(The following post got put behind a warning, presumably due to something I've since removed. It is now being republished late)
Thread by @FuckKoroks on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I read the whole 45 page report from GAO about "gaming extremists": 🧵 Bear with me, because this thread will be long. I will highlight all the parts I found funny or concerning. It's important to be aware that the government is full of stupid, intrusive clowns. So what is GAO? It is the Government Accountability Office, headed by the Comptroller General who is appointed by the President. It supposedly helps the government work more efficiently and tracks how taxpayer dollars are spent. Not doing a very good job of it I'd say, lmao. To start with, GAO links video games with domestic extremism and claims they influenced domestic terror attacks. They are claiming that livestreamers are the point of origin of extremism, which then moves through YouTube and Twitter, and finally "infects" a large group of people. They reference the Anti-Defamation League about white supremacy in games. You'll find out why towards the end of the thread. They unironically say that humor, memes, and positive aesthetics are a threat. They link the Buffalo shooter with FPS video games. Those gosh darned extremists making friends while playing games online! Their own experts say that there's no evidence to link violent extremism with video games, but they press on regardless. Reddit jannies mentioned LMAO . If you're too spicy online, companies may give you a personal janny who monitors your activity on other platforms so they can ban you. Companies give organizations and other special interest groups a reporting backdoor. This was revealed during the Twitter files, but apparently this is still going on unabated. They're afraid of statue pfps lmao. The FBI and DHS have direct lines to social media and gaming companies. The Jan 6ers had code words to bring weapons to the Capitol but mysteriously, they didn't bring any. Weird, that. The DHS collects text and images from social media. This means the DHS has a meme stash lmfao I&A is the Office of Intelligence and Analysis within the DHS. They lament that they're not able to collect spicy memes from online video games. The reason this report references the ADL so much is that they have THREE "experts" from the ADL. Other organizations are generally represented by a single person.
FINAL NOTES: The report reveals how intrusive the government is, and how they want to expand their incestuous relationship with social media companies into gaming as well. They make tenuous links between gaming and extremism, but they only support it with assertions. The worst is yet to come. The report urges the FBI and DHS to improve on their strategies to secretly collect data from games and work with gaming companies and social media to root out "domestic extremism". The DHS has already agreed to this report and is taking action."
The man who demolished Shakespeare's house - "New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. William Shakespeare's final home. It's where he is believed to have written some of his later works, such as The Tempest, and where he died in 1616, according to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. A building of huge cultural and historical importance - the very definition of a national treasure. Not an opinion shared by the Reverend Francis Gastrell. He bought the house in 1753 but quickly got irritated with tourists wanting to see it, says architectural historian Gavin Stamp. He is also said to have been in a dispute over taxes with local officials. Gastrell was already in the town's bad books after chopping down a mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare in the garden. Then, in an extraordinary fit of spite, he demolished the whole house in 1759. It was never rebuilt and only the foundations remain. The people of Stratford-upon-Avon were horrified and Gastrell became so unpopular he eventually had to move out of the town, says Stamp. He wasn't the only property owner to begrudge tourists. "In 1808 Lady Howe knocked down Alexander Pope's villa in Twickenham for the same reason," says Stamp. "This was much to the disgust of the painter Turner, who lived nearby... The idea that the state could stop someone doing whatever they wanted to their own property was ridiculous at the time. That Britain's heritage was worth preserving was a belief held by just a few radicals, say historians. But after witnessing decades of such destruction they became determined to do something. Action taken by one, John Lubbock, the Liberal MP for Maidstone in Kent, led to the first piece of legislation to safeguard Britain's heritage - the Ancient Monuments Bill. Even when there was interest in ancient sites it wasn't necessarily to do with preserving them. By the late 1800s more and more people were visiting Stonehenge for a day out. Now a World Heritage Site owned by the Crown, at the time it was privately owned and neglected. But the picnickers left behind litter and leftover food. It encouraged rats and rabbits that burrowed away at the stones' foundations, weakening them, say historians. One of the upright stones had already fallen over and a lintel had broken in two. They also chipped pieces off the stones for souvenirs and carved graffiti into them, says architectural critic Jonathan Glancey. It was the same for other pre-historic remains, which were disappearing fast. Threats also included farmers and landowners as the ancient stones got in the way of ploughing and were a free source of building materials."
Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 on X - "I had dinner with an old friend. We talked politics. He happens to be religiously Jewish so of course the concerning anti-Israel and antisemitic politics of the day came up. I asked many questions because for the life of me I cannot understand some of the Democrat Jews who, even after everything that leftist politics have done to them, plan to vote for Dems in November.
