I can handle nonsense but please don’t call me a liberal.

Can you point to the part you want me to engage with? Half your comments are you fantasizing about me so I’m not sure what you’re even trying to tell me.

I didn’t need to put this into anything because the writing style tells me everything I need to know. Highly opinionated. Essays posing as news. Opinion underlaid with paper-thin “arguments”. It’s the same that was around during covid spreading misinformation about vaccines and masks. The disinformation itself is not the goal. The goal is to capitalize on people’s fear and isolate them. Make them easy to manipulate later on.

It’s not a new strategy either. Fear and hate have always been tools in the hands of the powerful. If you think the West has a monopoly on that, you’re sorely mistaken.

Fuck Westerm hegemony and capitalism, sure. But also fuck Putin. Fuck all oligarchs.

What the fuck are you even talking about? I’ve said nothing about Ukraine. Do you call everyone who disagrees with you a liberal? That is a rude insult to sling around in these parts.

Your post got rained in downvotes despite being posted on lemmy.ml. Clearly I’m not the only one who can tell this is trash

No, I mean the Naomi Klein that voices pro-palestinian opinions in the book. Here’s a highly israel-critical interview.

This is what I mean. Blind dogma and hatred will make you turn against those who should be your allies.

The difference between journalism and propaganda to you is whether a western source is saying it or a country which is no longer controlled by the western financial apparatus

What makes you think this?

I haven’t been trained to question, that’s true. I learned. You only learned to be scared apparently, and you’re currently in training to dismiss facts altogether. I suggest you drop out of that curriculum

Oh I do. But I want journalists to tell me about it, not propaganda outlets. This article is written to make me angry, not to emancipate or enlighten me. It wants to manipulate me.

If I may recommend a book, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. It’s about exactly the difference between

1. investigative journalists that do their due diligence to uncover actual conspiracies
2. conspiracy nutjobs that just believe and share every conspiracy they hear, and ironically, often end up serving oligarchs by doing so.

If anger becomes more important than truth, we become tools in the hands of the powerful. Choose truth

This is just right wing and conspiracy theorist bs. I’m not saying there is no censorship but this is misinformation designed to confuse people, sow distrust, and make them susceptible to more misinformation so they can be influenced politically.

This kind of shit really took off in 2020 and if you’re still falling for it, please take your life back in control. If we’re gonna criticize the West, let’s take a fact-based approach.

The genomes have likely been indexed to make finding results faster. Google doesn’t search the entire internet when you make a query :P

If somebody corrects you about gender, just say woops, correct yourself, and move on. It’s an honest mistake, a simple fix, and nobody should be offended. Especially online. If they are still offended, it’s because they want to be.

The ad revenue part is true but what do you mean by not harvesting data? Mastodon definitely stores your boosts and likes, it just doesn’t use that data to recommend more content. And the big difference is of course that it is stored on your instance’s server, not a centralized location.

That’s fair! Although I fear big money will always come up with some way to make a “better” UX, either simply because they can afford more/better devs, and often by compromising privacy, accessibility, etc.

embrace extend extinguish has worked in the past and it can work again

So it should be Plato not Socrates in the meme?

It’s centralized. They allow federation using their own protocol.

But all you need to know is that it’s a capitalist, for-profit undertaking.

it’s quite different in the sense that you don’t see any recommended content, just your follows and their boosts.

That mindset is the problem. A slightly better UX at the cost of freedom is a bad deal.

It’s the dilemma of any alternative space. People seeking alternatives don’t like the mainstream.

And with a bit of generalization, there’s two reasons not to like the mainstream:

1. The mainstream is too oppressive
2. The mainstream is not oppressive enough

that’s the one. As a kid I never understood why punishments even exist. People being mad at me was already unbearable torture

I have parents that love me to bits, but their strategy to get me to do my homework was… adversarial? It felt like they were checking my performance, just like the teachers were. It didn’t feel like they were on my side, even though I’m sure they were.

Getting told off even gently felt like an unbearable punishment for some reason. I read something recently about adhd folks being more sensitive to negative interactions?

And that’s how I became a pathological liar and master of masking!

you are a real linux user don’t let some neckbeard tell you otherwise :P