VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7hr ago
Their bottom lines and viewers are still aligned with their platforms (yt, twitch). Reddit is a whole another discussion.
The House Oversight Committee has invited the CEOs of Discord, Reddit, Steam, and Twitch to appear at a hearing next month. I doubt anything directly comes of it, but I expect some embarassing hay-making from the right quoting posted site rules and asking if [the most objectionable moderator-approved posts] fall within them, and why [milquetoast removed by mods posts] didn't.
Also not sure about Steam on that list, but I don't use almost any of its social features.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8hr ago
It is convenient that making it ambiguous whether Kimmel was cancelled due to political pressure seems likely to redirect some ire for the decision at the administration and not at the network.
This is obviously just speculation on my part: I don't know the details of this specific decision.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11hr ago
The only reason you’re hearing this many people who support it is because there are even more who don’t. Otherwise you’d have to believe that almost every person who supports Kirk murder has been vocal about it on the internet, which is implausible.
I would absolutely believe there is an cultural vibe in which the far left feels much more confident going online and sharing their views widely than the equivalent on the far right would: why wouldn't they? They've almost never gotten meaningful consequences from doing so previously (contra the right self-censoring even fairly popular-by-the-numbers beliefs). I'd be willing to bet that the overlap there is pretty high but probably not every such person.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
I'm not sure what to make of the fact that mobile keyboards have kept iterating while the desktop keyboard interface seems to have stagnated — I can hold a virtual key to select a similar character, but on a desktop need obscure numeric (sometimes HTML) codes or a separate application. A pop-up "characters similar to" key binding isn't inherently impossible.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Didn't some of the testimony for the DC sniper case suggest they were targeting white people for being white people?
Everybody keeps making Nazi and WWII references here about these current events, but I think the left/right divide looks a lot like Rwanda in the 1990s: the new media of broadcast radio social media among the kids has allowed echo chambers with increasingly radical and eliminationist rhetoric, focusing on how the other side is going to take control of the country. History suggests it only took a few incidents like assassinations to start a huge wave of violence.
I think the only saving grace there is that the overlap between the (large) set of armed Americans and the (hopefully smaller) set of radicalized Americans is pretty small. But large enough to include Kirk's assassin, it seems.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
What was pulled out in 2014? I thought they left in 2005.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
In practice, "a language is a dialect with an army" seems to be the correct rule. There are instances of nations sharing a common language (the Anglosphere and friends), but also plenty of adjacent countries that can understand each other but declare them separate languages (I hear Swedish and Norwegian are almost identical) and countries that can't understand speech, but consider it a single language (China).
I think the language/dialect distinction is a bit like the religion/cult distinction: at the big picture most generally agree on the idea, but any concrete example can be argued over indefinitely.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Do you have trouble with the difference in orientation between phone (one in top row) and keyboard (one in bottom row) keypads?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I am somewhat curious about this myself. I've been watching/reading '90s content (most notably Northern Exposure, which might deserve an effort post at some point), and realizing that Native American representation has just dropped off a cliff culturally.
My personal thought is that purity spirals have made it difficult to portray Native Americans well enough to steer clear of progressive backlash, and so directors/producers choose the safe option of "doing something else." Which is disappointing, IMO, because the native cultures are surprisingly diverse and interesting in their own right (although sometimes oversold as almost flawless). See where the Land 'O' Lakes butter girl went.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
This is Cancel Culture under control.
For at least some of these cases I'll agree with you (I haven't looked into all of them). Maybe we should have an explicit societal Overton Window — much wider than the last few years — that frowns upon calling for or celebrating acts of literal violence. There is some fuzziness around exactly where the edges should be, but I don't think society is expected to tolerate a high level of anti-social (not just asocial) activism.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I was thinking of Fast and Furious, but maybe it's been done other times:
Several gun dealers who cooperated with ATF told CBS News and Congressional investigators they only went through with suspicious sales because ATF asked them to.
Sometimes it was against the gun dealer's own best judgment.
