Uriel238 [all pronouns]

My concern is that, as I said, they lied to me and I believed them. My first logic and critical thinking class was in freshman college, where I learned that media literacy is about checking multiple sources that don’t like each other very much. The facts that are consistent between them are most likely the actual facts. I was the sucker who got owned by the indoctrination system.

Media literacy became super important in the aughts during the George W. Bush administration. The White House started giving preferential treatment to correspondents that covered only approved stories and kept the US in a positive light. (It marked the beginning of the end of free journalism within news agencies) Foreign sources started covering the extrajudicial torture programs and the use of PMCs in Iraq and the International War on Terror. It became really important for Americans to cross examine sources to determine for themselves what was really going on.

Today, it creeps me out to hear kids talk about the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war and the international war on terror, and cite as fact details where I distinctly remember otherwise.

In the present era, we have huge swaths of Americans in FOX News silos, since FOX, like an abusive domestic partner, encourages its viewership to cut off all other sources. We need to be teaching media literacy in grade school. We should be teaching how to use the internet as a tool and not a substitute for social interaction.

When the US proscribed alcohol consumption from 18 years to 21 years, the rate of alcohol related crime and DUIs didn’t change, rather they just got older, and more people were imprisoned for it because they were old enough to know better (allegedly). If we cut off internet access to kids until they’re 18, or even the current proposals to raise the age from 13 to 16, it only means kids will be less experienced and less prepared at a later age.

And kids who are diverse, and fit outside the white, straight, normal mainstream, presently are utilizing resources on the internet to help them cope in a society that doesn’t like deviance very much. These resources literally save lives.

I think an education system that actually took itself seriously, and intended to teach kids in good faith will be able to not only handle kids having internet access, but will be able to integrate its use into education, better preparing children for adulthood.

But also, as I said, I am an outlier. I’m neurodivergent and I’m queer, so I do not have the pulse of the children of the US. In the way I assume not all men are in concurrence with the manosphere, I also submit not all children are daft and need to be taught in single syllables without distractions. If they are, we should get rid of school sports leagues. I suspect more kids would benefit from internet access and robust training in media literacy (including social media savvy) than would be aided by a device ban in school (or by age-gating social media).

Note: There are actual studies about the harms social media has on kids, and the scientific consensus is that harms are significantly less than what is being claimed to promote age verification. It’s looking a lot like the same moral panic that occurred about video games, violent movies and television. But then big social media companies like Facebook, X and Google would enjoy the reduction in competition from smaller sights that would result from an AV mandate, hence they are lobbying to mandate locking up the internet.

My disagreements with the policy are twofold, but I was a weird kid. And I am a weird adult.

Firstly, when my social studies teacher or my American history teacher tries to pass state propaganda as fact, I want to have the internet available to find sources either that confirm what I’m being taught or refut it. And similarly when our chemistry class can only provide a poor, hazy image of what we’re doing, I want to be able to go online and get a better one.

We didn’t have the internet when I was in school in the eighties, and instead, we had shitty textbooks and a state mandated syllabus. It was evident, even then, that we were being indoctrinated with an agenda, and being denied informed consent.

And as a naïve kid, I believed my schooling and grew up Republican… Eventually, I’d learn how much bullshit was spoon fed to me, and that our school districts, in fact, do not have an agenda to equip students for adult life, rather are instruments of control.

And secondly, the internet provides lifelines online for kids at risk, such as neurodivergents, LGBT+, kids in dysfunctional homes. And they should have access to them. I didn’t have those resources, and I believe my outcome is worse for it.

I get it, regarding bullying. Social media harassment is a problem, but by comparison I was cornered and outnumbered three to one by kids twice my size. Kids do not require social media to hurt. Since it was their word against mine school administrators sided with my assailants. Every time. I’d work out later they just hate weakling kids, and believe I should be able to hold my own against such odds.

I can assure you kids will be bullied anyway, just as sex trafficking increased when SESTA / FOSTA cut off internet resources to sex traffickers (and killed personal ads and ended online sex worker support groups.)

But then, I’m neurodivergent and was in that gap in which I was quite bright and interested in learning, but had testing difficulties so I wasn’t eligible for gifted programs. The mainstream school district wasn’t intended for me. But then there wasn’t a place for me at all.

The US state education districts are not being run in good faith, prioritizing obedience over critical thinking skills, ideological doctrine over factual history and enrichment of companies and administrators over paying faculty and budgeting learning materials. Restricting students from their own resources is yet another admission that the US does care what happens to students, and reinforces the notion that schools are not institutions of learning, but detainment centers to lock kids up and keep them out of mischief until they are legally responsible for their actions.

But as I said. I was a weird kid. And my schools assured I would never live it down.

Funny thing, UK camera’d up London in the aughts on the pretense of fighting crime.

That didn’t work either.

The entire tech sector screamed about the vulnerability of IoT devices, plenty of which are now participants in zombie botnets.

Does anyone remember in 2015 when YESCO billboards by the thousands were hacked to show Goatse instead of an AT&T ad? Pepperidge Farm remembers. IoTs are still vulnerable, including big municipal ones and, yes, Flock Safety cameras.

And CISA was severely broken had its staff severely reduced by DOGE.

In unrelated news the CDC, also a victim of DOGE, is entirely unprepared for the next epidemic.