Background: I am a lifelong Republican. I’ve never voted for a Democrat in any election. He is a lifelong Democrat who has never voted for a Republican in any election. We are old-school normal people— we remain friends even though we completely disagree politically.
I told him that in my comments on X, I see a trend of some Jews jumping ship and coming over to the Right. But I also told him about the comments from those Jews who agree with 80% of the things I say, if not more, but who insist on voting for a Democrat. The reasons they give me as to why just boggle my mind. They say 1) abortion rights and 2) trans rights - are why they can never vote for a Republican. And it makes absolutely no sense because those should be at the bottom of their list of concerns du jour. He explained that Judaism, as a culture, is very community oriented. You’re supposed to consider and care for your community, not just yourself. So the political ideology of the left makes sense religiously. As far as abortion, he explained that life is seen as the combination of the soul and the body together, in Judaism. He said that the soul doesn’t come into the body until the baby is born. And, the life of the mother, which definitely has a soul, should be prioritized in terms of who to save. I confronted him with the fact that most abortions are not about saving the life of the mother — at all; and, Jews don’t really get abortions in high numbers either. He didn’t disagree... The trans right issue — he didn’t have a response to that one at all. He couldn’t understand what that has to do with anything. But we both think it stems from the political philosophy of Reform Judaism — which is more politics than religion and which pushes this idea on the congregation. While he recognizes that there are antisemites in his party, he thinks they are a minority and not a legitimate threat. He believes the moderate Democrats will push back on them. I told him I haven’t seen anything to support his optimism.
We walked away with our political ideologies unchanged, as always. But it did strike me as odd that he was waiting for the moderate Democrats to save his interests in the party. After all the Democrats have done to him and his people, he is hoping they will come around before November. I’ll be seeing him again before November. I doubt he will be pleased with his party. And I don’t need to convince him to vote for a Republican. I just need to remind him that he can sit this one out. If he sits this one out, he sends a clear message to his party. That’s the best middle ground we can reach. That will be our conversation the next time around."
American politics is undergoing a racial realignment - "a New York Times poll showed President Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by just 56 points to 44 among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points when the two men last fought it out for the White House in 2020. As things stand, the Democrats are going backwards faster with voters of colour than any other demographic. Such startling statistics often meet accusations of polling error, but this cannot be written off as a rogue result. Data from America’s gold-standard national election surveys show Democrats’ advantage among Black, Latino and Asian voters at its lowest since 1960. Figures from Gallup show the same steepening decline. Part of this is due to fading memories and weakening ties. Black Americans who lived through the civil rights era still support the party at very high levels, but younger generations are wavering. There’s also the weakening correlation between income and voter choice in US politics. The image of the GOP as the party of wealthy country club elites is dimming, opening the door to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities. More ominous for the Democrats is a less widely understood dynamic: many of America’s non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest. The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party. This is best illustrated by US political researchers Ismail K White and Chryl N Laird, whose eye-opening 2020 book Steadfast Democrats demonstrates the incongruity between many black Americans’ policy preferences and votes. Take deeply conservative positions such as support for gun rights or the belief that government should stay out of people’s lives and let them succeed or fail on their own. Very few white voters who take these positions identify as Democrats, but much larger shares of Black, Latino and Asian conservatives do. History, culture and community have long overridden this misalignment between non-white conservatives’ policy positions and party choice. As recently as 2012, three in four Black self-identified conservatives were Democrats, but that has fallen to less than half. These voters won’t be won back by a bold environmental policy or defunding the police. Their historical support for Democrats was an anomaly and a further rightward shift is likely as it corrects. White and Laird’s insight is that social networks play an important role. Among Black conservatives whose social circles are predominantly Black, support for Republicans remains anaemic, but among those whose friends, family or colleagues are more diverse, social norms are much weaker and support for the GOP rises. My extension of their analysis shows the same is true for other non-white groups. There are echoes of voters in Britain’s Red Wall — the communities in northern England identified by pollster James Kanagasooriam with conservative demographics and attitudes that had stopped short of voting Tory due to a long-held sense that the party was not for them. In 2019 that changed. Non-white Americans are in a similar position. Strong community norms have kept them in the blue column, but those forces are weakening. The surprise is not so much that these voters are now shifting their support to align with their preferences, but that it took so long. As the US becomes less racially segregated, the frictions preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republican diminish. And this is a self-perpetuating process: discovering Republicans among one’s own group further weakens the stigma. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini puts it in his 2023 book Party of the People, this can create a “preference cascade”. Viewed in this light, the size of the shifts in current polling are entirely plausible."
