Reply With QuoteGiven that people are still desperate to believe utter crap with zero evidence...
... it is no surprise.
Fake AI image (Pentagon explosion) causes a tank in the stock market
A fake image of an explosion next to the Pentagon spread on social media and caused a brief dip in the US stock market on Monday.
The now-debunked image showed a plume of smoke billowing beside the headquarters of the US Department of Defense. Experts say it bears the hallmarks of being generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and illustrates the threat the technology poses in terms of misinformation.
The image was shared by a number of Twitter accounts carrying a “verified” blue check mark, including one impersonating the Bloomberg news agency - called “@BloombergFeed” - which has since been suspended.
The fake news was subsequently spread by dozens of other Twitter accounts, including Russian state-controlled news network RT, which has been blocked in the EU but has a following of more than 3 million on the platform.
Given that people are still desperate to believe utter crap with zero evidence...
... it is no surprise.
This video was interesting, it's about the undercurrent of fake channels masquerading as PBS Aeons type channels, to try and steal your clicks if you're looking for science content.
They mostly look to have AI generated clickbait titles and thumbnails. Those are probably generated first, then when they generate a sufficiently "people will click on that" one, a video is cobbled together with stolen footage, and even though there are dozens of such channels there are hints the same group is behind all of them.
Last edited by Cipheron; 31st May 2023 at 13:23.
Apparently, US conservatives are cancelling Chick-Fil-A now, because it has "gone woke" and hired a black VP of inclusivity or something:
https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/s...47913930604555
Apparently, being aware (woke), speaking out (virtue signaling) and taking action (SJW) are all bad things. Is being aware of wokeness also woke?
Who knows in this age of postmodern conservatism and their weird cancel culture bullshit.
Do two wokes make a wake?
In related not news, Utah went on a book banning spree and got the Bible banned from school libraries as a result:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/educatio...ed-these-utah/
[...]
The scripture was first challenged in December by a parent who wrote in their complaint that they were frustrated by the books being removed from school libraries in recent months — with conservative groups across the country and in Utah taking aim at literature they call “inappropriate,” and which has particularly focused on books written about the LGBTQ community.
So the parent submitted their request for a review of the Bible, saying it was time to remove “one of the most sex-ridden books around.”
{The solution is simple, The Tribune Editorial board writes: Remove the book bans. All of them}
“Incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide,” the parent wrote in their request, listing topics they found concerning in the religious text. “You’ll no doubt find that the Bible, under Utah Code Ann. § 76-10-1227, has ‘no serious values for minors’ because it’s pornographic by our new definition.”
The code cited is the Utah law passed in 2022 to ban any books containing “pornographic or indecent” content from Utah schools, both in libraries and in the classroom.
Based on the new code, something is indecent if it includes explicit sexual arousal, stimulation, masturbation, intercourse, sodomy or fondling. According to state attorneys, material doesn’t have to be “taken as a whole” in those situations or left on the shelf during a review. If there is a scene involving any of those acts, it should be immediately removed.
[...]
El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele has finally crippled the gangs that terrorized the country, with mass arrests, and a new mega prison , apparently bringing the first significant lull in crime in decades. El Salvador was one of the world's most dangerous, gang-ravaged countries till recently
Typically, almost every news source leveled criticisms against the president, bringing up human rights violations, some even calling him a dictator (while proposing no alternative solutions). But at some point you have to make a choice - have a semblance of 'human rights' while your country collapses under gang control, or impose a few restrictions and restore peace of mind to your law-abiding people. Extreme situations require extreme measures.Following a weekend of extreme gang violence in March last year, El Salvador's young and media-savvy president, Nayib Bukele, imposed a state of exception - an emergency measure under which several constitutional rights were suspended and police were granted wide-ranging powers of arrest.
Since then, some 66,000 people have been detained.
....
"On a scale of one to ten, it's a twelve," jokes one local resident when asked how much calmer the neighbourhood has become over the past year. "It's incredibly quiet."
Not prepared to give his real name, such is the ingrained fear of speaking about gangs, "Joel" says his neighbourhood is unrecognisable under the tighter security conditions: "Things were so bad here before, so ugly."
"This [area] was run by the MS-13. If we went into the neighbourhood next to ours, run by the 18th Street [gang], you might never come back. Now we can come and go as we please," he added.
The government's heavy-handed approach enjoys more than 90% support with the Salvadorean public, exhausted after years of gang intimidation and extortion.
Well done El Salvador I say
Hell of a marketing tactic they cooked up for this game.
