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Cake day: January 24th, 2024

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  • A lot of people don’t seem to remember Alex Jones getting banned from YouTube in 2018. While rightwing, ultra-MAGA’s were already a thing, they were relatively small compared today. Alex Jones was the first high profile ban from social media and it was like tossing gasoline onto a small bush fire.

    You have to remember that Trump did not win the first time because he had an army of fanatics. A lot of other factors were at play; from people still upset about the DNC’s snubbing of Bernie, to people who weren’t fully paying attention (remember, politics used to be boring), to people who voted for Trump simply “for the lols” (don’t discount this last group, any historical account that doesn’t factor in how important internet memes were to getting that man elected is being willfully ignorant) . Die-hard MAGA’s were relatively rare, and usually a source of ridicule.

    Until their spokespeople started getting banned from places. It seems so small by today’s standards. People get banned and deplatformed all the time. But Alex Jones was the first real incident, and people saw it as a massive attack on free speech. To his relatively small number of followers, the man had his free speech rights violated by the left-wing news cabal for daring to speak the TRUTH™. Suddenly, all their bullshit was justified.

    I’ve always been pretty far-left but I got a deep chill when that happened. I remember remarking to my friends that banning political speech, no matter how full of shit, would only cause problems in the long run, and so it has. Precedent was broken, and the right took it as a declaration of war. I truly believe things would not have gotten nearly as insane as they are had Google not decided to ban him. He deserved it, but they opened a door that couldn’t be shut again; and following this was a couple years of high-profile bans of rightwing figureheads and safe-spaces, all cumulating to the shut down of /r/theDonald in 2020. And the infection, which had been contained to a few small corners of the internet, suddenly exploded.




  • I’m not sure it was a lie, it’s the kind of thing that’s so minor it’s easy for someone on the marketing team to just not know about.

    It’s like if a snack company put out a message saying they used no animal products and then later found out that a derivative of beeswax was used to lubricate some of the mechanisms in their packing machine.

    If you want to be absolutely inflexible and refuse to allow any exceptions to the rules, no matter the circumstances, that’s fine. But you’ve gotta recognize the irony in that line of reasoning being more machine-like than human.







  • To play devil’s advocate, an issue arises when there AREN’T more verifiable sources. If someone makes an outlandish claim like “Billy Joel used to wash his ass with crisco” and cites a dubious interview, it’s hard to find a source that definitively states Billy Joel DIDN’T wash his ass with crisco. Even worse, is if there was an actual, verified instance of one time where Billy Joel washed his ass with crisco. That may have been the only time he ever did it, and it may have been done as a joke or something like that, but now we have an interview saying he did it regularly, and an example of when he did. Now it’s a lot harder to disprove.

    I feel gross defending Republican talking points, now I need to go take a shower. Maybe wash my ass with crisco.







  • There is a solution, but y’all aren’t going to like it.

    The solution is blockchain. Actually, it’s even worse, the solution is NFT’s.

    Not the scammy, crypto bro, nonsense it has been used for; but the actual technology.

    A cryptographically secure digital token that can track where something was made, where it’s being used, who has the rights to it, and ensures that it’s authentic and not some copy made with AI.

    Unfortunately, thanks to crypto bros, the technology has become so tainted by scams that most people get upset just hearing the letters NFT, so adoption isn’t likely.