

The man is an idiot who surrounds himself with smarter people. As long as he's alive, he can continue to say insane shit that slows down the smarter people who would otherwise be able to easily enact their evils. Trump will say sixteen contradicting things about a policy from project 2025 that have to be untangled.

Also: President Vance is not an improvement.