I just looked at the Build Back Better bill for the first time. It's 2,135 pages. How many people actually read and understand such a thing before deciding whether it should be passed or not?
Just look at the summer of 2020. There were many many examples of protests that turned into riots. Some included federal buildings too. Dozens of people were killed and billions of dollars in damages. It's obvious partisanship to frame these events so differently.
It strikes me as environmental vandalism. Solar panels make sense on roofs, not so much on landscapes. Maybe the desert, but you have transmission loss and still have to deal with the large amount of toxic landfill they generate. Nuclear makes much more sense for anything approaching base load.
Bill Maher had a segment on this recently about progressives that don't acknowledge progress and are afraid of it in practice. A kind of willful blindness. Steven Pinker calls it Progressophobia.
Right, it's where the mob is and where the journalists and politicians are. They use and watch Twitter very closely and it informs what actions they take. Companies too.
I don't think the root problem is any one person, given that Twitter is even more destructive to society. It's the users, it's the incentives of the platforms, it's bad actors. There's low trust, a breakdown of institutions, a raging culture war. It's complicated.
As you know my patreon has declined from like $9k to under $1k because of the fucking idiots who embrace the ideology of, "If You Read It On the Internet, It Must Be True!" Ironically, this was the original slogan for the site, before I changed it to "The Internet Makes You Stupid." Both apply equally in this case.
Nobody seems aware that anybody can allege anything. Nobody seems to give a shit that I built and maintained this community for 22 years; one single allegation destroyed all that good will. One single allegetion destroyed my entire career, site, job, and creation. And don't even try to say "BUT LOWTAX WHUT ABOUT THESE OTHER THINGS IN YUR PAST HURRRRRR" because I've never been convicted or found guilty of doing shit. Ever. Period.
A bunch of kiwifarms people easily whipped those gullible idiots into a frenzy of self righteous outrage, and nobody from SA even gave it a second thought. I've always been honest and open with everybody my entire life, which is also why I get easily manipulated. I cannot speak in further length about certain things, so I'm trying to be as vague as possible. Look at the background of both parties involved, look at their history, look at what they've literally and legally done. Not been ACCUSED of doing, but actually DONE.
We have a court of law to determine if allegations are valid. Rushing to judgement by simply acting on an allegation, something that has, by nature, not been proven at all, is pure idiot toilet fuck shit.
This event really shows who my true allies and friends are, and who are the people that don't give a shit about the things I've actually DONE and CREATED in the past 22 years are. I'm going to capitalize the word done here one more time. DONE.
An ALLEGATION. For fuck's sake, at least wait for me to be found legally guilty of SOMETHING. Innocent until proven guilty, except on the internet where it's guilty and then still guilty and always guilty because people make up their minds once and can never change them ever no matter what. Outrage is the currency of the internet, and by god nobody will ever be wrong!
Anyway I'm making a plea for logic, if there is any logic remaining on the internet. Thank you to the six remaining patreon members left, and a huge fuck off to the SA outrage culture reactionists that were apparently just waiting for any excuse or reason, no matter how idiotic, to turn on me. Congrats, you're betting on the wrong horse.
And yes, I'm aware that by writing this I'm just going to lose more donors but whatever, I'm not and never have done anything just for cash. I just wanted to point out how the site I used to run is now populated by the hand wringing, outrage culture warriors we used to once make fun of.
"Great to see YouTube finally protecting creators like Pepsi and Gillette"
"This is the most offensively dishonest thing you've posted even for your standard. Dislike counts were essential to spot scams, fake/bad tutorials, clickbaits and were especially important as a tool to fight back against horrible megacorporation announcements."
"To protect creators that suck, like politicians, big corporations that sponsor us, and astroturfed talentless on demand era hacks, we're preventing you from seeing how unpopular they are."
“We want everyone to have a voice, unless those voices are valid criticism or go against our agenda.”
"No one wants this other than the corporations who are getting shamed for putting out awful content that the public dislike. You are removing a key protection people have from scamming, dangerous or misleading content and are protecting no one. Stop hiding behind 'small creators mental health' like you think you're doing anything. We can all still see how many dislikes our video got. Our mental health is not protected in any fashion. The only thing you change is the public facing, and we know why you did this."
"When I was 12, my videos were dislike bombed. Not many liked them. Sure, it hurt, but I matured since then. I matured, because I was able to respond to the negative feedback my content was receiving. If not it, I would be falsely convinced of my perceived non-existant greatness. Dislikes are key to personal and content growth."
> in eleven out of the twelve areas of concern that were studied (such as loneliness and eating issues), more teen-age girls said that Instagram helped rather than hurt.
That's a data point that seems to have gotten lost in most of the coverage. Although you might argue that data based on what teenagers report is dubious at best anyway.
It's an open and shut case of self defense between that testimony and a timestamped walkthrough of the event. Yet the media is still trying to spin it. Though there is at least one journalist who admitted they made a mistake, which was great to see. Ana Kasparian of the Young Turks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRPsXhErQA8