Anyanka Bunny Slayer
✨ Hail Hydra ✨
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- Dec 17, 2015
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- 13,814
We're heading towards the New World Order. Freedom of speech lessens everyday, social media is used to influence opinions...the world is a mess, and its only going to get worse.
I've got a theory...
- Thread starter November
- Start date
DeepBlueJoy
Lion Faced Kitteh
Stephen King does rock and we aren't losing population on the planet, it's just the rich world that is spending more time online and less time actually getting down to business with real men and women!
In my opinion the politics and social attitudes of the world... and most of the world sucks and it will continue to suck in one direction until we end up in a big nasty war or several moderately small nasty ones, and people get tired of this particular tack. Then the politics will do a 180 until that side gets malignant and overbearing... Humans get complacent and a handful always get extreme and most of us follow or pretend we can ignore. Some hater gets people excited and off they go on a tangent and since hate is the easiest way to get people excited, we always have ugly stuff happening.
ILLYRIAN
TriBel said he/she had 3 kids in 15 months but carelessly did not tell us if they were fried or boiled. Naughty person!
TheMaster666
Potential
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2021
- Messages
- 320
If I may be so bold, I daresay that the usual refrain expressed in your post is in some ways contrary to fact.
It is indeed quite common to voice how much people are being silenced and cancelled (Jon Stewart on the Daily Show did a funny bit juxtaposing news hosts on Fox News complaining about cancel culture related to a certain topic against the same host going on a jeremiad on that very topic.)
No, I would like to posit the perhaps somewhat revolutionary notion that if anything, we have way too much free speech today. Or rather, too much low quality speech from those who ought not to have a platform. I know how censorious and authoritarian that sounds, but hear me out. Wouldn't you rather live in a world where the information that gets circulated to the public is well vetted, first? Where crackpots and conspiracy theorists and partisan hack activists can't pollute the well of information with extremist, radical nonsense? News ought to be a public service, fact-checked and provided by unbiased professionals who try as best they can to give it to you straight, and who have evidence for what narratives they tell you. Voices worth listening to from people whose opinions actually matter.
We went from the Walter Cronkite generation of news as a public service to fractured branches of partisan, biased news where it became more profitable to target demographics (i.e. echo chambers), to news increasingly resembling activist propaganda (previously op-ed material) than just merely facts, to abandoning professional news altogether for internet podcasts (forget bias, these are rarely based in fact altogether) and from that it became-- shudders in disgust --TikToks and Reddit. I'm not making this up. In an age when everybody has free access to online news articles, something like a third of young Americans under 30 get their news...on TikTok. I just read this in a recent Pew Research study. (Of course, if you do in fact get your news on websites, it barely even resembles a real newspaper anymore. The site is designed to look and scroll like a Twitter feed (live updates) and comes included with "short videos" (aka tiktoks of their own).
There is inevitably mud-slinging inherent to any discussion of controversial topics, but that becomes so much worse when you amplify the number of voices involved. Add to that the vast majority of voices are simply ill-informed or uninformed, live in echo chambers, overwhelmed by blind emotion rather than swayed by cool logic,, etc.
In short, I say to hell with this unlimited access to garbage quality speech. I'd rather have a single voice or a handful of voices which are intellectually stimulating and worth listening to than a billion that are not. That's not speech. It's a raucous din.
If I could summarize the internet with a pithy tagline, I'd say,
TMI, NO ONE ASKED!
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DeepBlueJoy
dont agree entirely, but i feel your pain. too much crappy information. it offends.
T
thrasherpix
The Fairness Doctrine was better than I'd think regarding media neutrality (and by today's standards was an incredible success), which Cronkite lived up to. The reasons it was abandoned are complex.
Anyanka Bunny Slayer
TL;DT
thetopher
Member of the Church Of Faith
Firstly cancel culture is very rarely about facts but more often about mere opinion i.e having the wrong one. And I'm skeptical of people pointing to 'high profile' figures such as news anchors or children's book authors voicing 'controversial' opinions in public as proof that, therefore, cancel culture does not exist.
The fact is there are numerous cases (running into the thousands at this point) on normal people being de-platformed, demonetized, fired from their jobs, shunned/removed from public events for having 'wrong opinions', not bad facts (oddly the facts tend to be on their side) and the majority mainstream media stays entirely silent on the matter.
Juast one example the children's book author who supported J.K Rowling on twitter and then found that no-one would publish her materials anymore. She now has to work as a long-haul truck driver.
Add to that the very real factor of self-censorship running through many facets of comedy, the arts, government departments and the media; in general people are having their speech controlled, overtly or covertly, an awful lot. Just not online.
I'm interested, what would you consider a high trust media platform that has good, unbiased opinions?
And why did this happen, do you think? When and how did people lose faith in media conglomerates? Maybe it's because many of them have been caught in a lie too many times.
Whether you agree with him or not Jordan Peterson coined it best; the internet in the new printing press, nobody is beholden to 'the church' (establishment media) for their truth or a translation of the facts through their filter; we can all decide for ourselves where and how we get our news. That's ultimately a good thing because sure, some of it is bad but the good will last out and the bad will fail/go broke, that's how its going at the moment.
