Technically true, though far less dense than a funnel cake.
edit:
One of the things I like best about posts from Armando is that they frequently evoke strong feeling in me. Today that feeling is nausea.
Oui, pate au choux puffs up when you cook it, so it is indeed lighter. But less crunchy, and no face-hole-nest.
Correct – for a single reply, directly under the post, this reply metadata is suppressed on the post. However you WILL get a special notification if someone replies directly to you. If you did not get one of those, they were not talking to you.
Make sure the topics are not set to “watching”, with the exclamation point. That is hardcore mode. Unless you reeallllllyyy love a particular topic, I don’t recommend hardcore mode.
Interestingly, science says the main (and perhaps only) thing that actually gets people to change their voting behavior is… face to face door interactions aka canvassing! But I just now found this competing article which says nothing works so 🤷♂️
That might actually be an improvement, though? There’s less political posturing and posting partisan / snopes bullcrap on instagram… I hope? Doesn’t instagram fit the following use case better?
Essentially Instagram could offer less news and less yelling about the news, more “what is person X actually doing right now that’s pinteresting?”
Yes, I set BSG to watching, and nothing else because otherwise ohmygodthenotificationsneverend
Brexit wasn’t going to pass until Cambridge Analytical did their scraping and targeted ads then got a whopping 10-20% clickthru AND subsequent action from those clicks on ads. Republican campaign had 7-10% I think?
Those ads were targeted not at Republicans but more at undecided and opposition. Think about what that entails. A 7% swing back to Democracy in the general election… And of course Brexit passed by the slimmest of margins. The British parliament is also asking questions about CA and Russian interference in the Czech elections as there’s interference there as well.
At any rate, take away Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and we don’t have trump, Great Britain is still part of the EU, NATO is stronger than ever, and Russia is embarrassed as Putin becomes castrated as the West repels his advances. Instead we’ve had the opposite. If not for Putin getting so overconfident and cocky, he’d still be laughing at us all as he fine-tunes his plans to absorb Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Eastern Ukraine.
Those are pretty massive claims.
If true, Putin has been manipulating the two most powerful democracies on the planet. I’m not sure what reasons the founding fathers laid out for reasons for war but this feels like it. We need to be in control of our own destinies, not be manipulated by outside forces.
Even if our electorate is dumb enough to believe the propaganda, it still doesn’t give a foreign power the leeway to manipulate the system. If Facebook is complicit in this and has no way to stop it or identify it … Well… The government can revoke corporate charters.
I dunno if you can really go to war simply because a foreign power exploits the stupidity of your population.
I mean, you can go to war for whatever reason you want, but that war would likely go baddly, since the hostile nation could continue to manipulate your population during the war effort.
You don’t start a war that will cost millions of people their lives because you found a voting block that is easily manipulated with advertising. A foreign country buying a bunch of ads to influence an election… it probably does hit a few a laws since it’s paying for political ads without revealing who is paying for it but the entire tech scene didn’t seem to care enough to even think about handling that. It’s not even hacking. It’s just more upfront than the backroom deals imagine happen all the time. If there’s going to be regulation, it should be in this area. They should have to verify their advertisers… even the bullshit political ads on TV, which I rarely say anymore without TV, has small print guiding to the source.
Well the whole world needs to come down hard on Russia and call for Putin’s resignation and political exile. This scumbag needs to go. And that threat needs to be backed up by the combined military of the whole world.
You can’t really issue a threat like that if you are not willing to back it up. I don’t think anyone wants to see outright war with Russia. It would be catastrophic.
What hurts Russia is taking their money. Problem is Europe is dependent on Russian natural gas which is what primarily fuels their economy. Europe needs to get on a crash course mission to ween themselves off Russian fuel. That’s easier said than done however.
Do any of the social platform have membership privacy tiers? Ie this is free but we sell your soul to the bad men, or pay $99 a year for anonysoul service.
You’re funny. If political meddling is all it takes to declare all-out war, America would be a smoking hole in the ground by now. So would a lot of other places, I guess. Anyway, how many “destinies” has the US manipulated do you think?
We typically send arms to aid the enemies of our enemies who are already fighting. Plenty of peoples and groups have declared de facto war on the US for that. ISIS, Al Q, various cartels, etc. We also financially and diplomatically support people who take power and do terrible things like Pinoche, by legitimizting their claim of rule. We’ve also straight taken over countries that surrendered to us after total war and installed the government we like (Japan and arguably the Taliban).
But we’ve directly tried to manipulate the elections of foreign countries on the sly? When did that happen? Toward what end?
Russia sought to straight up weaken us. It appears cold war never ended. Let’s get rid of Putin so we can have some kind of normal relationship with Russia. He dooming Russia and is going to make them very desperate.
The history of Latin America proves this though. Our actions in Panamanian elections, in particular, show disregard for sovreign determination.
Maybe not so overtly today, but the long history from the 1800’s through the Cold War? Yeah.
Are you referring to this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/05/11/panama-invalidates-election/8e10adc9-8e56-4109-b9e3-1bf9997aec64/?utm_term=.6881a8978af6
Noriega and his goons (he’s in Federal prison now) invlaidated the election because he lost and claimed nebulous “outside influence”. Then he attacked his rivals and slaughtered a bunch.
I think we have pretty clear moral superiority there. I didn’t see Clinton ordering execution squads against the Republicans.
We knocked over a ton of governments we didn’t like and it was insanely shitty. US influence lead to the Guatemalan Civil War that killed tens of thousands and left the country in the dirt even to this day. The US has no real moral superiority here.
That doesn’t make what Russia did good or mean that I approve of it or think we should accept it, but the US has done some super shady shit and killed a lot of innocent people over the decades and really can’t cast stones guilt free.
Just in terms of election tampering:
(The CIA has done so many amazingly shady things that I knew there was no way they hadn’t also tried to fuck with foreign elections, but I wanted to wait until I got home so I could back that up.)
So Craig, Armando, malkav: I’m curious. Your argument seems to be “if we have done a thing in the past we have no right to act, and look like hipocrates even complaining”. Is that correct? Because we did drop a nuclear bomb on someone. I’m curious where you guys draw this line.
My position is that each action stands on its own, in its own time and circumstances.