Which is hilarious, as the eponymous Culture is the epitome of luxury gay space anarchism. Pan-sexual, non-monogamous space hippies that can (and do) change their biological sex just by thinking about it. People so past the idea of “gender” that they consider giving any serious weight to the concept barbaric.
I know it’s a rhetorical question: but is Elon stupid or something?
One theory about how the whole Roswell UFO/aliens thing as government gaslighting.
This stuff happened during the height of the cold war when the Soviet Union was 100% looking for anything they could get on the USA’s secret programs. It’s easy to poison a source of actual intel if you send a few guys in suits and sunglasses to ask vague, leading questions to steer them towards “little green men.”
I just use my kindle as intended: using Calibre’s “email” button to load 100% legally obtained books via it’s [email protected] address.
IDGAF. If they start yanking books off my device I’ll put it in airplane mode.
They almost certainly have in house legal teams and those lawyers are salaried.
I agree that there’s a lot of direct trolling online, but I wouldn’t discount the number of “useful idiots”.
Remember Q-anon? The core of that entire “movement” was a handful of people on an obscure website steering discourse and pumping out conspiracy theories to a few hundred dedicated direct followers. That audience served as both a testbed for ideas and a free “localization service” – they’d take an unpolished core idea and through discourse transform it into something marketable for wider consumption. Said followers obscure the source of the messaging, amplify it, spread it to traditional social media / the real world, “fight” dissidents, etc.
Those “useful idiots” are a fundamental part of an efficient, cost effective, and successful disinformation campaign.
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Yeah, the majority of them aren’t “bots”. It’s mostly people acting as useful idiots, parroting talking points put forth by Kremlin backed trolls. The shit reeks of 2018’s totally organic “Walk Away” movement – the arguments and slogans practically rhyme.
I don’t like the “bots” thing either since it’s inaccurate to what’s actually going on, but at the same time I don’t know a concise way to call out pretty obvious Russian state backed AstroTurfing.
$50 says Putin demanded an audit of their military from top to bottom several weeks into the invasion of Ukraine, and he was very upset to learn the true state of their nuclear capabilities.
“Appear strong where you are weak” is 90% of Putin’s MO.
They are used for planes. The problem is the usable ones are stupidly expensive and/or classified millitary hardware.
Not really.
“We don’t have anything definitive and we can only speculate, which we’re not going to do.”
Targeting a smaller, receptive audience is actually better than going after larger and more diverse ones. With the later you’re more likely to get called out for your bullshit.
The former is more likely to listen, and a small echo-chamber will eliminate dissidents. That relatively small core group will gladly modify the message to better appeal to the local/culture they belong to, and spread it wide-and-far while obscuring the original source.
It’s a highly effective strategy: look at Qanon. It started on 8chan of all places, with a tiny userbase behind it.
Not a bad idea, but you’d be relying on the IDF and Hamas not to fuck it up. The odds of a fuck-up increases exponentially with every idiot you add to a situation.
Right? Raw shock value is only useful when something isn’t well known. Everyone knows about climate change and has a position.
Great, use “shock value”: but make a worthwhile statement with it too. The goal is to force people to confront an issue, not effortlessly write it off as a childish tantrum and ignore it.
It’s a dumb action, and this is from someone that supports direct action. How people are talking about an action is critical: the context matters.
The first thing people are going to ask is “why did you do this?” and the answer needs to make sense. Throwing soup on an oil exec, painting their office, etc – something sparks a conversation in a way you can exploit to further the cause.
“Vandalizing” a famous piece of art not even tangentially related to your cause is just going to make people think you’re an asshole and shuts down that potential for a productive discussion.
I know I’m late to the party, but my go-to refutation is “Ok, name one school that’s doing that. Go ahead and look it up on your phone.”
Then point out if a single school actually did have litter boxes for the kids the name of the school and everyone involved would be easy to find. It’s not something that could be kept secret: just one person has to say something – a kid talking to their relative, faculty, a parent, etc. Once that happened FOX, OANN, etc would be on that like flies on shit … and they would name and shame.
But they aren’t, because it’s bullshit.
If I worked for animal control and some dipshit school administer asked be to come collect a human child from their school, they would receive the following with the minimum amount of tact needed to keep my job:
I’d like to think most of the people actually employed as animal control officers would respond the same way.
I wouldn’t want to live close to a dispensary, there’s almost always a “stench”.
I pass by dispensarys all the time and never notice a smell. The only places that smell are those that allow smoking on premise – which with our state’s indoor smoking laws are very rare.
It’s no different than tobacco, really.
Because they believe in many of the same “traditional values” as nazis – they’re natural allies.
Of course those dipshits don’t realize the nazis only want their help now because they’re desperate for numbers. As soon as the nazis no longer need their help they’re getting their own “Night of the Long Knives”.
Don’t forget that starship launch last year. The dumbass blew up a rocket and launched giant chunks of concrete onto people’s property because he’s a impatient child.