----
Edit:Originally Posted by Azaran
I think this is exactly backwards. Gangs don't come out of a vacuum. They form in an environment of rampant government and police corruption and ineptitude. If a regime is severe in striking down on them, as in tossing out legal control of the police, you have to see that (1) it's a band aid at best. The gangs will just come back and long as the corruption and incompetence is there; and (2) it's pouring gas on the fire in the long term, since it's making it even easier for future administrations to toss out the law, which will make the environment better for gangs in the future. Bad cops don't stop crime in the long run.
And what's this "no alternative solution"? Are El Salvadorians somehow not capable of forming stable, law-abiding and human rights respecting democracies while dealing with gang violence. Bad history and social forces makes that a challenge, but countries like Panama, Chile, and Ecuador, most of South America sans Venezuela for that matter, beg to differ.
All of that said, if you really want to fight against the drug market fueling gangs in Central and South America, easily the number one thing that needs to be done is drugs need to be legalized in the US, or rather they need to be moved from a criminal issue to a medical issue.
Edit2:
Oh also 66K people detained? No way those are all hardened killers, not even near. It's the same playbook as Trump & Duturte, and every dictator since the beginning of time. You just call your political opposition "terrorists" and "gang members" and suddenly you can imprison them with impunity and people that also hate the targeted group think you're making the country safer when literally the government is the biggest criminal in the room.
Last edited by demagogue; 8th Jun 2023 at 14:32.
Bears an uncanny resemblance to United States, New York.
valid points, but are you gonna wait and hope that the country one day fixes itself? I'd rather have a radical, imperfect fix, than wait and hope for a bright future that may never come.
I also think we're pretty disconnected from some realities in the west. I wonder if your opinion would change if you lived in El Salvador, witnessed atrocities every other day, and had to pay a chunk of your salary to the local clique in exchange for them not killing your family
I thought they were celebrating the overdue death of Televangelist and wannabe theocrat, Pat Robertson at age 93.Hell of a marketing tactic they cooked up for this game.
Hey, Jesus! Get the lead out! Second coming, yesterday please.
The good die young (cf. Kissinger).
Fortunately one of our law interns this summer is El Salvadorian. I'll ask her her thoughts about it. I don't want to presume what she may say. I mean she's interning for a human rights NGO this summer, so I could venture some guesses, but you're right in that the right people to ask are the citizens actually living there, and I'm honestly wondering what her take may be and expecting her to have ideas I couldn't have considered.
Also worth noting though that my day job involves researching countries that have regular street violence and police crackdowns, almost always against "terrorists" and "gangs" ... Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines, Hong Kong, etc. So it's not like it's the first time I'm hearing about the issues countries like that face. One of my best friends here in Texas had his wife's brother killed by gang violence in Mexico, which forced the whole family to come to Texas actually, and we've talked about the challenges there. (Not to mention our own Duckeh comes from a place sadly wracked by gang violence.) So it's not like I just dismiss the problem of gang violence either and don't see the heavy costs it has on people. But even in those conversations, I didn't hear the police going to war with the people as one of the "good" options.
Well there's more to talk about than can we can cover here, and I haven't fully researched it (and I always try to hesitate to say too much about anything before I've researched a lot into it), but I'll try to give an update about what our El Salvadorian intern has to say about it anyway.
Whenever the ancient fascist argument of some variant of "at least the trains run on time", I think it's helpful to remember that the trains didn't run any more on time, they just made it illegal to point that out.
I'm not sure how sustainable the solution is either.
65,000 is 1% of the entire population of the country, which is 6 million, and other articles say the total they've locked up is close to 2% of the entire country.
Obviously if you restrict that just to males, it's 4% of everyone is now in prison, and if you restrict that to only younger men, it's 8-10% of everyone being locked up. They're also constructing a new 40,000 person mega-prison to fit even more people in.
With numbers that huge it sounds like the only way you could get that is to just go into the poorer neighborhoods and more or less indiscriminately round up any young men. Sure, the crime rate will drop as a result, but that's not proof that the people they rounded up were guilty of a crime.
Keep in mind, they've prevented 30 homicides per 100,000 population by rounding up 1000 people per 100,000 population. Clearly, 970 out of each 1000 people they rounded up never killed anyone. It's probably worse than that however. Since there are probably 10 murderers per 1000 arrested-people who killed 3 people each, so 99% of the people they rounded up to prevent murders are definitely NOT murderers.
Hell the USA could do a similar thing and knock the homicide rate in half by marching the cops into black neighborhoods and rounding up all males over the age of 15. But ... should they??
