YET ANOTHER FAKED MOON LANDING PHOTO BY THE LIBERAL GLOBALIST CULTURAL MARXIST ELITE

Clearly referring to countries with three words in their name, like “Antigua and Barbuda” or “Central African Republic”.

They clearly said “In the United States military”.

They just never mentioned getting fucked once you’re out of it.

submitting your wrinkly ball sac to a stranger on the Internet

She designs bioreactors and doesn’t even want to see mine for reference smdh

I think this perspective is the real copium.

We’ll see by January-ish, I guess, because until then both of our positions are unfalsifiable. But I brought up Vance having nothing with Democratic voters not because it’s impossible to win that way, but because Vance simply isn’t Trump and doesn’t have his uncanny ability to “flood the zone with shit”. He’s shown e.g. with the Springfield, Ohio pet-eating hoax that, like Trump, he’s not above insane, bigoted strawman issues to distract from real ones, but Trump probably almost really has been at the point where he could shoot someone dead on 5th Avenue and have it out of the news cycle two weeks later. (It’s at least starting to turn now thanks to dipshit Republicans caring about e.g. easily visible gas prices.)

Trump isn’t, of course, some magical creature – he’s propped up enormously by Congress, online floods of disinformation by foreign adversaries, right-wing justices, news media, etc. Vance would benefit from some of that. But he doesn’t have this insane, just-now-waning grip over the US’ right-wing where he functionally can’t do any wrong and, if he can, it’s immediately forgotten about. Trump over the last 10 years has accrued an insane followership, and Vance inherits almost none of that. I think that, right now, Vance “enjoys” (or at least prefers) having Trump out in front as an incompetent, buffoonish shield to the general public while he can mostly stand away and do whatever work he wants to.

Edit: I forgot to address the “real copium” part, and enequivocally: no, it isn’t. I badly want Trump out of office. I hold this belief despite what I’d want to happen (recognizing impeachment at this point is effectively impossible).

Vance is waiting for January so Vance can do two more terms for a total of a decade…

I see this as total, baseless cope. Vance was carried into office by Trump and has minimal popularity with Republicans – while Democrats despise him. If Vance were seeking power, he would know the 25th (not necessarily Section 4) would be his only chance at the presidency. If Trump is allowed to fuck everything up for two years, then Vance swoops in and says “I declare bankruptcy the 25th!”, it’s somehow successful, and he’s left barely cleaning up Trump’s mess for two years, he may have a shot in the primaries, but he has none in the general. The guy has the charisma and likeability of a wet sock, and he knows it.

That is, it’s the exact opposite: if Vance were seeking power by usurping his way to the presidency, now would be the opportune time to do it; he’d have the most time, and the iron is getting red-hot.

to prove I’m not a robot.

Well I mean a) that’s usually a third-party site asking Google to do that on their behalf, but more importantly b) you, uh, ever wonder if your ability to show you can recognize staircases might not be the main reason why Google’s challenge is menial image recognition tasks representing untold billions of hours of unpaid labor?

Oh, okay, that’s interesting and a bit odd but benign. As for who it is, it’s from the American sitcom Married… with Children. I agree it doesn’t look like genAI given the base image since it’s just a cutout of a ski mask and a bandana pasted atop and then… man, I don’t understand the eyes and mouth thing, but I have to say it seems deliberate given the base image had a serviceable mouth and eyes. By the standard that art should elicit an emotional response, it succeeds; it leaves an impression, and I don’t even mean that in a disparaging way.

I’m pretty sure the foundations of it are elsewhere than “They stopped making citations.”

My perspective is that it’s complicated – not a singular foundation, but a major component in a disastrous feedback loop. Lemmy’s news comms, for example, require a (usually quality or quality-enough) source, yet there are constantly comments that aren’t just wrong in that they lacked additional outside context, misread part of the article, maybe stopped midway through, think the article is wrong, just have some overriding bias, etc., but that they read the headline, said “fuck it, we ball”, and wrote 300 words that are totally disproven by the first 100 words of the article; sources clearly aren’t a panacea.