NotASlayer
𝕮𝖍𝖔𝖈𝖔𝖑𝖆𝖙𝖊 𝕻𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖈𝖊𝖘𝖘 🍫 👸🏻
DeepBlueJoy
Lion Faced Kitteh
Moptop
Scooby
Boy oh boy you got that right!!!! "Beam me up Scotty, there's no INTELLIGENT life form here!" for sure!
Anyanka Bunny Slayer
✨ Hail Hydra ✨
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I believe that a certain vaccination has not only killed people, but has left many women infertile. A depopulation plan, obviously. I wouldn't even hazard a guess as to who's responsible. But some of us can figure it out...
Joan the Vampire Slayer
Then there’s just women like me (more than you think) who can have kids, but choose not to have any.
Ethan Reigns
Scooby
Remember when Facebook/Meta squelched any statement that COVID-19 came from a Virology lab in Wuhan? Turns out that this is the most likely truth.
If you run into a situation where publishers will not publish your book because of your ideas, you can always self-publish using organizations like Book Baby, the new face of the vanity press.
Of the commercial news media, Al Jazeera seems to be the most accurate, but they usually come out with their opinions a day later than the rest of the media.
Every time I have known the inside story behind what was reported in the news, the news outlets have gotten the entire thrust of the story wrong and every single detail wrong. Two cases in point:
1. Toronto Star There was an epidemic of children going over balconies to their deaths in the 1977 to 1979 time frame. The Star went on a jeremiad complaining about bad landlords not keeping balconies in good repair. The reality? Canada had accepted a large number of immigrants from India and Pakistan after the war that took place at this time. Part of the culture from this area says that you are within your rights to kill a child who disgraces the family. The Children's Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto was quietly getting second-degree murder convictions in all of the cases where a perpetrator confessed. I know about this because my wife worked there. Being a liberal/socialist organization, the CAS never let a word of this get out. Their final story was of a 5-year old who went down a chute in a building that was five feet off the floor level with a cover bolted on. We were in a Kaneff building at the time, which was a well-run apartment building. As a result of the libel this caused, he switched to condo's and never acquired another apartment building.
2. Toronto Star There was coverage of protests against Litton Systems for supplying guidance systems for cruise missiles and the protesters claimed that this destabilized the nuclear balance of power. This culminated in an attack on a Litton building where ten people were injured, five permanently. The truth is a bit more interesting. Of the 1496 cruise missiles in inventory at this time, ten were integrated with tactical nuclear bombs as part of a development exercise. They were never put into active inventory. The real story came out a few months later. The soviets had called on the Communist Party of Canada to create chaos because of a problem they never mentioned. In their war games, in order to attack Europe, they had to send out bombers then retrieve them and reload and send them out again because they didn't have enough aircraft to attack Europe in one pass. In the meantime, cruise missiles could go to these airfields and use the runway bombs to destroy runways. This payload has 48 bomblets configured in a 12 x 4 array and they were to be dropped on a runways at intervals where there would be 48 craters to fill in while the planes were returning. Since they couldn't beat this armament, they claimed there were nuclear payloads so more people would be likely to put a stop to it. When one of our plants was finally bombed by terrorists from BC, we were back in production in three days. The damage (other than the injuries) was limited to a quality control section. We farmed out quality control to Canadian Marconi and Honeywell but never let the lack of effectiveness of the attack go public.
Joan the Vampire Slayer
Carpe Spuffy!
Anyanka Bunny Slayer
✨ Hail Hydra ✨
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- 13,814
Moptop
Scooby
It's not the fact that we can't recycle plastics, as we already can, and do in some cases, it's the cost of the recycling process that makes it not as cost effective as using cotton. BTW cotton can also be recycled and at a much less cost than any plastic can.
Ethan Reigns
Scooby
Plastics are already used for clothing. Orlon polyacrylonitrile is actually an acrylic plastic that was developed by Du Pont in the 1930's and has been used for clothing since the 1940's and it feels warm like wool to the touch because it traps air. There is an interesting issue from this: since acrylic is a transparent material, Orlon doesn't actually cover a person and make skin features unobservable, it scrambles the reflected light so when you see someone wearing Orlon, the visual effect is like digital scrambling of an image to cover parts of the body that should not be seen.
The claim is that Orlon was more expensive than other materials, so it has disappeared from use, but the real reason is it provides no opaque coverage of the body.
The claim is that Orlon was more expensive than other materials, so it has disappeared from use, but the real reason is it provides no opaque coverage of the body.
Scientist should be looking for poo on other planets. No poo, no life.
DeepBlueJoy
That is great science. Very logical. How do you find poo?
ILLYRIAN
Sorry November, To DeepBlueJoy, How do you find poo? Pretend that you have a runny nose - sniff . . . . sniff, tee hee.
Moptop
Scooby
No offense but I'm not consuming anybody's underwear!......regardless if they've been washed!!!🩳
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And that's another thing. Why would we put so much effort and spend so much money to go to a planet like Mars when we already know THERE'S NOTHING THERE?
Seems like a waist of time and money to me!!!
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We already have the technology to do that. The problem is it costs more to recycle it than it does to manufacture new plastics from raw materials.
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TamsinValencia
Scooby
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2017
- Messages
- 4,146
That I have met alien 51 escapees. 😛 My coursemates, coworkers whenever I join a normal academic course I encounter the strangest people, human or otherwise on Earth.