Yeah, it'll be an effective way to get the numbers down, and definitely people who are the ones NOT being locked up or having their family members locked up with be supportive. However it's unarguably a human rights catastrophe in it's own right:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-report-bukele
Just the 153 known deaths equal the claimed reduction in the homicide rate as a result of the crackdowns, so if that's the tip of the iceberg that it seems it could clearly be a blowout in the number of total deaths, just trading off gang violence for state torture and disappearances.At least 153 died in custody in El Salvador’s gang crackdown – report
The human cost of El Salvador’s controversial “war on gangs” has been laid bare in a new report which claims dozens of prisoners were tortured and killed in jail after being caught up in the year-long security crackdown.
...
The NGO said it had confirmed 29 of those fatalities as violent deaths and another 46 were considered suspicious. In most of those 75 cases, Cristosal said the bodies of the victims showed signs of torture, beatings or strangulation. Other dead inmates also showed signs of injuries but were classified as having died of “undetermined” or “natural” causes meaning the true number of violent deaths could be higher.
...
The rights group, Cristosal, said it had obtained photographs and mortuary reports showing bodies with signs of “asphyxiation, [bone] fractures, significant bruising, lacerations and even perforations”. Some appeared to have died of malnutrition. Nearly half of the victims were men aged between 18 and 38. The NGO claimed some prisoners had been tortured with electric shocks.
The government calling journalists "terrorists" is a worrying trend.El Salvador’s government has rejected criticism of its anti-gang campaign, which has seen more than 67,000 people arrested since its began in March 2022. It dismisses critical NGOs and media organizations as defenders of gangs and “terrorists”.
Last edited by Cipheron; 9th Jun 2023 at 05:48.
I mean, that's not too far from what the U.S. did. Soaring incarceration rates, plummeting crime rates.
Looks like they are doing just that, plus anyone deemed "inconvenient":
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...in-el-salvador
[...]
Under the state of emergency, no trial or charges are required to detain someone. Disgruntled neighbours, unhappy partners or rival businessmen can easily take advantage of the breakdown of due process.
“You no longer need to have any link with the gangs to be locked up in El Salvador. You simply need to be a young male,” said López.
The pair say they saw countless other foreigners caught up in the crackdown, including Hondurans, Guatemalans and North Americans.
As Bukele ramps up his attack on the gangs such tales are increasingly common.
On 9 May a fisherman from Isla El Espíritu Santo in the south of the country was released after a year in prison after authorities admitted he was wrongly imprisoned following an anonymous phone call.
In another case a young lesbian woman was taken from her home by soldiers after she was reportedly denounced by taxi drivers who did not like her sexual orientation.
[...]
I mentioned this before. I was reading up on the conflict in Sudan for a new class, and suddenly Wagner Group somehow became part of the story, hinting at hidden ties connecting the conflicts or violence in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, CAR, Chad, and if you pick at that scab enough, a whole brutish world of mercenaries for hire in Africa and the Middle East rears an ugly head. Not to mention, as we've talked about before, Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, looks like he's trying to position himself as Putin's successor; or at the least there's a power struggle happening there I'm not sure Prigozhin is going to win. In any event, it's worth knowing more about them.
And on that note, WSJ released a good documentary on the Wagner Group today that gives an interesting glimpse into that world.
By the way, it reminds me of the old saw in Afghanistan: they aren't warlords committing war crimes if you just call them "contractors".
Some articles were claiming that Prigozhin and Kadyrov seem allied to some degree. Both have been attacking the Russian military brass, however there was an interesting exception in that both were praising one up and coming general, Sergei Surovikin, when he was appointed head of the Ukraine operations.
It makes sense to look at who Prigozhin is friendly with, since you don't take over a country without putting your friends in control of major state institutions.
Something that I've begun to suspect is that some of the unexplained Russian deaths could be related to factions setting the stage for post-Putin power grabs, and not any Putin master-plan. Think about it this way: those people don't even need to have done anything ... them just being in their position could mean they were in the way of someone setting up one of their friends in that position.
EDIT: recent reporting has solidified the speculation that Surovikin works for Wagner:
https://www.economist.com/the-econom...litary-leaders
Wagner remains important to Russia. Ukrainian military officials say that the group’s units are among their enemy’s most effective, not least because of their willingness to sacrifice men. Meanwhile, Re:Russia, another think-tank, notes that, according to Mr Prigozhin, General Surovikin has begun to represent Wagner’s interests among Russia’s senior commanders.
Last edited by Cipheron; 10th Jun 2023 at 05:28.
