Elephants are incredible animals. They have complex communication and even communicate through seismic vibrations through the ground via their feet, and they can even recognize the elephant sending the seismic message. Additionally, they have cultural practices, including funeral rituals.
For citations for these claims and more information, here is a blog post of mine (I have ads turned off and don’t benefit from my blog in any way).
There’s no question the planet and all other life would be better off if we died out in the stone age. Climate change, PFAS, microplastics… We’re parasites to the planet (channeling my best Andrew Ryan impression there).
Well the world would certainly be a better place now if that were the case.
PDF Gear is the free alternative I use. Adobe can eat read a dick.
Enshittification had already been largely discussed here.
I saw users minimizing the aberrant business practices of Meta and doubting their role in assisting in genocide.
My point was to highlight how unethical and horrendous Meta itself is.
For the Meta apologists, I have a reality check for you:
Threads was immediately subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta’s information-harvesting practices. [1]
Threads was marketed to be open to ‘free speech’ (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3] They also fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads’ launch. [1]
As already established, Meta also assisted in genocide! [4]
Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [5], [6]
This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information.[7] Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads…
FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. [8] Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!
I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:
Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];
Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;
Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;
Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;
Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and
Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design. [9]
Damn! I commented the same thing before scrolling through the comments…
Nice Cage and John Travolta in Face Off.
I have the same approach of browsing all and blocking what I don’t want as I come across it. Which in my case, happens to be mostly anime and shitposting communities.
Who all is arguing in support of Left-Wing extremism? Other than select instances, most users on lemmy do not by any means support tankies. I for one can’t stand them.
They can be just as out of touch with reality as a MAGA extremist, but to say both sides are the same is blatantly false. Far-Right extremism is spreading across the globe and it threatens and takes lives and destroys family systems.
Allow me to enlighten you by illustrating how both sides are absolutely not the same
Some highlights:
There is a stark difference in the means with which the two groups engage in acts of extremism. In a study evaluating Left-Wing and Right-Wing domestic extremism between 1994 and 2020, there was one fatality as the result of Left-Wing extremism, versus 329 fatalities resulting from Far Right extremism in that 25 year period. [5]
The Far-Right movement is the oldest and most deadly form of domestic terrorism in the United States, and The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism found that the Far-Right is responsible for 98% of extremist murders in the U.S. [24] Furthermore, for nearly every year since 2011, Far-Right terrorist attacks/plots have accounted for over half of all terror attacks/plots in the United States. [21]
In the U.S., Right-Wing extremism was responsible for two-thirds of all failed, foiled, or successful terror attacks in 2019, and was responsible for 90% of attacks in the first half of 2020 alone. [21] Since 2013, Far-Right extremism has been responsible for more terror attacks/plots than the Left-Wing, ethnonationalism, or religiously motivated attacks/plots. [21]
These are excerpts from a blog post of mine, but I have ads turned off and do not benefit in any way from it.
I hadn’t noticed until the posts were weeks old, so I didn’t want to dig thru the mod log…
i don’t know why they “trust me” dumb fucks
Real quote from Mark Fuckerburg.
yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard just ask i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
That’s precisely why I left L.W. They also were removing community posts voicing opposition to threads federation. I witnessed it firsthand, where posts I commented in (and in which the majority of comments opposed it) were removed.
Now they removed the piracy communities again after promising not to. They are straight up untrustworthy and don’t care about what their users actually want.
I am happy on feddit.de. They are defederated from Threads and the tankie instances.
Yeah lemmy.ml has gotten worse with tankies, but it’s no where near as bad as the others. And I still want to see some lemmy.ml communities (tech, gaming).
But unless it’s changed with some of the recent updates, blocking instances as a user (on lemmy) only blocks posts from the instance but still allows interaction with their users in comments of posts. It’s different for kbin and mastodon.
I don’t want the annoyance of arguing with tankies from their main instances. I’d rather be defederated.
Also, why go back to lemm.ee and do that when I don’t need to on feddit.de? That seems kind of silly in the first place.
I was really unhappy with that change in the last update as well…
I couldn’t find a setting to change it back to the actual numbers, but I think that should absolutely be an option in settings.
As you said, the numbers provide a lot more information regarding engagement/views/how controversial a comment/post is.
Some people may feel it’s frivolous, but I’m considering a new app if it remains a percentage.
I really don’t lie. Unless it’s for safety or a white lie not to hurt someone’s feelings, I don’t feel the need to stoop to lying.
I accept my faults and I’ll admit wrongdoing before I lie. I’m not concerned with what other people think of me, so I speak my truth even if it will drive others away from me. If that happens, they aren’t the kind of people I want to associate with anyway.
I value honesty, authenticity, and empathy and hold myself strictly to the standards I’ve set in my mind and personal philosophy.
I don’t lie or say anything on the internet that I wouldn’t say in real life. I can’t personally comprehend the point or drive to lie on the internet. I’d rather focus effort on self-actualization rather than make-believe.
So formidable… Earlier detection of a severely outdated aircraft that’s being phased out…