• 327 Posts
  • 164 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • Its usually called an Individual in Custody Trust Account, and it varies from state to state and there’s a different system for federal crimes.

    It seems like this is being prosecuted as a state crime, so you would go through the Utah Department of Corrections, usually with a money order. Follow the guidelines from the UDOC. Pay attention, if the case gets elevated to a federal crime, the procedure will change.


    (Edit) If you don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy of the prison industrial complex, you can donate to an Anarchist Black Cross organization. On the 21st of this month, several are hosting a fundraiser called Running Down the Walls, and you can give money pretty anonymously and in-person.

    There’s a good chance that Tyler will not be on their list depending on how his politics shake out, but you can be sure your money will go to someone in prison who would be happy to piss in Trump’s breakfast cereal and who is not a white supremacist.



  • The speed of technological progress tends toward an exponential curve, and Frank Herbert understood and knew this, but wanted to write a serious medieval saga set in the distant future. The Butlerian Jihad was always a plot contrivance to explain why in the thousands of years of intergalactic civilization, human life is still recognizable to us, and still recognizable from their in-story ancestors.

    But just because AI was treated as an enemy by fictional fascists, doesn’t mean it was good. Fascists are enemies to other fascists. It’s an ideology that is always seeking enemies, and will either invade outwards or purge inwards - but their enemies don’t need to be ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ they only need to be ‘other.’

    It can both be true that a technocratic class using thinking machines would have dominated the human race, and the force that prevented their rule is a theofascist eugenic autocracy. The theme Herbert I think would have appreciated his readers noticing is that there is no real difference between a crushing totalitarian dictatorship under an inhuman technocratic class, and a crushing totalitarian dictatorship under a charismatic leader and a religious cult.

























  • Five@slrpnk.nettoWorld News@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    Let’s be clear that I am anti-Putin and anti-Kim.

    Ad-hominem means “to the man” – that is, instead of attacking the message, one attacks the credibility of the messenger. This also includes when instead of defending the credibility of a message, one defends the credibility of the messenger. Ad-hominem is exactly the purpose of the MBFC bot. Instead of fact-checking the individual article, it tells you if the article is credible or not based on its clearly biased assessment of the article outlet.

    You are correct in that ad-hominem is generally a terrible way of judging credibility. I am not making an ad-hominem fallacy. I am responding to an ad-hominem fallacy that has been spammed in every thread in this community.



  • Five@slrpnk.nettoWorld News@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

    In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site.

    Most people do not believe that propaganda is anything that disagrees with the United States Government’s foreign policy, and find the idea that the VOA is less biased than the New York Times laughable. Lemmy.World endorses these absurdities by advertising Media Bias Fact Check in every post in their community. You have a limited time to let !politics and !world know what you think.


  • I was a little disappointed that she tried to find some kind of synthesis between her own fawning opinion and Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical view of Always Coming Home.

    Ursula’s concern with erasure due to sexism is warranted, but everyone’s star must fade. No one is completely correct, and while Le Guin was ahead of her time, no one has a perfect vision of the future or even a clear vision of their own present. Sincere criticism is a form of flattery, and many authors long gone continue to be referenced not just because they had a prescient view, but because their critics keep them alive. Tolstoy was the most famous author in the Soviet Union because despite being banned to print, the publishing of rebuttals and counter-apologetics were subsidized by the central soviet, so that everyone knew his name and anarchist views.

    In this cast, DeFreitas celebrates Le Guin in a way that is effusive but neither hot nor cold. It’s exactly this kind of inoffensive praise that reduces the great to symbols of greatness, and from there to cliché, mediocrity, and obscurity. Good authors deserve trenchant praise, or at least honest criticism.


  • Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

    In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site. VOA has been conspicuously silent on the charges. Their reporters have unparalleled access to the details of the case, but none of them appear to have done any investigation.

    According to David Van Zandt in MBFC’s methodology:

    It’s crucial to note that our bias scale is calibrated to the political spectrum of the United States

    To better understand this statement, it should be noted that MBFC regards VOA as “least biased” despite its uncontroversial status as the United States’ official propaganda outlet.


  • ‘AI’ in the sense of machine learning algorithms is very old technology, and has seen revolutionary applications at every step of its development. Eliza was created in the 1960s and demonstrated that if the test of a computer’s artificial intelligence was whether it could fool a human that it was sentient, the value of that test depended very heavily on how willing the human correspondent was to ‘fill in the blanks.’ The results of those experiments show that the average person is extremely willing to fill in the blanks even when the technology is full of gaping holes.

    In the podcast, they’re talking specifically about ChatGPT-style technology, its flaws, and the willingness of people to ‘fill in the blanks’ in a new dimension – to assume LLM technology is a truckload more graphics cards or a nuclear reactor away from what sci-fi writers mean when they say ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – and that is evidently false.


  • ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising.

    Manufacturing Consent has this to say about Disney news media:

    Ben Bagdikian notes that when the first edition of his Media Monopoly was published in 1983, fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position.

    Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates-Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world’s major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time Warner, has integrated the leading Internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most U.S. citizens. Bagdikian concludes that “it is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling questions about the individual’s role in the American democracy.”






  • Dave M. Van Zandt rates Al Jazeera English as “Credibility: Medium” and “Factual Reporting: Mixed”; this is depite the news outlet being recognized worldwide as one of the best in the world.

    On Dave’s page, he lists two stories out of the enormous corpus they’ve produced in the last five years as evidence of his biased assessment.

    The real issue Dave has with Al Jazeera, as evidenced by his pattern of bad, unscientific, and arbitrary classifications of middle-eastern journalism, is that their journalists occasionally do investigative reporting critical of the Israeli government. He has repeated the indefensible opinion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

    Dave’s personal credibility gatekeeper site, MBFC, is a flak organization is to center corporate news that is favorable to power, and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is the fourth filter of the Propaganda Model.