Today’s Special Offah!

A conscience really is a goddamn hindrance in this world rather than a net positive.

Sort of. People without a conscience and without the power, privilege and/or social tools to abuse that often also end up pretty badly. Like how narcissism can lead both to (unwanted) social isolation, or even prison time, and then also sometimes to a successful business/political career or creating your own adoring cult, depending on other factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the person.

EDIT: Accidentally posted while still typing and reading, aaah, this is unfinished.

EDIT2: Okay, this is as done as I will do it, I also looked at the clock, and I won`t be awake for long now anyway.

EDIT3: Okay, this one is the last one, I really have to get to bed, because I am also noticing how diving into this is not good for my health. But turns out you can disregard the stuff I wrote below except for the last sentence, and me still thinking the data is more ambivalent narrative-wise. But while I still maintain the language was confusing, I finally noticed an unambivalent line from the survey: “Of the following issues, choose any that played a role in your [vote for presidential candidate/decision to not to vote for president]. Check all that apply.” So, yes, this was indeed also non-voters.

I admit, now that I explicitly checked, that is also how I would interpret (from the PDF):

This survey is based on 604 interviews conducted by YouGov on the internet of registered voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and not Kamala Harris in 2024.

But it is also just ambivalent enough to create questions when combined with the language of the article: Since both the study and the article seem to be by the same institute, I doubt it’s a miscommunication error. The language of the article is repeatedly so specific.

For Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris

29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris

When Biden 2020 voters cast a ballot for someone besides Harris in 2024

And then there are questions in the PDF like:

Next, think back to how you voted in 2024. You will see issues that some say may have impacted their vote. For each of those, please say how you feel about that issue.

That seem to indicate that this indeed only targeted people that did vote.

So, colour me genuinely confused, it seems like such a specific and deliberate usage of language. And I have to admit, it feels weird to me, especially considering the IMEU has an interest in making Gaza the most important topic. Note that the same numbers of the survey could also be used to support different narratives, like: 68% said abortion access was important to them and influenced how they voted in 2024, vs 27% saying the same about violence in Gaza. Or Question 12 vs 13, showing that on a policy difference exclusively on Gaza, the people surveyed would still predominately support the Democrat, and only 8% mention not voting if the Democrat supports Israel unconditionally. So, this also does not fit the narrative neatly.

But if this does indeed represent non-voters as well, and one third of those truly did not vote because of Gaza, yes, that is indeed a large enough group to swing close results in battleground states.

Ah, thank you, my search-fu did not provide me good numbers like that.

However, unless I am misreading them heavily, those numbers don’t seem to lay out what you mention. They are exclusively about “Biden 2020 Voters Who Cast A Ballot For Someone Besides Harris”. Again - I don’t think that group is large enough, because even combined, all the left-of-Democrats third party votes seem to be negligible. That is “29% of voters nationally who voted for Biden in 2020 and cast a ballot for someone besides Kamala Harris in 2024”. So, again, if I combine Jill Stein, Cornell West, and Claudia De la Cruz, that is 0.72% of the popular vote. Even with a naive calculation of taking all 29% of those that would then be commies like that, that seems like not enough to put Trump into office, unless highly concentrated in very embattled swing states.

EDIT: OK, I forgot, that means also people voting Trump, not just third party. So the influence could theoretically be more. But I doubt commie agitprop pushed a lot of people to outright voting Trump.

Hmm, maybe, it is always hard to prove an effect like that. Best one could do is exit polling with specific questions of what influenced the decision, and other polls in general. I was interested what polling was available there, most I found was just non-voters as a larger group, which seems to be predominately non-politically engaged and mostly centrist. One article I have found seems to indicate the non-voting Democrats don’t really fit the narrative of being swayed by radical left influencers and agitprop either.

I am also unsure how visible those kind of influencers were on mainstream social media, as I am not active there at all. I always had the feeling they were mostly visible in their own bubbles and by people who got angry at them, thus also getting them served by the algorithms. Their effect on motivating people to stay home, I’d be genuinely interested in seeing in polling numbers, but I sadly could not find any polls with questions like “who influenced your decision to not vote”.

In general, psychology-wise, I think motivating people to stay home that would have voted otherwise is I believe a much lower effect, than the failure in motivating people to get up and vote, who would have stayed home otherwise. Which was not the responsibility of those commie influencers the way I estimate it. However - I admit there may have been an effect: By inducing fatigue in activists that had to argue with them, taking away time and resources for trying to reach and motivate properly undecided non-voters.

