Notices by 🎅 🎄 Festive Dave 🎄 🎅 (dave@gleasonator.com), page 9

Lol

it is not uncommon for two independent jokes to be similar, especially if they are about current events

Just yesterday I posted the shitpost on the left, and within minutes I had 3 people make the same joke which is summarized by the image on the right

@splitshockvirus You solve a big problem at work or something?

Bought this so I could tell JK Rowling to go fuck herself.

Thinking about buying a 2nd copy and doing it again, just to really get my point across.

Yesterday I posted this story and just assumed it must be true, but now I’m far less convinced, especially given the gravity of it.

My fatal assumption was “there’s no way the guy who was breaking huge stories like this in the past would drop the ball this hard this late in his career by fucking up what would possibly be his last huge story”, which led me to just immediately accepting the story as true without even doing any real investigation, especially since it was already more likely that it was us since the incentive is more obvious.

Turns out I definitely should have investigated, because this is also the same dude that claimed the Syrian gas attacks were staged, something which has never been substantiated, and which I wasn’t aware of, and would have already made me question this story if I was. So no, this is not quite the open and shut case that I thought it was.

It could be true, but if all he has are anonymous sources, and he’s no longer working with an editor to verify these sources, then for all I know his sources are just Russian agents.

And I should add that given the combination of his advancing age (I’ve seen this cognitive decline in the elderly in my own family; formerly sharp people falling for phishing scams), and how ML has advanced to the point where foreign agents can much more convincingly present themselves as known public officials to the unwary, and how it sounds like he is working independently now, he is way more susceptible to this kind of manipulation than most people realize.

So sorry, I dropped the ball on this one by assuming it must be true and presenting it as if it were verified fact. While this story could be true, it is not in any way “100% reliable”. For now, it’s just another narrative. -

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

Good Morning

Soapbox added custom emoji reacts

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@PhenomX6 @coolboymew They would of course say that

@skylar True, schizos have correctly called all 80 of the last 5 conspiracies.

I wanted to believe it was Russia, but this is being published by Seymour Hersh, the same guy who was involved with breaking a number of major scandals (My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Iran-Contra Affair, etc.). I guess we really did do it.

(article link)

@alex will probably like this one

@LukeAlmighty Try it, worst case you just wasted a few minutes

@LukeAlmighty I’ve heard that if you put fake contacts whose names are the forbidden words in your contact folder, auto-correct will finally stop being so helpful.

In an era where an LLM-based AI is integrated into your phone and it now understands context

“Hey Siri, call those people that annoy me”

@coolboymew Damn, that is impressive. And also creepy. But also impressive.

#GoodSatire

Sometimes I think I should put more effort into being patient with climate skeptics and holocaust “skeptics”, but the problem is that, in my experience, it’s going to be a waste of your time 95% of the time.

With climate skeptics, trying to do direct refutation just results in a pivot to some new claim or stat once they realize they can no longer defend the previous one. And if you try to instead approach it in a roundabout way, by asking straightforward questions, that have answers you can readily find with a google search, but that where acknowledging what the correct answer is an acknowledgement that their claim was wrong, they just don’t answer the question.

With Holocaust “skeptics”, it’s even harder because they reject the answers to any empirical questions when the answers to those questions tell them something that they don’t like, but the climate skeptics are still frustrating because they also implicitly do this.

For example, earlier today I had a guy try to tell me that it would take more lithium than exists on planet earth to convert our ICE car infrastructure to EVs. When asked a simple question about what percentage of an EV battery pack is comprised of lithium, instead of getting the straightforward answer - that would have acknowledged how little lithium is actually required to build these batteries and also acknowledged that the claim that we didn’t have enough lithium was false - I instead got a pivot to volcanoes or something.

The response to having the foundations of their assertions questioned must not be inquiry.

@skylar Ok, there’s nothing that can convince you to “be afraid of the weather”.

How about convincing you of the more modest assertion that human greenhouse gas emissions are the primary reason for the observed rise in greenhouse gas concentrations, and that this rise in GHG concentrations is the primary driver for the observed rise in global temperatures?

@deprecated_ii @skylar I am astonished that after feeling the need to dodge such a simple question as “What did Syukuro Manabe win a Nobel Prize for?”, you are coming back the very next day and unironically declaring how your “deep investigations” uncovered the truth of this “junk science”, which you clearly do actually understand at a deep level, as evidenced by…your inability to grapple with simple questions concerning this junk science which you have supposedly investigated so deeply.

@lain No, I don’t care about how many hallucination victims this creates every year, you’ll pry my LLM from my cold dead hands!