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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • How about: Popularizing the idea of the wall in the first place, going mask-off calling illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists”, the “Muslim Ban” on air travel, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, employing white nationalists as staffers, packing the supreme court with extreme conservative justices, giving permanent tax cuts to the rich, expanding the presence of immigrant concentration camps, cozying up to foreign dictators, stating he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler’s behind closed doors when his own generals refused to nuke North Korea and blame it on someone else, egging on a far-right insurrection attempt, directly pursuing strikes and assassination attempts against middle-Eastern military generals and diplomats, ending the Iran nuclear deal, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, calling Covid the “China virus”, spreading vaccine disinformation until one was developed before the end of his term, trying to start a trade war with China, discrediting his chief medical advisor on factual statements about Covid, saying Black Lives Matter protestors were “burning down cities”, wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, declaring “far left radical lunatics” part of his “enemy from within”, being an avowed friend of Epstein, sexually assaulting over a dozen women and underage girls, being a generally abusive sleazebag, also funding a genocide (Israel has always been ethnically displacing Palestinians), also building the wall, also not implementing healthcare reform (and being against what we have), also not protecting abortion rights (+ setting up the conditions that led to their erosion; see supreme court point above), and also denigrating anti-genocide protestors (but not as harshly since he wasn’t the one in charge when it happened).

    I guess he’s not a cop though, so there’s that.

    (minor edits made for grammar/spelling)





  • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzEat lead
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    16 days ago

    I always found it funny how they’ll sometimes try to justify their claims scientifically to give it an air of legitimacy. If god created the stars close to one another and expanded them to fill the sky over a single day, the skies would be dark for billions of years. A YEC could easily say “oh well god put the light there to make the stars look like they’ve been in the sky for a long time” but very often they just don’t have an answer because they didn’t think of one. Unfortunately, there’s almost that will stop them from doubling down on their beliefs and just becoming more prepared for the next person they talk to




  • Without scarcity, artificial or not, the ruling class loses their grip on power. Capital will manufacture scarcity to whatever degree it is capable of, because without it there’s even less justification for owners to exist at the top of this neat little hierarchy they desperately cling to. They need to have their gated fortresses and their toys, cleanly separated from the rest of us undesirables.

    They’ll use AI to bolster the security of their bunkers while drying up the rivers to run them. The whole while, they’ll blame any economic decline on the claim that “nobody wants to work anymore” after having automated all the jobs and offering no replacements.

    I’d like to believe an alternative is possible. Perhaps we can come together and push for a better future, but that doesn’t seem to be the way things are going currently.



  • Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

    The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.








  • I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

    It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

    Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.