@Arotrios@kbin.social cover
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Arotrios

@[email protected]

For Amusement Purposes Only.

Changeling poet, musician and writer, born on the 13th floor. Left of counter-clockwise and right of the white rabbit, all twilight and sunrises, forever the inside outsider.

Seeks out and follows creative and brilliant minds. And crows. Occasional shadow librarian.

#music #poetry #politics #LGBTQ+ #magick #fiction #imagination #tech

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

Arotrios , to Fediverse
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

So after stumbling across this patently absurd bit of Russian propaganda from noagendasocial.com, I'd thought I'd stroll on over to the instance and see what the fuck is going on over there. After all, it's run by Adam Curry of MTV VJ fame and the so-called podfather, so it's gotta be just one bad apple, right?

Holy fuck, it's like walking into FSB propaganda machine made for Trumptards. That one bad apple is a power user with the top rated post, an anti-LGBTQ+ meme.

@adam what the absolute hell? You used to be cool when I was 8 and watching MTV. Did you lose your morality and ethics when you cut your hair?

Arotrios OP ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Oh look, the stupids are angry and have come out to play.

Dude, you're literally hosting the propaganda of a Russian foreign agent peppered with flat out lies, antisemitism and anti-LGTBQ+ tropes. This isn't a left vs right issue, this is you are literally hosting a foreign agent of a country that's a declared enemy of the US and is committing genocide as we speak issue.

Grown-ups clean house kid, and yours should be condemned. There isn't any such thing as free speech in Russia - there's no reason to give them the right they actively deny to others. Read up on the paradox of tolerance - there's a video there if you're having trouble reading the big words. To give them a platform means you're just as complicit in their crimes as they are.

Wisconsin billionaires quietly bankroll effort to shrink state’s social safety net ( wausaupilotandreview.com )

Republican lawmakers held a day of back-to-back public hearings in mid-April for bills that would add restrictions to receiving unemployment insurance payouts, ban local guaranteed income programs and prevent state agencies from automatically renewing low-income health insurance.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

“This is a cynical distraction from the work that we should be doing,” Senate Minority Leader Melissa Agard, D-Madison, said. “But thankfully, they’re not becoming law.”

Agreed, Ms. Agard. It's political theatre, and is not going to get past Evers' veto. The detail in the article is excellent and calls out:

A lead proponent testifying at the Capitol was a former Republican legislative aide representing a Florida-based advocacy group with no membership and tens of millions of anonymous donations. One Republican lawmaker noted it was the third time that afternoon that Adam Gibbs had spoken in favor of the bills, all which were aimed at dismantling the state’s social safety net.

“Busy day in the Legislature,” replied Gibbs, communications director for the nonprofit Foundation for Government Accountability.

...what's the problem with the FGA (aside from it's an out of state organization with no actual membership that for some reason has the full attention of Wisconsin legislators)?

A Wisconsin Watch analysis of the 2021-22 session found that of the 17 bills passed with Opportunity Solutions Project/FGA support, Evers vetoed all but one. The lobbying group also opposed a Democratic-sponsored bill that would extend Medicaid for eligible women for a full year after childbirth; Republicans refused to schedule a hearing, and the GOP-led budget committee stripped it from the governor’s budget. The group also supported 16 bills that ultimately did not pass both chambers.

....

Watchdogs that monitor dark money groups say FGA is just the latest example of an advocacy organization bankrolled by a small network of billionaire activists intent on deregulation, dismantling welfare protections and restricting voting rights.

FGA doesn’t disclose its donors. But IRS data tracked by the Center for Media and Democracy, which investigates the influence of money in politics, show some of the largest checks came from foundations tied to conservative causes.

The Ed Uihlein Family Foundation donated $17.85 million between 2014 and 2021, according to tax filings. The Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee gave $2.75 million over a similar period.

FGA’s lobbying arm isn’t required to disclose its funding sources. Critics call that a loophole in the law, giving donors the ability to secretly influence public policy.

