“status quo”

Compare how and why people cheer for sports teams. If you’re affiliated you will support any statement in favor of the team, while ignoring, suppressing, or attacking any statements to the contrary.

You won’t debate a Trump troll out of supporting Trump, because it’s about belonging to a group and showing loyalty regardless of facts. Honestly I’m not surprised he’s doing so well, consider how techy most of us are and still get overwhelmed by what the Internet is shaping up to be. If you’re in your 50’s from a poor rural area, what chance have you got to stand against weaponized online propaganda?

We are all like this, by the way. The inclination to blind affiliation with groups is the result of very deep, very old, very well studied cognitive structures and behaviors.

Here’s some introductory reading that might fundamentally change how you perceive people’s participation in groups:

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/sociology/conformity
Sherif’s autokinetic experiment - if enough people around you believe something, you’ll soon believe it too

https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
A similar experiment performed by Solomon Asch

https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html
The Robber’s Cave experiment - arbitrarily divide a group into two, and watch the inevitable descent into inter-group conflict (hopeful note: if you make the groups try to overcome a common obstacle, fighting goes away)

Leon Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Tests - This is an interesting one as well, here’s the idea:

Experiment: Infiltrating a doomsday cult before, during, and after the date of their supposed apocalypse, Festinger and his fellow scientists noted that instead of losing faith, members doubled-down on their beliefs after the ‘end times’ came and went — eventually believing that their work saved the world.

Conclusion: When we have two (or more) incompatible thoughts, we adjust them to minimize internal conflict, what Festinger called ‘cognitive dissonance’ — a term that explains the mind state of those unwilling to accept information that conflicts against their belief.

“The Greeks were a bunch of woke gays anyway, good riddance” is what a Republican might say if they knew the Greeks invented democracy.

The concept of AI weaponized mass propaganda on social media makes it less mysterious.

The US doesn’t like the idea of taking responsibility for its actions ever.

Nothing is anything, did people forget that these are all completely nonsense words with no connection to reality? No matter how scientific and very legal very cool semantic concepts you come up with it won’t change reality one fucking bit. Non binary… Nobody gives a FUCK, it has no correlation with ANYTHING in the Universe, it’s just another shit pseudophilosophical concept being shoved down everyone’s throat like it’s some kind of objective reality.

It’s metaphysics, and “you people” (yes, YOU PEOPLE) suck at it.

The shit you find in your belly hole while navel gazing is not worth shit.

Sounds like you’re simplifying the issue just as much as they do.

In fact words all those words are a bunch of gibberish and neither the world nor reality works like that. I can just question the vague and often circular premises of that argument and we’re back to square zero.

Not against the sentiment, but you’re never going to get anywhere with that pseudoacademic bullshit.

Edit: hahaha just keep proving my point. You’re the same as them- dogmatic fanatics with no arguments that hold up for shit.

Call it whatever you like, it’s a pretty damn powerful tool.

Let’s start with this and then we’ll do those in order.

What about this, if you buy a product, you no longer have to watch their ads. Anywhere.

I have one word for you:

Service Level Agreement.

I found se7en.

Man I thought I added that information, I intended to, obviously.

But either case, I’m not taking any chances. I’d never click a mail link regardless, I’d go straight to the address in another browser session to examine what’s going on.

My solid guess right now is actual hacker attempt, because they’ve been trying to log in every 6 hours or so for a day or two. I use solid passwords for everything, so hopedy hope. Not that I know what the fuck they’d use my twitter account for.

Of course it’s not!

Look at it like they are saying:

“Hi! Your account may be hacked. To mitigate it, you need to log in.”

I didn’t even know I had a Twitter account, and so 2FA certainly not. So as a person who never uses Twitter, to get a mail like this is a conundrum. Better log in and change that password or whatever, right? So suddenly someone who never used twitter, or apparently did sign up once some long time ago, is logging in for the first time in ages.

Corporate: “See, users are coming back to our platform!”

Then again, it could be a phishing attempt, too, but either case is un-good. Someone tried to log in multiple times over 6 hour intervals and over 2 days, so obv hacker, but still.

That sounds like a great idea, in that case, but I know 0 about HTML, I just make systems run. Where do we go to suggest something like it? Lemmy is a whole new thing for me so…

Si señor?

This is the EU slowly doing what it can.

“Kill cancer already”? Ok, for that we need to do testing and advanced chemistry for a long time. This IS how you get rid of it, there is no other way.

This is one battle in the long war, my friend. If you want to kill them, these kinds of steps are absolutely essential. You can’t just go back in time and snipe Hitler, you have to fight on the beaches, on the fields and in the streets, and you must never surrender.

De-googling is not a simple task, it takes actual man-hours of proper work to be done, especially when we’re talking decades of accounts et c. Even when and if that gets done, what are you going to do about Android? And even if you sort that out, there are a hundred other digital ware that would need the same treatment.

At some point the task becomes insurmountable, it seems, not to mention you already need to have a solid technical background to have a chance of pulling it off.

I would love some suggestions if you have them, but frankly I am getting too old for this shit, I’ve fought it all my life but I’m just the one person and my time is limited you know what I’m sayin.