Don't make this out like it's some brilliant plan only a mustache-twirling villain could pull off; buying politicians is what oligarchs do, Musk just netted himself a bigger fish than most. He saw a rare opportunity to dribble some money on the king of all grifter politicians who is only interested in enriching himself and inflating his ego to get the things he wanted. But it's not clever or brilliant or genius, buying politicians is in fact rather pedestrian these days.
Libra
joined 1 year ago
So let me get this straight, you're worried about giving the fascists who have shown zero compunction about lying and making shit up at literally every turn a justification for being fascists? They've been spinning non-issues into crises and fabricating bullshit whole-cloth the entire time, why do you imagine they care whether their reasons are legitimate or not? Do you think they would just stop being fascists if everybody was super chill? Someone else refuted that idea far more eloquently than I can::
But the point is that significantly lower traffic will kill the business model of many websites, and thus kill many websites.
Oh no, China is stealing your data! Wait, America is also stealing your data and you don't care? Hmm.
Yeah, it could be, but these guys aren't looking to replace human workers with a robust, well-trained, and properly-deployed AI, they're looking to slash and burn their labor costs with whatever they think will squeak by.
I've used Amazon's AI live chat bots a fair bit over the years and I have to say they're actually pretty good. 90% of the time they can resolve the issue themselves (at least in my experience) and faster than it would take to connect to a person. But most people don't have Amazon's budget or customer service-oriented business model.
Mehr News is an Iranian news agency sponsored by the government of Iran. It is extremely not main-stream. :P
Nah, cults have other characteristics too, like a particularly charismatic leader, a tendency to have an extreme us-vs-them mentality, a desire for isolation rather than spreading the 'good word' far and wide, etc. There are definitely things that distinguish a cult of 100 people from a religion of 100 people, for example.
You could describe literally all human activity in the entire history of the earth that way, so that's not particularly helpful. :P
Your scale is off there.. it should probably be more like:
cult(-100)...religion(-80).................atheism(0).................?'
A group of people that is very serious about what they believe in, no matter how illogical it is.
It's pretty easy to invert that statement: a group of people that is very unserious about what they believe in? That would be folks like DIscordians, the Church of the SubGenius, Pastafarians, etc.
'Yeah I have no idea whose hand that is stuck up my asshole and operating me like a sock-puppet. whistles innocently'
Yup, that's the trend I was gesturing at with my initial comment as well, that it's weird that a government-sponsored news source would use a headline that echoes that sentiment in Western media.