The IRS says charitable foundations like FGA aren’t supposed to engage in substantial political lobbying. But like other similar groups, it shares office space, staffers and other resources with its lobbying arm. Such arrangements allow donors to make tax deductible donations that ultimately end up being used for lobbying.

So all you have to do to funnel dark money to Wisconsin Republicans is to open a non-profit in the same office as your lobbying firm. Gotcha.

Opinon: Impeachment lawyer details list of people considered at risk for indictment along with Trump for 2020 election fraud ( www.alternet.org )

Former Donald Trump impeachment lawyer and Ethics Czar Norm Eisen gave a list of the top co-defendants that he thinks will also be indicted along with the former president when it comes to Jan. 6 and the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election....

Arotrios OP ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

RICO RICO RICO RICO RICO RICO

...don't mind me, just dreaming of a better day...

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

JFC I left just in time. This is literally encouraging me to go through the effort of deleting my old reddit accounts. Am I the only one that became notably nauseous when viewing that link? It's like it's been designed by the CCP for kindergartners.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Can someone point me to the bible verse where Jesus says you should let your kids die of plague?

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Not this shit again... already went through this drama with Kim Davis. She should be removed from the bench and disbarred to boot.

I think the rush to recreate communities is a bad idea. ( kbin.social )

If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit....

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That's what's going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.

Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it's a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors' submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.

That being said, I'd love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn't exist on Reddit. There's a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.

Arotrios , to Politics
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher (the Nanny) schools the AMPTP in historic pro-labor speech.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Boosted and upvoted for reprinting the text on the Fediverse.

I don't see this as being a winning tactic for Trump. He simply doesn't have the support from the power-brokers he did in 2016 - he's pissed off his wealthy donors and cost them too much money and power, both through grift and his glaring ineptitude in office. He will likely win the primary, but his chances in the general election are slim. He won't win the popular vote (again), and the electoral college landscape is less welcoming than it was seven years ago.

That being said, it's pretty clear that Trump realizes this. When you have both the institutions of the state and the financial backers in your party turn against you, no amount of populism can save you. He probably figures that he might as well go down "fighting the man", as it's unlikely at this point that surrender would provide him a better set of consequences than going out in a blaze of narcissistic glory.

This is where the real danger lies - after the election, when he's lost and has that brief moment as the dust settles before he's sent to jail, that's when he'll go nuclear, and you'll see him call not to "stand back and stand by", but to go to war.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Agreed, unless something changes, I don't see his level of support increasing to a point where he'd actually be able to mobilize a force large enough to begin a true civil war on the occasion of his loss.

That being said, given the virulence and fanaticism of the extremists in his cohort, I can see him advocating violence to the point where domestic terrorism becomes a daily part of American life, much like mass shootings have.

I'm not so much worried about him winning as the damage he'll do when he loses.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Excellent point, and thanks for illustrating the historical precedent. Interestingly enough, it was Superman who eventually broke the Klan, and it looks like he's been gearing up to do again.

Here's hoping the next issue will have him fighting MAGATs.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

I like the proposal. It could be reinforced with badges defined by the moderators in specific tech communities.

Opinion: Sweden’s giant-killer military is built for one thing: fighting Russia ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

The accession of Sweden to Nato is a historic moment. Regardless of the closed-door discussions between Turkish president Recep Erdoğan, the European Union, and the United States which led to this moment, the end result is simple. Nato has received a massive military boost; Russia has found swathes of the Arctic and Baltic...

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Agreed. Political movements are less tied to political boundaries than they ever have been in the past, and elections have significant consequences that reach far beyond borders with the advent of globalization.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

I would love to see this movement spread to other tech companies.

News: Under oath, John Kelly raises serious allegations against Trump ( www.nytimes.com )

Mr. Kelly’s assertions were disclosed on Thursday in a statement that was filed in connection with lawsuits brought by Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent in the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and Lisa Page, a former lawyer in the bureau, against the Justice Department for violating their privacy rights when the Trump...

