Idk, the TV told me this is antisemitic to think about

I haven’t listened to him lately, but I never got the impression that he was much of a right winger from anything he has ever said on there while I was listening.

You can only invite Elon Musk, Dave Smith, and JBP onto your show so many times before you tip your hand.

Hell, Tulsi Gabbard gets an invite every time she launches a new campaign.

Can’t trust mainstream American news because they’re right wing

Can’t trust foreign news services because they are all psyops campaigns intended to trick Americans

Who the hell are you allowed to trust? TikTok influencers and indie podcasters?

We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower.

It’s a perpetual two-edged conversation. On the one end, you’ve got reactionaries doggedly insisting the existence of Wikipedia is an attack on their personal reputations and a warehouse for far-left ultra-communist radical propaganda. On the other, you’ve got a very naked western bias to articles (thanks to a preponderance of western editors) and this creeping pay-to-play model of participation that enthusiasts and supporters simply refuse to acknowledge.

The utility of the site is such that nobody is really excited about ignoring it and replacing it is a herculean effort even would-be trillionaires haven’t managed. So the fight continues to be over degrees of control in editing existing articles and publishing new ones.

It isn’t a White Tower, but Wikipedia has become - like it or not - a system of record with an implicit amount of reflexive trust that hundreds of millions of people have learned to adopt. You can’t cynically reject its contents any more than you can naively accept them.

You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?

I think there are enough copies of the Mona Lisa such that we wouldn’t need to question what it looks like if the original was stolen.

In the same way, there are so many backups and mirrors and third-party logs of Wikipedia that we can very clearly see what is being changed and by whom. It is valuable in large part because it is so easily auditable. That’s not to say its infallible, but you can at least point to what you disagree with and challenge it piecemeal. This isn’t like a Grok AI or Conservapedia, where the preponderance is a black box of bullshit.

That’s what the “Talk” section functionally does. People can (and do) check it when an article has lots of frequent heavy editing. And a lot of these edits do get rolled back as they’re exposed, as Wikipedia admins are reasonably good at keeping the propaganda generically pro-western rather than nakedly for-profit or regionally partisan.

At the same time, Wales is a self-proclaimed libertarian who is constantly putting his hand out to keep the website funded and operational. I have to assume there’s a certain degree of self-dealing happening in the background just to keep the site from getting the kind of abuse suffered by Internet Archive or Anna’s Archive.

People keep saying this. The European states keep bending over for American military and diplomatic services.

Until the EU can decouple from the western tech and finance sectors (don’t hold your breath), they’re chained to the US economy and exposed to US tariff threats. And until they kick out the myriad of military bases, they’re beholden to the Pentagon. Europeans talked about decoupling during Trump 1. They talked about it during Bush 43. They talked about it during Reagen, ffs.

The only country that’s ever demonstrated an ounce of seriousness has been France. Every other country seems more than willing to take the American coin and bend the knee. And for all the bluster, I’m still waiting to see the rest of Europe take the threat of American hegemony seriously. Last I checked, Greenland is queuing up to get more American military bases, which doesn’t look like decoupling to me.

A million bucks in a trillion dollar economy is a drop in the budget. Joe Rogan is a cheap date at the scale of international media.

Israeli military-grade bullets were recovered from the bodies of children killed during the armed riots in Iran, according to forensic examinations cited by a source within Iranian security structures speaking to TASS.

Among the cases was an 8-year-old girl from #Isfahan, fatally shot in the “stomach, chin, and back of the head” while shopping with her family, and 3-year-old Melina Asadi, who was killed in #Kermanshah while returning from a pharmacy with her father.

The findings come after armed groups infiltrated peaceful economic protests in #Iran in early January.

Iranian officials accused “Israel” and the #UnitedStates of orchestrating the violence that turned the protests into deadly attacks on civilians and security personnel.

Like the US is taking an entire nation hostage

His podcast was already big before it was on Spotify, wasn’t it?

He rode a tidal wave of corporate sponsorship and political back scratching to land that Spotify deal. Rogan subsists on an enormous reservoir of unearned media coverage. He repays his corporate bosses by floating the turds FOX and Disney won’t touch.

Joe is the empty vessel through which corporate opinion flows, uninhibited.

He’ll say whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want if you just cover his fees.

He’s the white man’s Oprah.

People on Lemmy hate when you know any amount of history

Idk, sounds like Tankie Talk to me

A kind of Third World, independent of the dueling hegemony, as it were?

He’s a very British kind of racist who panders to a particularly British kind of white nationalism.

Naturally, the liberal response is to blame his existence on evil foreigners, while trying to outflank him on the right.

British are as bad as “I have no idea who voted Trump” Americans.

Hard truths. New Labour only ever knows how to run to the right of the opposition and the old Conservatives can’t campaign their way out of a paper bag. So it’s Reform UK in the next election, strictly due to liberal incompetence.

He gets in the news constantly by issuing the most reactionary takes. He’s got tons of friends in the corporate sector, because he knows exactly which assholes to lick. And his opposition is physically incapable of turning left, so he can periodically outflank Starmer on real bread-and-butter issues by saying “I’ll expand the NHS! I’ll be tough on the Bad Businesses! I’ll fight for the working class [white people]!” while Labour just stutters and tuts and replies “That wouldn’t be sensible.”

Any suggestion that there’s something questionable or unreliable about the American democratic process is a trick by the Republican Party to suppress liberal voter enthusiasm. And if you mention it you are helping the Republicans win. Also Russia.

If you’re still in line, stay in line. Our elections are secure. The midterms is winnable if you vote in it. Shut up and do what we tell you or you’re an enemy.

blasts

Israeli arms sales break record for 4th year in row, reaching $14.8 billion in 2024.

Billing one half of Iran to kill the other half.