I had been using YouTube for years without being presented rightwing propaganda in my suggestions. I mostly just watched strategy gaming, history, technology channels and some peculiar travelling blogs. And my suggested was just mostly those things.

Then one day I used my YouTube account to cast kid shows for my niece for the first time. After that I was suggested more kid shows which didn’t interest me personally, but I also started getting suggested cat videos, which I obviously clicked. And the week after that half my suggested feed was rightwing misogynist/racist/culture war misinformation, and it took a lot of “do not recommend channel” to clean it up again.

So now I believe that there is a concerted effort by some malicious actors to train Google’s algorithm to assume that if someone is interested in cat videos, that they would then also be open to becoming a misogynist racist prick.

I remember from an older article that it’s a very small college and the new republican dean/president/chairman (I forgot what he was) is being paid $ 700 000 per year, about $1000 per student. I’m certain that he isn’t the only person making bank from this. It seems to be a grift to funnel tax money into the pockets of friends and sycophants, and while the college board tries to make itself relevant in the eyes of their maga public, the future of the students appears to not be a consideration, because they’re not the ones paying for this circus.

Apparently fighting the republican culture war is very profitable for republican grifters.

According to the headline it’s 20% of those who voted for the mayor, not 20% of the population. So fe a drop from 60% to 48% voter participation.

If a system encourages people to not vote when they have no clue who they are voting for, then that might be considered a feature instead of an issue. Though one problem I can think off is that coaching of voters on how to vote becomes even more effective. I’m on the fence on this one.

Ps: is a 20% drop enough to say that something “cratered” or is this just another superlative clickbait title?

True, headlines matter.

Why “no”? You’re basically saying the same as the summary.

And she also had noone using millions of dollars to bribe voters to go vote, but only voters of a specific flavor. Somehow that was deemed legal, the usa has basically become a banana republic.

They don’t have to prove that someone is not a qualified elector to disenfranchise them, throwing up barriers to make it very hard / impossible to vote is enough. In the past the federal government could intervene if something like that happened, but that’s not really possible anymore thanks to the current scotus, so it’s up to the states.

And this state is now laying the legal groundwork: If “every” persons with xxx qualifications has the right the vote by law and new measures get implemented that make it practically impossible to vote for certain people that fit those qualifications, then those people had a right withheld from them.

If “only” persons with xxx qualifications have the right to vote by law and new measures get implemented that make it impossible to vote for certain people that fit those qualifications, then … nothing. That’s the difference between “every” and “only”. Changing the wording to “only” allows the state to legally pile on extra requirements and barriers.

Examples of groups of people that I’ve seen disenfranchised by state actions: Prisoners, felons who have done their time, college students, minorities, inner city people, military abroad. Some of these news articles will have been attempts that were not (yet) successful.

I haven’t read the full wiki article, but I expect those examples to be in here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States

Unfortunately SCOTUS gutted the power of the federal government to enforce those guarantees based on the old provisions + republicans filibustered the democrat bill that was meant to address that. It’s as if the republicans have a plan.

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-does-the-constitution-say-about-the-right-to-vote/

“The ability of the federal government to protect voting rights, particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, has been jeopardized both by recent Supreme Court rulings and the failure of Congress to enact new voting rights legislation.”

“With the federal government and the Supreme Court unlikely to protect voting rights in a substantial way in the near future, it’s up to the states to take action to protect voting.”

And now there’s a state changing the law so that they can more easily disenfranchise voters of their chosing. Imo this is no coincidence.

I’ve got the impression that Tucker Carlson is going after Alex Jones his audience. Tucker Carlson peddling crazy conspiracy theories right when the chickens are coming home to roost for Alex Jones, imo that’s no coincidence. Tucker never was stupid, he just has no morals, so he never had a problem with publicly stating stuff that he personally didn’t believe in. Grifters gonna grift.

Al Gore had already made climate change a political topic in 1981. He also had a major part in the roll out the early internet. The guy was a visionary and way ahead of his time in so many ways. Thinking about what could have been, hurts indeed.

