• 14 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • What if that is true though? What if it’s even virtually guaranteed to be true, given the effort and time required to reasonably prove something like that combined with the limited resources given (and which we can afford to give) to the justice system to do so, and the sheer number of crimes to deal with?

    Honestly, the more I hear about the number of cases of people being convicted falsely, or where it’s hard to tell if they truly were guilty, due to evidence being poor, or misconstrued, or based on faulty foresic science or known unreliable sources like eyewitness testimony, the more I worry that if called to serve on a jury I’d be effectively unable to do so, because I have come to doubt if the justice system is even capable of proving something beyond what I would consider to be a reasonable doubt.






  • the sprouts are a similar size and shape to those chocolates, and theyre hidden under the gold wrappers, meaning the actual chocolate isnt visible from the outside. So, they can remove the chocolate, wrap the wrappers back over the sprouts, and put those back in the package so as to make whoever it is given to think theyre getting chocolate, until they unwrap one.





  • While I do generally enjoy discovery, I do think It’s still pretty flawed. Not because of the spore stuff, but because of the way that they have to deal with so many “danger to the entire galaxy/universe/multiverse” type events back to back. Like, doing a few is fine, I generally enjoyed the xindi arc in Enterprise for example, but having so many starts to feel very forced after awhile.

    I especially find that bit with the spore energy extractor in the mirror universe that could kill all life in the multiverse if not stopped jarring, because, if you have a potentially limitlessness number of alternative timelines, and the massive expanse of space, to develop that tech in, the odds that nobody else ever built one of these drops to essentially zero, except that the existence of the plot at all implies nobody else ever has.




  • The trouble is, these sorts of trolls will take no issue with simply replying to themselves on multiple accounts, gaming engagement algorithms by buying popular accounts or stealing popular content, etc. Theyre almost certainly going to get the visibility they want either way, if they know what they’re doing.

    Hence I think that it is important to visibly show dissent against them, especially if you get enough people in a community to do it as to leave them visibly in the minority (okay, moderation would be even better, but the viability of that depends a lot on the space), to combat the effect wherein people go along with views that they perceive as being typical of those around them. Such a thing isnt truly an argument, at least not a good faith one.

    I get where you’re coming from, im just not really convinced that it works as well as the conventional wisdom about trolls suggests.


  • I think it depends on the type of “troll” tbh. The traditional kind, looking to get a rise out of people for amusement? Sure, they need you to interact, and starving them of that attention kills the point. But nowadays we also use that term for people trying to shape public discourse in a dishonest fashion, such as when governments attempt to manipulate foreign public opinion, or politically motivated people pretend to be a different position in order to discredit it.

    These kinds are slightly different I think, because their goal isnt necessarily to get a rise out of people, just getting seen enough times is enough to normalize their message in people’s heads.

    For that kind, it might be a good idea to present a counter-narrative, so that people that come across them dont subconsciously get the idea that the troll’s message is one with wide public support. You wont change their mind by arguing with them of course, but that just means that the point is not to change their mind, but to drown them out essentially.



  • Something that occurred to me this morning is that its a bit worse than just them sucking up to Trump with that to get unbanned; to my understanding, he’s just stated he wont enforce the ban law, so if he was to change his mind, he wouldnt need congress to pass another I dont think? He’d just need to start enforcing the existing one. That means that TikTok has a strong incentive to continue sucking up to him throughout his whole term, to stay on his good side. But it goes further, because it also creates an incentive for other corporate social medias that compete with TikTok to do the same (though admittedly, their owners seem to want to anyway), in the hopes that they can convince him to enforce the ban again and remove some of their competition.