I can agree with that. Movements that have been long incubated in silos can’t be suffocated, and these days they’re just “big tenting” their way to legitimacy. Dismissal without correction withholds legitimacy about as well as shame affects the shameless.

The people who voted for the Dumpster at least managed to take the most basic, simple first step in starting to fulfill their civic duty. I don’t know if I can bring myself to laud that, but I’ve certainly no credit to award those who didn’t even vote at all.

If so much as 10% of the nation is engaged and has so much as a spark of competence yet cannot bear to vote Democrat, where did all the 3rd-party and off-ballot votes go? Why are those still practically a rounding error, hovering around 2% every year but 2016?

Those who didn’t vote at all ought to feel the most shame, because the laziness of abdicating all personal responsibility doesn’t offer half the emotional shielding that idiocy does.

It’s not effective at changing minds when it’s done like that.

I had a rather lengthy response to Otter – then I read their post more carefully, so you get one even longer. 🙄 This is why I normally lurk. Moderation is not my strength.

Propaganda is absolutely effective, but only significantly so when measured, diverse, and subtle, at least until already enjoying widespread majority support. The tactics that work involve obscuring bias or position behind oblique or selective framing. Bludgeoning people with facts tends to be counter-productive, even alienating people who already share the same views. That means the data was incorrectly measured, with a bias toward checking boxes/signaling virtue rather than actually exerting influence.

And there lies the deeper problem as well. How does one form “good journalistic practice” around such manipulative presentation of information, when that is partly how we define bad journalistic practice? Honesty/diligence and effectiveness are directly at odds with one another, and that’s pretty hard to coherently codify. If you can’t always be objectively right, then you have to always be honest and transparent – to not exert influence that is not intrinsic to incontrovertible facts. And what today is ever incontrovertible to a general audience?

Journalism as a craft desperately needs the institutional trust it only ever earned by policing itself against such practices, so that it could leverage a trust that those who engage in more effective manipulations could not. And that didn’t even protect the truth nearly so much as it did the status quo and established beliefs. The reality is we always needed critical thinking that has to come from somewhere greater in breadth and capacity than our own imagination, intuition, or narrow experience could ever train.

When the walls around publishing collapsed, we lost the good with the bad. I don’t think the solution we need today can still (pretend to) exist within journalism/institutions, nor with a purely self-organized general public. Today, I find democratized aggregators like Lemmy helpful, but the quality is a direct consequence of its limited influence also limiting the incentive to subvert it. Even then it’s only a relative boost to signal quality, not a new kind of signal.

A new mechanism is needed to filter and direct trust irrespective of subject – perhaps as educational institutions once did to greater degree. If we don’t figure it out soon, AI will create that solution for us its creator-owners by becoming the substrate through which all human knowledge gets filtered and approximately summarized. We’ve likely already met the next Rupert Murdoch.

Dang it, of course I’d post in the wrong spot. For the record, this was a copy of the other reply, not the one I mentioned not posting.

I wouldn’t have considered the noise pollution to exceed the scope of a nuisance and disruption to wildlife habitat, but Benn Jordan did a pretty good job demonstrating infrasound’s capacity to impact human health.

I wouldn’t worry about that. Getting by presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote.

I, a colonizer by birth and person of average shittiness, care deeply about the environment, because I live in it. I’d have to be profiting pretty obscenely from destroying humanity’s future to budge that balance of self-interest. But as a regular working-class person, nothing I earn in my entire lifetime could possibly outweigh – nor secure – personal access to clean air and water, healthy food, and the natural beauty of our land.

In this context, the only distinction I see between myself and a “noble savage” is that indigenous people have, if anything, a stronger and more legitimate sovereign claim to Canadian territory (along with a tradition of more direct reliance on it). Why wouldn’t they care? And maybe they don’t care more than anyone else, especially relative to how they’re personally impacted. But whether from care or convenience, they are vastly over-represented among the people that actually show up and put their bodies on the line opposing environmental destruction. They’re 5% of our population, yet as best I can estimate a plurality across front lines nationwide.

With the billionaire class consistently getting to do whatever they want to the planet, it’s very easy to forget: Even in the face of so much pro-business propaganda permeating our media, environmental protection is actually one of the areas where the rest of the world is not very divided at all.

Besides…the more “civilization” I see, the more attractive the label “savage” becomes.

While I hope you’re wrong in general and fear you’re right about this specific outcome, I’m confident you’re at least partly wrong about the bigger picture.

Lessons not learned will be re-taught.

To what extent? Do we have an issue with Reuters or AP now? How about Canadian commentators like Steve Boots on foreign YouTube?

I’m having a hard time envisioning a rule around this that can be enforced equitably, but we can equitably reject content regardless of source, based on established merits of its substance.