I am European, so, an outsider perspective, but…

I’d love to know actual numbers, because I get the feeling “commies who voted third party” are too small a group to swing elections. Just a quick look at the numbers on Wikipedia give 0.11% for the Socialism and Liberation candidate. Jill Stein got more, as did RFK even after he had withdrawn already, but I doubt they were the popular choice of the communists arguing here on Lemmy during the election campaign. (Where I, personally, argued for voting for first Biden, then Harris, because I did not see the left in the US as organised enough to react to the kind of oppression Trump would bring early, whereas I’d wager a Democrat would not have escalated like this. Just to root my own bias for context.)

I am not saying it is impossible that they could have swung a very close state, but I admit, I do think it is very improbable.

So, this feels very much like impotent rage to me, directed at the annoying but ultimately equally impotent agitprop people on here. They are loud on here, but do you really think they were that influential during the election?

Benutze uBlock Origin DuKlotz Ursprung und Firefox Feuerfuchs sowohl auf Desktop Schreibtisch als auch Handy Händlich. Bisher keine Probleme gehabt - Ob es ReVanced ErneutSchrittlich noch gibt weiß ich gerade gar nicht, aber ich nehme an schon? Schaue auch tatsächlich mittlerweile gar nicht mehr so viel YT DR, schon noch einzelne Menschen, aber erstaunlich viel Video-Bedürfnis ist zumindest bei mir von PeerTube MitmenschRöhre ersetzt worden.

EDIT: Ups, da hätte ich doch fast vieles nicht gezangendeutscht D:

Ich finde es faszinierend wie ich heutzutage Werbung tatsächlich quasi nur noch über Maimais oder Gespräche mit Freundys mitbekomme. OK, Plakatwerbung erreicht mich noch. Und alle Jubeljahre sehe ich auch was auf YT DR bei jemandem ohne Adblocker Werbeklotzer. Aber selbst wenn ich meine Mutter besuche, wo der Fernseher läuft, ist das eigentlich immer ÖR und wenn da mal Werbung läuft, schaltet sie um oder mindestens lautlos.

Aussage des Kommentars: Es ist erstaunlich einfach geworden echt entspannt von Werbung losgelöst zu leben.

I was about to make a joke about “amateur file picture”, but while typing it I realised that sounds like porn images.

Zoomer Twitterbrain word for Avatar.

Well, I am surprised they are that into retro gaming! But who can blame them, that is one handsome fella to play as

And the games were early trans representation!

(Just to ruin the joke: That is short for transportation, I know. But Ultima actually was pretty “woke” for its time, I guess.)

My first account was on .ml roughly 5 years back, when it was basically the only instance. I had heard about there being a FOSS alternative to Reddit - but I quickly lost interest because the community was just too small back then. Re-activated my account when the API exodus happened, because there was finally a community large enough to provide a lived-in feeling. Have only gotten more dedicated to the Fediverse ever since.

Not impossible, although, sadly - any system where anonymity is the prime focus will also invite fucked up shit in addition to legitimate use, without any complicated motives behind it. There’s just a relevant fraction of humanity who are, sometimes essentially, sometimes temporarily, messed up fucks. Which is why I think providing ways to combat abuse has to be a high priority for the underlying development of any project like it, unless it explicitly doesn’t aim for mainstream adoption.

Ja, ich fands tatsächlich gerade weil es eine Perspektive von einem tech-interessierten aber gerade explizit nicht Linux-Nerd ist sehr interessant als Perspektive. Worauf achtet so ein Mensch? Was ist für den Ersteindruck von ihm wichtig? Was sind die Prioritäten die er kommuniziert? Ist glaube ich für potentielle Wechsler die frisch nach Linux kommen tatsächlich ein ganz gutes Video, während ein tiefergehendes Distro-Review, dass dann anfängt sich in für Linux-Veranen wichtigen, aber potentiell erstmal einschüchternden, Details zu verlieren, da eventuell abschrecken könnte.

Gibt es eigentlich quer-migrations-tools, so dass ich meine Paketauswahl, wlan-netzwerke und andere persönliche Konfigoptionen einfach beim Installieren übertragen kann?

Weiß nicht ob es noch Besseres gibt, aber für gängige Package-Manager wie Pacman gab es Befehle um die Paketauswahl als Textliste zu exportieren und importieren, und das scheint es analog mindestens auch für Debian zu geben. Da ich schon ewig nicht mehr selbst gesucht hatte, hier mal das erste Suchergebniss dafür, dass ich gefunden hab: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=94308

Bei Einstellungen zu wlan-netzwerken, etc. kenne ich aus dem Stehgreif keine tools zur Migrierung, aber ich habe dafür home-Verzeichnis, Config-Dateien und “dotfiles” generell meistens in eigenen Partitionen, die bei Reinstallation von der Distro selbst nicht angerührt werden müssen. Das funktioniert allerdings auch nicht immer reibungslos - besser ist vmtl die Config-Files einfach selbst vor dem Neu installieren zu sichern um sie händisch wiederherzustellen (oder vll gibt es doch auch schon automatisierte tools für)

I had a wild ride with matrix, originally wanting to run a node on my server. That did not turn out well, because I was a bit stupid and just assumed there would be more admin/mod tools out of the box. As it turned out, I had inadvertently allowed spam/abuse accounts on my node without even noticing, because naive as I was, I assumed my admin-level account would get informed of stuff like user registrations and abuse reports in the standard Element frontend. As a bonus, when I checked what was supposedly the official matrix support channel, it was repeatedly getting spammed with CSAM and gore at the time. That was when I realised, that it definitely was not the ecosystem for me, and running a node without experience had been a pretty stupid idea on my end.