Clearly, the Republicans have figured out how to make minorities internalise white supremacy
Thread by @jburnmurdoch on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I don’t think everyone appreciates that the familiar "young favour Dems, old favour Republicans" gradient we see in the US population overall is *inverted* among the Black population... The changing image of the parties regarding class and income is also a factor. In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest. The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities... In 2012, the vast majority of Black conservatives still identified as Democrats, but that has since fallen to less than half. Latino and Asian conservatives show similar but less sudden trends... Latino conservatives are now a very solidly Republican group, and Black conservatives favoured Republicans over Democrats for the first time in 2022. All groups are increasingly matching vote choice to ideology... @IsmailWhitePhD & @ChrylLaird find that social pressure is key. When everyone around you votes a certain way, you feel pressure to do the same. Political norms are hard to overcome In a brilliant piece of research they found that when Black voters with very conservative views have almost exclusively Black social groups, they still vote Dem. But if they have a more mixed social group, the weaker norm for voting Dem lets them vote in line with their beliefs. I’ve extended their analysis and I find the same thing, with a similar effect among Latinos. When people have more diverse social groups, there’s less social pressure to vote for the dominant party in the community, so non-white conservatives feel they can vote Republican... So you have:
• Decline of church attendance (key source of political norm policing)
• The US becoming more racially mixed, less segregated, fewer people with no friends/family of other races
The friction preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republican is diminishing. And crucially, that weakening of political norms doesn’t only come from people of other races. As the number of Black Republicans has risen from ~5% to 15% (the figure among young Black adults today), the Democrat-voting norm is eroded and the stigma of voting Republican reduced
The cope will be that the Democrats are really the working class party and that poor "minorities" are "voting against their interests"
Maybe this is why more and more Democrats now promote racial segregation
Democrats are hemorrhaging support with voters of color - "The thread triggered its share of responses from the usual suspects, part of a recent pattern of poll denialism among Democrats that has crept its way into even the White House. And it’s true that there are some things you could critique. Burn-Murdoch is mixing and matching data from different polls, and the observation from 2024 is based solely on the recent New York Times / Siena College poll, which has a relatively small sample size; I’d rather that he’d have taken an average of different surveys. If he’d done that, though, he’d likely have found the same thing... Adam Carlson has been performing an invaluable service by aggregating the results of different polls together, which at least solves the sample size problem. And he’s finding that Joe Biden’s share of the vote has dropped dramatically among Black and Hispanic voters as compared with an average reliable estimates of the 2020 vote... Carlson has been doing the same analysis for months now, and he’s been finding the same thing every time. So at the very least, Democrats can’t wish this problem away by complaining about small sample sizes, although that doesn’t mean they won’t try... Starr County is 98 percent Hispanic — the most of any county in the country outside of Puerto Rico — which makes it a uniquely valuable data point. There are no possible problems with ecological inference — misconstruing the behavior of individuals or particular subgroups from aggregate data — when basically everyone there is Hispanic. Starr County is also quite poor, in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border, so it’s a particularly good place to look for patterns among working-class Hispanics. And what’s happening there ought to be frightening to Democrats... It’s not just a Trump thing, either. In 2022, Henry Cuellar, the Democratic congressman in Texas’s 28th congressional district which represents Starr County and others along the Mexican border, won by 13 points. That’s not bad, I guess. But Cueller had won the race by 19 points in 2020, and by 69 points in 2018 against a Libertarian candidate as Republicans hadn’t even bothered to contest the race. He won by 35 points in 2016, when Republicans did have a nominee. Another place to find heavy concentrations of non-white voters is New York City... Democrats have become increasingly dependent on the votes of college graduates, but college grads are the minority — about 40 percent of people aged 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and the share is no longer really increasing as the number of Americans attending college is leveling off, particularly among men. Without winning huge majorities of Black voters, and solid majorities of Hispanics and Asian Americans, Democrats’ electoral math doesn’t add up to a majority."
How to Read a Barcode: Can it Tell You a Product's Country of Origin? - "Several times in years past, this question was the subject of memes that made the social media rounds instructing consumers to read barcode numbers to identify the country of origin of products they wanted to buy. As with a lot of unvetted information circulating online, the meme in question may have begun with a kernel truth. But it’s a misrepresentation of the information associated with a product’s barcode... as the memes suggest, do the first three digits show the country of origin? The short answer is no. As you can see in the list below, the first three digits of a GS1 company prefix are, in fact, associated with the country where the manufacturer’s business is based.
Jonathan Haidt on X - "Where are the Gen Z founders of tech companies? @patrickc asked @sama. Altman's answer is haunting...
