It’s perpetually confusing to me that there’s a legitimate Ukrainian news site called Pravda.

I think folks are struggling with the format of this post - I’m thinking it’s probably at least partially in interop issue between Mastodon and Lemmy. Folks on Lemmy are usually expecting the post itself to be a link to the article or site, with commentary in the body or in a comment.

The link is in the text block under the post - this is due to the fairly hacky interoperability between Mastodon and Lemmy. You can post to Lemmy instances via Mastodon but they almost always wind up looking very spammy because of the formatting and all of the hashtags.

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of them, and didn’t find an entry on them when looking up on mediabiasfactcheck.com. I wonder if the naming is intentional or just a coincidence around the word “Truth”.

Sorry, isn’t Pravda a literal Kremlin disinfo op? I’m not sure we should be posting anything about the Ukraine war (or, frankly, anything at all) from a Russian state-owned propaganda outlet…

Sorry if it seems like you’re being scolded - that’s not my intention. I think it’s fine to post something like this, but maybe I’m the future a brief explanation of why you found it worth posting would be helpful to get the discussion started - either in the post body or a comment.

Hi @BevelGear - Could you clarify a bit what kind of discussion you’re after by posting this? Also, most folks on Beehaw are probably not lawyers so posting a supreme court ruling without any commentary or clarification probably isn’t the most conducive to good discussion.

I’ve been somewhat surprised by Amy Coney Barrett. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t agree with her, but I’ve been surprised by her willingness to break with the conservative majority, and I’m surprised by her recusal here. Still - the fact that this is a 4-4 ruling is horrifying

I think the thing that has been most encouraging to me about these protests is seeing pictures folks in small towns and deep red states are posting of protests there.

Proponents say that that it should be a relatively humane method of execution: Nitrogen is inert and the body doesn’t react to breathing pure Nitrogen with a feeling of suffocation the way that it does with CO₂, and suddenly replacing the air a person is breathing with pure inert gas can lead to unconsciousness within just one or two breaths. In practice, though, the first Nitrogen Gas execution that was carried out in Alabama last year did not go that smoothly. I’m not sure about subsequent executions, there have been a handful.

Sorry, I just realized that you might take that as directed at you. I realize that sometimes the NYT is the best or only source for news, I’ve just been very frustrated with the NYT, especially when it comes to stuff like this.

This is a bad headline and it lends credence to the GOP framing that Trump and Elon are “cutting waste” and “saving money”. Musk didn’t “save” 8 billion OR 8 million dollars, he illegally halted payment for 8 million dollars worth of government services. Whether those services were wasteful or not has not been examined at all, as evidenced by these absolute clowns accidentally firing critical government workers who oversee things like nuclear arms and monitoring avian influenza. Multiple times these people have admitted to accidentally firing people when they had no idea what those people were doing and how the firings would affect citizens. We can not roll over and allow them to frame this the way they want to.

Yeah, a good bit of the article is dedicated to pointing out that there are a whole swathe of public “intellectuals” who describe themselves as Liberals but are shallow and regressive in their actual ideas.

Did you read the article? I think it does a pretty good job of explaining what the author means by that phrase. The author articulates her concept of a “far center” (as opposed to far right and far left), which she describes as people who take liberal values to reactionary extremes, valuing civility over justice, etc.

The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.

My wife and I joined an Episcopal church a few years ago after a fairly painful falling out with the church we had been part of for ~15 years. It has wound up being such a blessing for us in so many ways, one of which is not feeling like we have to cringe whenever a leader in our church speaks out in public. Bishop Budde is a perfect example of the kind of rhetoric that attracted us to the Episcopal church - gentle, kind, but firm on matters of love and care for others.

@thelucky8@beehaw.org, when you’re posting obvious satire as genuine news, you might need to take a step back and do some self evaluation. You’ve been posting a lot of articles with a pretty clear point of view, and if you’re not concerned about veracity or quality then you might want to slow down and think a bit more, no?

I actually also think it’s probably both, to a degree, that’s just not what the author of the article is arguing. I think there’s probably a certain amount of persuasion that is pulling people deeper into a belief system that they might only be partially invested in at first, and then they are sucked into ecosystems that reinforce those beliefs and pull them further in. I don’t have anything but vibes and lots of half-remembered reading about online radicalization, though.

You’re right, but I think they are using the term “brainwashing” in a colloquial sense. There’s a perception that misinformation on the internet is persuading people into more extreme views, but what the author of this article is arguing is that what is happening more is that online misinformation is allowing people to easily justify beliefs that they have already formed, and quickly and easily get rid of cognitive dissonance associated with encountering information that contradicts their beliefs. This is something that people have always done, but it’s become so easy on the modern internet that more and more people are embracing fringe worldviews who might previously have been unable to cognitively support those views.

It’s a small difference in the way we think about misinformation online, but I think it’s important that we understand what is likely happening. It’s not so much that misinformation is changing people’s beliefs, but that it’s allowing people to hang onto beliefs that contradict reality more easily.

So I’m not an expert in nuclear weaponry. However, more modern warheads don’t somehow magically vaporize everything within a certain radius and then not cause effects outside that radius - that’s not how things work. They may have a larger fireball, which is the area within which things (and people) are going to be vaporized, but they still have very large areas where people will receive burns decreasing in severity depending on distance, and (if the warhead is detonated at ground level) radiation doses that will kill within 5 days to 1 month. Check out Nukemap to see those areas in different scenarios. Here’s one that I did for a ground burst of a 800 kt Topol warhead. You can see that the areas for radiation are larger than the fireball itself, and the areas for 2nd and 3rd degree burns are quite large. Setting one of these off anywhere populated would cause an immense amount of human suffering even if the folks in the ~220m fireball never saw it coming.

I dunno, I’ve read some downright horrific accounts from Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Sure, if you’re right at the hypocenter you’re immediately dead, but lots of folks didn’t die right away, but were horribly burned or got lethal doses of radiation and died slowly and horribly.