I saw “Guadalupe River” in the news & immediately thought of 38 years ago.
ETA:
They could force all people to wear one on their right hands, & no one could buy or sell without it.
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Whoever thought governance needed a catchphrase should be sentenced to watch youtube advertisements for the rest of their lives.
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From so many different directions, too. This, the loss of research funds, the various attacks on universities (and the disproportionate impact on hospitals associated with those universities), etc.
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I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit in Kerr County and can confirm this is legit. There are tons of flood warning devices everywhere.
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So, shoo-in. Right?
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Just remembered what this reminded me of:
Published back in 2019.
Read it earlier this year.
Pretty terrifying.
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THIS!
Govts using social media for communications is fine as long as it is only an additional/optional channel. Using it as the only or even main way to disseminate official information absolutely should be illegal.
Not everyone uses private companies’ social media platforms and nor should they ever be forced to simply because of the lack of an alternative.
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I don’t think governments, politicians, or candidates for office should use social media at all, even as supplemental channels. The fundamental problem is disinformation. There’s so much disinformation, and traceability of who is generating the disinfo is nonexistent. At least when Fox News is lying to people, we know who is doing it. When someone on social media pretending to be the National Weather Service issues a fake tornado warning, we have no idea who that is.
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Remember when Obama was first elected in 2008, and his staffers (a) disabled his personal Facebook and Twitter accounts, and (b) took his personal cell phone away from him? That administration did use social media, but not for official announcements and they didn’t let Obama personally control any of it. That’s how it should be. If they want to post some interesting facts about Women’s History Month, or the history of the Resolute Desk, social media is a fine vehicle for that, and only that.
I really believe social media has gone way off the rails, though, and it really needs to be regulated. It is enabling misinformation and disinformation on a scale never before seen in human history, and AI is making it worse by an order of magnitude. We need to get control of it. I don’t know how, but the average person now has no ability to discern truth from fiction on social media. I now just assume anything I see there is fake, until I can corroborate it.
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Europe is facing extreme tarring threats for starting a process to regulate. JD Nonce stood up and pontificated to European leaders about so called free speech (doesn’t count for anti-racists of course) assaults which are holding wealthy transnational corporations accountable for their harms.
He can’t fuck off to the nonce wing fast enough.
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Hopefully ICE doesn’t round them up and send them to El Salvador.
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I saw that and my first thought was “how long until we see a news story about ICE detaining some of these guys?” Because you know Stephen Miller saw that and immediately thought “soft target.”
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which is
The US’s absolutist approach to free speech may have been fine when the mass media largely consisted of newspapers and a few TV stations, but it clearly no longer works when mass ‘broadcasting’ as available to all and lies are one of its key engagement methods.
It has reached the point where I automatically suspect anyone demanding absolutist free speech as having a hidden (or not so hidden) agenda to promulgate misinformation to the detriment of society at large, for their own nefarious purposes.
Social media must be regulated and if that entails some limits to ‘free speech’ I’m all in favour of it.
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But that’s just it. We’ve never had an absolutist approach to free speech, nor do we now. Broadcast TV was always regulated because of its impact on the broader public. Newspapers much less so, but they weren’t free to say anything and everything. And today? It’s still not absolute. Ask college students at public universities if they feel free to criticize Israel or publicly express support for Palestinians.
There is ample precedent to regulate social media. We just need a Congress willing to do that, and courts willing to allow it.
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This will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but:
From the first paragraph of the letter itself:
A US Department of Veterans Affairs dataset compiling veteran health-care use in 2021 was quietly amended on March 5, 2025. A column titled gender was renamed sex, and the words were also switched in the dataset title and description (appendix p 1). Before March 5, the dataset had not been modified since it was published in 2022. As of May 1, the dataset change log, in which modifications should be tracked, is empty.
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Never actually existed. It’s just now the grotesque hypocrisy between actual Nazi speech being promoted (if you don’t let our companies spread Nazi hate and misinformation we will attempt to destroy your economies) vs protesting against human rights violations (BLM or Palestine - we will beat, assault, arrest, imprison, deport you) was never starker.
As a beloved centrist once sang “bomb bomb Iran”.
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And to the fool that wishes to destroy our country so they never have to hear Spanish in public again, may I suggest jamming a sharp stick deeply into both of your ears instead? This would be much quicker, cheaper, and it wouldn’t affect the rest of us. Hell do us all a favor and go for your eyes too while you’re at it so that you’ll never have to see anyone with brown skin too.
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