Damn the deep state and their "weather". This is gonna be a long post, because there are LOTS of theories, which perhaps signals the fragmenting of the conspiracy crowd post-Covid and post-QAnon. for tl;dr I've bolded the headings so you can skim through.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture...es-1234766037/
The “Directed Energy Weapons” Theory
Why buy into lightning strikes when you can believe in “directed energy weapons?” Stew Peters is a far-right media host and conspiracy monger, infamous for his unhinged film claiming Covid-19 is caused by synthetic snake venom. Peters used his Telegram account on June 5 to blame the wildfires on government weaponry.
“Watch ALL of SE Quebec catch on fire at the EXACT SAME TIME,” Peters wrote, linking to a viral TikTok video of satellite imagery. “Statistically impossible to happen by accident,” Peters claimed without evidence. “Clearly our governments are targeting us with Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs).”
We’re not sure if DEWs are related to the infamous Jewish Space Laser that Congress’ resident Q-Anon queen, Marjorie Taylor Greene, previously implicated in a wildfire outbreak. But it’s clear this theory has juice. On Twitter, users are blaming an evil ruling class known as “the cabal” for deploying DEWs “both from planes and high-altitude satellites.”
“Looks like the storm has arrived,” wrote one user invoking a QAnon trope about a coming battle with the powerful forces of the Deep State. “Cabal is going scorched earth.”
The “Flame Thrower Drone” Theory
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little conspiracy theorists, but big players like Peters are ever eager to embrace the newest insanity. On June 6, Peters posted a new video, of what looks like a remote-controlled helicopter drizzling napalm on a forest. “It seems Canada isn’t sophisticated enough to use Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs),” Peters wrote. “Looks like they opted for a drone with a flamethrower instead.”
Normies replying to the post tried to offer a reality check, that the video actually depicted a fire-fighting drone engaged in “back burning” — “common practice to control/manage forest fires.” (For more on the reality of fighting fire with fire read here.)
But other conspiratorial commenters were undeterred. “That is Terrorism on our own soil,” insisted one. “These fsuks [sic] need to be arrested. Any helicopter with this equipment needs to be destroyed and the pilot hung.”
The “Antifa Arsonist” Theory
Probably the laziest misinformation collected here holds that antifascists are setting the fires. Why? Because they’re antifa, stupid. Anything can be blamed on those who would oppose militant far-right ideology, so may as well try it. “Antifa pyromaniacs are getting started early this year,” one user commented as the fires started to burn in May, in a typical post on the QAnon forum Great Awakening. “As this thing unwinds, look for wildfires to increase exponentially as the cabal burns everything down.”
The “Wildfires Are the New Covid” Theory
A variety of conspiracy theorists see the fires as part of a plot to limit freedom anew, now that the restrictions of the Covid pandemic have been largely eliminated. A Telegram account calling itself “GreatAwakening.World – Q + Trump” posted conspiratorially that: “They sets [sic] the Quebec and Ontario on fire” as part of a “globalist climate change scam.” The account warned: “Climate change lockdowns are starting.”
...
“As many of us have noticed from the start, many of the covid zealots also push climate crisis shit,” a redditor wrote Wednesday on r/CoronavirusCirclejerk, criticizing people who recommended masking up until the air has cleared. A member of r/conspiracy was more explicit: “Wildfires are the new Covid,” they declared. “Stay indoors, wear a mask, fear pushed by the news, it will only be two weeks… Is anyone else felling [sic] déjŕ vu?” Commenters agreed, saying, “Climate lockdowns are coming” and “the hype is starting, NYC mayor just recommended masks lmao.”
...
The “We Are About to Be Hit on Several Fronts” Theory
If there’s not a UFO angle, is it really even a conspiracy?
For some on the fringes of the internet, the notion that climate lockdowns are the new Covid lockdowns is directionally correct — but misses the big picture. A Gab user known as RusticMan thinks he’s got the real intel, that the fires are just the beginning of a cascade of unnatural disasters. “We are about to be hit on several fronts. Anther plandemic [sic], climate emergency, illegal invasion, and UFO invasion,” he wrote. “Sound crazy? Get ready. It’s coming. It’s happening NOW!”
Others have been quick to embrace extraterrestrial explanations. They blame the raging infernos on “space debris” or to connect the fires to the path of the notorious surveillance balloon and other unidentified aerial phenomena. Are we being firebombed by Chinese spycraft, lit ablaze by crashing UFOs, or is someone creating a massive smokescreen so that we can’t find out the truth about what’s in the skies? Finding answers, it seems, is a lot less entertaining for these folks than tossing out the craziest of questions.
The “Forced Migration to 15-Minute Cities” Theory
Urban planners trying to improve quality of life with “15-minute city” designs — reducing car use by ensuring people are just 15 minutes’ walking or biking distance to anything they might need — have been bedeviled by conspiracy theorists who claim they want to imprison people in tiny residential districts. Now it appears that a few of those alarmists are drawing baseless connections between the concept and the Canadian fires, suggesting that they are a pretext for forced migration to (where else!) these dystopian citadels.