According to our peerless leader, I blame it on Minnesota because they are grossly incompetent

But then he tells California (and Canada) we are to blame for wildfires for our failure to rake our forests.

Generated: Produced entirely from prompts and LORAs
Altered: Changed significantly so that the spirit of the moment represented is starkly different from the original
Edited: Changed while mostly preserving the essence of the moment represented.
Cleaned: Making minor alterations such as removing obstructions, correcting colors or illuminating details

And then, for completion, another boilerplate would be used in official images that have been shopped (or GIMPed or otherwise altered with image-editing software.)

The US is in a unique situation in which the President has tossed all illusions of regularity out the window, and checks from Congress and SCOTUS have been completely nullified. (Though Congress is shifting as Trump is making Republicans unelectable.) The federal government has been literally captured by corporate and oligarch interests.

Before Trump, the US was not a democracy – not really – but it pretended to be one, and did so convincingly for a large enough number of voters that little was done to assure rights were preserved. (For the record, a report from Oxford quantifies the US as behaving like an oligarchy with some democratic features.)

And after the 9/11 attacks and during the International War on Terror, a lot of rights were quietly stripped away, since everyone was afraid of foreign Islamist extremist terrorists… completely ignoring the radical far-right home-grown terrorists we have. The FBI’s disinterest in white supremacists through the George W. Bush and Obama eras is conspicuous.

Most people don’t realize the Bill of Rights has been gutted until they’re on the business end of a police encounter. And by then it’s too late.

Anyway, depending on the results and aftermath of the midterm elections this November, the US might pull back towards democracy the way it has at prior points in its history, or go full Third Reich.

It depends on how pissed we are without food and healthcare and an ongoing war that’s being poorly conducted. But maybe the big propaganda machine will keep us wanting to own the libs and hate on trans folk (and concentrating and torturing immigrants) for a while longer.

This kind of regulation needs to be enforced with bounties and fines.

AI slop can be made realistically enough to deceive, and there should be increasing sentences if willful intent to deceive is proven in court.

I’d be okay if there were a running list of disclaimer boilerplates:

~ Generated with AI
~ Altered with AI
~ Edited with AI
~ Cleaned with AI
~ Fixed [with non-AI image editing software]

This is one of those things that might actually serve to push the notion that digital devices (including cars now) should be required to be capable of installing independent operating systems, especially open source ones.

I’d absolutely require military devices to be driven by open source software. And yes, that’s a security liability, but security-by-obscurity is an even greater liability.

In the case of consumer devices, open-source access would be a means of protecting the end user from predatory software rife with dark patterns.

It’s highly likely that FC5 was referencing the song. Ubisoft is way into references.

Let us remember ALPRs have been around for a while now, and the fervor we’re building to dismantle Flock we need to quietly extend to all ALPR services actively feeding unwarranted surveillance data to law enforcement and federal paramilitaries.

To quote Far Cry 5…

Burn motherfucker burn motherfucker burn!

If that’s all a CEO was, then we’d have much more functional companies. But the CEO is also the top manager of the company and dictates policies that affect how the company is run. We’re seeing specific examples of what is nothing short of labor abuse by executives such as Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. And they choose their policies for purely emotional reasons, as an expression of resentment and vindictiveness toward their own workforce.

In fact, this is the core of their fantasy regarding AI, that with enough R&D it will be cheap enough to replace their human staff entirely with robots, who don’t have opinions and don’t fight for better treatment.

If a company separated the executive suite from upper management, and instead had a brain trust to maximize profits by hard data and cold calculation, I submit human labor would be better treated, since well-treated workers operate at an improved rate of productivity, which actually makes it profitable to make sure they take their breaks and eat their lunches.

History shows us the ownership class always thinks their workers are willfully withholding effort, and as we’ve seen during the North Atlantic slave era, the ownership class will work labor to death if they are allowed to do so.

Then they aren’t rare books necessarily.

The whole point of post-enlightenment government is to serve the public good. But then it gets captured by capitalist interests (as Karl Marx explains in Das Kapital) at which point the government serves capital.

Does anyone remember circa 2014 that radical jihadists in the middle east were destroying ancient and medieval artifacts, including stone heads? And I remember here in the liberal west we thought that was awful.

This is not the only thing that makes me think of that. Also Trump’s recent calls to reduce the size of US national parks and open them up to oil and uranium mining exploitation.

I have a fantasy that someone tries using data driven systems to run business. They’d still need AI to do all the C-speak and top-tier sales work, but as it is upper management commonly resents their own workforce and enacts policy just to be vindictive.

Imagine a game company that didn’t crunch because it knew crunching only slowed productivity and wrecked the health and morale of the dev team.

Imagine a company who didn’t issue RTO mandates because it saw it’s telecommuters are more productive and happier working from home.

Imagine if businesses didn’t surveillance-max and micromanage their administrative clerks and fulfillment teams understanding that doing so slows them down and makes them miserable.

I don’t know for certain that AI-assisted computers can run businesses and manage well, but we have countless examples of how upper management lets their feelings get in the way of maximizing profit and demonstrate incompetence and lack of adult maturity.

The bar really is that low.

Let’s also remember that before the screens, we had shitty textbooks, and underpaid teachers and a serious shortage of supplies.

Schools in the United States need more than a review of tech, but a complete overhaul and a budget that doesn’t look like Republicans are literally trying to kill the education system.

WOW! TIL!