A decade of editing Wikipedia, I think – not remotely some prestigious, exclusive, disciplined experience – has given me a unique perspective on sourcing that’s very divorced from the general public’s (which at best is usually “yeah, that’s a good thing to do because it’s a good thing to do”) but also somewhat divergent from traditionally citation-heavy fields like academia because of both the target audience and inherently near-zero-trust environment. It’s really weird, and the scare quotes around “traumatized” were kind of poking fun at my own experience. Ten years ago, I felt like citations were a tertiary concern that you tacked on at the end out of obligation if someone forced you to; nowadays, for a litany of reasons, sourcing to me is at least coequal with the contents of a work. I don’t think I’d be so ardent about it if I hadn’t undergone such a huge change.*

It’s hard sometimes to keep that passion in, so I try to let it shine through in the form of setting what I think is a positive example (or sometimes taking research way the fuck overboard in a way that’s probably an unrealistic example). However, in the case of the OP – for whom I don’t think “mainly one comm” holds any water given everything on the threadiverse shows up on ‘All’ – I don’t just hope they do better, but I outright expect them to if they’re going to be shoveling dozens of political propaganda leaflets onto the threadiverse’s front page every day. Regardless of their beliefs, this isn’t some casual “uwu I just want to share my politics” couple posts a day on a toilet break thing; this is a dedicated, months-long, obsessive propaganda effort with hundreds upon hundreds of posts. I wasn’t just being smarmy in my earlier comment about them having more time to include a source upon finding out they don’t make these. The fact that they’re not even creating these themselves makes it simultaneously more imperative they include a source (because I’mma be honest, chief, I don’t think they’re actually verifying almost any of this shit even for themselves) and even less onerous than it already minimally was.

* I always have to recognize that this is partly because it is much easier for me now to find and cite sources because I’m so much more practiced than I was. I keep that at the front of my mind when I see others’ work and think it’s undercited.

Normally I’d agree and wouldn’t bitch about it elsewhere if someone were just posting, say, an interesting, innocuous history/science/etc. fact. I routinely try to supplement sourcing on posts where it seems lacking (helps me learn too; it’s mostly not altruistic), and in the rare event I criticize sourcing on those kinds of posts, I like to think it’s pretty tepid unless it’s blatantly egregious like “posting a Discord link to a news community”. I still think they should post it pre-emptively/give some context,* but I won’t begrudge them for not grasping an importance you kind of have to be “traumatized” into internalizing.

In the case of the OP, I know they’re “memes” and that makes it sound innocent, but what they post to Lemmy is a flood of ancom (ansoc?) propaganda – over 30 (not counting normal posts) in the last 24 hours, just as a sanity check that this isn’t a cognitive bias seeing more than there are. I align with OP ideologically in a lot of ways, and that won’t stop me from holding them to the same standard I’d hold any other propagandist to (which, again, is 90% of the reason they’re here). This kind of widespread, coddling, “just memes bro” treatment of digital propaganda leaflets is actively unraveling society; when used by the far-right, in the US alone, “just memes” got Trump elected twice and completely rotted whatever crumbs were left of Republicans’ brains. The profound intellectual laziness that this kind of junk food propaganda perpetuates is terrifying to me, and it even seems like the OP is themself a victim of that.

Sourcing isn’t just a crutch for the incurious and a shortcut for the curious; it establishes a standard whereby the incurious learn to appreciate sourcing – because they can easily access it if they may not know how, call out the OP if they’re wrong instead of blindly accepting, adopt good practices in their own posts, and expect others to do the same. It has a legitimate healing effect in the nigh-apocalyptic media literacy crisis we’re all living through. By contrast, not including sourcing in your barrage of political propaganda has a serious harmful effect on that standard – namely, normalizing a subconscious assumption that taking propaganda at face value as long as you agree with it is totally cool and not horrifically, societally dangeorus.

Like I know this sounds dramatic, but also *gestures broadly at the world on fire right now*

* (or slow down the pace of their posts if it’s that much of a burden; people vastly underestimate how important verifiability/the ability to dig deeper is, and you [general “you”; you have overall good practices] don’t have to spew an avalanche of posts if you can’t maintain quality)

Against my better judgment regarding double standards, I’m going to treat this legitimately unexpected level of misandry with kid gloves compared to how I’d treat even garden-variety misogyny and say that I hope you find peace with any trauma that may have led you to this point. Sincerely, no smarm, no “bless your heart” condescension – I understand what it is to be burdened with a lifetime of systemic distrust through no fault of your own.