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

This is 100% true. At my last position, they hired a head winemaker at a cheaper than market rate. He had accepted because they let him choose his own title... Wine Overlord.

Arotrios OP ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

As someone who lived in LA, I have no doubt. I'm not scared of cops generally, but my interactions with the LAPD and LASD have led me to believe that they see themselves as violent enforcers, not civilian protectors. They were threatening, quick to intimidate, and bragged about killing suspects... or as they put it, "bad guys". That they've got members in their ranks who would openly align with an indicted traitor only reinforces my opinion that both departments need serious reform.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

I would like to see a clear delineation between News articles and Opinion pieces, even if it's just as simple as asking folks to put News: or Opinion: in the thread title.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Hmm... sounds a bit too idealistic to be true, especially given how Facebook has acted in the past. I appreciate his hope for the future, but I think he severely underestimates the lengths to which FB will go to monetize and control users on their platforms.

Here's the scenario I don't like. Threads scrapes my OC on a federated server, then reposts it to their users with advertisements. Now, not only has FB taken my OC without getting my permission or even informing me, they're now garnering profit from it. If this were a print publication, this would plainly be copyright theft. And if I want to remove my content that's now hosted on Threads without my permission, there's no possible way for me to do so - I can delete the post and hope their federated server does the same, but given how hard they make it to delete a FB account, I'm not terribly optimistic.

It's no wonder isn't launching in Europe - there's no way in hell this kind of thing is even remotely GDPR compliant.

The Supreme Court May Preemptively Ban a Federal Wealth Tax ( newrepublic.com )

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published in 2021, two of the Moores’ lawyers also declared unambiguously that the lawsuit “stands to slam shut the door on a federal wealth tax like the one Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to enact.” They made a direct pitch to “the courts” to hear the Moores’ case “now” to make it...

Arotrios OP ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Agreed. I would like to see a radical restructuring of the court, with additional justices to provide a better plurality of opinion and a non-partisan ethics oversight committee with the power to force recusals and bring criminal charges to justices that fail to disclose conflicts of interest.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.

In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.

I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.

What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.

Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.

But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.

And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he'd go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he'll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit's slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

@Bendersmember Content generation has slowed and from what I can tell, comment participation is way down. Right now, after going through and subscribing to a number of magazines, my kbin feed is more useful and active than reddit ever was, although the audience is clearly smaller (but seriously growing since last week). The quality of the content is better, and it's much easier to filter out the shitposting.

The clearest place to see content drought this is in /r/all - the top posts are all 3 - 15 hours old. Before the blackout, it would refresh in a matter of minutes, not hours.

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

@zcd Boosting everyone in this thread - I'm doing my part!

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

The first rule about test post is that we don't talk about test post. Please ignore.

Arotrios , to Politics
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Anyone else feeling that the sudden collapse of Twitter and Reddit is related to the conservative buyout of CNN? It feels like there's a concerted effort to capture or degrade major news outlets previously seen as left-leaning or centrist. I became suspicious after it became clear that Musk was deliberately running Twitter into the ground after buying with Saudi and Russian backers, but the timing of Reddit's attempt to emulate Twitter's self-destructive practices combined with the purchase of CNN has resulted in a significant portion of the MSM landscape that's been quickly and deliberately shifted politically rightward by the owners.

Curious to hear other folks thoughts on this dynamic, and what it will mean for the upcoming elections.

Hot take: 18 years of user contributions to reddit will serve as a base model for an AI that generates content and conversations. the reddit experience continues as a simulation, to harvest clicks, sales and ad revenue. ( kbin.social )

most of the time you'll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they're gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate...

Arotrios ,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Holy fucking shit I'm dying. That's fucking hilarious.

I now want to make a bot that detects bots, grades their responses as 0% - 100% bot, posts the bottage score, and if they determine bottage, engage the other bot in endless conversation until it melts down from confusion.

We can live stream the battles. We'll call the show Babblebots.

Any devs interested?

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • All magazines
    •