In April, 2010 a licensed gun dealer cooperating with ATF was increasingly concerned about selling so many guns. "We just want to make sure we are cooperating with ATF and that we are not viewed as selling to the bad guys," writes the gun dealer to ATF Phoenix officials, "(W)e were hoping to put together something like a letter of understanding to alleviate concerns of some type of recourse against us down the road for selling these items."
ATF's group supervisor on Fast and Furious David Voth assures the gun dealer there's nothing to worry about. "We (ATF) are continually monitoring these suspects using a variety of investigative techniques which I cannot go into detail."
Two months later, the same gun dealer grew more agitated.
"I wanted to make sure that none of the firearms that were sold per our conversation with you and various ATF agents could or would ever end up south of the border or in the hands of the bad guys. I guess I am looking for a bit of reassurance that the guns are not getting south or in the wrong hands...I want to help ATF with its investigation but not at the risk of agents (sic) safety because I have some very close friends that are US Border Patrol agents in southern AZ as well as my concern for all the agents (sic) safety that protect our country."
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I feel like the hypothetical Soros comment is in poor taste regardless, but IMO only outside the Overton Window if he didn't die of natural causes. If Kirk had died of an aneurysm, I think you'd see much the same comments, but less outrage over them.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
Well there was that one time ATF pressured FFLs to knowingly sell guns to otherwise ineligible buyers.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
We're you debating in favor of any right-leaning policies? You might be right, but I think the zeitgeist for the average conservative, even moderate ones, is heavily flavored by a decade of events like James Damore (pilloried for an IMO milquetoast view, definitely not violent, on STEM demographics) or Nick Sandmann (a literal kid with the audacity to get photographed standing awkwardly between two groups of vastly less polite protesters) getting dragged through the media, or no shortage of other such cases. Maybe forgive such folks for thinking it's unsafe to express such opinions in the public square.
Doubly so since Kirk seems to have just been literally shot and killed for doing so.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
I saw someone posted a clip of his appearance on Newsome's podcast. It seemed relatable and they had a reasonable rapport. But I haven't heard the whole thing.
It's up there with the iconography of the Finnish Air Force.
The Eastern Front isn't well-depicted in the Western public consciousness, and it's got a lot of weird history from that perspective.
In this case, it seems like it was intended to be the Helldivers 2 stratagem code for calling in a 500kg bomb.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6d ago
Even the Tuskegee airmen portrayed in Masters of the Air were played by British actors. That part felt particularly weird.
Canada has some protectionist policies on media (Canadian content requirements, probably some tax breaks but I don't know specifics) that I believe are generally credited with why they punch above their weight in music and TV production.
The UK has state-sponsored premier TV and radio networks that manage similarly, I think. Less clear on the specifics, but preference for British actors on British projects (the Harry Potter movies, for example) are accepted. I can't say I've heard of an American movie getting grief for casting non-Americans, except maybe in very specific roles. I was (slightly) miffed that Masters of the Air cast an almost exclusively British cast to play American flight crews, but I haven't seen anyone else care.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Wouldn't be the first example of this sort of kayfabe in Middle East politics.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Is there a list of allowed defenses in court? I suppose there are explicit ones (self-defense), so the existence of explicit not-allowed defenses seems plausible (although I'm not quite sure if that should square with jury nullification existing), but if you and your attorney really want to run the Chewbacca defense I didn't think there was a rule against it. Even if the jury accepts that defense, I suppose, although it'd probably make me question the jury selection process.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Even without algorithms, there is a huge bias between posting and lurking, too.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
Hypothesis: the Internet (social media more specifically) have made it much easier to become a political partisan with no need to join "organized politics", without which there isn't an IRL grounding and it's easier to find your own personal circle jerk that pushes you extremism. Local political groups are less likely to align with such numbers with such extreme views: the couple dozen most extreme people in your town have nothing on the top hundred in the entire Anglosphere.
I guess one way to check this would be to look at whether it applies equally to small nations with language barriers versus the US. But that's a small dataset and probably pretty noisy.
Tangential question: How often do NFL owners directly interact with the players? It seems like it could be pretty hands-on or aloof and only talking to the coaches.
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