A number of Facebook posts advances this narrative. One man in Quebec said the forest fires were intentionally set as “the perfect prelude to 15-minute cities,” while an Ontario woman who bought into the idea that the fires were all begun simultaneously argued that they were meant to “assist in destroying rural homesteaders” and “prove that those ‘15-minute cities’ will help ‘save’ the world.” On Truth Social, David “Nino” Rodriguez, a former heavyweight boxer at one point ranked among the top in the world, amplified similar claims to 33,000 followers. “The fires in Canada are being used for nothing more than to displace families, ruin homes and migrate people into 15-minute cities,” he warned. Just one example of the kind of thing you might say after being punched in the head too many times.
The “Blotting Out the Sun” Theory
Fans of The Simpsons will never forget the time Mr. Burns built a giant mechanical shade that plunged the town of Springfield into eternal darkness, making the citizenry all the more dependent on electricity from his nuclear power plant. It was a pretty convoluted plan when you consider that he could have simply set fire to a nearby national forest so that smoke blanketed the town, achieving the same effect.
Yes, a solar blackout is the goal of whichever nefarious organization kicked off this disaster, according to a handful of true wackos. “Does anyone else have a sneaking suspicion that these Canadian fires are meant to blot out the sun and kill crops?” asked a QAnon believer who shared an air quality map on the Telegram QAnon channel, “Great Awakening.” This fear was of course immediately confirmed by a fellow traveler: “The main thing that comes to mind is cloud seeding with smoke particles,” the commenter wrote. “It could possibly keep people from planting or make seeds too wet to germinate. So yes same goal, kill the crop production.”
On Telegram, the QAnon channel GreatAwakening.World — which boasts nearly a quarter million followers — has labeled the wildfires a “psyop” and man-made “apocalypse.” Multiple posts suggest this operation is in part an effort to block the sun. “BREAKING: The Sun is no longer visible in Binghamton, New York,” read the caption on one picture of orange haze hanging over the upstate city. “They just did it. They covered up the sun. No more vitamins.” You know what? Maybe it’s a good thing the sun is hidden for now — otherwise these dopes would probably be staring right into it.
Soap2day, the Youtube of movies and series, has shut down
The pirate streaming service Soap2day abruptly announced it was shutting down permanently on Tuesday, prompting an outcry of grief from its users on social media. The site allowed people to watch movies and shows without paying for subscription services.
The Soap2day shutdown announcement came early Tuesday morning, when the site’s moderators left a short goodbye note on the front page and scrubbed it of its content.
“Hello guys,” the note reads. “We have decided to close soap2day forever. We are very sorryBye.” When the site is opened, the tab title reads “soap2day is closed.”
I'm not sure if Prigozhin is gunning for Putin's job, or whether he wants to be a world figure and 3rd world king maker. I could see him pivoting from Putin to Xi. Either way, he's biting off a lot by replacing the French peacekeepers who were swept off the continent in a wave of anti-colonialism, while keeping the war and his reputation going in Ukraine. As for those peacekeepers, was it really anti-colonialism that ended their mission, or was it their ineffectual resistance against the Islamists who only got stronger?
I wish this stuff wasn't news:
https://www.castanet.net/news/Kelown...wna-track-meet
Two Kelowna moms are speaking out after their 9-year-old daughter was verbally assaulted at a track and field event on Thursday at Kelowna's Apple Bowl.
The mothers, who choose not to identify their daughter, say she was competing in a shot-put event when a grandfather of one of the other participants started yelling at her.
"She went to step up to compete for the grade four shot-put final, and right before she went to throw, a grandfather of a student said, 'Hey, this is supposed to be a girls' event, and why are you letting boys compete.' My daughter is cisgender, born female, uses she/her pronouns. She has a pixie haircut," said mom Heidi Starr.
Starr says the man then carried on to demand certification to prove that her daughter was born female.
"He stopped the entire event. He also pointed at another girl who also had short hair. He then piped in and said, 'Well, if she is not a boy, then she is obviously trans.'"
Starr said the man's wife then started calling her "a genital mutilator, a groomer, and a pedophile."
Central Okanagan School District superintendent Kevin Kaardal confirmed with Castanet that steps are being taken to ban the man from all school-related events.
"Staff intervened and actually moved the shot-put away from where he was. The gentleman was not a part of our school district. We are taking steps to ensure he is not able to be on our school property or attend events in the future."
Posting Permissions
