This is one effect of a general lack of real consequences for corporations and those that run them.

The company has already determined their likely fine after being caught doing something egregious. The profit from being early to market is significant, and so long as it is considerably higher than the likely fine, they go for it. The expected real earnings are the difference between the profit and the fine. It’s all made worse since so often the fine is absolutely nothing compared to the profit, since the numbers these companies are dealing with are so damn big.

This is why you won’t see real change until we stop slapping corporations with fines and start slapping executives with jail time. That is literally the only way to break the cycle.

And the really shocking thing is how easy that was to normalize.

Talk about random thing at dinner, phone in pocket.

Post dinner, hit up Insta and boom, ad for random thing… and at that point, some people go “heh” and keep scrolling. Some likely think it’s “the algorithm” being magical and just using other context cues to guess that they would have mentioned it at dinner. Many have realized that, in fact, the devices you pay for and subscribe to are actively spying on you. Constantly.

And yet, the number of people who have opted out of using these devices and services is relatively minimum. There is a good reason for that: many of these services are so ubiquitous, they look and feel like utilities. And in some cases, they effectively are, as it can be impossible to use another service without a smartphone.

Hell, I can’t even pay my damn rent without using some stupid app.

In conclusion, the results support the hypothesis that fecal knives are usually shitty knives

– the paper, probably

Good thing he gutted Twitter’s content moderation teams in the name of “free speech”, eh?

If I had a dollar for every time a billionaire loses more money than I could ever dream of because their hubris got in the way or they misunderstood a concept or were just plain dumb – well, I guess I’d be a billionaire too.

I guess that depends on your age. Even for some of the most contested elections in my lifetime (e.g. Bush v Gore 2000), supporters of either side did not have the kind of rabid quality that so many have now.

I wonder how much of that has to do with semantic drift on Elohim, i.e. by the time the oldest extant manuscripts were written, the figure was already considered singular despite retaining the noun plural morphology. The implication there would be that earlier (now lost) manuscripts may have had plural verb agreement for Elohim, or maybe simpler / more plausible, there was a time in the oral tradition where Elohim was still considered a plural figure and would have naturally gotten plural verbs.

I think the fact that the plural morphology exists on the noun at all suggests at least that the figure started as a collective.

Edit: probably also worth a mention that portions of Genesis (e.g. Garden of Eden) mirror portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story which is overtly polytheistic.

Yeah. I think historically it is interesting, because the Hebrew Elohim of Genesis is in the plural, and there is evidence that followers of El believed him to be one deity in a pantheon. In that sense, Elohim and the associated creation myths have their roots in a polytheistic religion.

Yhwh was more likely a figure from a belief system of a different region which ended up co-opting the earlier stories. I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I think it is actually plausible that things like the Catholic Holy Trinity have roots in El and Yhwh technically being different figures.

But is it Yhwh or El?

The Shintō sun goddess Amaterasu is quite interesting. As is the whole Shintō origin story.

Sounds like a very interesting read. Thanks for the suggestion.

I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.

For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.

At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.

What about Roosevelt then? He got voted into serving four terms before he established a term limit.

But how were his voters? Did you see the kinds of things I listed in the post? I’m not saying it isn’t the case, but I wouldn’t think that FDR being reelected multiple times necessarily means his supporters were doing culty things as I listed.

Same with JFK, etc. (modulo Reagan who is mentioned in another comment). I’d say all of them have definitely been elevated to a weird status after the fact, but I’m not sure that puts them in this group.

I take that more as a general nationalistic symbol. Yes, nationalism is also pretty cultish in a way, but it is less reliant on a single individual.

(And the faces of Mt. Rushmore are very much a blight on what the Lakota call Six Grandfathers).

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

This is pretty much where I was coming from with the post. It seems like a new thing to have something so culty be so popular in the US.

Thanks for these. Joseph Smith in particular is an interesting example. I didn’t know he attempted to run for President at one time. On the Mormon side, I find it quite interesting that his religion still exists despite him being outed as a charlatan. I guess that also says something about human nature.

I knew someone who was a Ron Paul supporter. Definitely heavily into the conspiratorial stuff. I think at the time, the movement was relatively small, so I hadn’t considered that it was somewhat culty.

Thanks for these. I had never heard or Charles Coughlin. I am familiar with McCarthy, but never considered his story in these terms. It does fit.

Very interesting figure and exactly what I was hoping to find through this post. Thanks.

I had heard this name before, but for some reason I thought he was mostly a religious figure. Maybe that’s the cultiness. Interesting that he shifted from left to right.

Oh yes. As a US person it blows my mind as well. We have an unhealthy fear of changing the Constitution, despite its many amendments. Of course that also precludes changing portions of it that were clearly designed under different pretenses than currently exist (e.g. 2A, but that’s a whole can of worms I’m just tired of opening at this point).

The main issue there in my view isn’t actually the Constitution but the sheer division at every decision. Nothing can be changed anywhere if people can’t even agree on the same facts anymore. It ultimately means the US is at a constant government standstill. Fun times.

In many ways we now feel like two different countries. The blue country with dense populations centered around either coast, and the red country with sparser population in the middle.

I was pretty young when Reagan was a thing, so I wasn’t quite sure how intense his original supporters were (modulo his election results).

But, I guess it’s also worth noting that he’s been glorified by the GOP over and over again.