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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • That is a very interesting observation. The anthropologists Davids Graeber and Wengrow studied how human groups had been controlled by charismatic leadership going back into prehistory. These groups could become authoritarian dictatorships which wage wars against their neighbors, engage in slavery, and human sacrifice. Alternatively when they were egalitarian and controlled by democratic institutions they were the opposite. More peaceful and equal.




  • You are completely right. There’s an entire ecosystem of right wing propaganda channels out there but most people get their news from their friends. It’s the key phenomenon behind influencer culture. And that’s how most of the damage is done.

    If someone has one friend who is considered knowledgeable on current affairs and that one friend watches Fox, chances are that none of his associates will have an accurate understanding of any given topic. And that’s by design. The kind of tripe spread on fox news is inflammatory and salacious. The sort of noxious trash you’d share with friends in private conversation.

    I realize this is what TikTok and facebook maximize: The friend effect. People learn from their friends. The kind of lies spread by right wing networks is magnified by social media and Russian bot farms.






  • I appreciate your informed response but no system other than advertising-abstinence is fool proof.

    Im saying this as a supporter. My browser of choice is firefox and I send them money regularly. And I understand their need to generate more revenue. But there has never been a company who has sold customer data discretely. My understanding is that every piece of data that’s sold can be de anonymized when combined with other data sets. And the data is horsetraded until it gets into some very marginal actors’ hands.

    Mozilla’s need for money is largely driven by massive mismanagement. It should have been fully funded in perpetuity through establishing a foundation that operates off interest payments but they decided to try and build a headquarters in Mountainview. They also operate offices in some of the most expensive cities in the world. They have made expensive software aquisitions. These are not necessary and have only whetted mozilla’s thirst for other revenue sources. It’s guaranteed that they will look for more customer data to sell because that’s the path of least resistance.

    I wish them luck but I also wish they’d not chase advertising money.




  • Reskinned cultic Persian diety known as Mithras. Mithras was not related in any way to the Abrahamic god and it’s not known how the historical Jesus borrowed large elements from the Mithras legend other than plagiarism.

    El is the name of an abrahamic storm god believed to be God. He was once a member of a Canaanite (and probably before then) pantheon but its clerics overthrew the old order and installed El as the sole god. Hilariously the clerics didn’t remove all references to El’s divine wife, Asherah, from the bible and you can still see references to her even today. Although most references are to the symbols of Ashera and not the goddess.

    Religious scholars do backflips to try and explain why a pagan god exists in the bible and they can’t get around the most obvious answer that it’s a error and the name had been partially edited out of older versions of the bible.