Patrick Collison: When we first met, 15 or so years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was preeminent in the technology industry and in his 20s. And not that long before then Marc Andreesen was preeminent in the industry and in his 20s. And not that long before then, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and so forth. Generally speaking for most of the history of the software sector, one of the top three people has been in their 20s. It doesn’t seem that that’s true to me today.
Sam Altman: I’m obsessed with this problem. It’s not good. Something has really gone wrong. There’s a lot of discussion about what this is, but, like, where are the great founders in their 20s? It’s not so obvious... I hope we’ll see a bunch, I hope this was just a weird accident of history, but maybe something has really gone wrong in our educational system or our society or just like how we think about companies, and what people aspire to, but I think it is worth significant concern and study...
As @FreeRangeKids has been saying for years, generations that were raised with independence and the chance to explore the world on their own--to tinker and take chances--produced young people capable of founding world-changing companies. In contrast, when we deny kids independence, keep them supervised at all times, and then give them smartphones and social media which fill up every open moment of mental space, we reduce the likelihood that they'll dream big and build something big. We've got to roll back the phone-based childhood and restore the play-based childhood."
You Can Be Persuaded To Confess To An Invented Crime, Study Finds - "A 28-year-old investment banker was brutally raped and beaten while jogging in New York's Central Park in April 1989. The city went berserk. Five boys of color, ages 14 to 16, soon confessed and were convicted — but not before being called "animals," "crazed misfits" and "park marauders" by anyone with a mouth or pen. Indeed, the boys were treated like animals, and they served up to 13 years in prison before being exonerated based on "shocking" new DNA evidence and a real confession from serial rapist Matias Reyes. The Central Park Five had falsely confessed — because, they said, they'd been coerced by police. Don't think that it could happen to you? Sorry, but a first-of-its-kind study shows that it could — easily. With a little misinformation, encouragement and three hours, researchers were able to convince 70 percent of the study's participants that they'd committed a crime. And the college-aged students who participated in the study didn't merely confess — they recalled full-blown, detailed experiences, says lead researcher Julia Shaw, a lecturer in forensic psychology from the University of Bedfordshire. The results were "definitely unexpected," says Shaw, who predicted only a 30 percent rate... Shaw and Stephen Porter, a forensic psychologist at the University of British Columbia, first got a few facts about the faux criminal's teen years — the name of her best friend, hometown, etc. — from parents or a guardian. (An ethical committee said it was OK.) Then, during three 45-minute interviews, Shaw extracted information from the students about one true experience (which they remembered) and one fabricated experience (of which she convinced them). After a few hours of feeding the students tidbits of the verified info, she added them up to equal her fabricated crime — and a majority of students were persuaded: They were criminals. One student, when told she had assaulted a classmate in her teens, "elaborately" filled in all the blanks: what weapon she used (a rock), what the argument was over (a boy), what she was having for dinner when the police came looking for her — even the color of the officers' hair. False memories don't happen quite like Inception — they're more like a Wikipedia page that can be edited by you and others, says Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. Once people believe something to be true, their imagination kicks in, and they begin to visualize the situation using past experiences from themselves, others, even movies, she says; when the patchwork of memory gets stitched together and internalized, truth and fiction become indistinguishable. And police use Shaw's tactics, says Mark Godsey, co-founder and director of the Ohio Innocence Project, an advocacy group for the wrongly convicted that has dealt with cases involving false confessions... Sure, "the system isn't perfect," says Albie Esparza, public information officer for the San Francisco Police Department. But the idea that police use the good cop, bad cop routine is "very Hollywood," he says. In fact, it's standard procedure to record interrogations either using video or audio, he says, preventing fishy business. Plus, the police have just as much interest as the public in nabbing the real criminal, Esparza says: "No department wants the image of locking up innocent people.""
Meme - Darth Sidious: "Soon I will have a new girlfriend, one far younger and more beautiful."
I made this meme for a friend who kept dating younger women
Meme - Important Animal Images: "Kuttiya Kanchanasopawong
*guy in car with seatbelted puppy*
*guy in car with seatbelted grown dog*"
Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "One of the weirdest trends on Twitter is hunters killing dangerous animals - always for lots of money, and often at the request of a government or village that wants something like a man-eater dealt with - and mobs of people piling on to say stuff a la: "Evil whore killed KITTTY!!! Kitty was a GOOD kitty!!!" It's fine if you find this a bit atavistic or egotistical....but what do you think leopards do all day, exactly?"
Benonwine @benonwine: "Shocking Sight: Trophy Hunter Brittany L. killed this beautiful male leopard in his prime.😱😡 Let’s make this women famous 👇 Retweet and spread this far and wide."