Here’s actual statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303450/bilateral-aid-to-ukraine-in-a-percent-of-donor-gdp/

Apparently Denmark is leading the pack with 1.83%, closely followed by the 3 Baltic countries. Poland is 7th with 0.68%. The usa is “only” at 0.35%, which is still by far the most of any of the non european nations that have send help, and also significantly more than a bunch of eu nations.

This is all aid, so weapons, humanitarian and financial. With the different kinds split out: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303432/total-bilateral-aid-to-ukraine/

Is this from Spain?

It sounds like what they are doing is clearly illegal and you probably could do a lot of people a favor by complaining to the authorities.

Generally for the eu: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2017-003934-ASW_EN.html “If users receive unsolicited communications after having withdrawn consent, they can file a complaint with the national regulatory authority. In addition, they have the right to a judicial remedy before national courts.”

The responsible agency for Spain: https://www.aepd.es/

Trump is happening because far right republicans realized after Watergate that if they wanted to get away with crimes in the future, that they needed to have news that presents “alternate” facts that are favorable to their narrative or that would at the least muddy the waters. Roger Ailes his plan worked basically.

Without censoring his appearances, Trump comes across as petulant/weak/selfish/stupid/hateful/… Without censoring his history, republican voters would have known that he was a serial scam artist, serial adulterer, … Basically without that alternate fact media supporting rightwing skullduggery, there would never have been a president Trump.

Imo it’s nonsense to claim that Trump getting elected, is happening because voters are angry because of mysterious reasons that no one can figure out, when those voters are so misinformed that they consistently vote against their own interests and believe stupid conspiracy theories that are being pushed to rile them up against the “other”. As long as that many people live in an alternate reality based on lies and hate, there is no helping them. So the challenge becomes: how do you bring them out of it and how do you prevent it from happening again in the future.

Maybe it’s because it was in the same language group as those others that polish got singled out. People who speak an Indo European language will expect to be lost when first trying to learn a language outside of the group, but might not expect to be so confuddled from a related language. Expectations basically.

The consequences of prolife politicians and their voters: “This corresponds with a 7% absolute increase in infant mortality overall ( ≈ 247 excess deaths; 95% CI, 73-421) and 10% in infant mortality with congenital anomalies ( ≈ 204 excess deaths; 95% CI, 60-348) in relevant months after Dobbs.”.

The excess deaths are still ongoing probably and i’m interested in extrapolating it to a per year statistic, but I can’t make out over how many months this data was, that part of the article reads like a convoluted mess for me and I have no desire to decipher it.

French people do eat apple beignets, which are basically fried apples.

If you’ve never had one before, apple beignets are easy to make and delicious, plenty of recipes around.

That’s obviously what they meant. There was probably some translation error. Just cut people some slack, everyone makes small mistakes from time to time. There’s a few (atleast 2) languages where the native word for billion starts with an m and the word for trillion starts with a b.

In the next paragraph: “by the time of the Daubert hearing, the printer that Cybercheck had identified in its report couldn’t be located.”. I suspect there never was a printer. If asked leading questions by the investigators, then the company probably fabricates evidence that corroborates the suspicions of the investigators. And the quality of fabricated evidence is probably poor because of how cheap they are. Quality takes time and skill, and skilled time costs money.

Parallel construction requires real evidence though. This company just seems to fabricate evidence to confirm police hypothesises. I think what happens is: Police ask “was this person there at that time on that day”, the company conjures up a report that the person’s mystical digital profile pinged a wireless printer at that place at roughly the right time, but also at a second other time for a tiny bit of credibility (but by only changing the date of the timestamp, which actually makes it more suspect). People go search for that printer, and then there never was a printer.

And given that the only thing that external parties saw, was less than a 1000 lines of code for automatic searches and none for interpretation, it might not even be automated, but just a human pasting together reports. A human pretending to be ai.

I’d call it outsourced fabrication of evidence.