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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I was excited when Biden dropped out and Harris got this huge surge as the new young, not actively deteriorating candidate, then more excited when she announced Tim Walz and got a mid western, blue collar surge, and cautiously optimistic when everyone was briefly focusing on how anti-democratic and un-American Project 2025 was, but then started getting worried when all I saw running up to the election was stories about abortion rights and women voting against their husbands and celebrity endorsements.

    It feels like Obama successfully ran a campaign of Hope and Change, and since then Democrats repeatedly campaign on maintaining the status quo and just not letting it slide too much further. And while it’s possible to win an election on the basis of ‘I’m at least somewhat competent’, it might not be in the US when so much of the population sees how fundamentally broken wealth inequality is at baseline.





  • COVID means everyone needs to work less, that means that every product that is a result of people’s work decreases in availability, and thus, increases in cost.

    This is a fundamental aspect of any major disruption, including the war in Ukraine, that will drive up prices.

    The problem that Democrats and most Liberal governments have is that they just let this happen. The reality of the situation is that the poorer you are, the more of your money goes to necessities, so when the price of necessities rises, the more of your money is lost to inflation. If you only spend 10% of your income on necessities and the rest goes to frivolous things, then you can just cut back on them no big deal, you can shift that money to investments and actually profit off the inflation. But if 90% of your money goes to necessities, than you have no choice and 90% of your money just got less valuable.

    Inflation is a frustrating and abstract word that just hides one of that ratchets that keeps rich people rich. They do not pay the costs of inflation (or pay them last). Every single time there is an inflationary event, be it a natural disaster caused by climate change, a war, a pandemic, etc, taxes should immediately rise on the wealthy to pay for it. If they do not, then, it is a tax on the poor and working class that will be hand waved away as “inflation”.







  • Even with newspapers and the like are filter bubbles possible. I am free to buy only the newspaper who writes the stories in the way I want to read them. There are left wing newspapers and right wing newspapers and stuff in between. And even with newspapers and broadcasts you are still free to only consume what you want to consume and block, by not buying or active ignoring, what you not want to see or hear. Things like cracker-barrel philosophy or Stammtischparolen where a thing long before the Internet.

    Are you arguing that the filter bubble effect is the same for a newspaper and for a social media site?

    Yes, the filter bubble effect is still possible to some extent with a traditional chronological news feed, but it’s quite frankly absurd on it’s face to claim that that is the same severity of filter bubble, when a site like Reddit / Lemmy operates by taking those chronological news feeds and filtering them further.

    The Guardian might be a relatively true neutral newspaper (meaning it appears to lean left by mainstream standards), and yet articles it publishes that back up any remotely right wing / economically conservative points do not get posted here.

    Echo chambers naturally arose in the past because information could not travel freely, that does not mean they are a good thing or something that we should be recreating and reinforcing on the internet now that it can.





  • Fascist? Are you fucking kidding me? You’re literally just describing newspapers, broadcast news, town criers, and literally all life pre-internet.

    Filter bubbles occur because we have the ability to selectively choose to only hear news we like which is a new phenomena that is a result of the internet, because it is fundamentally a messaging system, not a broadcast system like virtually every news system throughout history.

    You are just falling into the American trap that personal freedom is the ultimate good and should trump everything else, even if the systemic effects of it are bad.

    Reddit / Lemmy are fundamentally not a good place to read the news and get informed because of the filter bubble effect. They’re a good place to go have an in-depth discussion about an article, but if you actually want to be informed then you should use an RSS reader or something else that gives you a chronological feed, not one based on what’s popular amongst people you already agree with.