The power of charismatic megafauna
‘We are not gangsters, we are ACS boys’ quote goes viral, inspires shirts and song - "Boys will be boys, it seems. During a March 2 police raid at an Orchard Road KTV lounge where 14 men and 48 women were arrested over a four-day anti-crime operation targeting entertainment outlets and massage parlours, a man was found with an e-vaporiser and refused to provide his e-mail details when asked. He was with a group of five other men in a private room, reported The Straits Times on March 8. As officers quizzed him, one of the other male patrons raised his voice and said: “We are not gangsters. We are ACS boys.” ACS stands for Anglo-Chinese School, and the quote has gone viral online after being highlighted on Reddit and elsewhere. One Redditor commented: “This is the funniest thing I have seen this decade. They used ‘we are ACS boys’ as some kind of proof?” Another said: “Was he trying to imply ‘my parents are rich and influential’? Why would anyone even say that in a situation he’s in? Sigh, there’s always that one friend.”"
When medicine went wrong: how Americans were used illegally as guinea pits - human medical experiments on radiation - "IN JANUARY, 1946, a four-year-old Australian, Simeon Shaw, was diagnosed as having a highly malignant form of bone cancer. In a desperate effort to save the boy's life, his parents decided to bring him to the U.S. for further diagnosis and treatment. The family had been referred to the University of California Hospital in San Francisco. Once in America, Simeon did not receive the life-saving medical treatment his parents desperately sought. Instead, he was ensnared in a hush-hush, extremely unethical medical experiment. Simeon was one of 18 supposedly dying patients injected with deadly, radioactive plutonium by scientists working for the Manhattan Project, the organization that produced the atomic bomb. Concerned about the dangers of radioactive material on nuclear workers, U.S. government officials wanted to discover how the human body eliminated plutonium. Simeon was two months short of his fifth birthday when he was injected on April 26, 1946, with 0.169 microcuries of plutonium 239, a dose of radiation nearly 24 times what the average person receives in 50 years. About a week later, bone, blood, and tissue samples were taken from the child. Samples were collected at other times as well. Simeon Shaw died eight months after the injection. Many unsuspecting Americans were exposed to radiation in experiments which provided no medical benefit to the subjects. In the years following the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military and nuclear weapons production industry sought data concerning the biological effects of plutonium and radioisotopes of the fallout resulting from atmospheric nuclear tests. Plutonium injections in human subjects, such as Simeon Shaw, had no purpose other than providing information for determining safety standards for weapons production. Plutonium has no medical uses... It is possible that the program involved more than 1,000 people. These experiments were conducted by the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the Energy Research and Development Administration, all predecessor agencies of the Department of Energy. During 1945-47, as part of the Manhattan Project, patients who were diagnosed as having diseases that gave them life expectancies of less than 10 years were injected with plutonium. Besides the University of Califomia Hospital, such studies were carried out at the Manhattan District Hospital, Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester, N.Y.; and the University of Chicago. Despite the original diagnoses, seven of the 18 patients lived longer than 10 years and five survived for more than 20. Internal investigations by the AEC found that informed consent was not granted in the initial experiments, since even the word "plutonium" was classified during World War II, and living patients were not informed that they had been injected with plutonium until 1974."
Too bad they weren't black, so no one cares
Meme - "HISTORIENS A TRAVERS LES SIECLES
500 ans en arrière: Je suis un historien, spécialisé en... histoire
200 ans en arrière: Je suis un historien, spécialisé dans... la Rome antique
100 ans en arrière: Je suis un historien, spécialisé dans le Japon de la deuxième moitié du XVIIe siècle
Maintenant: "Le 14 avril 1810, le climat à Paris était merveilleux, mais Napoléon s'est réveillé de mauvaise humeur..."
"Pourquoi de mauvaise humeur ? Que s'est-il passé la veille ?"
"Je ne sais pas, le 13 avril 1810 ne fait pas partie de ma spécialité"
Meme - "Do you want to play a game ? This game is called "Ten clicks to shit" go to maps.google.com. Type in India. Grab the little google guy and drop him anywhere on the map of India. once you are taken to street view. you are required to click ten times either right or left on the street you are on... If on any of your ten clicks. while strolling down the street - you see a random turd or pile of shit or even something that can be mistaken as a pile or shit. You Lose. If you can make it out of India without seeing a shit pile. You WIN. However, should you catch a glimpse of someone in the actual act of shitting, then not only do you lose, but You are also are considered an official Indian for 24 hours. Good Luck."
"I'm dropping a pin in mumbai. feel like playing this on god mode."
I tried playing this game in Aurangabad but had problems because India is so dirty that it's hard to tell what is shit and what isn't. But on my 9th click I found what looked like cowdung