I have the same phenomenon, and sometimes really weird intrusions, like - a few days ago I had a dream of working in an office building, and out of nowhere during work, there would be a drawer just filled with piss to pee into for the employees - but of course it never works.

Yupp, I never got the hang of cross-eyed viewing, even with the tips that are around, whereas the “looking through the image” technique is super easy for me, basically just relaxing my eyes. I assume there’s people where it is the other way around, and the cross-eyed method works better for them.

Basically it’s about which image is transferred as information from which of your eyes, and the two different techniques swap the eyes, which also swaps the 3D depth information.

I love the Wellington here viewed the “wrong” way - like the ocean is a massive plateau surrounding the coast, with that strip of developed area rising like another giant wall.

A mere 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news. Twelve accounts – known as the “disinformation dozen” – created most of the vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic. These few hyperactive users produced enough content to create the false perceptions that many people were vaccine hesitant.

So, this is super anecdotal, but through the father of a friend I learned about a guy who was just downright a walking stereotype in that regard. Said father is a rather conservative guy (ex-cop, actually), got lucky and rather rich, and he lived in a suburban village here in Germany. Said neighbour, as described by him: Also an ex-cop, old acquaintance, wife and kids left him because he was violent, living financially comfortably in a large house in that suburban German village on his own, but miserable. And he, unironically, sent said father of my friend far-right propaganda articles, images, messages just… all day long. Every 10 minutes or so. Presumably as mass messages to about anyone who still had a semblance of contact with him. Anecdotal, hearsay with 2 degrees of separation, but - it was the first time I realised those people existed as actual people just casually living their lives around us all.

It’s definitely not the same, but I am somewhat reminded of Robert Sapolski’s Baboon stress study

Some key paragraphs:

Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share report evidence of a higher order cultural tradition in wild baboons in Kenya. Rooted in field observations of a group of olive baboons (called the Forest Troop) since 1978, Sapolsky and Share document the emergence of a unique culture affecting the “overall structure and social atmosphere” of the troop.

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986. Their deaths drastically changed the gender composition of the troop, more than doubling the ratio of females to males, and by 1986 troop behavior had changed considerably as well; males were significantly less aggressive.

After the deaths, Sapolsky stopped observing the Forest Troop until 1993. Surprisingly, even though no adult males from the 1983–1986 period remained in the Forest Troop in 1993 (males migrate after puberty), the new males exhibited the less aggressive behavior of their predecessors.

The authors found that while in some respects male to male dominance behaviors and patterns of aggression were similar in both the Forest and control troops, there were differences that significantly reduced stress for low ranking males, which were far better tolerated by dominant males than were their counterparts in the control troops. The males in the Forest Troop also displayed more grooming behavior, an activity that’s decidedly less stressful than fighting. Analyzing blood samples from the different troops, Sapolsky and Share found that the Forest Troop males lacked the distinctive physiological markers of stress, such as elevated levels of stress-induced hormones, seen in the control troops.

But if aggressive behavior in baboons does have a cultural rather than a biological foundation, perhaps there’s hope for us as well.

Stimmt, in der Hinsicht war tatsächlich die FDP deutlich relevanter.

Die CDU hatte schon auch ihren Anteil dran getragen, Altnazis eine Karriere zu ermöglichen, und hat damals dann ja auch gerade im Rahmen der 68er genug Kritik geerntet, aber in Retrospektive ist Nachfolgerpartei tatsächlich nicht richtig. Aber “in jeglicher Hinsicht” - auch wenn im Streit verständlich - läuft in meinen Augen dann Gefahr den Aspekt wiederum zu unterbewerten.

Die AFD hatte sich in jüngerer Geschichte aber schon gut am Werteverfall am rechten Rand der CxU aufgebaut, und beeinflusst nun mehr und mehr selbst die Partei. Es fällt ja auch global auf, dass es immer weniger quasi “Wertekonservative” zu geben scheint, und immer mehr nihilistisches “Werte sind nur Mittel zum Zweck und zur Kontrolle” - Denken, mit dem guten “Werte für meine Feinde und nützliche Idioten, Grenzüberschreitung für mich und Freunde”.