Still, there’s nothing more I can say to a closed loop of “men are assumed malicious and a man probably made this statement because this statement is misogynistic and the statement is assumed misogynistic because a man made it and if a man made it then surely it’s misogynistic […]”. Even though we irreconcilably disagree on the OP, and I don’t think your assumptions about men are overall accurate or healthy, I appreciate your polite candor about why you feel the way you do.

a error message popped up telling that " on Ukraine" has been decided as the only allowed form.

That’s… interesting and concerning. I unfortunately lack the knowledge to find how that rule was implemented or how it slots into the Russian Wikipedia’s policies. Keep in mind in that NPOV article that “Wikipedia” is shorthand for “the English Wikipedia” following the first sentence, so huge portions of that only inherently apply to English (even if there’s probably a lot of overlap with others). There really are major languages I basically never visit, and Russian is one of them – only very occasionally for cross-linking a Russian topic we lack an article about. I’m totally inept about what goes on there.

I’m happy to stand corrected

Which is easy to say when your hypothesis is functionally unfalsifiable (used heuristically in support of another functionally unfalsifiable hypothesis).

I can’t stop you from believing it; I can push back and say it’s vibes on top of vibes to legitimize your assumption about a random person you’ve never spoken to who said something that’s totally benign and entirely correct unless you actively ascribe malice to it.

The majority of men do expect and prefer that women are shaved, thus the assumption.

You know, I wasn’t going to call it out in my original comment because it was beside the overall point, but “geeksandmisandry” and now you are interestingly assuming the gender of an anonymous user with a default pfp and the gender-neutral username “dinogatrr”.

I don’t think even if they were a man that this would be a good reason to assume they’re a shitty person (especially because the sample of “men on Tumblr” is going to be vastly different than “men overall” or even “men on social media overall”). But it is an interesting assumption on top of an assumption: they’re a man, and they’re a shitty person who thinks women’s legs are naturally icky.

It’s not impossible that they are, but given there’s a perfectly logical and highly plausible explanation that they’re making an entirely cogent point (because the argument is severely flawed, and they point out the flaw accurately), I choose to not just assume that they’re a shitty person who thinks women are icky and need to shave their legs or they’re gross – like the third comment from “geekandmisandry” (really self-reporting the bias there) does instead of just… asking them to clarify.

then what’s the problem?

You write a lot for someone who doesn’t understand communication. [200 words btw did I time travel back to fucking 4th grade?]

The fact you read that and couldn’t even grasp that there fucking is no problem with leg hair and I’m not saying there is one and I even directly said “leg hair on women is fine” is just *chef’s kiss*. You missed the excruciatingly obvious point of the entire comment – for which apparently even “a lot” of unambiguous clarification wasn’t enough. Fucking Mordecai’d that shit.

Who exactly doesn’t understand communication here? The one who thinks 200 words is “a lot” of writing?

but isn’t this ideology partially responsible for the situation we’re in now?

Welcome to the intent of the propaganda mills creating the easily digested, easily disseminated slop that gets spammed to this community repeatedly and uncritically.

90% of people have herpes simplex virus. Everyone(?) on Earth catches the common cold repeatedly throughout their lives.

Trying to appeal to nature about leg hair is a dumb argument that only “works” because you already – correctly – understand leg hair is fine in a medical (safe) and sociological (acceptable/should be accepted) context.

Yeah, the third post is “Local Tumblr User Doesn’t Understand Reductio ad Absurdum; More at 11.”

The user isn’t saying leg hair is like cancer (like fucking obviously; how disingenuous would you be to even suggest that?). They’re saying the argument of “it wouldn’t grow there if it wasn’t supposed to” is completely stupid – that it has little discriminative power to distinguish what’s good and bad if you don’t already know. It isn’t even nearly limited to the absurdity of that contradictory example:

“Sorry, honey, but the dick cheese wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t supposed to.”

It’s a fine-ish retort to get a seven-year-old to chill out, but it’s total bullshit when you don’t already know leg hair on women is fine. Pointing out that “Gravity is real because most people think it is” is a bad argument by saying “Germs didn’t exist because most people thought they didn’t” doesn’t mean I’m trying to say believing gravity is like disbelieving germ theory; I’m pointing out the argument doesn’t hold water regardless of what the fallacy (in the OP’s case, a pretty clear appeal to nature) was supporting.

TL;DR: Denying the means, not the conclusion.

You know, the crypto bro could just be self-identifying as a moron.